A referral ID destroys the credibility of the referral. Plus, I would hate to see Ask Slashdot junked up with financially motivated referral links. I think it's best to keeps things clear for sincere recommendations by maintaining the standard that links with referral IDs are unwelcome.
Another way to look at it: Helping out the OP is the topic. Recommendations that have no credibility because the poster has a financial interest are of no help to the OP. Therefore, they are Offtopic, and an acceptable way to spend my mod points when they're about to expire and I can't find anything worth modding up.
As for your sig, don't you realize that half the forum and blog spam out there takes the form of a few random sentences followed by a money-making sig?
Do you think athletes have worse genes for intelligence? I really doubt it.
Almost anyone who has a choice between being a successful athlete and being a nerd will choose being an athlete. Same thing for cultivating social connections vs. cultivating smarts. Even in a rich school full of lawyers' and doctors' kids, being a varsity football player gets you hotter chicks and more attention than being on the debate team.
People make a more or less subconscious choice pretty early, based on social feedback they from peers and adults, and many choose too optimistically. Even if they figure it out later in life, playing catch-up doesn't work too well. Meanwhile, the ugly and clumsy kids have been working on their nerd skills their whole lives.
So what's the problem? How does this make someone look silly because they don't also become thoroughly familiar with the entire publication history of the field?
Essentially, the purpose of The Mismeasure of Man is to demonstrate that scientists can and do get things wrong when studying intelligence, and when they get things wrong, they systematically err in the direction of their prejudices. This casts a general cloud of doubt over the whole field, which is appropriate, and it allows people to say, "Meh, I wouldn't trust that research unless I were allowed to examine the specifics." Unfortunately, that argument doesn't hold when you're talking to someone who has read a particular piece of research. Their specific examination of a particular work trumps your general attitude based on different pieces of work.
I was first trying to point out the implications of the original comment, since a lot of people are naive about what IQ means without realizing some of its history and the racist results it supports.
This is exactly the circular reasoning that I warned about -- "IQ research is suspect because it supports racists." Is scientific research validated or invalidated by the moral principles that political opportunists use it (speciously) to support? Gould himself wrote extensively about the distortions that were brought into science by people who rejected scientific theories because of the political, moral, or religious conclusions that could be drawn from it. He mocked the idea that heliocentrism could lead to moral anarchy -- what does astronomy have to do with theology, anyway? -- and said that science should be allowed to develop as science, while society looks elsewhere for moral guidance. He was quite convincing in this mode and made an effective enemy for creationists. Creationists HATE Stephen J. Gould.
When it came to his own political and moral beliefs, though, he dropped the ball and became a much less effective advocate. His writing in The Mismeasure of Man is a great example. He freely (though implicitly) uses the taint of modern racism to turn the reader against the works that he is scientifically discussing. The tragedy of this is that white supremacists LOVE Stephen J. Gould, because in his writings about race, he consistently used the same methods he debunked in his previous writings about the history of science, such as mixing the scary political consequences of a work into a discussion of its scientific merit. Even worse, he made NO effort, none at all, to convince anyone who wasn't already disposed to agree with him. Because he failed to write with that part of the audience in mind, he alienated them and became a useful tool for racists.
there is in fact a test that would be essentially definitive. it's called "admixture mapping"
Can it distinguish between effects mediated through racism in US society and effects that are not mediated through racism? Simple degree of admixture would correlate with all the cultural factors, so you'd have to be more specific. Also, if a person's appearance causes the social expectations that inhibits IQ development or performance on IQ tests, you could just end up isolating genes that cause a person to be perceived as "black" by other people. Although the U.S. draws a particularly sharp line between black and white, people still judge a black person by his degree of "blackness" or "whiteness" to a certain extent. Now, if that aspect can be controlled for... you may have a solution. One troublesome question is, could it ever answer the question in favor on non-racism, by saying that if there is a genetic effect, it must be smaller than x? Or can it only provide evidence in the opposite direction?
just fyi, I abhor the politics of white supremacists. they make discussion of these kinds of politically sensitive topics much more difficult.
They do make it hard... though I kind of enjoy the challenge. They keep you honest. You never know how much you've taken for granted until you're challenged to justify your assumptions. Also, taking a look at their literature reminds you that every time you take the comfortable answer for granted, someone will use that to undermine your credibility and paint non-racists as willfully blind. It's never a good idea to take questions of fact for granted on political or moral grounds, even if your intended audience lets you get away with it, because there's always someone out there ready to use your intellectual mistakes as ammo against the political and moral ideas you support. (Kinda depressing and nerve-wracking, now that I think about it. Yuck.)
I think some amount of intelligence is inborn. But nowhere near all.
IQ is meant to measure exactly what you're describing -- the inborn intelligence that is relatively non-plastic after birth (or at least the first few years of development.) Decades of research have been devoted to this, and supposedly it works -- at least within a given race and within a given culture, in an industrialized society.
Now, even aside from any issues of political correctness, I hope you aren't in fact claiming that, because it's been pretty thoroughly refuted. If you take someone (of any race) out of poverty and give them a good education, their average IQ increases dramatically.
Unfortunately, that isn't a refutation. I have a white supremacist acquaintance who sends me links to articles about race and IQ, and I've done a little bit of web research to try to counter him. Unfortunately, there is really no data proving racial equality to throw at him, probably because racism skews the tests. It's easy to find plenty of studies showing that people of southern African or west African descent have lower IQs on average than people of European descent. It's of no interest or relevance that kids in Africa have lower IQs than kids in the US; the only way to control for cultural differences is to test kids raised in a white, western society. Unfortunately, in that case, everyone the kids come into contact with (including the most enlightened and liberal of people) is either fighting their own racism or unwittingly succumbing to it. Expectations of teachers and family members are too powerful. There's no fair test. Even the expectations of third-party test administrators can influence scores.
So nothing is established about race and IQ. The racists can point to tons of supporting data from worthless studies. Anti-racists can take the Stephen J. Gould route and attack the motivation and methodology of individual IQ researchers, most of them long dead, but don't bother. It just makes you look silly, unless you really can name names and publications and know their significance in the context of the entire field of IQ research. (Trust me, it's waaaaay too big a project, unless you do it professionally.)
IQ is decidedly not (as you claim) "mostly in-born [and] inheritable" unless you really believe that there is a measurable sense in which whites are inherently (on average) intellectually superior to blacks and hispanics in the United States.
Trust me (again -- I'm experienced!), don't make this argument unless you're prepared to continue arguing after your opponent says, "Yes, that's exactly what I believe." That's the trap they're setting. They get most of their satisfaction and conviction from non-racists' sputtering and inability to continue the discussion rationally without depending on circular reasoning. Just point out the difficulty of doing a worthwhile study and challenge them to outline a hypothetical study that would reasonably control for all the confounding factors. If you take that route, it's pretty easy to establish that no such study has been done or is ever likely to be done.
By figuring out the exact level of fat on my body, we could determine what weight I would be at 13% and 6% body fat. I am male, 6'1", and at 13% body fat (on the lean side of the normal, health range), I would be 225 lbs. At 217 lbs, I would be at 6% body fat, the lowest I can be and still be healthy. In order to get a BMI score that does not read "overweight", I would need to weigh 187 lbs. In fact, a 225 lbs, I will have a BMI label of not only "overweight", but also "obese".
First, keep in mind that it's much harder to maintain muscle mass at lower body fat levels, plus you developed a lot of supporting muscle mass while you weighed over 300 pounds. You won't know until you get there.
Second, I would hardly call your case typical. Losing that much weight is a rare achievement, and there are probably all kinds of medical measurements that would give totally screwy results on you right now.
Third, BMI is not intended for people like yourself who actually know a little bit about taking care of themselves. It doesn't take very much reading at all to get way beyond BMI. For the people who never get that far, BMI is probably the most accurate, useful thing they can handle.
That's a good suggestion; it probably has the same strengths as body fat percentage and would be measured using the same techniques.
Unfortunately, measurements of body fat percentage are inaccurate unless expensive. Scales that use electrical impedance are reliable at detecting relative change in a single individual, if they are used consistently under the same circumstances (time of day, level of skin moisture, etc.) They don't give you a useful reading from one trip to the doctor's office. Skin fold tests using calipers can be pretty accurate when done by a trained person, but they measure subcutaneous fat levels and have to be adjusted using an age-dependent estimate of your intra-abdominal fat. Immersion tests are too expensive for routine use; they're a luxury for pro athletes and yuppie fitness enthusiasts.
BMI is a public health tool. It's great for large, cheap studies relating lifestyle factors to health, and it's pretty good for educating the average person. It's the only absolute number that you can use to bring a clue to the large numbers of overweight people who are under the impression that their weight is normal and healthy. Being overweight, like being anorexic, usually involves warped self-perception and an incorrect idea of what "normal" is. You have to provide an absolute number because it's the only way to bypass their warped preconceptions. As bad as it is, BMI is the best thing available for this purpose.
Fitness enthusiasts don't have much to learn from BMI, but luckily, most people who are muscular enough to throw off the standard normal-overweight-obese BMI classification are going to ignore BMI because they already think about their fitness on a daily basis. They aren't going to shit their pants over an article in Newsweek that says they need to lose weight. Anyway, public health information isn't about taking care of corner cases. It's about trying to use a few million dollars to reduce the national diabetes rate by 2%. (Those numbers = WAG.)
The nonsense with the inches and the pounds is slightly less so-- and the slight bit of extra effort diminishes the "quick and dirty" appeal of the BMI.
Not at all. Doctors and nurses use charts; most people use charts or web calculators like this one.
Mostly "quick and dirty" applies to medical research, where it's quick, cheap, and routine to record a patient's height and weight. You don't need extra funding or specially trained staff to measure height and weight consistently, and in many cases, that data is already recorded as a matter of course. It's an easy statistic to use in a study or to apply retroactively to existing data. The extra complexity of dealing with inches and pounds doesn't matter, since the data is handled in bulk by software.
You mean the BMI is not an accurate indicator of something that someone is promoting it as an accurate indicator of.
During the rainy season, I don't exersize, so I lose muscle mass and get skinny, and I look - pardon me for saying it - like a geek. And my BMI is normal ( and allegedly healthy ). But during the other ten months, I am more muscular ( and probably a lot healthier ) and yet I am technically obese, according to the BMI.
I call BS. There's a huge gap between "normal" and "obese," so I believe you're "technically" making stuff up. For a 5'9" man, normal is less than 169 pounds. Obese is at least 203 pounds. Are you telling me you lose that much muscle mass (relative to your height) in two months because it's rainy outside? Complete and utter nonsense.
BMI is useful for its intended purposes:
1. In research, as a mediocre but cost-effective proxy for body composition.
2. In a clinical setting, to beat ignorant, delusional people over the head with it and say "YOU HAVE A PROBLEM! SCIENCE SAYS SO! ADMIT IT!" (It isn't meant to be used on people who have the slightest clue. Just on, oh, about 50% of the US population. It may be unsound in principle, but it's better than their current thinking about their weight.)
It makes as much sense to say that the average IQ never changes as it makes to say that the US dollar never changes its value. It's always worth a dollar, right?
The score on an IQ test is relative to the sample the scoring method was calibrated against. If I go into a room and take an IQ test by myself, will I automatically be assigned a score of 100? No. I'll be given a score that indicates how I compare to a reference sample. Since some popular tests remain in use for decades, and correlations between new tests and old tests are carefully studied, it is quite possible to assign IQs to members of a sample S according to a scale calibrated for a mean of 100 on a different sample S'. Then there is no guarantee that the mean IQ over S is 100.
That means you can estimate (presumably by some statistical method based on correlations between modern IQ tests and those given fifty years ago) the mean IQ of current testees on a scale calibrated to data from fifty years ago, or vice-versa.
IQ measures academic performance/potential. That's all it measures.
It has some power to predict academic performance, but that is not what it is designed to measure. Nor is it particularly good at it. Just as in business, non-IQ abilities (hard work, emotional strength, social skills, mental stamina, valuing achievement and status) play a role in academic success. Predicting academic performance from IQ is like predicting a car's range from its engine efficiency.
MBAs are far, far more successful than most academics will ever be
It depends on what you mean by success:-) If by success you mean money and coercive power over people, then yes, MBAs tend to be more successful than PhDs. When they say that academic politics are nasty because the stakes are so small, they mean that there is less of that kind of "success" to go around, and people with an appetite for it are bitterly unhappy in academia.
Fortunately, most academics measure themselves differently:-)
1. More stability and less memory usage. On both Windows and OS X, Firefox can swallow all your system resources if you leave it running long enough and do enough browsing. On my machines, the program also crashes, infrequently but regularly, most often when a page it's loading is corrupted by a network error. Spend the effort on finding memory leaks and bugs instead of adding gewgaws.
+1 on the memory growth. Happens to me, forces restarts, matters more than gewgaws.
2. Without changing the functionality of the interface or its basic elements, make it prettier.
I like it the way it is. On my monitor, the toolbar takes up about the right amount of space. If it's all done with vector graphics, maybe there should be a way to resize the toolbar? Locked by default, of course, with options to restore sizes to default values and restore sizes to their start-of-session values.
I just wanted to add that Firefox does the same thing to me on Windows. I've never experienced the problem under Linux, but my, um, browsing habits are a bit different on Linux; I don't open seventy tabs of *cough* media-rich pages at a time. I haven't noticed it degrading the performance of other apps, but I'd still love to see it fixed.
I agree with your skepticism 100%. The evidence they've come up with is easily explained. (I don't mean to imply that you implied the evidence is conclusive, when in fact you said the opposite, but this is a convenient place for me to play devil's advocate.)
The police say they found his wife's blood splattered in his house and car.
A recurring theme in weak and eventually overturned convictions.
He had tried to hide the car from the police
He isn't cooperating with them, so they will characterize anything they have difficulty finding, or find in a weird place, as "hidden."
and took the back seat out
It's harder to deal with that one. I've known people who had (and even drove) cars with missing seats, but they were rural teenagers and college students, not prosperous urban software developers. On the other hand, the guy dropped out of junior high school and got into Berkeley anyway, so he's an odd duck.
What makes me most skeptical is that the police investigated for weeks and then said everything they found led back to him. That seems mean that they didn't find any evidence that pointed any other way, and the less evidence they found, the more confident they felt in their first guess. (Data can make you pretty sure of something, but no amount of data can make you feel as sure as you would if you didn't have any data at all.) Next they order a forensic examination of his house and car and frame what they have in the most damning way possible for the press. That projects confidence, which may prompt the suspect to confess and will go a long way toward convincing a judge and/or jury if no further evidence is discovered.
You are what you do. Only Christians and other orthodox religious wingnuts believe that there is a difference between the so-called "sin" and "sinner". We all make our own decisions in life and are ultimately responsible for them. Orthopraxy all the way!
I think you're a bit mixed up. Orthopraxic religions are more relaxed about what people say and believe theologically, but this has nothing to do with hating people who do evil things. There's no "conservation of religious nastiness" that forces them to hate murderers to compensate for tolerating heterodoxy. Buddhism, for instance, counsels against hatred and makes no exception for hatred of murderers.
Furthermore, while some people believe that moral responsibility should be enforced through the hatred of believers, this is unfortunately a recurring pathology in all religions, not something limited to a specific class of religions.
That's five times more likley to recommit the crime they already served time for then someone who just robbed a bank or cheated on thier taxes.
From your link, the quote you're interpreting:
Released murderers are almost five times more likely than other ex-convicts to be rearrested for murder.
So murderers aren't five times as likely as non-murderers to repeat the crime that put them in prison -- they're five times more likely to commit murder. In other words, a released non-murderer is 20% as likely to commit murder as a released murderer. Far from reinforcing your point, that statistic undermines it.
Well around here in Texas, it's a well known joke. We don't take offense, and I doubt enough people take it seriously to elevate it to the status of myth.
And he had it right; it's "needed killin'," not "needed killing." Big difference.
But the syntax == AST central to Lisp has clearly failed to catch on and has been probably the main reason of its current downfall.
According to John McCarthy, the guy who invented Lisp, he and his collaborators didn't intend for Lisp programs to always be written using the S-expression syntax. The demand for different syntax never materialized, though. As people used Lisp, they learned to appreciate the S-expressions. That has continued to be the case up to the present day. Projects that do away with S-expressions, such as Dylan and Arc, are explicit attempts to popularize Lisp among less adventurous programmers, not improve the productivity of experienced Lispers.
So you're wrong and you're right. You're wrong about S-expressions not catching on: Lisp has S-expressions, and always will, because they do catch on with basically everyone who uses Lisp for a significant amount of time. On the other hand, you're right that S-expressions stop Lisp from catching on in a big way, because they prevent many people from trying Lisp or keeping at it.
Fortunately, Lisp has proven its ability to survive as an unpopular language, so it isn't a question that Lisp programmers lose sleep over.
It's great for recommending music that sounds similar to stuff you like. Unfortunately, for everything you like, there's a ton of dog food that sounds just like it. It's completely useless, in my experience, especially if lyrical content means anything to you.
Sounds like a great way to waste months or years of two people's time. Not to mention that eventually he'll most likely make the wrong choice between losing a girl he's become attached to and repressing things he likes about himself.
It all depends on what you mean by design patterns. Sometimes people describe design patterns as recurring patterns in programs. However, judging by the design patterns they catalogue, what they mean in practice is recurring patterns in source code. Aspects of program structure that do not have to be laboriously and repetitively specified do not qualify as design patterns. "Named memory cell that contains a value" is not a design pattern, despite its ubiquity, because most languages allow it to be expressed quite efficiently.
So, design patterns are patterns that recur in code because they describe a recurring structure that cannot be efficiently expressed in the language. Every language provides abstractions to allow programmers to factor out redundancy, but no language is perfect, so design patterns emerge as coders are forced to recode the same structures over and over again.
Naturally, since different languages support different abstractions, they result in different sets of design patterns. A person coming from a functional language to Java will see many of Java's design patterns as workarounds for Java's lack of support for functional programming. Similarly, a programmer moving from Java to C will notice C design patterns that are essentially workarounds for the lack of OO support in C. "Struct member pointing to table of operations for operating on that struct" would be a C design pattern for supporting polymorphism.
Unfortunately, design patterns books don't give much consideration to the difference between how to design a program's structure and how to express that structure in a particular language.
In politics, everyone is a slimeball. Can you suggest a better idea than getting behind a guy who, for whatever reason, will do the right thing right now?
If you only support honest men in politics, then everyone you support has made a fool of you.
Slashdot Mirror
A referral ID destroys the credibility of the referral. Plus, I would hate to see Ask Slashdot junked up with financially motivated referral links. I think it's best to keeps things clear for sincere recommendations by maintaining the standard that links with referral IDs are unwelcome.
Another way to look at it: Helping out the OP is the topic. Recommendations that have no credibility because the poster has a financial interest are of no help to the OP. Therefore, they are Offtopic, and an acceptable way to spend my mod points when they're about to expire and I can't find anything worth modding up.
As for your sig, don't you realize that half the forum and blog spam out there takes the form of a few random sentences followed by a money-making sig?
"Awesome points! -Bob
---
www.spamlink.com/pay-Bob/spamproduct.html"
If you're in danger of being mistaken for a spammer, you've got a problem.
Do you think athletes have worse genes for intelligence? I really doubt it.
Almost anyone who has a choice between being a successful athlete and being a nerd will choose being an athlete. Same thing for cultivating social connections vs. cultivating smarts. Even in a rich school full of lawyers' and doctors' kids, being a varsity football player gets you hotter chicks and more attention than being on the debate team.
People make a more or less subconscious choice pretty early, based on social feedback they from peers and adults, and many choose too optimistically. Even if they figure it out later in life, playing catch-up doesn't work too well. Meanwhile, the ugly and clumsy kids have been working on their nerd skills their whole lives.
Essentially, the purpose of The Mismeasure of Man is to demonstrate that scientists can and do get things wrong when studying intelligence, and when they get things wrong, they systematically err in the direction of their prejudices. This casts a general cloud of doubt over the whole field, which is appropriate, and it allows people to say, "Meh, I wouldn't trust that research unless I were allowed to examine the specifics." Unfortunately, that argument doesn't hold when you're talking to someone who has read a particular piece of research. Their specific examination of a particular work trumps your general attitude based on different pieces of work.
This is exactly the circular reasoning that I warned about -- "IQ research is suspect because it supports racists." Is scientific research validated or invalidated by the moral principles that political opportunists use it (speciously) to support? Gould himself wrote extensively about the distortions that were brought into science by people who rejected scientific theories because of the political, moral, or religious conclusions that could be drawn from it. He mocked the idea that heliocentrism could lead to moral anarchy -- what does astronomy have to do with theology, anyway? -- and said that science should be allowed to develop as science, while society looks elsewhere for moral guidance. He was quite convincing in this mode and made an effective enemy for creationists. Creationists HATE Stephen J. Gould.
When it came to his own political and moral beliefs, though, he dropped the ball and became a much less effective advocate. His writing in The Mismeasure of Man is a great example. He freely (though implicitly) uses the taint of modern racism to turn the reader against the works that he is scientifically discussing. The tragedy of this is that white supremacists LOVE Stephen J. Gould, because in his writings about race, he consistently used the same methods he debunked in his previous writings about the history of science, such as mixing the scary political consequences of a work into a discussion of its scientific merit. Even worse, he made NO effort, none at all, to convince anyone who wasn't already disposed to agree with him. Because he failed to write with that part of the audience in mind, he alienated them and became a useful tool for racists.
Can it distinguish between effects mediated through racism in US society and effects that are not mediated through racism? Simple degree of admixture would correlate with all the cultural factors, so you'd have to be more specific. Also, if a person's appearance causes the social expectations that inhibits IQ development or performance on IQ tests, you could just end up isolating genes that cause a person to be perceived as "black" by other people. Although the U.S. draws a particularly sharp line between black and white, people still judge a black person by his degree of "blackness" or "whiteness" to a certain extent. Now, if that aspect can be controlled for... you may have a solution. One troublesome question is, could it ever answer the question in favor on non-racism, by saying that if there is a genetic effect, it must be smaller than x? Or can it only provide evidence in the opposite direction?
They do make it hard... though I kind of enjoy the challenge. They keep you honest. You never know how much you've taken for granted until you're challenged to justify your assumptions. Also, taking a look at their literature reminds you that every time you take the comfortable answer for granted, someone will use that to undermine your credibility and paint non-racists as willfully blind. It's never a good idea to take questions of fact for granted on political or moral grounds, even if your intended audience lets you get away with it, because there's always someone out there ready to use your intellectual mistakes as ammo against the political and moral ideas you support. (Kinda depressing and nerve-wracking, now that I think about it. Yuck.)
IQ is meant to measure exactly what you're describing -- the inborn intelligence that is relatively non-plastic after birth (or at least the first few years of development.) Decades of research have been devoted to this, and supposedly it works -- at least within a given race and within a given culture, in an industrialized society.
Unfortunately, that isn't a refutation. I have a white supremacist acquaintance who sends me links to articles about race and IQ, and I've done a little bit of web research to try to counter him. Unfortunately, there is really no data proving racial equality to throw at him, probably because racism skews the tests. It's easy to find plenty of studies showing that people of southern African or west African descent have lower IQs on average than people of European descent. It's of no interest or relevance that kids in Africa have lower IQs than kids in the US; the only way to control for cultural differences is to test kids raised in a white, western society. Unfortunately, in that case, everyone the kids come into contact with (including the most enlightened and liberal of people) is either fighting their own racism or unwittingly succumbing to it. Expectations of teachers and family members are too powerful. There's no fair test. Even the expectations of third-party test administrators can influence scores.
So nothing is established about race and IQ. The racists can point to tons of supporting data from worthless studies. Anti-racists can take the Stephen J. Gould route and attack the motivation and methodology of individual IQ researchers, most of them long dead, but don't bother. It just makes you look silly, unless you really can name names and publications and know their significance in the context of the entire field of IQ research. (Trust me, it's waaaaay too big a project, unless you do it professionally.)
Trust me (again -- I'm experienced!), don't make this argument unless you're prepared to continue arguing after your opponent says, "Yes, that's exactly what I believe." That's the trap they're setting. They get most of their satisfaction and conviction from non-racists' sputtering and inability to continue the discussion rationally without depending on circular reasoning. Just point out the difficulty of doing a worthwhile study and challenge them to outline a hypothetical study that would reasonably control for all the confounding factors. If you take that route, it's pretty easy to establish that no such study has been done or is ever likely to be done.
First, keep in mind that it's much harder to maintain muscle mass at lower body fat levels, plus you developed a lot of supporting muscle mass while you weighed over 300 pounds. You won't know until you get there.
Second, I would hardly call your case typical. Losing that much weight is a rare achievement, and there are probably all kinds of medical measurements that would give totally screwy results on you right now.
Third, BMI is not intended for people like yourself who actually know a little bit about taking care of themselves. It doesn't take very much reading at all to get way beyond BMI. For the people who never get that far, BMI is probably the most accurate, useful thing they can handle.
That's a good suggestion; it probably has the same strengths as body fat percentage and would be measured using the same techniques.
Unfortunately, measurements of body fat percentage are inaccurate unless expensive. Scales that use electrical impedance are reliable at detecting relative change in a single individual, if they are used consistently under the same circumstances (time of day, level of skin moisture, etc.) They don't give you a useful reading from one trip to the doctor's office. Skin fold tests using calipers can be pretty accurate when done by a trained person, but they measure subcutaneous fat levels and have to be adjusted using an age-dependent estimate of your intra-abdominal fat. Immersion tests are too expensive for routine use; they're a luxury for pro athletes and yuppie fitness enthusiasts.
BMI is a public health tool. It's great for large, cheap studies relating lifestyle factors to health, and it's pretty good for educating the average person. It's the only absolute number that you can use to bring a clue to the large numbers of overweight people who are under the impression that their weight is normal and healthy. Being overweight, like being anorexic, usually involves warped self-perception and an incorrect idea of what "normal" is. You have to provide an absolute number because it's the only way to bypass their warped preconceptions. As bad as it is, BMI is the best thing available for this purpose.
Fitness enthusiasts don't have much to learn from BMI, but luckily, most people who are muscular enough to throw off the standard normal-overweight-obese BMI classification are going to ignore BMI because they already think about their fitness on a daily basis. They aren't going to shit their pants over an article in Newsweek that says they need to lose weight. Anyway, public health information isn't about taking care of corner cases. It's about trying to use a few million dollars to reduce the national diabetes rate by 2%. (Those numbers = WAG.)
Not at all. Doctors and nurses use charts; most people use charts or web calculators like this one.
Mostly "quick and dirty" applies to medical research, where it's quick, cheap, and routine to record a patient's height and weight. You don't need extra funding or specially trained staff to measure height and weight consistently, and in many cases, that data is already recorded as a matter of course. It's an easy statistic to use in a study or to apply retroactively to existing data. The extra complexity of dealing with inches and pounds doesn't matter, since the data is handled in bulk by software.
You mean the BMI is not an accurate indicator of something that someone is promoting it as an accurate indicator of.
I call BS. There's a huge gap between "normal" and "obese," so I believe you're "technically" making stuff up. For a 5'9" man, normal is less than 169 pounds. Obese is at least 203 pounds. Are you telling me you lose that much muscle mass (relative to your height) in two months because it's rainy outside? Complete and utter nonsense.
BMI is useful for its intended purposes:
1. In research, as a mediocre but cost-effective proxy for body composition.
2. In a clinical setting, to beat ignorant, delusional people over the head with it and say "YOU HAVE A PROBLEM! SCIENCE SAYS SO! ADMIT IT!" (It isn't meant to be used on people who have the slightest clue. Just on, oh, about 50% of the US population. It may be unsound in principle, but it's better than their current thinking about their weight.)
The score on an IQ test is relative to the sample the scoring method was calibrated against. If I go into a room and take an IQ test by myself, will I automatically be assigned a score of 100? No. I'll be given a score that indicates how I compare to a reference sample. Since some popular tests remain in use for decades, and correlations between new tests and old tests are carefully studied, it is quite possible to assign IQs to members of a sample S according to a scale calibrated for a mean of 100 on a different sample S'. Then there is no guarantee that the mean IQ over S is 100.
That means you can estimate (presumably by some statistical method based on correlations between modern IQ tests and those given fifty years ago) the mean IQ of current testees on a scale calibrated to data from fifty years ago, or vice-versa.
It has some power to predict academic performance, but that is not what it is designed to measure. Nor is it particularly good at it. Just as in business, non-IQ abilities (hard work, emotional strength, social skills, mental stamina, valuing achievement and status) play a role in academic success. Predicting academic performance from IQ is like predicting a car's range from its engine efficiency.
It depends on what you mean by success :-) If by success you mean money and coercive power over people, then yes, MBAs tend to be more successful than PhDs. When they say that academic politics are nasty because the stakes are so small, they mean that there is less of that kind of "success" to go around, and people with an appetite for it are bitterly unhappy in academia.
Fortunately, most academics measure themselves differently :-)
+1 on the memory growth. Happens to me, forces restarts, matters more than gewgaws.
I like it the way it is. On my monitor, the toolbar takes up about the right amount of space. If it's all done with vector graphics, maybe there should be a way to resize the toolbar? Locked by default, of course, with options to restore sizes to default values and restore sizes to their start-of-session values.
I just wanted to add that Firefox does the same thing to me on Windows. I've never experienced the problem under Linux, but my, um, browsing habits are a bit different on Linux; I don't open seventy tabs of *cough* media-rich pages at a time. I haven't noticed it degrading the performance of other apps, but I'd still love to see it fixed.
A recurring theme in weak and eventually overturned convictions.
He isn't cooperating with them, so they will characterize anything they have difficulty finding, or find in a weird place, as "hidden."
It's harder to deal with that one. I've known people who had (and even drove) cars with missing seats, but they were rural teenagers and college students, not prosperous urban software developers. On the other hand, the guy dropped out of junior high school and got into Berkeley anyway, so he's an odd duck.
What makes me most skeptical is that the police investigated for weeks and then said everything they found led back to him. That seems mean that they didn't find any evidence that pointed any other way, and the less evidence they found, the more confident they felt in their first guess. (Data can make you pretty sure of something, but no amount of data can make you feel as sure as you would if you didn't have any data at all.) Next they order a forensic examination of his house and car and frame what they have in the most damning way possible for the press. That projects confidence, which may prompt the suspect to confess and will go a long way toward convincing a judge and/or jury if no further evidence is discovered.
But I'd still bet on him being the killer :-)
I think you're a bit mixed up. Orthopraxic religions are more relaxed about what people say and believe theologically, but this has nothing to do with hating people who do evil things. There's no "conservation of religious nastiness" that forces them to hate murderers to compensate for tolerating heterodoxy. Buddhism, for instance, counsels against hatred and makes no exception for hatred of murderers.
Furthermore, while some people believe that moral responsibility should be enforced through the hatred of believers, this is unfortunately a recurring pathology in all religions, not something limited to a specific class of religions.
It's only sane to commit murder if you aren't going to suffer as a result. Based on that reasoning, only psychopaths can sanely commit murder.
From your link, the quote you're interpreting:
So murderers aren't five times as likely as non-murderers to repeat the crime that put them in prison -- they're five times more likely to commit murder. In other words, a released non-murderer is 20% as likely to commit murder as a released murderer. Far from reinforcing your point, that statistic undermines it.
Well around here in Texas, it's a well known joke. We don't take offense, and I doubt enough people take it seriously to elevate it to the status of myth.
And he had it right; it's "needed killin'," not "needed killing." Big difference.
I don't think a great programmer has a language of choice, except for each particular problem he tackles.
According to John McCarthy, the guy who invented Lisp, he and his collaborators didn't intend for Lisp programs to always be written using the S-expression syntax. The demand for different syntax never materialized, though. As people used Lisp, they learned to appreciate the S-expressions. That has continued to be the case up to the present day. Projects that do away with S-expressions, such as Dylan and Arc, are explicit attempts to popularize Lisp among less adventurous programmers, not improve the productivity of experienced Lispers.
So you're wrong and you're right. You're wrong about S-expressions not catching on: Lisp has S-expressions, and always will, because they do catch on with basically everyone who uses Lisp for a significant amount of time. On the other hand, you're right that S-expressions stop Lisp from catching on in a big way, because they prevent many people from trying Lisp or keeping at it.
Fortunately, Lisp has proven its ability to survive as an unpopular language, so it isn't a question that Lisp programmers lose sleep over.
It's great for recommending music that sounds similar to stuff you like. Unfortunately, for everything you like, there's a ton of dog food that sounds just like it. It's completely useless, in my experience, especially if lyrical content means anything to you.
Sounds like a great way to waste months or years of two people's time. Not to mention that eventually he'll most likely make the wrong choice between losing a girl he's become attached to and repressing things he likes about himself.
It depends on which operations have to be O(lg n). Operations that don't traverse the entire structure can be more efficient.
It all depends on what you mean by design patterns. Sometimes people describe design patterns as recurring patterns in programs. However, judging by the design patterns they catalogue, what they mean in practice is recurring patterns in source code. Aspects of program structure that do not have to be laboriously and repetitively specified do not qualify as design patterns. "Named memory cell that contains a value" is not a design pattern, despite its ubiquity, because most languages allow it to be expressed quite efficiently.
So, design patterns are patterns that recur in code because they describe a recurring structure that cannot be efficiently expressed in the language. Every language provides abstractions to allow programmers to factor out redundancy, but no language is perfect, so design patterns emerge as coders are forced to recode the same structures over and over again.
Naturally, since different languages support different abstractions, they result in different sets of design patterns. A person coming from a functional language to Java will see many of Java's design patterns as workarounds for Java's lack of support for functional programming. Similarly, a programmer moving from Java to C will notice C design patterns that are essentially workarounds for the lack of OO support in C. "Struct member pointing to table of operations for operating on that struct" would be a C design pattern for supporting polymorphism.
Unfortunately, design patterns books don't give much consideration to the difference between how to design a program's structure and how to express that structure in a particular language.
In politics, everyone is a slimeball. Can you suggest a better idea than getting behind a guy who, for whatever reason, will do the right thing right now?
If you only support honest men in politics, then everyone you support has made a fool of you.