I'll tell you how my "conservative" (I hesitate to say republican, because they haven't represented conservative principles in a long time IMHO) mind works regarding raising taxes:
The government is a great waste of tax money. Giving them more money is giving them a longer leash and they'll spend 150% of whatever you give them. Taking more from a small class (the rich) while the poor majority votes for government services on that money is tyranny. And it will never result in fiscal responsibility, balanced budgets, etc. I want to see fiscal responsibility, but the lower-class majority doesn't care enough to hold their representative's feet to the flame because those tax dollars don't come out of their own pockets.
The only way I think this government will ever again be effective and efficient is if the majority of voters, mid- and lower- class, directly feel the pain and the cost of the policies their favored politicians support. I'd gladly pay more taxes if it means every voter does, not just the rich. And for the record, April 15 is better than christmas for me and I have my earning withholding at $0. I'm nowhere close to being rich.
Taxing the rich is the feel-good thing to do, not the right thing.
[enter Michael Palin] Thank you, thank you everybody. You're too kind. <cheesy smile>
What do you call a nun who walks in her sleep? <cheesy smile> A Roamin' Catholic. Ha ha ha, wasn't that just grand? <cheesy smile>
And now, on with the show! <cheesy smile>
Today we have three contestants. <cheesy smile> Tim, Edward, and Susan. <cheesy smile>
Tim is an accountant by day, but at night he illegally bittorents films and sells them to his friends. <cheesy smile> Edward is in college, majoring in psychology. He's got illegal copies of 37 games on his dorm PC. <cheesy smile> And Susan is a grade-school teacher. She enjoys listening to Celine Dion, Jordan Sparks and Kelly Clarkson. She has all their albums... but hasn't paid for any of them. <cheesy smile>
One lucky contestant will repent, and... well let's just say the game doesn't end well for the other two contestants. Ha ha ha, isn't that just grand? <cheesy smile>
The security for paper ballots is that you have volunteers from different political organizations keep eyes on everything that happens at the polls. Ballots are deposited by the voter into a locked box where it remains until the count, when there are literally dozens of eyes of different political interests observing the hand count. I'm pretty happy with that.
I'm all for giving exclusive rights for a considerable time period after the author/inventor died. Otherwise it'd be as simple as offing them and you are free to use their writings and inventions without any problems.
No, the reason it was scrapped was because they knew what could happen if they use this weapon on a certain kind of person, like an unrealized kwisatz haderach.
umm... did you miss the part where the guy also bitched that interpreted languages are "too slow"?
so which is it? where on this stone are you going to squeeze the blood from? it's a tradeoff and the menu of available programming language choices is already comprehensive.
That's kind of what I was thinking. As the old saying goes, you can pick any two things:
Ok, I get where I was wrong. I was selecting a boy at random, not a family at random, as some of the comments I was responding to incorrectly said, if you're a boy in a 2-child family you have a 1/3 chance of your sibling being a boy and 2/3 chance of your sibling being a girl.
To beat a dead horse, having girl/boy and boy/girl are mutually exclusive events and cannot both be counted in statistics. Tuesday boy is a subject of the study, not part of the statistics. He can be either younger or older, but not both. Although that data is undiscovered it is not indeterminate, so the data must be split into two sets to avoid counting mutually exclusive events in the statistics.
Essentially, in statistics the concept of something being mutually exclusive serves to prevent it from being counted more than once in the overall tally and has less to do with it being true or false over something else (although it is always preferable to count only true data).
The reply where you start by agreeing that 1/3 is correct, and then propose some meddling in order to prove your hurt intuition right again?
You're just trying to justify your intuition, and beat the data into a shape that feels right to you. The analysis of the data in the article (and by me) is correct, though. Unfortunately for your intuition.
No, I agreed that the data they provided showed 1/3, but that data is incorrect.
Explain how the data I beat "into a shape that feels right" to me is wrong.
If, on the other hand, you select a child specifically for being a boy and part of a 2-child family, then the gender of the other child is not independent.
Intuition would say that it is independent. TFA is all about how intuition is wrong. Just because your data (and theirs) shows that it is not independent doesn't mean it isn't. You may have your data wrong. Intuition may be right.
If you've selected a child specifically for being a boy, he is specifically either older or younger than his sibling in question, and so the set of data which he belongs to is not the group with either a younger boy or an older boy, but to one of two sets of data which are each subsets of that data.
Just because you don't know if he is older or younger doesn't mean you discard that data, but you form two sets of data to represent the two cases. Average out those two sets of data to determine probability, which comes to approximately 50/50.
Yes, that's right, if you take a random sampling where either the older (column 1) or the younger (column 2) child is a boy, there will be approximately 2 girls for every boy in the other column.
But divide these results into 2 different sets. One set where the child in column 1 is a boy and the second set where the child in column 2 is a boy. If Tuesday boy is the older child, his sibling belong to the first set of data. If he's the younger child, his sibling is in the second set of data.
I did your test in SQL for 1000 families, results are 260 boys, 495 girls. However, when applying an identity to Tuesday boy, the results are:
Tuesday is the older child in a family with 1 or more boys: 260 boys, 252 girls.
Tuesday is the younger child in a family with 1 or more boys: 260 boys, 243 girls.
Tuesday is a member of both sets (all boys are), but only as a younger child or an older child. But his sibling can belong to only one of these sets, if a girl. And that data shows approximately 50/50.
Unfortunately, my cable company doesn't have that nice of hardware. No "skip" button, just regular FF with 3 speeds. And they claim that they don't support other hardware.
B/G and G/B are both possible, but mutually exclusive. If the boy is older, then G/B is not possible. You know that because he's a boy you cannot have G/G. You don't know his age, or the age of his sibling in question, but that data is not undetermined, it's merely undiscovered.
Listing their sexes in order of their birth: B/G B/B G/B
Since you're qualifying order of birth as part of this calculation, you must take into consideration whether Tuesday is the younger or the older. You don't know which one he is, that data is undiscovered, but it's not undetermined. He is either older, or younger, and so you can KNOW that G/B and B/G are mutually exclusive to the order of birth, having only one boy that is Tuesday.
Another way to express it, since you're talking about order of birth, is to actually define who Tuesday is in the sequence. Obviously Tuesday would be the boy in the B/G and G/B sequence, but who is he in the B/B sequence? He could be either. Since the question is who is the OTHER, to define the other so clearly in B/G and G/B but not define who the other one is in the B/B leaves the whole thing lacking that detail: is he older or younger than the other boy?
T/G T/B B/T T/G
So you have 2 chances for the other being a boy and 2 chances for the other being a girl.
Where T is the Tuesday boy: G/G - impossible T/G -
How many seconds does it take to fast forward through a full set of ads on your DVR? For me it was about 12-15 seconds, with a few seconds to rewind if I went past the end of the break into the show. Say, an average of 20 seconds.
Hulu commercial breaks are typically 15 to 30 seconds, which may be on average 2-3 seconds longer than it takes me to fast forward commercials on a DVR. Add to that the fact that you can often rewind to before the break (in case you missed something) without backing through the commercials, and then it sometimes (being smart) skips the break that you already watched, I don't see how Hulu is anything but LESS of a pain concerning commercials.
I paid a monthly fee of $15 for renting a DVR, compared to Hulu service for $10. Hulu is bad?
I'm just trying to show that the over-analysis was incomplete.
Truly, probability doesn't change even when you add a ton of irrelevant data. Having seven boys does not one bit affect the sex of the next child. If it doesn't affect the sex, then it doesn't change real probability.
Statistics is the art of crafting convincing lies.
If you select a family where (at least) one of them is a Male that leaves the following options:
Male Dog, Male Cat Male Dog, Female Cat Female Dog, Male Cat
So the chances of both being male are 1/3.
This is the premise where I disagree. The one in question is male, and must be either a dog or a cat (not both), so before you calculate the odds you must determine that either #2 or #3 are impossible and cannot be included in your final statistics.
Male Dog, Male Cat and (Male Dog, Female Cat or Female Dog, Male Cat)
Devlin started by listing the children’s sexes in the order of their birth:
Boy, girl Boy, boy Girl, boy
Since one child is a boy, we know that girl, girl isn’t a possibility. Of the three approximately equally likely possibilities, one has two boys and two have a girl and a boy — so the probability of two boys is 1/3, not 1/2, Devlin concluded.
All this analysis appears to be over-complicating the problem. But I'll see if I can play the game, too.
While it's true that g/g is obviously eliminated, the boy MUST be either the younger or the older. Since he's either one or the other, we can infer that either b/g or b/g is also impossible. If he's older, then g/b is not possible, and if he's younger, then b/g is not possible. One of them is not possible, even though we don't know which one it is.
So we have: Boy > boy OR Girl > boy | boy > girl.
The woman cannot have girl > boy if the boy is older or boy > girl if the boy is younger.
Slashdot Mirror
I'll tell you how my "conservative" (I hesitate to say republican, because they haven't represented conservative principles in a long time IMHO) mind works regarding raising taxes:
The government is a great waste of tax money.
Giving them more money is giving them a longer leash and they'll spend 150% of whatever you give them.
Taking more from a small class (the rich) while the poor majority votes for government services on that money is tyranny. And it will never result in fiscal responsibility, balanced budgets, etc. I want to see fiscal responsibility, but the lower-class majority doesn't care enough to hold their representative's feet to the flame because those tax dollars don't come out of their own pockets.
The only way I think this government will ever again be effective and efficient is if the majority of voters, mid- and lower- class, directly feel the pain and the cost of the policies their favored politicians support. I'd gladly pay more taxes if it means every voter does, not just the rich. And for the record, April 15 is better than christmas for me and I have my earning withholding at $0. I'm nowhere close to being rich.
Taxing the rich is the feel-good thing to do, not the right thing.
Every generation needs a new revolution. - Jefferson
So everything deteriorates and must be replaced. Even (and especially) government.
*gasp* THE BISHOP!
[enter Michael Palin]
Thank you, thank you everybody. You're too kind. <cheesy smile>
What do you call a nun who walks in her sleep? <cheesy smile> A Roamin' Catholic. Ha ha ha, wasn't that just grand? <cheesy smile>
And now, on with the show! <cheesy smile>
Today we have three contestants. <cheesy smile> Tim, Edward, and Susan. <cheesy smile>
Tim is an accountant by day, but at night he illegally bittorents films and sells them to his friends. <cheesy smile>
Edward is in college, majoring in psychology. He's got illegal copies of 37 games on his dorm PC. <cheesy smile>
And Susan is a grade-school teacher. She enjoys listening to Celine Dion, Jordan Sparks and Kelly Clarkson. She has all their albums... but hasn't paid for any of them. <cheesy smile>
One lucky contestant will repent, and... well let's just say the game doesn't end well for the other two contestants. Ha ha ha, isn't that just grand? <cheesy smile>
So let's -- get -- started! <huge cheesy smile>
The security for paper ballots is that you have volunteers from different political organizations keep eyes on everything that happens at the polls. Ballots are deposited by the voter into a locked box where it remains until the count, when there are literally dozens of eyes of different political interests observing the hand count. I'm pretty happy with that.
Should have made it the head of Al Gore, eating chads, being chased by lawyers draped in bedsheets. Pac-Chad.
An inventor has up to 1 year after the invention goes public to file for a patent.
Meat inspections?
Rabbis do a much better job.
The Senator from Nebraska votes wheat and corn.
Despite Nebraska being of no particular importance to the majority of the states, we do in fact have 2 senators, much like the rest of the states.
I'm all for giving exclusive rights for a considerable time period after the author/inventor died. Otherwise it'd be as simple as offing them and you are free to use their writings and inventions without any problems.
Put your hand in the box.
No, the reason it was scrapped was because they knew what could happen if they use this weapon on a certain kind of person, like an unrealized kwisatz haderach.
umm... did you miss the part where the guy also bitched that interpreted languages are "too slow"?
so which is it? where on this stone are you going to squeeze the blood from? it's a tradeoff and the menu of available programming language choices is already comprehensive.
That's kind of what I was thinking. As the old saying goes, you can pick any two things:
Fast.
Accurate.
Cheap.
So how can they claim a patent on old tech that they weren't even close to being the inventor of?
Sorry for AC.
Claim: * on a hand-held device.
I imagine that's how.
Now I'm going to go out and file a patent for doing the same thing with a refrigerator.
Ok, I get where I was wrong. I was selecting a boy at random, not a family at random, as some of the comments I was responding to incorrectly said, if you're a boy in a 2-child family you have a 1/3 chance of your sibling being a boy and 2/3 chance of your sibling being a girl.
To beat a dead horse, having girl/boy and boy/girl are mutually exclusive events and cannot both be counted in statistics. Tuesday boy is a subject of the study, not part of the statistics. He can be either younger or older, but not both. Although that data is undiscovered it is not indeterminate, so the data must be split into two sets to avoid counting mutually exclusive events in the statistics.
Essentially, in statistics the concept of something being mutually exclusive serves to prevent it from being counted more than once in the overall tally and has less to do with it being true or false over something else (although it is always preferable to count only true data).
The reply where you start by agreeing that 1/3 is correct, and then propose some meddling in order to prove your hurt intuition right again?
You're just trying to justify your intuition, and beat the data into a shape that feels right to you. The analysis of the data in the article (and by me) is correct, though. Unfortunately for your intuition.
No, I agreed that the data they provided showed 1/3, but that data is incorrect.
Explain how the data I beat "into a shape that feels right" to me is wrong.
Since when does intuition trump data?
It's not the data, it's the analysis.
Nice! Experimental data, even.
Can we agree that that settles the case that the chance is indeed 1/3 if you select by family?
No. Read my reply to that comment.
If, on the other hand, you select a child specifically for being a boy and part of a 2-child family, then the gender of the other child is not independent.
Intuition would say that it is independent. TFA is all about how intuition is wrong. Just because your data (and theirs) shows that it is not independent doesn't mean it isn't. You may have your data wrong. Intuition may be right.
If you've selected a child specifically for being a boy, he is specifically either older or younger than his sibling in question, and so the set of data which he belongs to is not the group with either a younger boy or an older boy, but to one of two sets of data which are each subsets of that data.
Just because you don't know if he is older or younger doesn't mean you discard that data, but you form two sets of data to represent the two cases. Average out those two sets of data to determine probability, which comes to approximately 50/50.
See here http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1701394&cid=32752678
Yes, that's right, if you take a random sampling where either the older (column 1) or the younger (column 2) child is a boy, there will be approximately 2 girls for every boy in the other column.
But divide these results into 2 different sets. One set where the child in column 1 is a boy and the second set where the child in column 2 is a boy. If Tuesday boy is the older child, his sibling belong to the first set of data. If he's the younger child, his sibling is in the second set of data.
I did your test in SQL for 1000 families, results are 260 boys, 495 girls. However, when applying an identity to Tuesday boy, the results are:
Tuesday is the older child in a family with 1 or more boys: 260 boys, 252 girls.
Tuesday is the younger child in a family with 1 or more boys: 260 boys, 243 girls.
Tuesday is a member of both sets (all boys are), but only as a younger child or an older child. But his sibling can belong to only one of these sets, if a girl. And that data shows approximately 50/50.
Unfortunately, my cable company doesn't have that nice of hardware. No "skip" button, just regular FF with 3 speeds. And they claim that they don't support other hardware.
B/G and G/B are both possible, but mutually exclusive. If the boy is older, then G/B is not possible. You know that because he's a boy you cannot have G/G. You don't know his age, or the age of his sibling in question, but that data is not undetermined, it's merely undiscovered.
Listing their sexes in order of their birth:
B/G
B/B
G/B
Since you're qualifying order of birth as part of this calculation, you must take into consideration whether Tuesday is the younger or the older. You don't know which one he is, that data is undiscovered, but it's not undetermined. He is either older, or younger, and so you can KNOW that G/B and B/G are mutually exclusive to the order of birth, having only one boy that is Tuesday.
Another way to express it, since you're talking about order of birth, is to actually define who Tuesday is in the sequence. Obviously Tuesday would be the boy in the B/G and G/B sequence, but who is he in the B/B sequence? He could be either. Since the question is who is the OTHER, to define the other so clearly in B/G and G/B but not define who the other one is in the B/B leaves the whole thing lacking that detail: is he older or younger than the other boy?
T/G
T/B
B/T
T/G
So you have 2 chances for the other being a boy and 2 chances for the other being a girl.
Where T is the Tuesday boy:
G/G - impossible
T/G -
How many seconds does it take to fast forward through a full set of ads on your DVR? For me it was about 12-15 seconds, with a few seconds to rewind if I went past the end of the break into the show. Say, an average of 20 seconds.
Hulu commercial breaks are typically 15 to 30 seconds, which may be on average 2-3 seconds longer than it takes me to fast forward commercials on a DVR. Add to that the fact that you can often rewind to before the break (in case you missed something) without backing through the commercials, and then it sometimes (being smart) skips the break that you already watched, I don't see how Hulu is anything but LESS of a pain concerning commercials.
I paid a monthly fee of $15 for renting a DVR, compared to Hulu service for $10. Hulu is bad?
I'm just trying to show that the over-analysis was incomplete.
Truly, probability doesn't change even when you add a ton of irrelevant data. Having seven boys does not one bit affect the sex of the next child. If it doesn't affect the sex, then it doesn't change real probability.
Statistics is the art of crafting convincing lies.
If you select a family where (at least) one of them is a Male that leaves the following options:
Male Dog, Male Cat
Male Dog, Female Cat
Female Dog, Male Cat
So the chances of both being male are 1/3.
This is the premise where I disagree. The one in question is male, and must be either a dog or a cat (not both), so before you calculate the odds you must determine that either #2 or #3 are impossible and cannot be included in your final statistics.
Male Dog, Male Cat
and
(Male Dog, Female Cat or Female Dog, Male Cat)
1/2.
Devlin started by listing the children’s sexes in the order of their birth:
Boy, girl
Boy, boy
Girl, boy
Since one child is a boy, we know that girl, girl isn’t a possibility. Of the three approximately equally likely possibilities, one has two boys and two have a girl and a boy — so the probability of two boys is 1/3, not 1/2, Devlin concluded.
All this analysis appears to be over-complicating the problem. But I'll see if I can play the game, too.
While it's true that g/g is obviously eliminated, the boy MUST be either the younger or the older. Since he's either one or the other, we can infer that either b/g or b/g is also impossible. If he's older, then g/b is not possible, and if he's younger, then b/g is not possible. One of them is not possible, even though we don't know which one it is.
So we have:
Boy > boy
OR
Girl > boy | boy > girl.
The woman cannot have girl > boy if the boy is older or boy > girl if the boy is younger.
I conclude intuition is correct, 1/2.
Having no sense of humor is no excuse for limiting free speech.