The people taking it, I can understand. It's the people prescribing it I have an issue with. By promoting their method as anything other than wishful thinking (which sounds harsh, but isn't a bad description of the placebo effect, really), they increase the chance that someone will take the sugar pill instead of real medicine. This is especially true in the cases when many of the people promoting their cures actively attack conventional medicine as being the harmful work of evil corporations and so forth.
When this happens, as I said above, people will die, with a much higher frequency than the real provable successes of the placebo effect from these pills. Just look at the case of Rath noted in the introduction - by promoting his magic water for the treatment of AIDs at the expense of retrovirals, hundreds of thousands of Africans have died before their time.
Is this an acceptable cost so these people can peddle their "alternatives"? I don't think so.
What you posted describes the Pareto distribution, yes. However, the Pareto distribution is exactly the opposite of what the "Long Tail" model suggested by Andersen describes.
The crux of Andersen's argument is that, while Amazon et al have the same demand for big-name titles, their tail is longer and higher than a traditional bookstore, and by defining a cut at a certain point (say, those with less than 5% of the peak sales, those outside the top 10% or whatever is appropriate) it can be seen that the low-volume sales represent a larger fraction of the total sales due to the extreme length of the tail.
Quoting from the Wikipedia article on the topic:
In the graph shown above, Amazon's book sales or Netflix's movie rentals would be represented along the vertical axis, while the book or movie ranks are along the horizontal axis. The total volume of low popularity items exceeds the volume of high popularity items.
Andersen was suggesting that, in the limit of infinite items to sell and negligable stocking costs, much more profit is to be derived from the large number of items that sell a few copies than the few items that sell many copies.
Indeed, it went further than that, suggesting that as people got used to having more choice, they would begin to shun the "popular" items in favour of more obscure titles, further fattening the tail. But that's even more speculative and somewhat independent of the other economic predictions.
Your father did not prove the official story wrong, it's mentioned in your post and numerous of the sibling posts - the placebo effect. That's all there is to the vast majority of these cases - sometimes, stuff which demonstrably should not work does, because human bodies are funny things like that. Sometimes, a sugar pill really could save your life.
However, the other 99 times out of 100, the real medical treatment is what gives you the best chance of a cure. And when people are advocating their magic sugar pills rather than proven medical treatments, people will (and did) die. That is why "live and let live" style outlooks are not a suitable approach to these issues, and no number of anecdotes changes that.
With regards to the "1 of 9" thing - you said in a reply below that you got the first part of the first book free. Would this by any chance have been "From the two rivers"? If so, that was part of a re-release of the books, where the first was split up into two to try and entice new readers.
I ask, because at the time there were indeed 9 books in the series, which would explain the discrepancy between your recollection and those of other submitters.
I think we must be using the term "balance" in different ways, as I'm struggling to make sense of your post, based on my interpretation.
In my interpretation, 'balance' would mean that no (class/skillset) has a clear competitive advantage over all others*, such that all options were equally valid.
There is nothing about skills-based games that would stop a particular skill/skillset dominating over the alternatives (swords do 1 million damage per hit, maces do 1 damage per hit with no other differences: clearly swords and maces aren't 'balanced', in this admittedly ludicrous situation).
Is your argument that this interpretation of balance doesn't matter, because, in the above example, anyone who used to use maces can just switch to swords and redress the balance? If so, I suppose I have to agree in principle, but it doesn't feel like a system which I would describe as "balanced" - while the players may in principle be balanced, skills and classes are not, and this leads to uninteresting gameplay.
* - Obviously class differentiation may lead to some classes being better at some things than others and so forth, but taken as a whole classes should have roughly as many good points as bad points. Exact counting of good and bad points may vary, but this should be the general goal.
The idea that you can modify each skill "in a vacuum" is patently false - unless there is absolutely no potential overlap between skills (which would be a rather dull system), you will need to take into account what happens with a player with skills X and Y now picks up skill Z because of a change which is made.
In reality, such a system seems like it would be massively harder to balance, since balancing a single skill against others is a meaningless task (wood-chopping is balanced perfectly against magery! Wait, what?). Instead balancing skill sets becomes the key challenge. And since the number of skillsets is vastly larger than the number of skills, it is also likely much larger than the number of classes in most MMOs, making this a very complex job indeed.
The international olympiads are held in maths, Informatics and the sciences, and are actually quite prestigious events - most large countries send full teams, and it's held in many countries.
Similarly, most countries do put a significant amount of effort into the selection and training of the teams (here's the US training organisation's site, for example). While the exact amount of effort varies, it's still a fair time contribution, even in the US. Luckily, the prestige of the event tends to offset any minor issues it causes in other areas of the student's study.
I think you're underestimating how seriously some countries take these events - while I'm sure he got started in it because he was interested in programming, preparation for these events typically involves collecting the best talents from national events and putting them through rigorous training (in the interview pdf linked above, he mentions the training camps they use to select the people they send to the event).
This goes quite a bit beyond "schools", to be sure. But if you think competitors in these events are entirely self-taught and doing it just for fun, you're quite mistaken.
You can calculate the physical dose, sure. But what do you compare it to? If the answer is "ionizing radiation", there's a pretty big question mark as the two types of radiation have fundamentally different behaviors and interactions. Moreover, even if they were the same the understanding of low-dose non-acute exposure to ionizing radiation is terribly poorly understood at the moment. If you're going down the alternative route of localized heating, then the energy deposits are very small indeed - the temperature change would probably saturate at a degree or less, I would guess.
Really, given our lack of knowledge of possible methods of action, you have to look at the epidemiology, and at the current moment there really doesn't seem to be anything to it. But maybe in ten or twenty years we'll all be kicking ourselves...
But in case of Wi-Fi, it's more simple: Calculate the effects of the energy that the radiation has on his body. My guess is, that it can't change anything.
If you think it's easier to perform calculations from first principles of the effects of low-dose low-frequency radiation than to observe the effects over a few years, I think you're severely over-estimating our knowledge of radiobiology.
That said, these short-term measurements are sufficient to address concerns such as those raised in TFA - the sufferers are not saying wifi is dangerous in the long term, they are saying they get significant effects with immediate (or close to) onset upon exposure to wifi. For that, what the GP suggested is more than adequate.
'Great Britain' refers to all the hundreds of islands around the British mainland.
This is pretty much exactly wrong - "Great Britain" is the name of the island which could be described as the "British Mainland", which contains most of England, Scotland and Wales. 'Great' typically meaning "large", it's easy to see how that comes about.
So, taking numbers from Wikipedia's article on Guantanamo:
775 prisoners have been delivered to Guantanamo. Of these, 420 have been released without charge already, and of those that remain only 60 to 80 actually have pending charges. The rest will be freed (once there's somewhere to put them). So, if anything, the accuracy of imprisoning people in Guantanamo is actually worse than general picking up of people in Iraq, not better.
Pandora made a withdrawal from non-US markets some time ago - it seems the difficulty and cost of working out licensing agreements with every single country was too much, and so they decided to restrict to the US where they had a workable agreement and leave it at that for the time being.
They've said they want to expand once again, but I haven't heard anything from them for quite some time...
I had this discussion with some friends after the long-range rocket test NK did a while back, and I don't buy that the US having nukes would substantially affect NK's outlook on using a nuclear weapon against the US if it could and saw a clear benefit from it.
Consider it from the USA's point of view - a North Korean nuke sails out of the sky and flattens, say, Seattle. Should the US respond with nuclear weapons? Where should they go?
Targeting North Korean cities just kills a lot of civilians who the NK authorities don't seem to care that much for anyway, and which would certainly guarantee a degree of hatred from the remaining North Korean populace and severely damage what would otherwise be a perfect moral high ground for removing the current leadership.
The other option is using them to speed along the war by using them on military targets - a slightly more plausible use - but raises similar problems to the above. The US would lose a portion of its moral high ground, and the rest of the international community is going to be a bit leery of committing troops to an invasion force if they suspect there's going to be lots of nukes flying around.
If a government seemed to really be concerned for the welfare of all their citizens, then yes, the concept of deterrence would be a good policy. But if they're out to promote an ideology and strike back at their enemies, then its effects are dangerously diminished. At the moment this means that North Korean nukes would be a strong deterrent to the USA, but perhaps not the other way around.
What is the definition of "Published" for something like an assignment, anyway?
Since it's presumably been handed over willingly to a professor to grade, the only obvious rights the student has over what the professor can and cannot do (barring some other contract between the two) are those granted him as the copyright holder of the work, which is what is being addressed in this case.
(Also, careful about using the word "stolen". People round these parts get uppity when you use it in connection with cases involving copyright. Well, sometimes they do...)
And don't they stop treating cancer patients in some European countries if they're too old?
This is a fairly ubiquitous practice - most cancer treatments are nasty. Invasive surgery, chemotherapy and radiotherapy all potentially have significant negative impact on quality of life. If someone has the option of a certain number of relatively comfortable years, or a few additional years filled with serious complications, many doctors will recommend the latter option, and this is sometimes reflected in treatment options.
Extra appropriate since KoL has been way ahead of this achievement business with their trophy system.
Of course, if Taco et al get ideas from some of the more ridiculous KoL trophies, I fear to see what may happen to slashdot as the completionist hordes get carried away.
That said, I'm off to register a WoW character. Mmm, precious precious points...
On every paper I've been associated with (admittedly not many since I'm relatively new to this "science" malarky), the copyright signing over was related to a particular instance of the paper - that is, you signed away copyright not for the work as a whole, but the particular formatting and attributions which appear in the journal.
Simply processing it in a different stylefile and removing any mention of the journal it's actually published in is sufficient to address this concern, meaning a "preprint" style formatting is perfectly acceptable to publish on your own page, or somewhere like arxiv.org (a point some of them explicitly acknowledge - and even seem to encourage somewhat).
If this is the status quo elsewhere, this isn't really as dramatic a step as MIT would like to make it out to be.
I think you hit on the key point here in your post:
"fear" comes from the desire to avoid unpleasantness or otherwise shocking, jarring stimuli.
The easy, day 1 of horror school approach is the jarring stimuli you mention, which are typically hard-wired into our fight-or-flight reaction. But consider the series of events in Doom 3 when the lights go out and a demon bellows from a just-revealed compartment: You almost immediately resolve into the "Fight" status, pull out your shotgun, and apply liberally to the demon's face till it stops moving. After a few instances like this, there isn't really a vestige of a fear response, as all the lights going out mean is that there's a new Monster-In-The-Box to kill off before you move into the next area - indeed, the shocks are a sign things are going well. All you're left with the anticipation of unpleasant noises, which is far from what I'd hope for in something billed as horror.
Unfortunately, I don't really know what would make a good horror game though - the issue comes down to the fact that the things in computer games are by design beatable, and in most cases can be attempted without any sort of penalty - as the starter of this thread suggests.
This leads to a set of conflicting goals - fears comes from something being a real threat, but a video game is typically the player overcoming a series of challenges. Having them arranged such that the enemies are sufficiently powerful that the player is driven to flee and actively fear their reappearance could be an approach, but rendering the player effectively helpless in the face of adversity doesn't seem like the foundation of a good game.
Really, I don't know what I want from a good horror game - but I'm pretty sure it's more than monsters jumping from boxes.
Oddly, the things you list (things popping up, lighting changes and similar) are the exact antithesis of what I would like to see in a "horror" game.
Big loud noises and beasts jumping out of walls can make you jump, sure - but that's really the lowest level of horror, surely games could aim a bit higher?
Actually, I think that this is the point. Reading the article, there is no argument beyond the shallow "EULAs are bad, they should be disposed of" that anyone who's been on a site like/. is probably deeply familiar with already.
I bet my old GP is quite miffed about this, since he "discovered" this about 15 years ago when I developed a rash back in the heydey of the SNES. The fact that these ad-hoc "case studies" are still viewed as a serious part of medical research baffles me no end.
I think whoever wrote the summary also only skimmed the article. Quoting from the final paragraph of the article:
Can you put up with people looting your kills and a very real lack of direction/hand holding
"Can you put up with a lack of handholding" does not sound like praise to me.
Really, the thing which puzzles me is that all the games which want to harken back to the good old "hardcore" days seem to think that it will excuse them from being buggy, unbalanced, and generally "rough around the edges" - but largely thanks to Blizzard and the degree of polish they've put into WoW, the bar has been raised and a lot of new MMOs just don't seem to have noticed despite the intervening years. A shame, really.
Slashdot Mirror
When this happens, as I said above, people will die, with a much higher frequency than the real provable successes of the placebo effect from these pills. Just look at the case of Rath noted in the introduction - by promoting his magic water for the treatment of AIDs at the expense of retrovirals, hundreds of thousands of Africans have died before their time.
Is this an acceptable cost so these people can peddle their "alternatives"? I don't think so.
The crux of Andersen's argument is that, while Amazon et al have the same demand for big-name titles, their tail is longer and higher than a traditional bookstore, and by defining a cut at a certain point (say, those with less than 5% of the peak sales, those outside the top 10% or whatever is appropriate) it can be seen that the low-volume sales represent a larger fraction of the total sales due to the extreme length of the tail.
Quoting from the Wikipedia article on the topic:
In the graph shown above, Amazon's book sales or Netflix's movie rentals would be represented along the vertical axis, while the book or movie ranks are along the horizontal axis. The total volume of low popularity items exceeds the volume of high popularity items.
Andersen was suggesting that, in the limit of infinite items to sell and negligable stocking costs, much more profit is to be derived from the large number of items that sell a few copies than the few items that sell many copies.
Indeed, it went further than that, suggesting that as people got used to having more choice, they would begin to shun the "popular" items in favour of more obscure titles, further fattening the tail. But that's even more speculative and somewhat independent of the other economic predictions.
However, the other 99 times out of 100, the real medical treatment is what gives you the best chance of a cure. And when people are advocating their magic sugar pills rather than proven medical treatments, people will (and did) die. That is why "live and let live" style outlooks are not a suitable approach to these issues, and no number of anecdotes changes that.
I ask, because at the time there were indeed 9 books in the series, which would explain the discrepancy between your recollection and those of other submitters.
In my interpretation, 'balance' would mean that no (class/skillset) has a clear competitive advantage over all others*, such that all options were equally valid.
There is nothing about skills-based games that would stop a particular skill/skillset dominating over the alternatives (swords do 1 million damage per hit, maces do 1 damage per hit with no other differences: clearly swords and maces aren't 'balanced', in this admittedly ludicrous situation).
Is your argument that this interpretation of balance doesn't matter, because, in the above example, anyone who used to use maces can just switch to swords and redress the balance? If so, I suppose I have to agree in principle, but it doesn't feel like a system which I would describe as "balanced" - while the players may in principle be balanced, skills and classes are not, and this leads to uninteresting gameplay.
* - Obviously class differentiation may lead to some classes being better at some things than others and so forth, but taken as a whole classes should have roughly as many good points as bad points. Exact counting of good and bad points may vary, but this should be the general goal.
In reality, such a system seems like it would be massively harder to balance, since balancing a single skill against others is a meaningless task (wood-chopping is balanced perfectly against magery! Wait, what?). Instead balancing skill sets becomes the key challenge. And since the number of skillsets is vastly larger than the number of skills, it is also likely much larger than the number of classes in most MMOs, making this a very complex job indeed.
Similarly, most countries do put a significant amount of effort into the selection and training of the teams (here's the US training organisation's site, for example). While the exact amount of effort varies, it's still a fair time contribution, even in the US. Luckily, the prestige of the event tends to offset any minor issues it causes in other areas of the student's study.
This goes quite a bit beyond "schools", to be sure. But if you think competitors in these events are entirely self-taught and doing it just for fun, you're quite mistaken.
Really, given our lack of knowledge of possible methods of action, you have to look at the epidemiology, and at the current moment there really doesn't seem to be anything to it. But maybe in ten or twenty years we'll all be kicking ourselves...
But in case of Wi-Fi, it's more simple: Calculate the effects of the energy that the radiation has on his body. My guess is, that it can't change anything.
If you think it's easier to perform calculations from first principles of the effects of low-dose low-frequency radiation than to observe the effects over a few years, I think you're severely over-estimating our knowledge of radiobiology.
That said, these short-term measurements are sufficient to address concerns such as those raised in TFA - the sufferers are not saying wifi is dangerous in the long term, they are saying they get significant effects with immediate (or close to) onset upon exposure to wifi. For that, what the GP suggested is more than adequate.
Up Up Down Down Left Right Left Right B A, you philistine!
'Great Britain' refers to all the hundreds of islands around the British mainland.
This is pretty much exactly wrong - "Great Britain" is the name of the island which could be described as the "British Mainland", which contains most of England, Scotland and Wales. 'Great' typically meaning "large", it's easy to see how that comes about.
Wait a minute...
775 prisoners have been delivered to Guantanamo. Of these, 420 have been released without charge already, and of those that remain only 60 to 80 actually have pending charges. The rest will be freed (once there's somewhere to put them). So, if anything, the accuracy of imprisoning people in Guantanamo is actually worse than general picking up of people in Iraq, not better.
They've said they want to expand once again, but I haven't heard anything from them for quite some time...
Consider it from the USA's point of view - a North Korean nuke sails out of the sky and flattens, say, Seattle. Should the US respond with nuclear weapons? Where should they go?
Targeting North Korean cities just kills a lot of civilians who the NK authorities don't seem to care that much for anyway, and which would certainly guarantee a degree of hatred from the remaining North Korean populace and severely damage what would otherwise be a perfect moral high ground for removing the current leadership.
The other option is using them to speed along the war by using them on military targets - a slightly more plausible use - but raises similar problems to the above. The US would lose a portion of its moral high ground, and the rest of the international community is going to be a bit leery of committing troops to an invasion force if they suspect there's going to be lots of nukes flying around.
If a government seemed to really be concerned for the welfare of all their citizens, then yes, the concept of deterrence would be a good policy. But if they're out to promote an ideology and strike back at their enemies, then its effects are dangerously diminished. At the moment this means that North Korean nukes would be a strong deterrent to the USA, but perhaps not the other way around.
Since it's presumably been handed over willingly to a professor to grade, the only obvious rights the student has over what the professor can and cannot do (barring some other contract between the two) are those granted him as the copyright holder of the work, which is what is being addressed in this case.
(Also, careful about using the word "stolen". People round these parts get uppity when you use it in connection with cases involving copyright. Well, sometimes they do...)
And don't they stop treating cancer patients in some European countries if they're too old?
This is a fairly ubiquitous practice - most cancer treatments are nasty. Invasive surgery, chemotherapy and radiotherapy all potentially have significant negative impact on quality of life. If someone has the option of a certain number of relatively comfortable years, or a few additional years filled with serious complications, many doctors will recommend the latter option, and this is sometimes reflected in treatment options.
Of course, if Taco et al get ideas from some of the more ridiculous KoL trophies, I fear to see what may happen to slashdot as the completionist hordes get carried away.
That said, I'm off to register a WoW character. Mmm, precious precious points...
Simply processing it in a different stylefile and removing any mention of the journal it's actually published in is sufficient to address this concern, meaning a "preprint" style formatting is perfectly acceptable to publish on your own page, or somewhere like arxiv.org (a point some of them explicitly acknowledge - and even seem to encourage somewhat).
If this is the status quo elsewhere, this isn't really as dramatic a step as MIT would like to make it out to be.
"fear" comes from the desire to avoid unpleasantness or otherwise shocking, jarring stimuli.
The easy, day 1 of horror school approach is the jarring stimuli you mention, which are typically hard-wired into our fight-or-flight reaction. But consider the series of events in Doom 3 when the lights go out and a demon bellows from a just-revealed compartment: You almost immediately resolve into the "Fight" status, pull out your shotgun, and apply liberally to the demon's face till it stops moving. After a few instances like this, there isn't really a vestige of a fear response, as all the lights going out mean is that there's a new Monster-In-The-Box to kill off before you move into the next area - indeed, the shocks are a sign things are going well. All you're left with the anticipation of unpleasant noises, which is far from what I'd hope for in something billed as horror.
Unfortunately, I don't really know what would make a good horror game though - the issue comes down to the fact that the things in computer games are by design beatable, and in most cases can be attempted without any sort of penalty - as the starter of this thread suggests.
This leads to a set of conflicting goals - fears comes from something being a real threat, but a video game is typically the player overcoming a series of challenges. Having them arranged such that the enemies are sufficiently powerful that the player is driven to flee and actively fear their reappearance could be an approach, but rendering the player effectively helpless in the face of adversity doesn't seem like the foundation of a good game.
Really, I don't know what I want from a good horror game - but I'm pretty sure it's more than monsters jumping from boxes.
Big loud noises and beasts jumping out of walls can make you jump, sure - but that's really the lowest level of horror, surely games could aim a bit higher?
In short, move along, nothing to see here.
I bet my old GP is quite miffed about this, since he "discovered" this about 15 years ago when I developed a rash back in the heydey of the SNES. The fact that these ad-hoc "case studies" are still viewed as a serious part of medical research baffles me no end.
Can you put up with people looting your kills and a very real lack of direction/hand holding
"Can you put up with a lack of handholding" does not sound like praise to me.
Really, the thing which puzzles me is that all the games which want to harken back to the good old "hardcore" days seem to think that it will excuse them from being buggy, unbalanced, and generally "rough around the edges" - but largely thanks to Blizzard and the degree of polish they've put into WoW, the bar has been raised and a lot of new MMOs just don't seem to have noticed despite the intervening years. A shame, really.