Wrong, actually. It has two separate contacts at each end--the positive "blip" will touch one contact, the negative pad will touch the other. If it works reliably, that's pretty neat.
In addition, the battle between "old media", newspapers fighting to stay in business, and "new media", anyone with the time to set up a blog, means that misinformation is spread ever wider and further. There's so much written on any contentious topic that people can limit themselves to reading only what they agree with (we're probably all guilty to some extent). Oh, and our culture has drummed "question authority" into us so effectively that some people seem to believe that a couple of hours reading blog posts is all they need to judge the work of scientists who've spent years studying something, though I suspect that this last one isn't just a recent development.
And what can we do? In science, the key thing is the evidence. And yet the evidence for climate change fills a book, but people don't read it, and jump on any mistake as if it brings the whole theory crashing down. The evidence for evolution is overwhelming, but people still think it's impossible, or "just a theory". All the well written science communication in the world won't reach people who don't want to be convinced.
The paper describes replacing "decide, announce, defend" with "engage, interact, cooperate." Perhaps that lets you choose your nuclear waste site, but what about vaccination? Or teaching evolution? So long as there is anyone with an interest in criticising the science (fossil fuel industries criticising climate change, Christian fundies criticising evolution), you'll always need a measure of "defend" alongside your "cooperate".
IANA mathematician, but: if you also list the probabilities for the Boy on Tuesday being the first child, you get 28 possibilities, of which 14 have two boys (giving you 1/2 again). However, then you've listed "Boy on Tuesday, Boy on Tuesday" twice, although there's no reason for it to be more likely than any of the other possibilities. So if you remove the duplicate, you get 13/27, as stated.
If, on the other hand, it stated that the younger child was a Boy born on a Tuesday, your list would apply, so the probability of two boys would be 1/2.
same-gender, both male: 50%
different-gender: 50%
boy first: 25%
girl first: 25%
I don't think that's right. If you took a thousand two-child families from the census, they would be evenly split between same-gender and opposite gender. But the same-gender families would be equally two-boys and two-girls. If you drop the families with two girls, the same-gender families are only one third of the remaining set, taking us back to the 33% probabilities that you discounted.
nobody wants to drop $300 all at once, and they also don't want to have to buy a new computer, to get the price discounted.
I think a tiny fraction of the market is interested in getting the new operating system. Most consumers get an operating system just as part of getting a computer. They'll replace the whole lot when it's too old to do what they want, and automatically get the next OS then. The OS itself is of interest only to a small section of geeks.
Of course, much of their market is 'enterprise', but they buy volume licenses, and won't be paying $300 per seat. All in all, the retail price of a boxed copy of Windows is more or less irrelevant.
It always bothers me when people with PhD's discount the information provided by amateurs... train them in proper data collection and where to report it.
/me sets up his own soap box.
Proper data collection in science usually boils down to a couple of options:
Buy some equipment costing between several thousand and several million dollars
Repeat a tedious procedure ad nauseam, carefully keeping it as similar as possible each time
In most cases, you're not going to get much good data from amateurs. There are exceptions, such as where the sheer volume of amateur reports makes up for the lack of quality control, or where a very dedicated amateur manages to make a much cheaper alternative to some expensive kit. Of course, the media loves these, but for most research, you want data collected by someone who really knows what they're doing, and has the time to keep doing it.
Within any given field, there are slightly more specific journals with equal 'street cred'
Not quite any field. At least for some parts of biology, a Nature paper is still the golden target (standard isn't the right word). A paper in Science is something to celebrate, but even that's not as good as getting a Nature paper.
Note that there's a difference between reading and publishing--scientists may get more information from more specific journals, but for 'street cred' (lab cred?), the big name general journals like Nature and Science are king, at least in my field.
These scumbag publishers... act like the researchers should be grateful not to be charged a fee.....PLoS is where I'll be sending my work.
So, you take issue with the fact that mainstream publishers don't pay scientists (we'll ignore how that would work in a market where space in well known journals is the scarce resource), and would like to thumb your nose at them by... going with a publisher that will charge you >$2000 to publish your own material! There are good arguments for open access publishing, but your complaints contradict one another.
There is still a market for print journals, although maybe it's on the wane. Someone has to pay for printing and distribution, and the journal staff require salaries. Even online publishing needs servers and bandwidth. The traditional model is that the publishers charge the readers, and the new model is to charge the authors (i.e. the funding agencies), but either way, it can't be free for everyone.
Happily my access does cover it (link for anyone else who wants to try).
The statistics look...mediocre. There's enough there, I think, to make it an interesting avenue for research, but it's definitely not a 'urine test for autism' (to be fair, the paper doesn't claim that, the blog and the summary exaggerate it).
What differences there are are pretty minor, and only some of them are apparently significant between the autistic children and their siblings (as opposed to the unrelated controls). I'm not altogether happy that some of the controls are from a different location, although they have found that there is no significant difference between the two control subgroups, but it's still a bit dodgy. They're also using statistical methods I don't know ("Projection to latent structure discriminant analysis"). Finally, I don't see any evidence that they've done corrections for multiple tests, although some of their results are P < 0.001, which would probably withstand that.
I'm not sure if Cambridge is GBP3,000 for one year or for the degree.
Per year. Slightly over £3,000. Same for pretty much all courses at pretty much all UK universities. It's the most they're allowed to charge students, although they would love to be able to charge more. The rest is paid by the government. Foreign students pay the full rate, which is about £10k.
Thanks for the reminder, Slashdot. Whatever my country's faults, I'm really glad I grew up here.
I am interested to find out exactly what solution the Liberal Democrats in the UK would like to see implemented.
Multi member constituencies elected by Single Transferable Vote. You vote for individual candidates in an order of preference, and the votes are used to allocate four or five seats for the region in which you vote. (This is their preferred option, although I think they've said that AV+ (Alternative Vote Plus) would also be acceptable).
They could easily edit their robots.txt and keep Google out,
Murdoch may be evil, but can we at least understand what he wants? The 'problem' isn't with being indexed, it's about how it works with a paywall.
Google insist that, to be indexed, you show visitors clicking through the same page that their crawler sees. So they won't index stories that users will have to pay to see. (In fact, they make an exception if you can get the first few pages for free.) Sites using a paywall have often quietly allowed a 'back door', whereby visitors coming from google can see the page without paying, just so that it gets indexed. Murdoch would like to do away with that system, so that he can charge anyone who wants to see his news.
Even if he gets his way, it probably won't make much difference. Pagerank is based on links to your content, and there simply won't be so many links to content that needs a subscription. So his paywalled sites will sink down the results.
It will appear on new installs of windows, but an automatic update also pushes it to existing installations of XP, Vista and 7. You get a "browser choice" icon on the desktop, and I believe it pops up when you try to use IE.
Reasons you might not have seen it: You're not in the EU, it's not been rolled out to you yet (they're not doing it all at once), or it may even detect that you already have another browser installed, so decide not to bother you.
Most of the oceans are well oxygenated. Oxygen dissolves from the air and is mixed through the water by large scale currents. The exceptions are some river outlets, where nutrient inputs allow life to grow quickly and use up the available oxygen.
The question with these creatures is what they eat. Oxygen wouldn't be lacking.
The HSR trains are rarely going to the announced 240 km/h top speed, most of the time, they aren't even reaching 200.
I think the reference is to this recent story about the new trains going up to 350 km/h (averaging 313), which have just come into operation. I'm thousands of miles away, so I can't check on the speed, but I think you (the French) might just have been overtaken.
In more detail: the "no" votes from the UK were all members of the UK Independence Party, a right-wing* party whose main policy is that Britain shouldn't be in the EU at all.
The Dutch "no" votes all seem to be from Partij voor de Vrijheit, (Party for Freedom), a right-wing Dutch party. I don't know much about them, but their leader, Geert Wilders is a notorious right wing figure. He was once refused entry to the UK, although that was later overturned.
*Right wing by British standards. I don't know what they'd look like in the US.
Does Google somehow have a monopoly on this information? I find it hard to believe that nobody else has done it.
Other people have. The two main alternatives are called Web of Knowledge and Scopus. I don't know that any of them is particularly more complete than the others (although I've heard it said that Google Scholar has better coverage of social sciences--I've not tested).
The big difference is that Google Scholar is free. The others, your institution has to pay a subscription to get access.
Is there something like Zotero that *isn't* a cloud service?
Well, you could always use it without the sync feature: giving them your data is very much optional. For most users, their institution is likely only aware of Endnote, and won't set up a server for them, so Zotero's hosting the server themselves makes sense.
I'm not sure that it really meets the OP's needs, though. It fits how I work brilliantly--it's designed for indexing web pages, like a highly structured bookmark manager. But the OP specifically talks about a collection of local files, which Zotero handles rather awkwardly. Any notes would be outside the file, for example, not embedded in it. Mendeley comes closer, but AFAIK it only deals with PDFs, not all the other formats.
Mendeley is designed primarily as a local application: you store files on your own desktop, it just takes care of indexing them. Online syncing is an added bonus, from that point of view. They're not in the business of giving out huge amounts of free fileserver space.
That article says nothing about the differences between typing and handwriting, it's just about the fact that writing notes in itself is good for memory.
In fact, when asked about it in the comments, the author says "I didn’t come across anything on typing, but I would guess it would have the same effect. Here’s why..."
Trouble is, it's not just about the politicians. We have to, you know, vote for them. A substantial proportion of the public don't know about or don't trust science either, so politicians who tell stories (which may be true or not) stand a much better chance than if they tried to discuss all that dull evidence. The media also plays a part: political coverage tends to focus on tiny soundbites and fact-lets, which again favours politicians who can give you a story in a single sentence.
You appear to single out Labour. I haven't seen the numbers (so, in fact, I have "No Evidence"), but I very much doubt that the situation is any better amongst the Tories.
I also cut my teeth on BASIC (slightly later, I used Q-BASIC on Windows machines), and now habitually tinker in python. For starting to program, you can use it in much the same way as BASIC, minus GOTO (and that's not a habit you want to teach them, anyway!). And it's much more powerful if they do want to carry it on.
No, wait, BASIC did have one thing over Python for children: dead simple, low-res graphics painting. The joy of setting the screen mode and then doing a series of drawing commands. Sadly, DOS emulation in XP didn't include the graphics modes, so all those programs (which I still have, somewhere) are useless.
I've been involved with a project which fitted this description almost perfectly: FOSS webapp which was dependent on a community it never really had. I almost thought the question could be about it, until I visited its page to find that it's being closed down. It may sound obvious, but I think what really did for that project was that it didn't do anything people could already do. Specifically, a large part of its functionality was replicating things that Facebook did, and maybe 99% of its target users were on Facebook. Without a compelling reason to use it, it never really took off, and the developers weren't enthused enough to create the grand new features that had been planned.
Getting critical mass in the first place is hard. I wonder if there's any stories out there about how Facebook/Myspace/Twitter first got started. As others have said, you'll need to sell it to your friends first, then work at keeping them happy until they're happy to recommend it to their friends. Perhaps focus at first on the non-social aspects of the site, that don't depend on community, then be ready to shift to a more social model once you've got a couple of dozen users. An empty forum is just depressing, but some old-fashioned content is useful even for the very first visitor.
Oh, and since everyone's busy berating you for not giving the name: well done on not Slashvertising! Although I admit I'm also curious about it.
Slashdot Mirror
Wrong, actually. It has two separate contacts at each end--the positive "blip" will touch one contact, the negative pad will touch the other. If it works reliably, that's pretty neat.
Sometimes, I like to RTFA, just for the novelty.
In addition, the battle between "old media", newspapers fighting to stay in business, and "new media", anyone with the time to set up a blog, means that misinformation is spread ever wider and further. There's so much written on any contentious topic that people can limit themselves to reading only what they agree with (we're probably all guilty to some extent). Oh, and our culture has drummed "question authority" into us so effectively that some people seem to believe that a couple of hours reading blog posts is all they need to judge the work of scientists who've spent years studying something, though I suspect that this last one isn't just a recent development.
And what can we do? In science, the key thing is the evidence. And yet the evidence for climate change fills a book, but people don't read it, and jump on any mistake as if it brings the whole theory crashing down. The evidence for evolution is overwhelming, but people still think it's impossible, or "just a theory". All the well written science communication in the world won't reach people who don't want to be convinced.
The paper describes replacing "decide, announce, defend" with "engage, interact, cooperate." Perhaps that lets you choose your nuclear waste site, but what about vaccination? Or teaching evolution? So long as there is anyone with an interest in criticising the science (fossil fuel industries criticising climate change, Christian fundies criticising evolution), you'll always need a measure of "defend" alongside your "cooperate".
IANA mathematician, but: if you also list the probabilities for the Boy on Tuesday being the first child, you get 28 possibilities, of which 14 have two boys (giving you 1/2 again). However, then you've listed "Boy on Tuesday, Boy on Tuesday" twice, although there's no reason for it to be more likely than any of the other possibilities. So if you remove the duplicate, you get 13/27, as stated.
If, on the other hand, it stated that the younger child was a Boy born on a Tuesday, your list would apply, so the probability of two boys would be 1/2.
same-gender, both male: 50% different-gender: 50% boy first: 25% girl first: 25%
I don't think that's right. If you took a thousand two-child families from the census, they would be evenly split between same-gender and opposite gender. But the same-gender families would be equally two-boys and two-girls. If you drop the families with two girls, the same-gender families are only one third of the remaining set, taking us back to the 33% probabilities that you discounted.
nobody wants to drop $300 all at once, and they also don't want to have to buy a new computer, to get the price discounted.
I think a tiny fraction of the market is interested in getting the new operating system. Most consumers get an operating system just as part of getting a computer. They'll replace the whole lot when it's too old to do what they want, and automatically get the next OS then. The OS itself is of interest only to a small section of geeks.
Of course, much of their market is 'enterprise', but they buy volume licenses, and won't be paying $300 per seat. All in all, the retail price of a boxed copy of Windows is more or less irrelevant.
It always bothers me when people with PhD's discount the information provided by amateurs... train them in proper data collection and where to report it.
/me sets up his own soap box.
Proper data collection in science usually boils down to a couple of options:
In most cases, you're not going to get much good data from amateurs. There are exceptions, such as where the sheer volume of amateur reports makes up for the lack of quality control, or where a very dedicated amateur manages to make a much cheaper alternative to some expensive kit. Of course, the media loves these, but for most research, you want data collected by someone who really knows what they're doing, and has the time to keep doing it.
I know most people aren't interested, but let's have the URL for the original paper:
http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/early/2010/06/14/rspb.2010.0863.short?rss=1
This one is available free (i.e. you don't need a subscription to read it).
Within any given field, there are slightly more specific journals with equal 'street cred'
Not quite any field. At least for some parts of biology, a Nature paper is still the golden target (standard isn't the right word). A paper in Science is something to celebrate, but even that's not as good as getting a Nature paper.
Note that there's a difference between reading and publishing--scientists may get more information from more specific journals, but for 'street cred' (lab cred?), the big name general journals like Nature and Science are king, at least in my field.
These scumbag publishers... act like the researchers should be grateful not to be charged a fee.....PLoS is where I'll be sending my work.
So, you take issue with the fact that mainstream publishers don't pay scientists (we'll ignore how that would work in a market where space in well known journals is the scarce resource), and would like to thumb your nose at them by... going with a publisher that will charge you >$2000 to publish your own material! There are good arguments for open access publishing, but your complaints contradict one another.
There is still a market for print journals, although maybe it's on the wane. Someone has to pay for printing and distribution, and the journal staff require salaries. Even online publishing needs servers and bandwidth. The traditional model is that the publishers charge the readers, and the new model is to charge the authors (i.e. the funding agencies), but either way, it can't be free for everyone.
Happily my access does cover it (link for anyone else who wants to try).
The statistics look...mediocre. There's enough there, I think, to make it an interesting avenue for research, but it's definitely not a 'urine test for autism' (to be fair, the paper doesn't claim that, the blog and the summary exaggerate it).
What differences there are are pretty minor, and only some of them are apparently significant between the autistic children and their siblings (as opposed to the unrelated controls). I'm not altogether happy that some of the controls are from a different location, although they have found that there is no significant difference between the two control subgroups, but it's still a bit dodgy. They're also using statistical methods I don't know ("Projection to latent structure discriminant analysis"). Finally, I don't see any evidence that they've done corrections for multiple tests, although some of their results are P < 0.001, which would probably withstand that.
All in all, it strikes me as a case of the Science News Cycle.
Disclaimer: I am a biologist, but in a very different field.
I'm not sure if Cambridge is GBP3,000 for one year or for the degree.
Per year. Slightly over £3,000. Same for pretty much all courses at pretty much all UK universities. It's the most they're allowed to charge students, although they would love to be able to charge more. The rest is paid by the government. Foreign students pay the full rate, which is about £10k.
Thanks for the reminder, Slashdot. Whatever my country's faults, I'm really glad I grew up here.
I am interested to find out exactly what solution the Liberal Democrats in the UK would like to see implemented.
Multi member constituencies elected by Single Transferable Vote. You vote for individual candidates in an order of preference, and the votes are used to allocate four or five seats for the region in which you vote. (This is their preferred option, although I think they've said that AV+ (Alternative Vote Plus) would also be acceptable).
They could easily edit their robots.txt and keep Google out,
Murdoch may be evil, but can we at least understand what he wants? The 'problem' isn't with being indexed, it's about how it works with a paywall.
Google insist that, to be indexed, you show visitors clicking through the same page that their crawler sees. So they won't index stories that users will have to pay to see. (In fact, they make an exception if you can get the first few pages for free.) Sites using a paywall have often quietly allowed a 'back door', whereby visitors coming from google can see the page without paying, just so that it gets indexed. Murdoch would like to do away with that system, so that he can charge anyone who wants to see his news.
Even if he gets his way, it probably won't make much difference. Pagerank is based on links to your content, and there simply won't be so many links to content that needs a subscription. So his paywalled sites will sink down the results.
It will appear on new installs of windows, but an automatic update also pushes it to existing installations of XP, Vista and 7. You get a "browser choice" icon on the desktop, and I believe it pops up when you try to use IE.
Reasons you might not have seen it: You're not in the EU, it's not been rolled out to you yet (they're not doing it all at once), or it may even detect that you already have another browser installed, so decide not to bother you.
I really like the promise of the queen to pay me the amount mentioned on the paper money.
The promise is from "the governor and company of the Bank of England".
How did the oxygen get down there?
Most of the oceans are well oxygenated. Oxygen dissolves from the air and is mixed through the water by large scale currents. The exceptions are some river outlets, where nutrient inputs allow life to grow quickly and use up the available oxygen.
The question with these creatures is what they eat. Oxygen wouldn't be lacking.
The HSR trains are rarely going to the announced 240 km/h top speed, most of the time, they aren't even reaching 200.
I think the reference is to this recent story about the new trains going up to 350 km/h (averaging 313), which have just come into operation. I'm thousands of miles away, so I can't check on the speed, but I think you (the French) might just have been overtaken.
In more detail: the "no" votes from the UK were all members of the UK Independence Party, a right-wing* party whose main policy is that Britain shouldn't be in the EU at all.
The Dutch "no" votes all seem to be from Partij voor de Vrijheit, (Party for Freedom), a right-wing Dutch party. I don't know much about them, but their leader, Geert Wilders is a notorious right wing figure. He was once refused entry to the UK, although that was later overturned.
*Right wing by British standards. I don't know what they'd look like in the US.
Does Google somehow have a monopoly on this information? I find it hard to believe that nobody else has done it.
Other people have. The two main alternatives are called Web of Knowledge and Scopus. I don't know that any of them is particularly more complete than the others (although I've heard it said that Google Scholar has better coverage of social sciences--I've not tested).
The big difference is that Google Scholar is free. The others, your institution has to pay a subscription to get access.
Is there something like Zotero that *isn't* a cloud service?
Well, you could always use it without the sync feature: giving them your data is very much optional. For most users, their institution is likely only aware of Endnote, and won't set up a server for them, so Zotero's hosting the server themselves makes sense.
I'm not sure that it really meets the OP's needs, though. It fits how I work brilliantly--it's designed for indexing web pages, like a highly structured bookmark manager. But the OP specifically talks about a collection of local files, which Zotero handles rather awkwardly. Any notes would be outside the file, for example, not embedded in it. Mendeley comes closer, but AFAIK it only deals with PDFs, not all the other formats.
Mendeley is designed primarily as a local application: you store files on your own desktop, it just takes care of indexing them. Online syncing is an added bonus, from that point of view. They're not in the business of giving out huge amounts of free fileserver space.
That article says nothing about the differences between typing and handwriting, it's just about the fact that writing notes in itself is good for memory.
In fact, when asked about it in the comments, the author says "I didn’t come across anything on typing, but I would guess it would have the same effect. Here’s why..."
Trouble is, it's not just about the politicians. We have to, you know, vote for them. A substantial proportion of the public don't know about or don't trust science either, so politicians who tell stories (which may be true or not) stand a much better chance than if they tried to discuss all that dull evidence. The media also plays a part: political coverage tends to focus on tiny soundbites and fact-lets, which again favours politicians who can give you a story in a single sentence.
You appear to single out Labour. I haven't seen the numbers (so, in fact, I have "No Evidence"), but I very much doubt that the situation is any better amongst the Tories.
I also cut my teeth on BASIC (slightly later, I used Q-BASIC on Windows machines), and now habitually tinker in python. For starting to program, you can use it in much the same way as BASIC, minus GOTO (and that's not a habit you want to teach them, anyway!). And it's much more powerful if they do want to carry it on.
No, wait, BASIC did have one thing over Python for children: dead simple, low-res graphics painting. The joy of setting the screen mode and then doing a series of drawing commands. Sadly, DOS emulation in XP didn't include the graphics modes, so all those programs (which I still have, somewhere) are useless.
I've been involved with a project which fitted this description almost perfectly: FOSS webapp which was dependent on a community it never really had. I almost thought the question could be about it, until I visited its page to find that it's being closed down. It may sound obvious, but I think what really did for that project was that it didn't do anything people could already do. Specifically, a large part of its functionality was replicating things that Facebook did, and maybe 99% of its target users were on Facebook. Without a compelling reason to use it, it never really took off, and the developers weren't enthused enough to create the grand new features that had been planned.
Getting critical mass in the first place is hard. I wonder if there's any stories out there about how Facebook/Myspace/Twitter first got started. As others have said, you'll need to sell it to your friends first, then work at keeping them happy until they're happy to recommend it to their friends. Perhaps focus at first on the non-social aspects of the site, that don't depend on community, then be ready to shift to a more social model once you've got a couple of dozen users. An empty forum is just depressing, but some old-fashioned content is useful even for the very first visitor.
Oh, and since everyone's busy berating you for not giving the name: well done on not Slashvertising! Although I admit I'm also curious about it.