That's exactly what we do here. Age 5-10 is a great age to *prevent* psychological problems later on if you can detect it by that time... the detection is the hard part now, but that's where this statistical science comes in.
There is indeed no punishment involved, only actual help as projects at school. The problem with this is that parents are naturally suspicious and afraid they might lose their children (to the goverment). Inspired by this alarmist article for example.
Some people have a strong imagination that everything they fear will corrupt you, so porn=bad, gays=bad, violence=bad, lyrics=bad etc. With tragedies like Columbine people will blame everything and everyone, even the most far-out shit... Coincidentally these are the same people who have never heard of something like Occam's razor, or scientific method for that matter...
Sure why not. I'm also not *into* hentai, not by a long shot... But I am not afraid to admit what most people have done (or will do) at least once in their life. I want to bet that in the near future will look back at hentai as the childish sexual cartoons they are and say 'was this what all the fuss was all about?'.
The 'criminal gene' has already been debunked. Reality is much more complex than such a simple fix... But you are right this is data that can be abused and has to be kept private.
Don't be sarcastic... I work exactly in this line of work, and we use the above identifiers A-D (and others) to determine if a child is at risk of developing social and psychological problems... when a child has an indication they can give them help, and since this is a rough pre-selection they can start with very non-invasive projects at the school. It's exactly to prevent some children from falling trough the cracks and only getting help when they are a troubled (criminal) teen, because it's become a problem for them and society by then. br
We have a professor at the university working on the data to check what indications we can use best (and SPSS is widely used for finding those correlations). When the professor is done my programmer collegues and me will build an online tool that will help professionals to quickly gage if there is a reason why a child could develop problems (this is tough to do by hand since it can be surprizingly counter-intuitive).
This isn't news. SPSS already exists since 1968, and is now on version 18 of the software. IBM just bought the program in 2009. For those who never heard of the program: it's a souped up Excel with advanced statistics and datamining. Here at my work (public health department in Amsterdam) they use it a lot for scientific studies of health, surveys etc. In fact the use of SPSS in the field of research is so widespread for many years already it's strange they only replaced Excel with it now...
I'd guess Slashdot geeks would really like it since you can program some nice stuff in a pseudo SQL script language (I don't know the name of it), but if you've ever seen it you'll know that SYSMIS sorta means NULL.
Well, technically zombie would be the correct term... since you cannot kill what has already been killed. But still, he's the most loved zombie in the world, with statues of his dead corpse hanging in churches and houses around the world. And people eating pieces of zombie-flesh and drinking zombie-blood on a regular basis. And in light of recent events the photo's found of Jesus and the children are dubious: http://images.google.nl/images?q=jesus+children&safeui=off
Damn, Christianity is really morbid if you think about it.
When you have religion dictating what to do with/for/about children I always think: these are the same people that are against planned parenthood, want children to go to church (and the risk of buggering is a bonus) and preach abstinence and other fables to children. There has been a shitstorm about catholic child-abuse, but it's only the tip of the iceberg because a lot of people still think they will betray their faith/god/pope when they talk about their pedo-priest... that's the saddest part: not that it happened but that religion is so involved people are scared for their soul while it should be the priests that fear the flames...
All religions are created equally, some more equal than others... It will be fun for a laugh, but if they try they'll see how objective people really are around religion. FSM supporters might even get jail-time because the have invented a religion purely for blasphemous purposes in the judges eyes.
Wow, facebook is full of posers? Call the newspaper! There is a reason i'm not on Facebook, Hyves, MySpace or even sign in to MSN. I'm talking about the part of the generation that stays the fuck away from those shallow cesspools. I know it's bad, but there is a slow growing movement of people who are fed up with 'faking it'. Maybe it's a cultural thing and some countries have this more than others...
P.S. The young generation is not just the 15 year old kids.
It is just as if you showed up on interview dressed unapropriatelly.
I do exactly that at my job, dressed up as inappropriate as possible as the computer guy is kinda accepted. There is no difference when I meet with my boss, his bosses or someone from the city council. Amsterdam might be a little bit more relaxed with a live-and-let-live attitude, but I would not want to work in a company that fires you for what you do in your private time. They can ask of you that you show up and do your work (and limit the time on Slashdot), but you do not belong to a company and in your private time you are your own man.
Exactly, it shows you're not pretentious and a little more easy-going... I know enough people who care way too much what people think about them and pretend to be better than they are... why? I won't think any less of anyone because they do some stuff that people normally do... some may find some things weird that others do, but in the end everyone does and I can respect people that don't try to live a lie.
Hypocrisy feeds the need to appear 'better', there are way too many examples of extremely anti-gay figures who come out of the closet later on... I always suspect people who appear to be 'good' and know what's best for others and voice their judgmental view on people... like you said the young generation won't trust those people and they hate posers. Living a lie is one of the worst things you can do to yourself...
Oh yeah, the dude who wrote this virus probably also loves Hentai.:-)
That's the problem with blackmail, it only works if you're uptight about it... I don't give a fuck. I have hentai in my porn collection, my girlfriend and friends know and I even shared it on the LAN at the student dorm (and kept stats that said over 50% of people accessed it)... Hentai is just like masturbation: everyone is doing it but no-one want's to admit it. With the difference that masturbation is a gift for life and hentai is just a thing to check out once in your life.:-)
Never had this problem... only legitemate mail I ever found there were the lamest mailinglists... then again I never look trough all 10.000:)
I found that all the addresses I add to my address book are much less likely to be blocked, especially some foreign domains need to be added otherwise they will go to spam...
In this regard Google is awesome... I get 1 spam message per month in my mailbox tops, but my spam box (which keeps the spam for 30 days) has over 10.000 spam messages in it. So only one in every 10.000 spam messages slips trough at maximum.
Buy Logitech instead... exact same crap built in the exact same factory by the exact same Chinese workers... But as long as there are no photo's them being 'exploited' yet you're doubleplusfeelgood.
Don't they have thousands of 'interns' like that building the luxureous Dubai for instance?
Contrary to what most people believe the worldwide total of exploited people you can categorize under the label 'slave' is more than before the abolition of slavery... Slavery and human trade is booming business and an order or magnitude more widespread than in 'slavery times'.
Who else thinks that Google consists of alien gamers that are trying to complete a worldwide matrix simulation of earth (and every other planet they encounter). Why else would they datamine all the worlds knowledge *and* create a 3D model of the earth???
We know after all that aliens are addicted to games: http://games.slashdot.org/story/10/04/15/051213/Maybe-the-Aliens-Are-Addicted-To-Computer-Games. This only proves it!
Now excuse me I have to go out to buy some more tinfoil...
Dr. Farnsworth: Good news everyone, I've eliminated the meeting... it only took a millennium for it to die of old age, that and your next paychecks. But long story short: naptime is over!
Hermes: Noooooooooooooooooooooo!
Fry: [wakes up] Huh, what happend?
Leela: They're trying to take away our benefits, we have to unionize to save the meeting!
No, the people who once made those terrible sites later made the entire site in Flash, and even uglier, and not able to index or view with styles disabled... But you are right that most moved to social networks, i'm glad that we can avoid the part of the internet west from the Noob sea (http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/online_communities.png).
Yeah, the Andromeda Strain was awesome! It was also the debut of the great (and sadly late) Michael Crichton on the silver screen, and he has written many entertaining books and movie scripts after that.
I loved the sets they used in the original, the same hallway painted in different colors to indicate another level inside the contained structure... There was definitely some good acting, and the suspense was heightened by the awesome soundtrack... And they left the origin of the strain kinda in the middle (although the new movie had a mildly interesting sci-fi-ish plot with a wormhole from the future... it felt a little too much Star Trek).
There are some ways to optimize, even when you brute force. For example the small Flood-it board has 14 × 14 = 196 squares. The total search space is 196 ^ 25 = 2×10^52 (a lot). But when you consider that clicking a neighboring same-color square is logically equivalent the average moves per turn is much lower, I would estimate about 50 (100 on the first, 2 on the last move). You also never have to complete the full 25 moves, because you will find a shorter solution fast enough and you can discard any longer solution, so the average is around 18 moves to finish the game... The total moves to calculate are 50 ^ 18 = 4×10^32, that is some massive saving (but still takes years on a regular CPU). But you can of course optimize further...
When you are time limited you can always modify a brute force algorithm to choose the most promising branches first (like largest number connecting squares first). When you need to make the move in under 1 minute you can calculate until you hit 59 seconds and then return the best result you've found until now. In my experience when you have a good decision algorithm you can get near-optimal results with a partial time limited brute force search.
I wonder when we'll start seeing Flood-it bots competing against each other in an international competition.:-)
Slashdot Mirror
That's exactly what we do here. Age 5-10 is a great age to *prevent* psychological problems later on if you can detect it by that time... the detection is the hard part now, but that's where this statistical science comes in.
There is indeed no punishment involved, only actual help as projects at school. The problem with this is that parents are naturally suspicious and afraid they might lose their children (to the goverment). Inspired by this alarmist article for example.
Some people have a strong imagination that everything they fear will corrupt you, so porn=bad, gays=bad, violence=bad, lyrics=bad etc. With tragedies like Columbine people will blame everything and everyone, even the most far-out shit... Coincidentally these are the same people who have never heard of something like Occam's razor, or scientific method for that matter...
Sure why not. I'm also not *into* hentai, not by a long shot... But I am not afraid to admit what most people have done (or will do) at least once in their life. I want to bet that in the near future will look back at hentai as the childish sexual cartoons they are and say 'was this what all the fuss was all about?'.
The 'criminal gene' has already been debunked. Reality is much more complex than such a simple fix... But you are right this is data that can be abused and has to be kept private.
Don't be sarcastic... I work exactly in this line of work, and we use the above identifiers A-D (and others) to determine if a child is at risk of developing social and psychological problems... when a child has an indication they can give them help, and since this is a rough pre-selection they can start with very non-invasive projects at the school. It's exactly to prevent some children from falling trough the cracks and only getting help when they are a troubled (criminal) teen, because it's become a problem for them and society by then.
br We have a professor at the university working on the data to check what indications we can use best (and SPSS is widely used for finding those correlations). When the professor is done my programmer collegues and me will build an online tool that will help professionals to quickly gage if there is a reason why a child could develop problems (this is tough to do by hand since it can be surprizingly counter-intuitive).
This isn't news. SPSS already exists since 1968, and is now on version 18 of the software. IBM just bought the program in 2009. For those who never heard of the program: it's a souped up Excel with advanced statistics and datamining. Here at my work (public health department in Amsterdam) they use it a lot for scientific studies of health, surveys etc. In fact the use of SPSS in the field of research is so widespread for many years already it's strange they only replaced Excel with it now...
I'd guess Slashdot geeks would really like it since you can program some nice stuff in a pseudo SQL script language (I don't know the name of it), but if you've ever seen it you'll know that SYSMIS sorta means NULL.
Well, technically zombie would be the correct term... since you cannot kill what has already been killed. But still, he's the most loved zombie in the world, with statues of his dead corpse hanging in churches and houses around the world. And people eating pieces of zombie-flesh and drinking zombie-blood on a regular basis. And in light of recent events the photo's found of Jesus and the children are dubious: http://images.google.nl/images?q=jesus+children&safeui=off
Damn, Christianity is really morbid if you think about it.
When you have religion dictating what to do with/for/about children I always think: these are the same people that are against planned parenthood, want children to go to church (and the risk of buggering is a bonus) and preach abstinence and other fables to children. There has been a shitstorm about catholic child-abuse, but it's only the tip of the iceberg because a lot of people still think they will betray their faith/god/pope when they talk about their pedo-priest... that's the saddest part: not that it happened but that religion is so involved people are scared for their soul while it should be the priests that fear the flames...
Keep the faith brother, Jesus was once an outcast and convicted criminal and look at him now!
All religions are created equally, some more equal than others...
It will be fun for a laugh, but if they try they'll see how objective people really are around religion. FSM supporters might even get jail-time because the have invented a religion purely for blasphemous purposes in the judges eyes.
Wow, facebook is full of posers? Call the newspaper!
There is a reason i'm not on Facebook, Hyves, MySpace or even sign in to MSN. I'm talking about the part of the generation that stays the fuck away from those shallow cesspools. I know it's bad, but there is a slow growing movement of people who are fed up with 'faking it'. Maybe it's a cultural thing and some countries have this more than others...
P.S. The young generation is not just the 15 year old kids.
It's because I don't care for the opinions of people like you I can say this without a problem.
It is just as if you showed up on interview dressed unapropriatelly.
I do exactly that at my job, dressed up as inappropriate as possible as the computer guy is kinda accepted. There is no difference when I meet with my boss, his bosses or someone from the city council. Amsterdam might be a little bit more relaxed with a live-and-let-live attitude, but I would not want to work in a company that fires you for what you do in your private time. They can ask of you that you show up and do your work (and limit the time on Slashdot), but you do not belong to a company and in your private time you are your own man.
:-)
I love my job, and my town!
Exactly, it shows you're not pretentious and a little more easy-going... I know enough people who care way too much what people think about them and pretend to be better than they are... why? I won't think any less of anyone because they do some stuff that people normally do... some may find some things weird that others do, but in the end everyone does and I can respect people that don't try to live a lie.
:-)
Hypocrisy feeds the need to appear 'better', there are way too many examples of extremely anti-gay figures who come out of the closet later on... I always suspect people who appear to be 'good' and know what's best for others and voice their judgmental view on people... like you said the young generation won't trust those people and they hate posers. Living a lie is one of the worst things you can do to yourself...
Oh yeah, the dude who wrote this virus probably also loves Hentai.
That's the problem with blackmail, it only works if you're uptight about it... I don't give a fuck. I have hentai in my porn collection, my girlfriend and friends know and I even shared it on the LAN at the student dorm (and kept stats that said over 50% of people accessed it)... Hentai is just like masturbation: everyone is doing it but no-one want's to admit it. With the difference that masturbation is a gift for life and hentai is just a thing to check out once in your life. :-)
Posting non-AC for obvious reasons.
Never had this problem... only legitemate mail I ever found there were the lamest mailinglists... then again I never look trough all 10.000 :)
I found that all the addresses I add to my address book are much less likely to be blocked, especially some foreign domains need to be added otherwise they will go to spam...
In this regard Google is awesome... I get 1 spam message per month in my mailbox tops, but my spam box (which keeps the spam for 30 days) has over 10.000 spam messages in it. So only one in every 10.000 spam messages slips trough at maximum.
Buy Logitech instead... exact same crap built in the exact same factory by the exact same Chinese workers... But as long as there are no photo's them being 'exploited' yet you're doubleplusfeelgood.
Don't they have thousands of 'interns' like that building the luxureous Dubai for instance?
Contrary to what most people believe the worldwide total of exploited people you can categorize under the label 'slave' is more than before the abolition of slavery... Slavery and human trade is booming business and an order or magnitude more widespread than in 'slavery times'.
Who else thinks that Google consists of alien gamers that are trying to complete a worldwide matrix simulation of earth (and every other planet they encounter). Why else would they datamine all the worlds knowledge *and* create a 3D model of the earth???
We know after all that aliens are addicted to games: http://games.slashdot.org/story/10/04/15/051213/Maybe-the-Aliens-Are-Addicted-To-Computer-Games. This only proves it!
Now excuse me I have to go out to buy some more tinfoil...
Dr. Farnsworth: Good news everyone, I've eliminated the meeting... it only took a millennium for it to die of old age, that and your next paychecks. But long story short: naptime is over!
Hermes: Noooooooooooooooooooooo!
Fry: [wakes up] Huh, what happend?
Leela: They're trying to take away our benefits, we have to unionize to save the meeting!
or my balls...
No, the people who once made those terrible sites later made the entire site in Flash, and even uglier, and not able to index or view with styles disabled... But you are right that most moved to social networks, i'm glad that we can avoid the part of the internet west from the Noob sea (http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/online_communities.png).
Yeah, the Andromeda Strain was awesome! It was also the debut of the great (and sadly late) Michael Crichton on the silver screen, and he has written many entertaining books and movie scripts after that.
I loved the sets they used in the original, the same hallway painted in different colors to indicate another level inside the contained structure... There was definitely some good acting, and the suspense was heightened by the awesome soundtrack... And they left the origin of the strain kinda in the middle (although the new movie had a mildly interesting sci-fi-ish plot with a wormhole from the future... it felt a little too much Star Trek).
There are some ways to optimize, even when you brute force. For example the small Flood-it board has 14 × 14 = 196 squares. The total search space is 196 ^ 25 = 2×10^52 (a lot). But when you consider that clicking a neighboring same-color square is logically equivalent the average moves per turn is much lower, I would estimate about 50 (100 on the first, 2 on the last move). You also never have to complete the full 25 moves, because you will find a shorter solution fast enough and you can discard any longer solution, so the average is around 18 moves to finish the game... The total moves to calculate are 50 ^ 18 = 4×10^32, that is some massive saving (but still takes years on a regular CPU). But you can of course optimize further...
:-)
When you are time limited you can always modify a brute force algorithm to choose the most promising branches first (like largest number connecting squares first). When you need to make the move in under 1 minute you can calculate until you hit 59 seconds and then return the best result you've found until now. In my experience when you have a good decision algorithm you can get near-optimal results with a partial time limited brute force search.
I wonder when we'll start seeing Flood-it bots competing against each other in an international competition.