Statisticians are still people, and people are susceptible to lazy thinking, confirmation bias, framing effects, and a host of other problems.
But yes, assuming we manage to overcome our inherent limitations when looking at problems and claims, statistics is a necessary skill for a human bullshit-detector. Statistics by itself does not confer the ability to analyse a claim and place it in the proper context.
The terrorists of the future aren't in Iraq, Afghanistan, or any Mosque like our govt. would like us to belive. They're lurking in Downing Street, and Westminster.
Tony Blair and Gordon Brown may lay the foundations for it, but sooner or later, our greatest fears will be of the government themselves.
The way I'd do it if I had the time/inclination/money would be to build my own house monitoring box. I'd have to build several bits of kit specifically, like a temperature monitor (may I recommend the LM35 as a good temperature sensor), a water alarm, and others, link them up to a 'head box' that communicates with the computer.
The computer would have a demon on it that if it received a warning (e.g. Temp > 50C or Temp
You'd have to have a BIG UPS to run it in case the power failed (broadband router and all). Hell, you could have an ammeter on the power into the box, that if it's turned off, the UPS not only kicks in, and fires up a diesel generator (It'd have to have a starter motor), now that would be cool! This is probably only viable if you have the money, time and skills to build it. I'd get stuck at the money part, as I'd estimate it to easily pass the £1500 mark (thats GBP). Especially if you want to go for low power motherboards for the main computer, like a Nano-ITX.
Also, for full redundancy, you'd likely need more than 2 generators, more than 2 of each sensor, more than 2 main computers, more than 2 UPSs so you'd easily double your costs.
Also, you may like to add some IP camera's into the bargain, which can upload their images to a remote FTP server ever 2 seconds, for a kind of CCTV. Don't forget your burglar alarm!
You could also hook up microphones that record sound, and if the sound level's greater than a certain amount (e.g. like a window being broken), it could email you.
This solution should work, though it would cost a s**t load of money, easily in excess of £5000, and then you've got to/build/ the damn thing, and set it up, and program it, and test it. It's not an easy task, but I bet it could be done.
If your box is infected with Micro$oft Windoze, may I suggest Thermite (tm) as a cure?
To use to Thermite (TM) on an infected machine, simply remove the hard drive, apply liberally to the hard drive, stand well back and light the touch paper.
This may cause some singing to carpets and other fabrics.
After the Thermite (TM) had worked, simply purchase a new hard drive and install a Real Operating System
Just Get Linux. Or Mac. Or *BSD. Or anything that has less security holes than swiss cheese. Microsoft products boast that they are 'secure' but security cannot be claimed, look at WinXP, they said that was secure, but today we know it has more holes than aluminium pits on a pressed CD.
Microsoft should stop calling their products secure, even the networking stack is screwed. To anyone who upgrades within the first two years, I blissfully stand, point and laugh.
Note, FC5, Ubuntu 6.06, Mac OS X and OpenBSD all have firewalls as-standard. Did WinXP when it first came out? Nope. I'm gonna ask when Microsoft will implement a 'critical' feature that the FOSS community comes up with that secures sooo much stuff (I'm thinking SELinux, ELF, or other low-level protections here).
Anyone who tells you Windows is secure by default has no place in the IT community. They'd be better off bashing their heads against brick walls until their brain's left a stain.
I find that when I'm designing stuff quickly, I need to have something that I can use easily and quickly, even when my mind feel like it's going faster than my hands can go, so I draw. Just scribbles, but when I have one that I think is good enough, I'll pull out the ruler and colouring pencils, and see if it really does look that good.
When I'm done, I'll open up Vim and see if I can get a working style sheet & HTML. If I still think it looks good, then I'll go ahead with it.
I/do/ keep a thumb drive on me, I have an embedded version of DSL on it, but that's not the point. For fixing family & friend's PCs, I loose the thumb drive, I don't want my nice files/apps/utils being infected by whatever crud they've got on their PC, so I use a bootable CD: UBCD4Win, CD-Rs are read-only once burnt, so it can't get infected, and I can boot it and run plenty of nice utils for defragging, checking disks, anti-virus, anti-spyware, etc.
I only plug my thumb drive into PCs I trust, I'd hate to carry viruses, etc. round to other PCs.
Because they've fallen for the same trap as Microsoft Windows: They put the button you push to turn the machine off in a sub menu of the button you push to start your work! What could possibly be next? Insert headers and footers in the View menu on the Freespire-customized version of OpenOffice.org?
HaHa, Yea, I used to be 'addicted' to PlanetSide. It was awesome. Then I just got bored of it, and most other games. I used to get home from school, and just play, forget tea, forget sleep. this was *my* time and I wanted to play, not much was gonna stop me.
On week ends I would get up at 0600, and play alll the way to 2300. I quit it all
Because I got bored of it
Because I got a Mac, and didn't get he Mac version of PlanetSide with it, and
Because I had some coursework to do, else I don't get the jobs I want when I'm older.
My new game is the GNU Compiler Collection;-) (and increasingly, Mono Compiler)
Enjoy life how you want. Games are like any other form of recreation. You can play them until people call you addicted, but you are in control. You can always get up, walk away, turn the console/computer off and be done with it.
When I wanted to do my coursework for school. I put my hard drive in the safe, and on a blank one, I put Linux on it. You can't easily install most games on Linux. My 'gaming' hard drive is still in the safe. And I've sold the PC it goes in.
I simply do not do 8-12 hour strectches on/games/ anymore, but I do it with code from time to time(slightly different, I can more easily make a career out of code, not so out of games, people do but you've got to be the cream of the crop).
If these kids are addicted, have any of the parents let it pan out before rushing off to these 'clinics'?-Most kids can easily cure (god I HATE that word) themselves. Do they realise that their kids don't start writhing in pain without games, unlike what happens with drug addicts (they may, however kick up a fuss that their not having fun)? Have they looked into this 'clinic'?-WTF do they do to the kids in there?
I think this is just hype and advertisment for the 'clinic', I personally think it's a load of bull sh*t.
I know parents try to do what's 'best' for their children in their eyes, but it simply is best to leave well enough alone. Most kids realise that being hungry IS NOT GOOD. If they're not eating, take them to the hospital and have them pumped (usually painfully, from what I've heard) full of food, then let them play until their hungry. They GET THE PICTURE after a while.
One thing that worked for me was a little something called the opposite sex (until I worked out that I could make the computer do exactly as I wanted).
If you really want to stop them playing, take the games away from them! If your kid doesn't have the self control to make it so that s/he can't continue to play until they drop, make it so, take their PC. If they have a good reason for keeping it, put Linux on it. Then they have to go to some lengths to get most games to play.
IMHO, if you take your child to a 'clinic' like this, you're saying to the world "Yes, I am so lazy as to not try to tackle this myself! I do need someone else to parent my children; I'm not fit to be a parent!"
Personnaly, whilst learning to program (self taught, so having a teacher maybe different on this matter) I always found that an IDE simply bogged me down. I couldn't find buttons, the syntax completion often drove me up the wall.
I do not know, having a teacher there to say 'this button does this' may sove this problem, however, it may not.
Yeah, the terminal's good, but giving that to end users?? they tend to freak, get confused, or jsut claim it's crap. I tend to write a "backend" script, that will produce output to a terminal, and then get a GUI-frontend script to interact with it.
For the moment, I only know how to use TKinter:/ but I am learning GTK...
Even on my mac, I nearly always have a terminal open, once you have that power/speed or whatever in your head (learning allll the commands:-) ) it's quite hard to get by with just a GUI, It's the main reason Windows frustrates me sooo much, the cmd has nowhere near the power of bash or sh... well, to my knowledge anyways
Yeah, I do have a mac, Mac OS X comes with Python as standard, so thats what I keep getting my teeth into; it's available. I got nowhere trying to learn to program on windows, as there's nothing built in, other than making.bat files (which pales in comparison to making shell scripts as far as power goes...)
I don't tend to write anything in C/C++ anymore (though I do try from time to time) as it's soo much harder, write, compile, run is a little too slow for me. I prefer to fire up the interpretter, throw stuff at it, see what works, what doesn't then bolt it all together in a.py file.
That Ozone OS is pretty cool, I'll give it a shot sometime:) *book marks*.
I have tried to write some simple apps using C++, but I got bogged down in the details, I've only (so far) been sucessful in writing anything remotley useful in Python. All the rest in C/C++ have been xterm progs, that do simple things such as calculate quadratic formulae, however, I can write GUI progs in Python.
I know that kernels can be written in C++, It's just that the Linux kernel isn't, and if I ever get to be good enough, I'd love to work on it. Failing that, I'll go and do my own stuff in Python, under Linux. My understanding of C isn't great, I'm definatley leaning towards the later at the moment; application programming. Which kernels are written in C++? I've never heard of any, but I'd love to find one:) I do know a little C++, I just prefer C because of the Linux Kernel
C is my choice, there is no wrong choice of language, until you actually try to make sometime, then one language becomes harder than another, + most of the Linux kernel is written in it (yes I do aspire to that)
I'm sorry that I've only had to say that, not spell it.
It's a joke! it's meant to imply that MS Word is a Wart! And since Word is kinda like Wort, and Wort is said similarly to wart, It's a little humour, deal with it.
I am finding my own way, I mostly ignore school (I know I shouldn't, according to my teachers, parents, friends, little underground mole people, the government, but I do)
I'd rather not be pushed around by strangers, so I'll keep C, I'll accept that I couldn't spell one saying, and I'll keep using my own (apparently useless) brand of humour
... and I *do* program. so far, I've jumped on the chance to learn how to code in C, shell scripting and Python, HTML, CSS and PHP (does that count??). I've also jumped on the idea of building my own network with a Linux server.
It know how to build my own ethernet cables (not hard, but it proves that I will go looking for stuff to learn).
I only know of 1 other pupil in my entire school who can program, per-say (given, he does it in Visual Basic), and a different pupil runs a MS Windows server (in London, where he's bought some space on it, and logs on from time to time and updates it etc.) I know of one other pupil who uses Flash + ActionScript, and creates things that way. That is the extent of programmers in my school.
There are 900 pupils
The ICT lessons are just that, how to use MS Wort and MS Excel. I took ICT thinking it would be interesting to me, a programmer, but no, it has just been boring. They're training us to be office gophers, although I have heard rumours that it is possible (with enough requests) to do computing or computer sciences in 6th form, but they are just rumours.
Here in Britain, we're a fairly calm lot. Recently, across the tunnel, our French friends have been rioting against being *fired* from their first job, why are we sat idly back, whilst the govt. watches our every move and becomes totalitarien!?
-- From the lovley land of Air Strip One. we love Tony Blair, T.B.T.B.T.B.T.B....
They could write a compiler that only works on the Cell pocessor in the PS3, taking away a lot of the hardware variables. I think that would speed the process pf creating a compiler easier (not easy, easier)
Slashdot Mirror
Statisticians are still people, and people are susceptible to lazy thinking, confirmation bias, framing effects, and a host of other problems.
But yes, assuming we manage to overcome our inherent limitations when looking at problems and claims, statistics is a necessary skill for a human bullshit-detector. Statistics by itself does not confer the ability to analyse a claim and place it in the proper context.
What's þe problem? I can't see any "problem" here.
The terrorists of the future aren't in Iraq, Afghanistan, or any Mosque like our govt. would like us to belive. They're lurking in Downing Street, and Westminster.
Tony Blair and Gordon Brown may lay the foundations for it, but sooner or later, our greatest fears will be of the government themselves.
The entire justice system in Australia is on crack.
The way I'd do it if I had the time/inclination/money would be to build my own house monitoring box. I'd have to build several bits of kit specifically, like a temperature monitor (may I recommend the LM35 as a good temperature sensor), a water alarm, and others, link them up to a 'head box' that communicates with the computer.
The computer would have a demon on it that if it received a warning (e.g. Temp > 50C or Temp
You'd have to have a BIG UPS to run it in case the power failed (broadband router and all). Hell, you could have an ammeter on the power into the box, that if it's turned off, the UPS not only kicks in, and fires up a diesel generator (It'd have to have a starter motor), now that would be cool! This is probably only viable if you have the money, time and skills to build it. I'd get stuck at the money part, as I'd estimate it to easily pass the £1500 mark (thats GBP). Especially if you want to go for low power motherboards for the main computer, like a Nano-ITX.
Also, for full redundancy, you'd likely need more than 2 generators, more than 2 of each sensor, more than 2 main computers, more than 2 UPSs so you'd easily double your costs.
Also, you may like to add some IP camera's into the bargain, which can upload their images to a remote FTP server ever 2 seconds, for a kind of CCTV. Don't forget your burglar alarm!
You could also hook up microphones that record sound, and if the sound level's greater than a certain amount (e.g. like a window being broken), it could email you.
This solution should work, though it would cost a s**t load of money, easily in excess of £5000, and then you've got to /build/ the damn thing, and set it up, and program it, and test it. It's not an easy task, but I bet it could be done.
If your box is infected with Micro$oft Windoze, may I suggest Thermite (tm) as a cure?
To use to Thermite (TM) on an infected machine, simply remove the hard drive, apply liberally to the hard drive, stand well back and light the touch paper.
This may cause some singing to carpets and other fabrics.
After the Thermite (TM) had worked, simply purchase a new hard drive and install a Real Operating System
Symantex et al. have made a living moping up one companies spills. Maybe they should've considered that the business could stop spilling their drink?
Does this also mean that every patch to the OS (thereby making the os more secure) was anti-competitive?
Maybe, Vista will be crap (thinks of shiny new network stack) and the AV/AS companies will be in there, making more money than ever?
Just Get Linux. Or Mac. Or *BSD. Or anything that has less security holes than swiss cheese. Microsoft products boast that they are 'secure' but security cannot be claimed, look at WinXP, they said that was secure, but today we know it has more holes than aluminium pits on a pressed CD.
Microsoft should stop calling their products secure, even the networking stack is screwed. To anyone who upgrades within the first two years, I blissfully stand, point and laugh.
Note, FC5, Ubuntu 6.06, Mac OS X and OpenBSD all have firewalls as-standard. Did WinXP when it first came out? Nope. I'm gonna ask when Microsoft will implement a 'critical' feature that the FOSS community comes up with that secures sooo much stuff (I'm thinking SELinux, ELF, or other low-level protections here).
Anyone who tells you Windows is secure by default has no place in the IT community. They'd be better off bashing their heads against brick walls until their brain's left a stain.
I find that when I'm designing stuff quickly, I need to have something that I can use easily and quickly, even when my mind feel like it's going faster than my hands can go, so I draw. Just scribbles, but when I have one that I think is good enough, I'll pull out the ruler and colouring pencils, and see if it really does look that good.
When I'm done, I'll open up Vim and see if I can get a working style sheet & HTML. If I still think it looks good, then I'll go ahead with it.
Fear is the point of terrorism, by being paranoid and afraid, the terrorists have 'won'
Terror = Fear ++
Therefore, Terrorism = Fearism ++
I /do/ keep a thumb drive on me, I have an embedded version of DSL on it, but that's not the point. For fixing family & friend's PCs, I loose the thumb drive, I don't want my nice files/apps/utils being infected by whatever crud they've got on their PC, so I use a bootable CD: UBCD4Win, CD-Rs are read-only once burnt, so it can't get infected, and I can boot it and run plenty of nice utils for defragging, checking disks, anti-virus, anti-spyware, etc.
I only plug my thumb drive into PCs I trust, I'd hate to carry viruses, etc. round to other PCs.
UBCD 4 Win
--DanBecause they've fallen for the same trap as Microsoft Windows: They put the button you push to turn the machine off in a sub menu of the button you push to start your work! What could possibly be next? Insert headers and footers in the View menu on the Freespire-customized version of OpenOffice.org?
May god save us all.
... The finger, and install Linux (or get your phone call, one or the other ;-) ) I think Ubuntu would be best here.
Thank you, Your one of the few to have the balls to say that around here.
HaHa, Yea, I used to be 'addicted' to PlanetSide. It was awesome. Then I just got bored of it, and most other games. I used to get home from school, and just play, forget tea, forget sleep. this was *my* time and I wanted to play, not much was gonna stop me.
On week ends I would get up at 0600, and play alll the way to 2300. I quit it all
My new game is the GNU Compiler Collection ;-) (and increasingly, Mono Compiler)
Enjoy life how you want. Games are like any other form of recreation. You can play them until people call you addicted, but you are in control. You can always get up, walk away, turn the console/computer off and be done with it.
When I wanted to do my coursework for school. I put my hard drive in the safe, and on a blank one, I put Linux on it. You can't easily install most games on Linux. My 'gaming' hard drive is still in the safe. And I've sold the PC it goes in.
I simply do not do 8-12 hour strectches on /games/ anymore, but I do it with code from time to time(slightly different, I can more easily make a career out of code, not so out of games, people do but you've got to be the cream of the crop).
If these kids are addicted, have any of the parents let it pan out before rushing off to these 'clinics'?-Most kids can easily cure (god I HATE that word) themselves. Do they realise that their kids don't start writhing in pain without games, unlike what happens with drug addicts (they may, however kick up a fuss that their not having fun)? Have they looked into this 'clinic'?-WTF do they do to the kids in there?
I think this is just hype and advertisment for the 'clinic', I personally think it's a load of bull sh*t.
I know parents try to do what's 'best' for their children in their eyes, but it simply is best to leave well enough alone. Most kids realise that being hungry IS NOT GOOD. If they're not eating, take them to the hospital and have them pumped (usually painfully, from what I've heard) full of food, then let them play until their hungry. They GET THE PICTURE after a while.
One thing that worked for me was a little something called the opposite sex (until I worked out that I could make the computer do exactly as I wanted).
If you really want to stop them playing, take the games away from them! If your kid doesn't have the self control to make it so that s/he can't continue to play until they drop, make it so, take their PC. If they have a good reason for keeping it, put Linux on it. Then they have to go to some lengths to get most games to play.
IMHO, if you take your child to a 'clinic' like this, you're saying to the world "Yes, I am so lazy as to not try to tackle this myself! I do need someone else to parent my children; I'm not fit to be a parent!"
Phew! what a RANT
Personnaly, whilst learning to program (self taught, so having a teacher maybe different on this matter) I always found that an IDE simply bogged me down. I couldn't find buttons, the syntax completion often drove me up the wall.
I do not know, having a teacher there to say 'this button does this' may sove this problem, however, it may not.
Personally: no IDE.
Yeah, the terminal's good, but giving that to end users?? they tend to freak, get confused, or jsut claim it's crap. I tend to write a "backend" script, that will produce output to a terminal, and then get a GUI-frontend script to interact with it.
For the moment, I only know how to use TKinter :/ but I am learning GTK...
Even on my mac, I nearly always have a terminal open, once you have that power/speed or whatever in your head (learning allll the commands :-) ) it's quite hard to get by with just a GUI, It's the main reason Windows frustrates me sooo much, the cmd has nowhere near the power of bash or sh... well, to my knowledge anyways
Yeah, I do have a mac, Mac OS X comes with Python as standard, so thats what I keep getting my teeth into; it's available. I got nowhere trying to learn to program on windows, as there's nothing built in, other than making .bat files (which pales in comparison to making shell scripts as far as power goes...)
I don't tend to write anything in C/C++ anymore (though I do try from time to time) as it's soo much harder, write, compile, run is a little too slow for me. I prefer to fire up the interpretter, throw stuff at it, see what works, what doesn't then bolt it all together in a .py file.
That Ozone OS is pretty cool, I'll give it a shot sometime :) *book marks*.
I have tried to write some simple apps using C++, but I got bogged down in the details, I've only (so far) been sucessful in writing anything remotley useful in Python. All the rest in C/C++ have been xterm progs, that do simple things such as calculate quadratic formulae, however, I can write GUI progs in Python.
I am called Daniel, but I do prefer Danny...
Nice to meet you Yuki.
I know that kernels can be written in C++, It's just that the Linux kernel isn't, and if I ever get to be good enough, I'd love to work on it. Failing that, I'll go and do my own stuff in Python, under Linux. My understanding of C isn't great, I'm definatley leaning towards the later at the moment; application programming. Which kernels are written in C++? I've never heard of any, but I'd love to find one :) I do know a little C++, I just prefer C because of the Linux Kernel
Right,
I'd rather not be pushed around by strangers, so I'll keep C, I'll accept that I couldn't spell one saying, and I'll keep using my own (apparently useless) brand of humour
-- Goodbye from Mr. Mistake
... and I *do* program. so far, I've jumped on the chance to learn how to code in C, shell scripting and Python, HTML, CSS and PHP (does that count??). I've also jumped on the idea of building my own network with a Linux server.
It know how to build my own ethernet cables (not hard, but it proves that I will go looking for stuff to learn).
I only know of 1 other pupil in my entire school who can program, per-say (given, he does it in Visual Basic), and a different pupil runs a MS Windows server (in London, where he's bought some space on it, and logs on from time to time and updates it etc.) I know of one other pupil who uses Flash + ActionScript, and creates things that way. That is the extent of programmers in my school.
There are 900 pupils
The ICT lessons are just that, how to use MS Wort and MS Excel. I took ICT thinking it would be interesting to me, a programmer, but no, it has just been boring. They're training us to be office gophers, although I have heard rumours that it is possible (with enough requests) to do computing or computer sciences in 6th form, but they are just rumours.
Here in Britain, we're a fairly calm lot. Recently, across the tunnel, our French friends have been rioting against being *fired* from their first job, why are we sat idly back, whilst the govt. watches our every move and becomes totalitarien!?
-- From the lovley land of Air Strip One. we love Tony Blair, T.B.T.B.T.B.T.B....
They could write a compiler that only works on the Cell pocessor in the PS3, taking away a lot of the hardware variables. I think that would speed the process pf creating a compiler easier (not easy, easier)
By the time this is settled, you'd be past your retirment age