I don't know about these kids, but the only way I made undergrad (and Med School for my wife) happen is, as the commercial says "I'm in debt up to my eyeballs!". I suspect this is the case for most (all but the richest) students. Student loans have a designated set of things you can spend them on, and I'm guessing (maybe not?) that paying off lawsuits is not one of them. So it's not like you can drop out of college to divert funds to paying off some lawsuit. You may be able to free up whatever you're paying out-of-pocket, but if anything I would think this would make you elligible for MORE student loans. This is clearly just an intimidation tactic, since it makes so much more sense to adjust your loans, finish college, get a job, be in a much higher income bracket and have some hope of paying off the settlement.
Does anyone actually know how a lawsuit affects student loan status? I've also always wondered.. what happens when someone really does sue you for more than you have? Is the collection regulated by the government or something?
The player would glisten and be dazzling... but I imagine that the headphone would still look just as tacky.
And, just like a new iPod, the glisten and dazzle would last approximately one week. Should have picked titanium, or some other scratch-resistant shiny metal. Now THAT would be worth something. And they could coat the screen with scratch-resistant transparent aluminum. Thank you Scotty.
Britannica is authorative, peer reviewed and reliable but it costs money.... the simple fact is that most people are not going to fork a pile of cash when Wikipedia is good enough for day to day use.
I totally agree. But is Britannica, or any other encyclopedia, really authoritative? When I want authoritative information, I go to a peer-reviewed journal. That doesn't always work with factual-type information (a list of Presidents, State Flags, etc..), but it seems like there is always a "higher" source (the government in this case). Do encyclopedias ever present the results of their own independent, novel research?
Usually encyclopedias are just convenient to find comprehensive, top-level information, and hopefully a reference to go to for more detail or to confirm. That's why Wikipedia works just fine 99.99% of the time, I think.
... so I have something to do other than sit in an uncomfortable chair in my dark, cold, crowded, noisy apartment and watch the movie on a sub-par display with sub-par sound.
It seems like everyone wants to argue that fishing works because "there will just always be so many idiots who don't understand." I think this is a pretty pessimistic, misanthropic, slightly elitist viewpoint.
It "works" because it costs the phisher almost nothing. It always takes at least one sucker, but it doesn't take an average number of suckers per 1000 people.
Suppose a phisher sents B "bait" emails and suckers N people out of W dollars each. Also suppose it costs the phisher C dollars to do all of this. So think about the efficiency... the payoff is N*W - C, so the payoff per dollar invested is something like (N*W - C)/C = N*W/C - 1 and N, W, and C may all depend on the number of baits, B. It's reasonable to assume W is constant. Suppose N *isn't* proportional to B, but is still increasing on the whole (it may saturate at some level, for example). The problem is that C is still insignificant, and certainly doesn't grow as fast as N does, so there's always a huge incentive to send LOTS of bait emails.
If the number of suckers really is a percentage, then that makes the situation worse, but getting rid of most of them doesn't fix the problem. It helps, but it might help more to focus on stopping the fact that this is "easy money" for someone with the right resources than complaining about how not everyone has the same level of skill with a computer as you do.
Actually, most engineering disasters in history have probably been caused by unexpected violations of known assumptions.
Thanks for restating my point.
Well, with that attidue, you'll never be an engineer. But the rest of your comments have to lead us to that conclusion anyway.
Actually that was my impression of your attitude, which I'm sure is hurtling you into the upper echelons. Along with spending hours on slashdot and modding all of your own posts up.
No, you simulate and test. It's the mainstay of engineering and reliability. As I was saying: proofs are neither necessary nor sufficient in general.
If I ever said that to any of my supervisors they'd laugh. The simple truth is that you need both analysis (trying to prove something will work) AND testing, usually with the testing being guided by analysis. You'll learn that as an undergrad.
There is no "dilemma"; knowing a mathematical proof is neither necessary nor sufficient to determine that an engineered system works
Sure, you can simply observe - "it works". For now.
You have put your finger on one efficient way of testing an engineered system: you simulate it and test with many different initial conditions.
Sure. Let's just blindly test all of the conditions. Since we're not going to bother with proof, we might as well abandon all of the analysis. 0, 0.1, 0.2, 0.3, 0.5, 0.6, 0.7, 0.8, 0.9, 1.0, 1.1, 1.2,... (days later) OK! It works, lets put it into practice (days later) What do you mean it blew up? Why would they use 0.25 as a setting?
Just because the assumptions of a proof are violated doesn't mean that the system will break--it only means that the proof doesn't work.
That's true. So let's discard the assumptions completely. It's not like almost every major engineering disaster in history has been caused by ignorance to the assumptions of their design.
First of all, for many engineering purposes, it only matters that it works, not that you can prove that it works theoretically.
- Proclaimed the engineer after one successful run of his simulation/program, before he ran it again with a different set of initial conditions/parameters only to see it fail because he didn't understand the math behind what he was doing.
There is a Platonic dilemma dealing with the necessity of proof for a mathematical idea to "exist," which is all well and philosophical, but that's not to say proof shouldn't matter for engineers. Knowing something about the proof of a theory you use means knowing something about the assumptions that are made, which in turn means you know precisely what will BREAK it.
I don't know for sure, but this may have been a slight over-generalization. Data compression (especially music) in general is driven by Fourier analysis. The toy example is that to represent a pure sinusoid by straightforward sampling we'd need something on the order of thousands or millions of numbers (depending on the sampling rate and length of the signal). Using Fourier decomposition, strictly speaking, we'd only need 2 numbers: the phase and amplitude. Add as many details as you want to make it practical (frequency table, sampling rate, start/stop times, etc), it will still be many orders of magnitude less than the sampled signal.
Interesting. The bit about changing what your friend is thinking about is a general principle in conducting experiments involving human (even animal) subjects. If they know they're taking a test, or being part of a study, it will effect their responses. That's actually one of the reasons why medical research is so difficult.
The bit about shouting fire in a crowded theatre I think is more of a "law of large numbers" argument than being Heisenbergian. Your model that allows you to predict the response of a large crowd is predicated by the fact that there is a large crowd. It's called a continuum model - the basic idea is that you let the density of individuals at any location (or in any state) become large enough that you can model it as a continuous density distribution. The fact that you can't handle a situation with small numbers is a breakdown in the assumption that you can treat the group en masse rather than as a group of interacting individuals.
That could be applied to business practice, politics, military, world economics, or anything else important with a social foundation.
Trust me, it's being done. I can speak for military and biological applications. This is very closely related to swarming, which is a pretty hot topic right now in a lot of fields. The general game is to find individual-based rules to produce desired (possibly optimal) behavior at the group level, or alternately (like TFA) to find individual-based models that describe group behavior. Ever since we've been able to make lots of little robots cheaply, this has been a big push.
Verizon has announced a new method to supply faster internet connections (a concept they have dubbed "broadband") using existing telephone lines. The information will be modulated to a higher frequency and transmitted from existing local switching stations along with voice data. The user will be able to utilize their existing landline by placing a "filter" inline before their telephones to remove the high frequency data transmission. The illusive internal project name at Verizon R&D is simple the acronym "DSL."
Re:Jupiter a better choice than Saturn in 2001
on
Alien Rain Over India
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· Score: 1
Nice. Do we have any idea where the dust originates? I'm curious how far it travels and how much chance it has to pick up a sizable velocity. The surface area thing is a really good point, though.
Re:Jupiter a better choice than Saturn in 2001
on
Alien Rain Over India
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· Score: 1
(IANA cosmologist)
Beauty shool dropout, eh?
Yes. Sadly I've resigned myself to engineering. Everyone talks about dropping out of engineering to become a business major, but we never acknowledge the shameful few who decided to fall back on engineering because they couldn't handle the sophomore workload of Hair Style 320 and Eyeliner 413.
Re:Jupiter a better choice than Saturn in 2001
on
Alien Rain Over India
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· Score: 3, Interesting
On being recovered, it turned out that the three cultures that were intended to be in there had all been killed off by the heat of reentry - but that a contaminant strain had survived and thrived inside the unbroken sealed container.
That's an important point, though. In both of those cases, whatever lived was shielded during re-entry. A spore on an asteroid or other "natural" projectile would experience similar (worse, probably) extremes and it seems less and less likely they could survive "re-entry" (entry, rather?). Could a lone bacteria/spore/whatever that was just "floating" on its own through space survive entry into the atmosphere without being burned up?
My guess (IANA cosmologist) is that after a long journey through space it would have been accellerated to great speed by passing nearby massive objects, so despite not having much mass the friction would still be pretty intense.
I don't understand where this would be useful. In a clinic dealing with patients who don't speak English as a first language, yes, but at the practice I go to they already have Chinese/English speaking doctors, as well as several others who are multilingual, which works fine.
Many hospitals, especially in larger cities, already have paid medical translators on hand - so the need for this type of service is pre-established.
Furthermore, human translators are highly expensive (salary, training, benefits, etc), so only high-budget hospitals and clinics have them. If you introduce a machine that, in principle, isn't a ton more expensive than a high-end PC, then you make translation services a whole lot more affordable for a whole lot more establishments. Even if the machines costs $40k, that more than pays for a human interpreter over the course of a year or two.
Every kid in the world probably knows that "plays for sure" means "won't work with your iPod".
There's a chicken or the egg argument here, though. This implies that everyone wants to play the songs on their iPod because the iPod has some intrinsic value (trendiness, I guess). I know that's true now, especially among kids, but would iPods have become so hugely successful if you had to pay month-to-month to keep the songs on it and they went away as soon as you stopped subscribing?
I find it ironic that the only people likely to care about this apparent decline in US Scientists is us, the Science types.
I think mostly it's the professionals that care (and well they should, it's their jobs). I actually think that the people in academia don't really care that much. Maybe we should care more, but there's a conflict in that. The general academic dogma is that the pursuit is paramount and location/ethnicity/whatever is just not a consideration.
There's also something to be said about the fact that ALOT of foreign students still come to the US to get their degrees, though that number will definitely decline if they keep leaving. Industry, like it or not, is vital for scientific research, and if all of the industry goes away then the research will follow suit.
Why bust your hump getting MS or PhD in one of the hard sciences/engineering, only to land a job making less than 80k??
I don't know, something about the pursuit of philosophical truth?
Besides, just marry a doctor (the other kind), that's what I did;-) Er... there's that whole quarter-million-dollar loan debt thing.... but after that, we're golden.
And where I came from... $80K is ALOT of money. If I start at $80K I'll be making more than my parents combined after they've been at their (actually decent) jobs for a long time.
No, I don't believe I feel so bad about busting my hump to get that PhD.
I'm not familiar with 3D rendering software, but alot of times there is one software package that is especially well suited to a particular application. So if the class is teaching that application, it's natural to use that software. My classes always tell me I can use matlab or c/c++ or whatever I want to do my homework, but in most cases it would be assinine to use anything other than matlab, so that's what I have on my laptop. It's not mandated, but I'd be in rough shape if I tried to use anything else (no, not even octave).
A big "problem" is a lack of experimental methods. You can't (ethically) tweak someone's brain and see what happens. That's why this guy is doing it to himself. We actually learned more about the human body faster (per research dollar, at least) in the first 2/3-ish of the twentieth century than we have since around the sixties, when medical ethics really began to take shape.
Monogamy (or at least serial monogamy) is *prevalent* though. Especially in "successful" societies, genetically speaking, which was the basis of the argument - that monogamy is selected for evolutionarily, with the implication that societies where monogamy is the norm will dominate the population as a whole. So the argument holds, whether you've sensitively considered every secluded tribal society or not.
Slashdot Mirror
Bipedal robot with neurologically-based control. We've mastered that.
A simple camera design mounted to the boom so the @##@$@# picture doesn't keep jumping... now THAT is difficult.
I don't know about these kids, but the only way I made undergrad (and Med School for my wife) happen is, as the commercial says "I'm in debt up to my eyeballs!". I suspect this is the case for most (all but the richest) students. Student loans have a designated set of things you can spend them on, and I'm guessing (maybe not?) that paying off lawsuits is not one of them. So it's not like you can drop out of college to divert funds to paying off some lawsuit. You may be able to free up whatever you're paying out-of-pocket, but if anything I would think this would make you elligible for MORE student loans. This is clearly just an intimidation tactic, since it makes so much more sense to adjust your loans, finish college, get a job, be in a much higher income bracket and have some hope of paying off the settlement.
Does anyone actually know how a lawsuit affects student loan status? I've also always wondered.. what happens when someone really does sue you for more than you have? Is the collection regulated by the government or something?
The player would glisten and be dazzling... but I imagine that the headphone would still look just as tacky.
And, just like a new iPod, the glisten and dazzle would last approximately one week. Should have picked titanium, or some other scratch-resistant shiny metal. Now THAT would be worth something. And they could coat the screen with scratch-resistant transparent aluminum. Thank you Scotty.
Britannica is authorative, peer reviewed and reliable but it costs money. ... the simple fact is that most people are not going to fork a pile of cash when Wikipedia is good enough for day to day use.
I totally agree. But is Britannica, or any other encyclopedia, really authoritative? When I want authoritative information, I go to a peer-reviewed journal. That doesn't always work with factual-type information (a list of Presidents, State Flags, etc..), but it seems like there is always a "higher" source (the government in this case). Do encyclopedias ever present the results of their own independent, novel research?
Usually encyclopedias are just convenient to find comprehensive, top-level information, and hopefully a reference to go to for more detail or to confirm. That's why Wikipedia works just fine 99.99% of the time, I think.
... so I have something to do other than sit in an uncomfortable chair in my dark, cold, crowded, noisy apartment and watch the movie on a sub-par display with sub-par sound.
Oh wait...
It seems like everyone wants to argue that fishing works because "there will just always be so many idiots who don't understand." I think this is a pretty pessimistic, misanthropic, slightly elitist viewpoint.
It "works" because it costs the phisher almost nothing. It always takes at least one sucker, but it doesn't take an average number of suckers per 1000 people.
Suppose a phisher sents B "bait" emails and suckers N people out of W dollars each. Also suppose it costs the phisher C dollars to do all of this. So think about the efficiency... the payoff is N*W - C, so the payoff per dollar invested is something like (N*W - C)/C = N*W/C - 1 and N, W, and C may all depend on the number of baits, B. It's reasonable to assume W is constant. Suppose N *isn't* proportional to B, but is still increasing on the whole (it may saturate at some level, for example). The problem is that C is still insignificant, and certainly doesn't grow as fast as N does, so there's always a huge incentive to send LOTS of bait emails.
If the number of suckers really is a percentage, then that makes the situation worse, but getting rid of most of them doesn't fix the problem. It helps, but it might help more to focus on stopping the fact that this is "easy money" for someone with the right resources than complaining about how not everyone has the same level of skill with a computer as you do.
Actually, most engineering disasters in history have probably been caused by unexpected violations of known assumptions.
Thanks for restating my point.
Well, with that attidue, you'll never be an engineer. But the rest of your comments have to lead us to that conclusion anyway.
Actually that was my impression of your attitude, which I'm sure is hurtling you into the upper echelons. Along with spending hours on slashdot and modding all of your own posts up.
No, you simulate and test. It's the mainstay of engineering and reliability. As I was saying: proofs are neither necessary nor sufficient in general.
If I ever said that to any of my supervisors they'd laugh. The simple truth is that you need both analysis (trying to prove something will work) AND testing, usually with the testing being guided by analysis. You'll learn that as an undergrad.
There is no "dilemma"; knowing a mathematical proof is neither necessary nor sufficient to determine that an engineered system works
Sure, you can simply observe - "it works". For now.
You have put your finger on one efficient way of testing an engineered system: you simulate it and test with many different initial conditions.
Sure. Let's just blindly test all of the conditions. Since we're not going to bother with proof, we might as well abandon all of the analysis. 0, 0.1, 0.2, 0.3, 0.5, 0.6, 0.7, 0.8, 0.9, 1.0, 1.1, 1.2,... (days later) OK! It works, lets put it into practice (days later) What do you mean it blew up? Why would they use 0.25 as a setting?
Just because the assumptions of a proof are violated doesn't mean that the system will break--it only means that the proof doesn't work.
That's true. So let's discard the assumptions completely. It's not like almost every major engineering disaster in history has been caused by ignorance to the assumptions of their design.
First of all, for many engineering purposes, it only matters that it works, not that you can prove that it works theoretically.
- Proclaimed the engineer after one successful run of his simulation/program, before he ran it again with a different set of initial conditions/parameters only to see it fail because he didn't understand the math behind what he was doing.
There is a Platonic dilemma dealing with the necessity of proof for a mathematical idea to "exist," which is all well and philosophical, but that's not to say proof shouldn't matter for engineers. Knowing something about the proof of a theory you use means knowing something about the assumptions that are made, which in turn means you know precisely what will BREAK it.
I don't know for sure, but this may have been a slight over-generalization. Data compression (especially music) in general is driven by Fourier analysis. The toy example is that to represent a pure sinusoid by straightforward sampling we'd need something on the order of thousands or millions of numbers (depending on the sampling rate and length of the signal). Using Fourier decomposition, strictly speaking, we'd only need 2 numbers: the phase and amplitude. Add as many details as you want to make it practical (frequency table, sampling rate, start/stop times, etc), it will still be many orders of magnitude less than the sampled signal.
Interesting. The bit about changing what your friend is thinking about is a general principle in conducting experiments involving human (even animal) subjects. If they know they're taking a test, or being part of a study, it will effect their responses. That's actually one of the reasons why medical research is so difficult.
The bit about shouting fire in a crowded theatre I think is more of a "law of large numbers" argument than being Heisenbergian. Your model that allows you to predict the response of a large crowd is predicated by the fact that there is a large crowd. It's called a continuum model - the basic idea is that you let the density of individuals at any location (or in any state) become large enough that you can model it as a continuous density distribution. The fact that you can't handle a situation with small numbers is a breakdown in the assumption that you can treat the group en masse rather than as a group of interacting individuals.
That could be applied to business practice, politics, military, world economics, or anything else important with a social foundation.
Trust me, it's being done. I can speak for military and biological applications. This is very closely related to swarming, which is a pretty hot topic right now in a lot of fields. The general game is to find individual-based rules to produce desired (possibly optimal) behavior at the group level, or alternately (like TFA) to find individual-based models that describe group behavior. Ever since we've been able to make lots of little robots cheaply, this has been a big push.
Verizon To Use New Tech With Old Cables
Verizon has announced a new method to supply faster internet connections (a concept they have dubbed "broadband") using existing telephone lines. The information will be modulated to a higher frequency and transmitted from existing local switching stations along with voice data. The user will be able to utilize their existing landline by placing a "filter" inline before their telephones to remove the high frequency data transmission. The illusive internal project name at Verizon R&D is simple the acronym "DSL."
Nice. Do we have any idea where the dust originates? I'm curious how far it travels and how much chance it has to pick up a sizable velocity. The surface area thing is a really good point, though.
(IANA cosmologist)
Beauty shool dropout, eh?
Yes. Sadly I've resigned myself to engineering. Everyone talks about dropping out of engineering to become a business major, but we never acknowledge the shameful few who decided to fall back on engineering because they couldn't handle the sophomore workload of Hair Style 320 and Eyeliner 413.
On being recovered, it turned out that the three cultures that were intended to be in there had all been killed off by the heat of reentry - but that a contaminant strain had survived and thrived inside the unbroken sealed container.
That's an important point, though. In both of those cases, whatever lived was shielded during re-entry. A spore on an asteroid or other "natural" projectile would experience similar (worse, probably) extremes and it seems less and less likely they could survive "re-entry" (entry, rather?). Could a lone bacteria/spore/whatever that was just "floating" on its own through space survive entry into the atmosphere without being burned up?
My guess (IANA cosmologist) is that after a long journey through space it would have been accellerated to great speed by passing nearby massive objects, so despite not having much mass the friction would still be pretty intense.
I don't understand where this would be useful. In a clinic dealing with patients who don't speak English as a first language, yes, but at the practice I go to they already have Chinese/English speaking doctors, as well as several others who are multilingual, which works fine.
Many hospitals, especially in larger cities, already have paid medical translators on hand - so the need for this type of service is pre-established.
Furthermore, human translators are highly expensive (salary, training, benefits, etc), so only high-budget hospitals and clinics have them. If you introduce a machine that, in principle, isn't a ton more expensive than a high-end PC, then you make translation services a whole lot more affordable for a whole lot more establishments. Even if the machines costs $40k, that more than pays for a human interpreter over the course of a year or two.
Every kid in the world probably knows that "plays for sure" means "won't work with your iPod".
There's a chicken or the egg argument here, though. This implies that everyone wants to play the songs on their iPod because the iPod has some intrinsic value (trendiness, I guess). I know that's true now, especially among kids, but would iPods have become so hugely successful if you had to pay month-to-month to keep the songs on it and they went away as soon as you stopped subscribing?
I've ostensibly chosen to assimilate it into my own personal lexicon.
I find it ironic that the only people likely to care about this apparent decline in US Scientists is us, the Science types.
I think mostly it's the professionals that care (and well they should, it's their jobs). I actually think that the people in academia don't really care that much. Maybe we should care more, but there's a conflict in that. The general academic dogma is that the pursuit is paramount and location/ethnicity/whatever is just not a consideration.
There's also something to be said about the fact that ALOT of foreign students still come to the US to get their degrees, though that number will definitely decline if they keep leaving. Industry, like it or not, is vital for scientific research, and if all of the industry goes away then the research will follow suit.
Why bust your hump getting MS or PhD in one of the hard sciences/engineering, only to land a job making less than 80k??
;-) Er... there's that whole quarter-million-dollar loan debt thing.... but after that, we're golden.
I don't know, something about the pursuit of philosophical truth?
Besides, just marry a doctor (the other kind), that's what I did
And where I came from... $80K is ALOT of money. If I start at $80K I'll be making more than my parents combined after they've been at their (actually decent) jobs for a long time.
No, I don't believe I feel so bad about busting my hump to get that PhD.
I'm not familiar with 3D rendering software, but alot of times there is one software package that is especially well suited to a particular application. So if the class is teaching that application, it's natural to use that software. My classes always tell me I can use matlab or c/c++ or whatever I want to do my homework, but in most cases it would be assinine to use anything other than matlab, so that's what I have on my laptop. It's not mandated, but I'd be in rough shape if I tried to use anything else (no, not even octave).
...a 4016/4066 will sort of just about do, but look at the Maxim web site for some higher-bandwidth, lower-on-resistance ones...
Maxim has girls AND components? It truely is geek heaven.
A big "problem" is a lack of experimental methods. You can't (ethically) tweak someone's brain and see what happens. That's why this guy is doing it to himself. We actually learned more about the human body faster (per research dollar, at least) in the first 2/3-ish of the twentieth century than we have since around the sixties, when medical ethics really began to take shape.
Monogamy (or at least serial monogamy) is *prevalent* though. Especially in "successful" societies, genetically speaking, which was the basis of the argument - that monogamy is selected for evolutionarily, with the implication that societies where monogamy is the norm will dominate the population as a whole. So the argument holds, whether you've sensitively considered every secluded tribal society or not.