Some contemporary examples (from wikipedia):
Youtube's official launch was November 2005. By July 2006, they had 26k videos being uploaded per day.
Facebook launched c. 2005 and had it's first 100 million users by August 2008, then doubled it in 225 days.
Apple's app store was launched mid 2008. There are now some 200k approved apps.
Twitter's tipping point happened at SXSW 2007, when it went from 20k to 60k tweets/day.
These days, how long is too long to wait for something to take off?
Plasma flowing poleward at the solar surface and returning equatorward near the base of the convection zone, called the meridional circulation, constitutes the Sun's conveyor-belt. Just as the Earth's great oceanic conveyor-belt carries thermal signatures that determine El Nino events, the Sun's conveyor-belt determines timing, amplitude and shape of a solar cycle in flux-transport type dynamos. In cycle 23, the Sun's surface poleward meridional flow extended all the way to the pole, while in cycle 22 it switched to equatorward near 60. Simulations from a flux-transport dynamo model including these observed differences in meridional circulation show that the transport of dynamo-generated magnetic flux via the longer conveyor-belt, with slower return-flow in cycle 23 compared to that in cycle 22, may have caused the longer duration of cycle 23.
Sacrificing all my mod points to say this, but a friend of mine did this with his PS3 so he could play remotely using a PSP. Also, check out OnLive for a pretty slick implementation of gaming in the cloud.
I believe the catholic church held a similar view when the Gutenburg press came out. They argued that the general public would not understand the scriptures and would take parts of it out of context. They thought that a version filtered through the priesthood was more appropriate; if you really wanted to study the bible on your own, well there's a solution for that: become a priest.
facebook and WoW are not equivalent playing fields. right now, female gamers can play anonymously and (with the right privacy settings) simultaneously maintain a facebook page. they can keep their virtual stalkers in WoW, and still interact with their friends/family through facebook. this little snafu needlessly makes that balancing act even harder.
I'm glad they are not using lat-long anymore, but my main concern was the method of integration. I fully accept that there are climate models that use more modern approaches in the vein of the fluid dynamics community, like this one http://dev.mitgcm.org/pdfs/96JC02775.pdf
but I'm having trouble linking such models to those used in the IPCC reports. Can you point me to some methods papers?
My biggest concern with climate modeling right now is that climate scientists are not the equal of computer scientists, and this gives one pause [wikipedia]:
The fluid equations for AGCMs are discretised using either the finite difference method or the spectral method. For finite differences, a regular grid (i.e. with constant grid spacing) in latitude and longitude is most common.
So one of their approaches to solving Navier Stokes is to use finite difference methods, while the entire field of fluid dynamics moved away from that decades ago (because it is inherently unstable!). This is why all the climate models predict wildly different outcomes for the future: their results are only as good as their boundary conditions, which can only be measured in the present. To me, that's kindof a big deal.
I'm rather fond of Scotsmen, not to mention Ghandi when he said "I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ."
Videogames are not that different from traditional sports: there is a rule set that exists to define the sport, but those rules do not determine the quality of the player. In fact, a good player never complains about patches, because she can change her strategy accordingly. The evolution of the starcraft II beta is a good example of this. To me, there are two measurements that determine the quality of every sport, and it helps to motivate why we appreciate some sports more than others: Game-critical decisions per minute and secondly, the skill of execution in carrying out those decisions. The first is easiest to measure (at least with video), but the latter is a little more subtle - I think it's related to the number of degrees of freedom involved those actions (think of how many wrong ways there are to hit a baseball). Basically, every decent sport should rank highly on both of the scales.
Overpaid my ass. Esports are not mainstream enough for all but a few to be paid to play. The sponsors haven't quite woken up to reality yet. Take the
HDH invitational : every single game had more than 100,000 views, yet the prize pool was a mere $2500, and that was apparently the largest prize pool for a foreign starcraft tournament.
You're right, it's about whether such features add to the feel of the story. By the way, I once saw a man in RDR rear his horse suddenly and jump down for seemingly no reason. I stopped my horse and walked it over to him. The guy was taking a leak on the side of the road. When he finished, he muttered something, got back on his horse and kept moving. I couldn't help feeling a little embarrassed.
As far as maintaining your character is concerned, I think that's something Rockstar tried with San Andreas. The majority of people complained that their character had to eat and exercise to stay in shape. I think it's partly that feedback and in part because Rockstar is trying to reflect a lot of the tropes of Western cinema. For example the dead-eye mechanic does a pretty good job of making you feel like the-man-with-no-name: walking up to a bunch of bad guys yammering at you and taking them all out in a split second, though not historically accurate, is pretty damn satisfying.
Maybe if there's enough articles - a year's worth for each journal. I suppose someone would have to download each one individually - where there's a will there's a way right?
However, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal is a closed publisher and the article is locked behind a paywall, so I guess the vast majority of us will never know.
This has bothered me a lot lately. Bittorent to the rescue?
#cnnfail was the twitter hash tag used when CNN neglected to cover the Iranian protests last summer. It's what prompted CNN to include a twitter feed in their broadcasts.
Kevin Smith is the writer/director of Dogma, Clerks, Chasing Amy and other counter-culture cult classics. He complained over twitter about getting kicked off a plane for being too fat. Southwest Airlines was forced to make a few public statements defending their policy. I mention these stories as examples of how twitter is helping shift the balance of power away from mainstream media and corporations and toward the public.
My point in the comparison is simply to illustrate that the benefits of twitter as a utility outweigh the costs of whatever spam that might get through, just as with email. Twitter does not need to duplicate the functionality of email for it to be genuinely useful to society.
Slashdot Mirror
Some contemporary examples (from wikipedia): Youtube's official launch was November 2005. By July 2006, they had 26k videos being uploaded per day. Facebook launched c. 2005 and had it's first 100 million users by August 2008, then doubled it in 225 days. Apple's app store was launched mid 2008. There are now some 200k approved apps. Twitter's tipping point happened at SXSW 2007, when it went from 20k to 60k tweets/day. These days, how long is too long to wait for something to take off?
Exactly. Has no one ever heard of a little game called Counter-Strike? In about half of ever game, the terrorists win.
Plasma flowing poleward at the solar surface and returning equatorward near the base of the convection zone, called the meridional circulation, constitutes the Sun's conveyor-belt. Just as the Earth's great oceanic conveyor-belt carries thermal signatures that determine El Nino events, the Sun's conveyor-belt determines timing, amplitude and shape of a solar cycle in flux-transport type dynamos. In cycle 23, the Sun's surface poleward meridional flow extended all the way to the pole, while in cycle 22 it switched to equatorward near 60. Simulations from a flux-transport dynamo model including these observed differences in meridional circulation show that the transport of dynamo-generated magnetic flux via the longer conveyor-belt, with slower return-flow in cycle 23 compared to that in cycle 22, may have caused the longer duration of cycle 23.
A quick google search turned up these odd stations I think you are referring to: http://www.surfacestations.org/odd_sites.htm and the faq page seems to cover what you described in your summary http://www.surfacestations.org/faqs.htm
I meant to mod this funny. accidentally hit overrated. wish there were an undo button..
Sacrificing all my mod points to say this, but a friend of mine did this with his PS3 so he could play remotely using a PSP. Also, check out OnLive for a pretty slick implementation of gaming in the cloud.
They make more money threatening to sue than they do over the actual lawsuits. Ever get one of their "pay us $1000, or else!" letters?
Figures that the "skeptics" take part of their knowledge straight from chick.com.
You're making a lot of assumptions there, dude. Interesting, though - I hadn't heard that before about Gutenburg. Thanks for the info
I believe the catholic church held a similar view when the Gutenburg press came out. They argued that the general public would not understand the scriptures and would take parts of it out of context. They thought that a version filtered through the priesthood was more appropriate; if you really wanted to study the bible on your own, well there's a solution for that: become a priest.
My bad. Here is the full interview on youtube. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vi1FTCzDSck
The first time I heard of Monsanto was in this interview with Vandana Shiva, concerning the effects of patented seed on Indian farmers: http://www.hulu.com/watch/133725/cooking-up-a-story-vandana-shiva-the-future-of-food-part-1
facebook and WoW are not equivalent playing fields. right now, female gamers can play anonymously and (with the right privacy settings) simultaneously maintain a facebook page. they can keep their virtual stalkers in WoW, and still interact with their friends/family through facebook. this little snafu needlessly makes that balancing act even harder.
I'm glad they are not using lat-long anymore, but my main concern was the method of integration. I fully accept that there are climate models that use more modern approaches in the vein of the fluid dynamics community, like this one http://dev.mitgcm.org/pdfs/96JC02775.pdf but I'm having trouble linking such models to those used in the IPCC reports. Can you point me to some methods papers?
The fluid equations for AGCMs are discretised using either the finite difference method or the spectral method. For finite differences, a regular grid (i.e. with constant grid spacing) in latitude and longitude is most common.
So one of their approaches to solving Navier Stokes is to use finite difference methods, while the entire field of fluid dynamics moved away from that decades ago (because it is inherently unstable!). This is why all the climate models predict wildly different outcomes for the future: their results are only as good as their boundary conditions, which can only be measured in the present. To me, that's kindof a big deal.
I'm rather fond of Scotsmen, not to mention Ghandi when he said "I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ."
Indeed - my spidy sense tells me there's prior knowledge hidden under all those 250,000 yet-to-be-leaked state department documents!
Videogames are not that different from traditional sports: there is a rule set that exists to define the sport, but those rules do not determine the quality of the player. In fact, a good player never complains about patches, because she can change her strategy accordingly. The evolution of the starcraft II beta is a good example of this. To me, there are two measurements that determine the quality of every sport, and it helps to motivate why we appreciate some sports more than others: Game-critical decisions per minute and secondly, the skill of execution in carrying out those decisions. The first is easiest to measure (at least with video), but the latter is a little more subtle - I think it's related to the number of degrees of freedom involved those actions (think of how many wrong ways there are to hit a baseball). Basically, every decent sport should rank highly on both of the scales.
Overpaid my ass. Esports are not mainstream enough for all but a few to be paid to play. The sponsors haven't quite woken up to reality yet. Take the HDH invitational : every single game had more than 100,000 views, yet the prize pool was a mere $2500, and that was apparently the largest prize pool for a foreign starcraft tournament.
I grew up watching COPS, and I thought it was the anti-COPS show. Just listen to the theme song.
You're right, it's about whether such features add to the feel of the story. By the way, I once saw a man in RDR rear his horse suddenly and jump down for seemingly no reason. I stopped my horse and walked it over to him. The guy was taking a leak on the side of the road. When he finished, he muttered something, got back on his horse and kept moving. I couldn't help feeling a little embarrassed.
As far as maintaining your character is concerned, I think that's something Rockstar tried with San Andreas. The majority of people complained that their character had to eat and exercise to stay in shape. I think it's partly that feedback and in part because Rockstar is trying to reflect a lot of the tropes of Western cinema. For example the dead-eye mechanic does a pretty good job of making you feel like the-man-with-no-name: walking up to a bunch of bad guys yammering at you and taking them all out in a split second, though not historically accurate, is pretty damn satisfying.
Maybe if there's enough articles - a year's worth for each journal. I suppose someone would have to download each one individually - where there's a will there's a way right?
However, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal is a closed publisher and the article is locked behind a paywall, so I guess the vast majority of us will never know.
This has bothered me a lot lately. Bittorent to the rescue?
#cnnfail was the twitter hash tag used when CNN neglected to cover the Iranian protests last summer. It's what prompted CNN to include a twitter feed in their broadcasts. Kevin Smith is the writer/director of Dogma, Clerks, Chasing Amy and other counter-culture cult classics. He complained over twitter about getting kicked off a plane for being too fat. Southwest Airlines was forced to make a few public statements defending their policy. I mention these stories as examples of how twitter is helping shift the balance of power away from mainstream media and corporations and toward the public.
My point in the comparison is simply to illustrate that the benefits of twitter as a utility outweigh the costs of whatever spam that might get through, just as with email. Twitter does not need to duplicate the functionality of email for it to be genuinely useful to society.