Different statements apply to individuals and to populations. Sex (to avoid the difficult term gender) does not predict the average math aptitude of random samples of males and females. Their population means are close as can be. Sex does predict the number of male and females individuals in such a random sample likely to differ greatly from the population mean. Their population variances are quite different.
When considering a non-random sample of math high-achievers, it requires no phallocentric conspiracy to account for a preponderance of the subpopulation with a larger variance, only Baye's Theorem.
If you hold unswervingly to the gender-feminist axiom that males and females have identical distributions of everything except reproductive organs, it will be necessary to reject this argument. But you're going up against lots of good data. I find the durability of said axiom when confronted by inconvenient data hugely amusing. Intellectual honesty is clearly not an issue when the mission is rolling back the patriarchy.
Perhaps because it doesn't exist? If women like shoes, they must be subtly oppressed. Riiight.
So, what else, beyond lack of evidence, would strengthen my belief in this construct? How many women have to claim their consciousness isn't "false" before gender feminists deign to hear their voices?
My point, such as it is, is methodological. Once you issue yourself a license to filter the evidence stream, as for example the false consciousness filter, you need never abandon your preconceived idea. Which is fine. Just don't claim it's evidence-based.
--
phunctor
Oh yeah. Back in 1976 I needed a diff so I wrote one. In S/360 COBOL. Because it was the immovable coding standard. Simulated recursion, what a concept.
--phunctor
Strangely enough those big bucks are often less than what the State spends on providing an inferior educational product, forced association with don't-wanna-learners, pre-jail babysitting services for disinterested parents, and lots and lots of social engineering.
Not surprising the bundle costs more than just the decent education that people are willing to pay for. Not surprising that attempts to reform education that focus on learning rather than on the compulsory bundle are doomed to fail.
If you needed to know about anything higher than Secret, if such a thing existed, somebody would have briefed you.
-- phunctor
Re:shhh! don't go blabbing this all over the place
on
The Return of Ada
·
· Score: 1
Hey museumpeace - I make a decent living playing with missile guidance problems in C++, but have used Ada in the past. And I'm keenly interested in upgrading from "decent" to "nice". Let's have lunch! (It sounds like we may be contemporaries; we can tell get-off-my-lawn jokes...)
It's well documented that the range in end-to-end productivity within the set of employable codebeasts is a of the order of 500%. (For the sake of argument, assume that all/. readers are in this set.) Those who have this productivity edge want to personally realize some personal financial benefit from it. Clueful hiring managers are able to recognize these individuals, understand that their productivity can enhance their (the manager's) career, and will fight to hire them.
HR is your deadly enemy, and the hiring manager who burns corporate brownie points to get excellent you an excellent offer is your indispensable ally. The clueful manager may or may not be good for one (1) anomalously phat raise thereafter. The chain of higher management needs to be clueful and interested enough to later notice consequential excellent results and issue sufficient replacement brownie points that clueful managers are encouraged to continue with this awful discriminatory behavior. Sadly the clue of a chain is the product of the clue of its links, so such environments are rare.
Inside most organizations there's a lifetime limit to what one manager can do for you. Take it for granted that HR wants only to eliminate the upper 20% of any salary range. Therefore to properly execute the salary ratchet algorithm you must switch to another organization for your next major raise. It's always made me scratch my head to see this flow of excellent people through code creation organizations, but I guess it's good for the industry as a whole and the individuals.
Oh yeah, one other thing. Going the contractor route really clarifies the 70hr thing. Usually only get straight time for overtime, but hey, 100% is better than 0%. And in reality, contractors have exactly (0.00) as much actual job security as employees. Death to HR, long live the free market!
A Java-only miseducation provides no tools for grasping how and why the templated nature of the C++ Standard Library enables good compilers to produce efficient code from abstract source representations.
Most of my O() thinking these days seems to come down to using the appropriate Standard Library containers and methods.
The rest comes down to using lots of hashes in perl...
What is giving this issue legs right now is the resistance of the Navy and Air Force (OMG! No more golf course warriors!) to the Army's emerging control of the UAV assets in its battlespace. It doesn't mean that what the Navy is saying is wrong, exactly, but they need to declare their agenda to provide a context for evaluating their statements.
There's a couple of critters I know about, the arctic tern and a California salamander, that are "ring species". They have ring-shaped geographic ranges. Each local population can and does breed with its neighbors, but diametrically opposed sub-populations are not interfertile. They hover on the very edge of becoming multiple species. In fact, if some external event broke the ring in two places, they would instantly become two species.
Then of course there's all the Endangered Species Act engendered legal but not biological species. But that's another tale for another time. Arizona, observatory, squirrel.
Correlations in a data set are "hmm, that's interesting" flags. They can suggest interesting hypotheses about causation. These hypotheses must then be tested on an independantly sourced data set. A lot of the time the causal hypothesis will pan out. Sometimes it won't. That can be a flag that something even more interesting, and deeper, is going on. Or that the original correlation was accidental. Um, duh? -- phunctor
Yes, the concept that having professional qualifications in a field disqualifies one from commenting on the field is odd to say the least. It's part of the systematic undermining of the very concept of "authority" that has brought our society so very far since my grade-school days. -- phunctor
As it happens I am 6'5" and built like an (out-of-condition) wrestler. Most cops, in ones, twos, and threes, would prefer not to grapple with me. During my 8 years studying ju jitsu I met and trained with many LEOs, and they shared with me that when they saw someone my size their favorite martial art instantly became ching-ching-pow, also known as glock-fu.
I made a policy decision that if I was ever in a situation where a cop might perceive me as a threat I would without delay and without any quick moves put my hands on my head and sit down. I know with what intensity they intend to go home at the end of their shift.
I for one am happy to hear that zap-fu is now more available.
OK fair enough. Let's invent a closed system; in essence a calorimeter big enough that you can live in it and don't cook yourself.. invent invent invent.. done! Now we can actually measure your energy interchanges with your environment.
Live in that calorimeter for a week, and you will indeed find that you'll be in caloric balance. If some change in your physiology lifestyle or circumstances alters your basal metabolism you'll be in caloric balance. If your kidney fat works overtime producing heat you'll be in caloric balance. If you sit in your mother's basement wanking to chubby sheep porn you'll be in caloric balance. If you run marathons and boink supermodels on your yacht you'll be in caloric balance. If your fat cells snatch glucose out of your bloodstream, leaving you constantly hungry while increasing your body fat.. you'll be in caloric balance! The closed system is in balance any which way. There is no argument on the table to the contrary.
However calorimeters are not the measuring instruments we are most interested in. We are interested in tape measures, scales, and the roving eyes of members of the appropriate lust group. And the tape measures and scales are negotiable. For these purposes living in a calorimeter is inconvenient. And worse than that, irrelevant. As we walk around within our closed system, we may be getting fatter or thinner. We may be maintaining an obese weight with less or more caloric input than another maintaining a non-obese weight. That all are in caloric balance is irrelevant.
The topic of obesity research is, or should be, "why does this homeostatic dissipative system (and let me say for those upset by the bigg wurdz that Taubes never used the phrase dissipative system, non-equilibrium thermodynamics is an interest of mine, it's cool stuff, check it out) - why does this one self-regulate at 50Kg and that one at 80Kg?
The answer of course is obvious. That one is worthless and weak, lazy, gluttonous, slothful. A big, fat, ugly loser! And as evidence supporting these judgements, the judges bring forth.. the First Law Of Thermodynamics! Game over, pwned! kthxbye!
The human impulse to put the boot in is given free rein with regard to obesity in our culture. I suppose somebody has to be Emmanuel Goldstein.
He makes the extraordinary claim that Official Nutrition has been getting it wrong for the last 40 years. However, he provides and discusses a solid body of relevant and eminently respectable (Lancet, JAMA, NEJM, etc..) citations to support his claim. Color me 95% convinced.
He notes that the application of the first law of thermodynamics (the slogan is "A Calorie is A Calorie") to a homeostatic dissipative system like the human body is beyond simplistic. It is simply wrong.
The core of his thesis is that a cellular-level metabolic disorder caused over time by consumption of concentrated and rapidly available carbohydrates, and the insulin spikes they provoke, is the cause not only of obesity but also of type II diabetes. Briefly, fat cells become too good at extracting glucose from the blood and storing it. This results in cellular-level semi-starvation in other body tissues, expressed at the organismic level by eating more and exercising less.
He depicts the high level of investment in the competing "gluttony & sloth" model of obesity which exists in our medical establishment and in our culture. Indeed, from his portrayal this viewpoint is very close to being an ideology rather than a theory, in that dissenters are cast into outer darkness rather than refuted.
He discusses the personalities and politics involved in the alleged disastrous wrong turn, and points up some interesting coincidences involving what research gets funded, and what research doesn't get funded, by for example sugar producers.
I'm intentionally being very brief. If you have a personal stake, read this book and form your own conclusions.
This involves effective emotional communication. Being tightly acculturated with the workforce helps a lot. Engineers only need to communicate factually. The highest level of language skills is not required. H1B competition drives down the price. QED.
--
phunctor
Meta to discussion: who is this "we" you speak of?
on
Is SETI Worth It?
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
I'm depressed that nobody is challenging the paradigm that "we" should decide whether SETI or anything else for that matter is "worthwhile". The mere effort presumes the existence of one true value system that trumps all others. Jihad, anybody?
How about Bob and Carol spend their money on SETI, Ted spends his on protein folding, and Alice spends hers on beer? Because it's their money and their choice.
"Should" expresses a moral judgement. When collectivists use it they are advocating, in the end, unlimited social violence against those who will not comply. Pol Pot wan't bugfuck crazy, he was just consistent.
Trainees are potentially heading into very dangerous, very consequential situations. Thousands of years of experience show that stressful training helps them survive these situations and achieve vital objectives. This involves an irreducible level of danger in training exercises.
It is proper to try to minimize the sum of training casualties, battle casualties, and mission-failure consequential casualties. It turns out that under this constraint the optimal number of training casualties is not zero. Sorry, it's a dangerous world.
Sigh. This is slashdot. Geeks are supposed to be well-informed. I learned about this little thing called "lambda/D" in high school.
Lets see what the beam angle might be for, oh 10cm microwaves focused by a 1Km aperture transmitting antenna. That would be 1e-4. And at 40000km that spot diameter on the ground would be, 4km. So for a 100Mw beam the energy density would be a blistering 8W/M^2. A full 1.2% increase over direct sunlight. Phe4r Me! BAH.
The ground-based rectenna is a fundamental part of the power transmission system. (handwave) Think of the combination of the powersat and the rectenna as a far-field-coupled transformer, if you like (/handwave). No multi-acre rectenna, no beam. No house full of popcorn, no tango torches. Not A Weapon.
The phase control system is the fundamental element in the forming, steering and control of the solar power satellite (SPS) microwave power beam. This system must in essence automatically adjust the phase at each of the transmitter's 101,552 power amplifiers to compensate for differences in transmission path lengths to the earth-based receiving antenna (rectenna). SPS phase control system requirements are discussed, taking into account system concepts, a reference system description, reference system performance, ground based phase control concepts, and ionosphere considerations. It is pointed out that the importance of determining the ionospheric effects cannot be overemphasized. The permissable power density limit through the ionosphere is a critical SPS sizing factor and the phase control system must be able to accommodate errors induced by a heated ionosphere.
Slashdot Mirror
I can't take your stupid antinomies any more, Russell! /BLAM/ /THUD/
--
Frege
Different statements apply to individuals and to populations. Sex (to avoid the difficult term gender) does not predict the average math aptitude of random samples of males and females. Their population means are close as can be. Sex does predict the number of male and females individuals in such a random sample likely to differ greatly from the population mean. Their population variances are quite different.
When considering a non-random sample of math high-achievers, it requires no phallocentric conspiracy to account for a preponderance of the subpopulation with a larger variance, only Baye's Theorem.
If you hold unswervingly to the gender-feminist axiom that males and females have identical distributions of everything except reproductive organs, it will be necessary to reject this argument. But you're going up against lots of good data. I find the durability of said axiom when confronted by inconvenient data hugely amusing. Intellectual honesty is clearly not an issue when the mission is rolling back the patriarchy.
--
phunctor
While flash-blined, you have been eaten by a mutant grue.
--
phunctor
Perhaps because it doesn't exist? If women like shoes, they must be subtly oppressed. Riiight. So, what else, beyond lack of evidence, would strengthen my belief in this construct? How many women have to claim their consciousness isn't "false" before gender feminists deign to hear their voices?
My point, such as it is, is methodological. Once you issue yourself a license to filter the evidence stream, as for example the false consciousness filter, you need never abandon your preconceived idea. Which is fine. Just don't claim it's evidence-based.
--
phunctor
--
phunctor
Oh yeah. Back in 1976 I needed a diff so I wrote one. In S/360 COBOL. Because it was the immovable coding standard. Simulated recursion, what a concept.
--phunctor
Strangely enough those big bucks are often less than what the State spends on providing an inferior educational product, forced association with don't-wanna-learners, pre-jail babysitting services for disinterested parents, and lots and lots of social engineering.
Not surprising the bundle costs more than just the decent education that people are willing to pay for. Not surprising that attempts to reform education that focus on learning rather than on the compulsory bundle are doomed to fail.
--
phunctor
A cult is a religion whose founder has not been dead long enough.
--
phunctor
If you needed to know about anything higher than Secret, if such a thing existed, somebody would have briefed you.
--
phunctor
Hey museumpeace - I make a decent living playing with missile guidance problems in C++, but have used Ada in the past. And I'm keenly interested in upgrading from "decent" to "nice". Let's have lunch! (It sounds like we may be contemporaries; we can tell get-off-my-lawn jokes...)
--
phunctor
s/Tube//
It's well documented that the range in end-to-end productivity within the set of employable codebeasts is a of the order of 500%. (For the sake of argument, assume that all /. readers are in this set.) Those who have this productivity edge want to personally realize some personal financial benefit from it. Clueful hiring managers are able to recognize these individuals, understand that their productivity can enhance their (the manager's) career, and will fight to hire them.
HR is your deadly enemy, and the hiring manager who burns corporate brownie points to get excellent you an excellent offer is your indispensable ally. The clueful manager may or may not be good for one (1) anomalously phat raise thereafter. The chain of higher management needs to be clueful and interested enough to later notice consequential excellent results and issue sufficient replacement brownie points that clueful managers are encouraged to continue with this awful discriminatory behavior. Sadly the clue of a chain is the product of the clue of its links, so such environments are rare.
Inside most organizations there's a lifetime limit to what one manager can do for you. Take it for granted that HR wants only to eliminate the upper 20% of any salary range. Therefore to properly execute the salary ratchet algorithm you must switch to another organization for your next major raise. It's always made me scratch my head to see this flow of excellent people through code creation organizations, but I guess it's good for the industry as a whole and the individuals.
Oh yeah, one other thing. Going the contractor route really clarifies the 70hr thing. Usually only get straight time for overtime, but hey, 100% is better than 0%. And in reality, contractors have exactly (0.00) as much actual job security as employees. Death to HR, long live the free market!
--phunctor
A Java-only miseducation provides no tools for grasping how and why the templated nature of the C++ Standard Library enables good compilers to produce efficient code from abstract source representations.
Most of my O() thinking these days seems to come down to using the appropriate Standard Library containers and methods.
The rest comes down to using lots of hashes in perl...
--
phunctor
What is giving this issue legs right now is the resistance of the Navy and Air Force (OMG! No more golf course warriors!) to the Army's emerging control of the UAV assets in its battlespace. It doesn't mean that what the Navy is saying is wrong, exactly, but they need to declare their agenda to provide a context for evaluating their statements.
--
phunctor
Bah! You're not even wrong!
--
phunctor
There's a couple of critters I know about, the arctic tern and a California salamander, that are "ring species". They have ring-shaped geographic ranges. Each local population can and does breed with its neighbors, but diametrically opposed sub-populations are not interfertile. They hover on the very edge of becoming multiple species. In fact, if some external event broke the ring in two places, they would instantly become two species.
Then of course there's all the Endangered Species Act engendered legal but not biological species. But that's another tale for another time. Arizona, observatory, squirrel.
--
phunctor
Correlations in a data set are "hmm, that's interesting" flags. They can suggest interesting hypotheses about causation. These hypotheses must then be tested on an independantly sourced data set. A lot of the time the causal hypothesis will pan out. Sometimes it won't. That can be a flag that something even more interesting, and deeper, is going on. Or that the original correlation was accidental. Um, duh?
--
phunctor
Yes, the concept that having professional qualifications in a field disqualifies one from commenting on the field is odd to say the least. It's part of the systematic undermining of the very concept of "authority" that has brought our society so very far since my grade-school days.
--
phunctor
As it happens I am 6'5" and built like an (out-of-condition) wrestler. Most cops, in ones, twos, and threes, would prefer not to grapple with me. During my 8 years studying ju jitsu I met and trained with many LEOs, and they shared with me that when they saw someone my size their favorite martial art instantly became ching-ching-pow, also known as glock-fu.
I made a policy decision that if I was ever in a situation where a cop might perceive me as a threat I would without delay and without any quick moves put my hands on my head and sit down. I know with what intensity they intend to go home at the end of their shift.
I for one am happy to hear that zap-fu is now more available.
--
phunctor
(this is me, not Taubes)
OK fair enough. Let's invent a closed system; in essence a calorimeter big enough that you can live in it and don't cook yourself.. invent invent invent.. done! Now we can actually measure your energy interchanges with your environment.
Live in that calorimeter for a week, and you will indeed find that you'll be in caloric balance. If some change in your physiology lifestyle or circumstances alters your basal metabolism you'll be in caloric balance. If your kidney fat works overtime producing heat you'll be in caloric balance. If you sit in your mother's basement wanking to chubby sheep porn you'll be in caloric balance. If you run marathons and boink supermodels on your yacht you'll be in caloric balance. If your fat cells snatch glucose out of your bloodstream, leaving you constantly hungry while increasing your body fat.. you'll be in caloric balance! The closed system is in balance any which way. There is no argument on the table to the contrary.
However calorimeters are not the measuring instruments we are most interested in. We are interested in tape measures, scales, and the roving eyes of members of the appropriate lust group. And the tape measures and scales are negotiable. For these purposes living in a calorimeter is inconvenient. And worse than that, irrelevant. As we walk around within our closed system, we may be getting fatter or thinner. We may be maintaining an obese weight with less or more caloric input than another maintaining a non-obese weight. That all are in caloric balance is irrelevant.
The topic of obesity research is, or should be, "why does this homeostatic dissipative system (and let me say for those upset by the bigg wurdz that Taubes never used the phrase dissipative system, non-equilibrium thermodynamics is an interest of mine, it's cool stuff, check it out) - why does this one self-regulate at 50Kg and that one at 80Kg?
The answer of course is obvious. That one is worthless and weak, lazy, gluttonous, slothful. A big, fat, ugly loser! And as evidence supporting these judgements, the judges bring forth.. the First Law Of Thermodynamics! Game over, pwned! kthxbye!
The human impulse to put the boot in is given free rein with regard to obesity in our culture. I suppose somebody has to be Emmanuel Goldstein.
--phunctor
He makes the extraordinary claim that Official Nutrition has been getting it wrong for the last 40 years. However, he provides and discusses a solid body of relevant and eminently respectable (Lancet, JAMA, NEJM, etc..) citations to support his claim. Color me 95% convinced.
He notes that the application of the first law of thermodynamics (the slogan is "A Calorie is A Calorie") to a homeostatic dissipative system like the human body is beyond simplistic. It is simply wrong.
The core of his thesis is that a cellular-level metabolic disorder caused over time by consumption of concentrated and rapidly available carbohydrates, and the insulin spikes they provoke, is the cause not only of obesity but also of type II diabetes. Briefly, fat cells become too good at extracting glucose from the blood and storing it. This results in cellular-level semi-starvation in other body tissues, expressed at the organismic level by eating more and exercising less.
He depicts the high level of investment in the competing "gluttony & sloth" model of obesity which exists in our medical establishment and in our culture. Indeed, from his portrayal this viewpoint is very close to being an ideology rather than a theory, in that dissenters are cast into outer darkness rather than refuted.
He discusses the personalities and politics involved in the alleged disastrous wrong turn, and points up some interesting coincidences involving what research gets funded, and what research doesn't get funded, by for example sugar producers.
I'm intentionally being very brief. If you have a personal stake, read this book and form your own conclusions.
--
phunctor
This involves effective emotional communication. Being tightly acculturated with the workforce helps a lot. Engineers only need to communicate factually. The highest level of language skills is not required. H1B competition drives down the price. QED.
--
phunctor
I'm depressed that nobody is challenging the paradigm that "we" should decide whether SETI or anything else for that matter is "worthwhile". The mere effort presumes the existence of one true value system that trumps all others. Jihad, anybody?
How about Bob and Carol spend their money on SETI, Ted spends his on protein folding, and Alice spends hers on beer? Because it's their money and their choice.
"Should" expresses a moral judgement. When collectivists use it they are advocating, in the end, unlimited social violence against those who will not comply. Pol Pot wan't bugfuck crazy, he was just consistent.
--phunctor
Trainees are potentially heading into very dangerous, very consequential situations. Thousands of years of experience show that stressful training helps them survive these situations and achieve vital objectives. This involves an irreducible level of danger in training exercises.
It is proper to try to minimize the sum of training casualties, battle casualties, and mission-failure consequential casualties. It turns out that under this constraint the optimal number of training casualties is not zero. Sorry, it's a dangerous world.
--phunctor
Sigh. This is slashdot. Geeks are supposed to be well-informed. I learned about this little thing called "lambda/D" in high school.
Lets see what the beam angle might be for, oh 10cm microwaves focused by a 1Km aperture transmitting antenna. That would be 1e-4. And at 40000km that spot diameter on the ground would be, 4km. So for a 100Mw beam the energy density would be a blistering 8W/M^2. A full 1.2% increase over direct sunlight. Phe4r Me! BAH.
The ground-based rectenna is a fundamental part of the power transmission system. (handwave) Think of the combination of the powersat and the rectenna as a far-field-coupled transformer, if you like (/handwave). No multi-acre rectenna, no beam. No house full of popcorn, no tango torches. Not A Weapon.
(from http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1980ntc.....3...48S)
The phase control system is the fundamental element in the forming, steering and control of the solar power satellite (SPS) microwave power beam. This system must in essence automatically adjust the phase at each of the transmitter's 101,552 power amplifiers to compensate for differences in transmission path lengths to the earth-based receiving antenna (rectenna). SPS phase control system requirements are discussed, taking into account system concepts, a reference system description, reference system performance, ground based phase control concepts, and ionosphere considerations. It is pointed out that the importance of determining the ionospheric effects cannot be overemphasized. The permissable power density limit through the ionosphere is a critical SPS sizing factor and the phase control system must be able to accommodate errors induced by a heated ionosphere.
--
phunctor