... Remember that humans are slightly larger than rabbits, so a rabbit is going to suffer a lot more than we would from the same amount of radioactive material....
On the other hand they only live a few years in the wild - so the long-term effects of exposure aren't going to show up. And when dealing with people, a 0.1% chance of cancer due to exposure is considered an enormous hazard, while you would need perhaps 25,000 rabbits to have a large enough population (considering longevity) to show one additional case at that same exposure level.
Whale racing! That sounds so cool! I'd definitely pay to see that!
Would the various whale classes be defined by size or species? Do larger whales have an advantage (in the long distance categories I would think so)? I can imagine a whale-racer importing a larger southern hemisphere blue whale as a ringer to compete with their northern hemisphere cousins.
So this isn't a long term problem, provided that whatever circumstances resulted in the rabbits getting contaminated in the first place have been rectified.
The rabbits are contaminated with Cs-137 and Sr-90, both of which have ~30 year half-life. So their droppings are going to remain "hot" for a long, long time. Long-lived contamination being move off of the reservation is definitely a long term problem, as long is it exceed safety limits.
Cesium is more dangerous as a toxic heavy metal than as a radioactive source and the level of Cessium was insufficient to kill the rabbit via toxicity, because it's still only as toxic as common salt. When Cesium decays it emits Beta radiation which doesn't penetrate heavy clothing and barely penetrates the skin. The level of Radioactivity was insufficient to kill the rabbit but they still go to all that trouble to track it down. All the hallmarks of Nuclear Paranoia.
Any sample of Cesium-137 also emits strong gamma rays - 662 keV - due to its decay product Ba-137m with a half life of 2.55 minutes. So yes, handling anything containing Cs-137 is irradiating your internal organs at the same time. It has been used for radiography in medicine for decades. Check out the Goiania Brazil disaster where hundreds were significantly exposed to an old Cs-137 source (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident). I have no idea where you are getting this "cesium is more dangerous as a toxic heavy metal" nonsense.
The problem is that the rabbits on the reservation are distributing lumps of long-lived radiation (Cs-137 and Sr-90 are both commonly found) that considerably exceed safety standards (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/15/science/earth/15rabbit.html ). This means they have a legal responsibility to control this exposure. Note also that low-level exposure to radiation causes a cumulative increase in cancer risk, so the fact that no one will show symptoms from handling radioactive rabbit poop does not mean it is "safe".
You do realize that Google uses Java extensively ?
Indeed.
And it raises the question about whether Google is going to safeguard its own software investments and create a Java development team for open source Java large enough to provide the core development expertise and resources formerly provided by Sun.
Self interest suggests that they should be taking the lead role in Java development simple t support their own business.
I have practiced, and been an advocate of the "spiral model" since its first publication by the very famous Barry Boehm in 1986. See:
Boehm B, "A Spiral Model of Software Development and Enhancement", ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes", "ACM", 11(4):14-24, August 1986.
He advocated a model of short iterative cycles of refinement - the very essence of Agile (with less of the dogma). So we should really proclaim: almost 25 years of Agile (but ten years after the re-branding).
A classic misunderstanding of statistics. Lets see how this works.
Lets assume we have 100 future martyrs loaded up and ready to blow.
Send 500 convoys. Lets say 90 get blown up by the 100 martyrs.
Ivory tower metrics MBA says, lets cut back so we only send 250 convoys. Since a bit under a fifth of convoys are blown up, that means by definition only about 40 convoys will get blown up.
Send 250 convoys. 90 get blown up by the 100 martyrs. Maybe due to doubled security, VERY optimistically twice as many fail, so best case only 80 convoys get blown up by the 100 martyrs.
Ivory tower metrics MBA gets confused that losses are 100% higher than expected.
And this is an example of an arm chair "analyst" being overly impressed with a model he/she cooked up out of their under-stocked larder of domain knowledge.
Just maybe the U.S. Army keeps detailed statistics on the likelihood of casualties and material losses under field conditions, and knows for certain whether reducing convoy sizes actually drives up loss rates, and has solid evidence to back up expectations that this is a big win.
And just maybe the "all martyr combat model" is utter hokum.
Problem is... these distortion generators already exist in abundance. People have no trouble gravitating to as many of their preferred degree of polarity as they have time to surf. The novelty here is that it is adjustable so one site serves all (in theory).
This has a certain subversively educational appeal. Making the issue of bias in providing (or absorbing) information explicit forces people to confront and think about the issue.
Unfortunately only people who are curious, undogmatic and reflective are likely to benefit from experimenting with it so certain segments of the political spectrum may be immune to its education effect.
And it is different from other forms of gambling, how exactly?
There is curious tendency to pick exclusively on lotteries.
I know a good number of very smart people who are excellent in math, who regularly go to casinos, and almost always leave with less money than they started (though people rarely talk about their losing streaks). Why do they do this? Because it is a form of entertainment, and the money they lose is its price.
When low income people gamble it because they are bad at math. When better off, highly educated people do it its because... of the THRILL of course!
What is the expected return on a Dodger's season pass (which you actually use, not scalp)? Zero. But you got entertained. Gambling is no different, whether rich smart people drop some large ones on roulette, or poor (assumed to be stupid) people buy lottery tickets.
You might be onto something there. Maybe the progressive agenda is to destroy cities' economies and cause all businesses to move elsewhere, with high taxes...
No, this is the right wing agenda.
Remember - the right wanted GM go under and take down all of its supporting suppliers and ravage what's left of Detroit, and the right wants to destroy infrastructure by chronic underfunding (ya know, taxes are actually needed for stuff...), and wipe out the blue collar middle class through off-shoring (but don't worry white collar workers are now going away also, so you won't be left out of the fun).
The demonstrable fact is - the U.S. economy in general, and the middle class in particular, does consistently better under Democratic than Republican administrations since the 1920s.
But please, carry on with your ideological, fact-free blather. (I know you will.)
I guess it depends on your definition of liberal. Most self-proclaimed liberals I know are not very open to other views. The open-mindedness they are interested in is MY open mindedness to THEIR ideas.
...
I can't speak to your personal experiences, but which party is it in which it has become common to denounce long-standing members, whose policy positions were long accepted by the party, as "__ In Name Only"?
Don't tell us people with rich parents don't get hand-outs.
It's got nothing to do with ideology. Heck just look at the Kennedy's, or some of the other liberal New England political families.
The difference though is that the Kennedys are not hypocrites like the Bushs. The Kennedys readily acknowledge that their personal success is largely due to great wealth and powerful connections, in addition to any personal merits, and seek to assist those who are born without the silver spoon.
The privileged right pretend it is only their personal merits that cause them to succeed, and that it is a terrible thing to try helping those lacking a fortune. As Ann Richards said (about GHW Bush) "He was born on third base and thinks he hit a triple." This is infinitely more true of his thoroughly incompetent offspring GW Bush.
I remember back in the late '90s when Ira Katznelson, an eminent political scientist at Columbia, came to deliver a guest lecture to an economic philosophy class I was taking. It was a great lecture, made more so by the fact that the class was only about ten or twelve students and we got got ask all kinds of questions and got a lot of great, provocative answers. Anyhow, Prof. Katznelson described a lunch he had with Irving Kristol back either during the first Bush administration. The talk turned to William Kristol, then Dan Quayle's chief of staff, and how he got his start in politics. Irving recalled how he talked to his friend Harvey Mansfield at Harvard, who secured William a place there as both an undergrad and graduate student; how he talked to Pat Moynihan, then Nixon's domestic policy adviser, and got William an internship at The White House; how he talked to friends at the RNC and secured a job for William after he got his Harvard Ph.D.; and how he arranged with still more friends for William to teach at UPenn and the Kennedy School of Government. With that, Prof. Katznelson recalled, he then asked Irving what he thought of affirmative action. "I oppose it", Irving replied. "It subverts meritocracy."
And all the Patriot Act sunsets removed by who? OH! Right! Obama.
George Bush was no more conservative than Obama is. Stop thinking in terms of Donkeys and Elephants. Think more government and less government.
Expand your political spectrum a bit to actually include liberty. Nothing that George Bush did, with the exception of striking back at the people that attacked us on 9/11, had anything to do with liberty and less government.
You are right to identify Obama as a conservative, he is moderate conservative, well to the right in many areas compared with, say, Richard Nixon. His health care reform plan is very similar to Mitt Romney's for example, and much more conservative than Nixon's plan (not enacted due to the collapse of his presidency). In the Eisenhower era he might well have been a Republican. (Which puts paid to the utterly-disconnected-from-reality ranting about him being a "socialist" much less a Marxist).
Bush was/is however far more right wing than Obama. Being right-wing is not the same thing as being conservative. The right wing radicalism of the "Tea Party" (seeking to remove constitutional amendments, or else suspend their effect?) is not conservative at all.
The gene in question does not "make someone liberal". It is a gene that promotes novelty seeking, and leads to many wide ranging friendships in adolescence, resulting in exposure to many points of view, and this predisposes one to be liberal as an adult (this is all in the TA).
Without the 'wide ranging friendships in adolescence' there is no effect. It is the life experience of being open to other points of view, the additional knowledge gained, that makes you more likely to be liberal.
For the conservatives here crowing nonsense about "curing liberalism", perhaps the fact that absence of this gene promotes the opposite - fewer friends and ignorance of other points of view - should make one be less enthused with this finding. Unless, of course "closed mindedness" is considered a conservative virtue.
The interesting thing, to me at least is that they actually do seem to be researching things like this but it never makes it to market. I've heard different reasons, including infighting between departments, but the end result almost always seems to be that they had something really need going and then it disappears with an accompanying statement of "oh that was just for internal research".
One wonders how big a hidden penalty they are paying now in driving away talent. An ambitious geek with great ideas, but seeking a corporate sponsor (most creative geeks are not entrepreneurs ), would not go to Microsoft since that would most likely lead to burial of all of his/her efforts.
The Supreme Court of the United States has been singularly inept in anticipating the consequences of its decisions for quite a long time. Consider this statement by Judge Stevens in the Court opinion in Clinton v. Jones, 520 U.S. 681 (1997):
"...it appears to us highly unlikely to occupy any substantial amount of petitioner's [Clinton's] time."
This case of course led ultimately to Clinton being impeached in the House, only the second such event in U.S. history, and disrupting national governance for the better part of a year.
Having some sense of how the outside world works is very important in properly deciding a case. Unlike some posters here who seem to believe that court decisions are the mechanical application of immutable principles, a major part of any court decision is balancing competing considerations against each other and unless you understand the true costs the appropriate balance cannot be achieved.
Alternatively - we may suspect that at least some of the justices do have a good idea of how things are outside the marble walls, and approve of the mischief that results, but choose to pretend ignorance to escape responsibility.
... Yet, syntactic matching appears to be exactly what this program is doing.
What constitutes "plagiarism" in a scientific paper is very different from plagiarism in journalism or English literature. In scientific writing, it is expected that authors will use the same flat, impersonal style and repeat definitions and the results of others to save the reader the time of having to look them up. So, simple pattern matching between science papers will result in a great many false positives. In science (and math) writing what matters is the new result which the author is claiming. It seems to me that it would be nearly impossible for a computer program to detect the distinction.
Hours of speculation and typing can save one minute of reading TFA. From the article:
"Unlike other plagiarism detectors, it does not use phrases or similar words to check for copying. Helio Text actually looks at the entirety of the text."
So no, it does not. It uses instead some sort of similarity metric computed from analyzing the entire text. This is possibly similar to the text distance metrics used in vector space search engine models (see: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector_space_model ). They will be publishing a paper online in PLoS ONE.
Okay so they give widely varying estimates of the crater's size - assuming the centre value of 120 Km a +/- 60 Km ia one hell of a margin of error. I imagine that the energy released from such an impact is orders of magnitude greater than any nuke we could ever throw at each other.
The article metions the release of CO2, but i thought that by definition asteroids were just lumps of rock. So where does the CO2 come from after the impact?
It is about 100,000 megatons, at its peak the world nuclear arsenal had around 20,000 megatons.
CO2 is released if the asteroid impacts a carbonate rock bed - it then releases the CO2 just like a giant cement kiln (which is a major source of human CO2 release BTW - about 5% of the global release).
On TV you see lots of computer sims but none look realistic to me. Would there be a light covering the sky so bright you couldn't see it or would it traverse the atmosphere so quick it wouldn't have time to heat up and you really would see this huge space rock impact. And what would the explosion look like? WOuld it be a fireball initially or would you simply see billions of tons or rock being launched into orbit?
Taking their upper size estimate (12 km) and average impact parameters (17 km/sec, 45 degree angle of entry) this would light up brilliantly at around 120 km altitude and get brighter all the way down its 10 second transit to the Earth. However you would probably not want to be anywhere you could actually see its entry. At a distance of 1250 km you would just see it light up on entry on the horizon, and thereafter the glow would be indirect until impact. THEN - part of the fireball which appear ~5 times larger and brighter than the Sun would rise above the horizon and irradiate you for about half an hour. This would be quite uncomfortable - a first degree thermal burn would develop after several seconds, but you get roasted for a hundred times longer than that, or until the fine ejecta thrown into space comes down and starts blocking your light after 10 minutes of so. And an hour after the impact a 12 psi blast wave with tornado-speed 335 mph winds would hit. This would likely be fatal.
in Nevada you don't have to identify yourself with a license or anything. You can use, as in most states (dubiously), a utility bill with your name and address, a bank statement, etc.
So... there's really only very weak security around verifying of voter identities.
Most (all?) places require the voter to sign a log of some sort - making auditing the election possible to prove fraud.
"Never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence..."
The problem is likely some poor interface design....
Most likely this is the reason.... but it does not matter why the voting system is corrupted - it is just as corrupted. Any election with these machines (until the problem has been corrected, and confirmed by auditing them all) is invalid. Of course even the Supreme Court is willing to certify invalid elections. If the election system corruption were only restricted to the voting machines...
Wait, taxes are usually assessed on business profit, not volume. How is tax per gross product dollar meaningful? Could just mean there are a lot of low/negative/non profit businesses.
This is a nonsensical response - there are many types of business taxes, some are on profit and some aren't (property tax anyone)?
Try reading the referenced report, you might learn something. The amount of business tax collected as a proportion of the total California economy is the most direct measure of the aggregate tax burden you can devise. A high proportion is a high tax burden, a low proportion is a low tax burden.
Possibly you think the eighth largest economy in the world, and 13% of the entire U.S. economy is based on non-profits and money losing businesses?
Funny thing - not one poster here attempting to promote the "high tax" story, or to attack the evidence showing it to be a lie, has offered any evidence whatsoever. Only FUD.
Slashdot Mirror
Evolution really is the ultimate hacker; constantly expanding the usefulness of very simple resources.
"Mother Nature: Überhacker".
That would make a cool tee-shirt!
... Remember that humans are slightly larger than rabbits, so a rabbit is going to suffer a lot more than we would from the same amount of radioactive material....
On the other hand they only live a few years in the wild - so the long-term effects of exposure aren't going to show up. And when dealing with people, a 0.1% chance of cancer due to exposure is considered an enormous hazard, while you would need perhaps 25,000 rabbits to have a large enough population (considering longevity) to show one additional case at that same exposure level.
Wouldn't that be like racing whales?
Whale racing! That sounds so cool! I'd definitely pay to see that!
Would the various whale classes be defined by size or species? Do larger whales have an advantage (in the long distance categories I would think so)? I can imagine a whale-racer importing a larger southern hemisphere blue whale as a ringer to compete with their northern hemisphere cousins.
So this isn't a long term problem, provided that whatever circumstances resulted in the rabbits getting contaminated in the first place have been rectified.
The rabbits are contaminated with Cs-137 and Sr-90, both of which have ~30 year half-life. So their droppings are going to remain "hot" for a long, long time. Long-lived contamination being move off of the reservation is definitely a long term problem, as long is it exceed safety limits.
Cesium is more dangerous as a toxic heavy metal than as a radioactive source and the level of Cessium was insufficient to kill the rabbit via toxicity, because it's still only as toxic as common salt. When Cesium decays it emits Beta radiation which doesn't penetrate heavy clothing and barely penetrates the skin. The level of Radioactivity was insufficient to kill the rabbit but they still go to all that trouble to track it down. All the hallmarks of Nuclear Paranoia.
Any sample of Cesium-137 also emits strong gamma rays - 662 keV - due to its decay product Ba-137m with a half life of 2.55 minutes. So yes, handling anything containing Cs-137 is irradiating your internal organs at the same time. It has been used for radiography in medicine for decades. Check out the Goiania Brazil disaster where hundreds were significantly exposed to an old Cs-137 source (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident). I have no idea where you are getting this "cesium is more dangerous as a toxic heavy metal" nonsense.
The problem is that the rabbits on the reservation are distributing lumps of long-lived radiation (Cs-137 and Sr-90 are both commonly found) that considerably exceed safety standards (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/15/science/earth/15rabbit.html ). This means they have a legal responsibility to control this exposure. Note also that low-level exposure to radiation causes a cumulative increase in cancer risk, so the fact that no one will show symptoms from handling radioactive rabbit poop does not mean it is "safe".
You do realize that Google uses Java extensively ?
Indeed.
And it raises the question about whether Google is going to safeguard its own software investments and create a Java development team for open source Java large enough to provide the core development expertise and resources formerly provided by Sun.
Self interest suggests that they should be taking the lead role in Java development simple t support their own business.
I have practiced, and been an advocate of the "spiral model" since its first publication by the very famous Barry Boehm in 1986. See: Boehm B, "A Spiral Model of Software Development and Enhancement", ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes", "ACM", 11(4):14-24, August 1986.
He advocated a model of short iterative cycles of refinement - the very essence of Agile (with less of the dogma). So we should really proclaim: almost 25 years of Agile (but ten years after the re-branding).
A classic misunderstanding of statistics. Lets see how this works.
Lets assume we have 100 future martyrs loaded up and ready to blow. Send 500 convoys. Lets say 90 get blown up by the 100 martyrs.
Ivory tower metrics MBA says, lets cut back so we only send 250 convoys. Since a bit under a fifth of convoys are blown up, that means by definition only about 40 convoys will get blown up.
Send 250 convoys. 90 get blown up by the 100 martyrs. Maybe due to doubled security, VERY optimistically twice as many fail, so best case only 80 convoys get blown up by the 100 martyrs.
Ivory tower metrics MBA gets confused that losses are 100% higher than expected.
And this is an example of an arm chair "analyst" being overly impressed with a model he/she cooked up out of their under-stocked larder of domain knowledge.
Just maybe the U.S. Army keeps detailed statistics on the likelihood of casualties and material losses under field conditions, and knows for certain whether reducing convoy sizes actually drives up loss rates, and has solid evidence to back up expectations that this is a big win.
And just maybe the "all martyr combat model" is utter hokum.
...great, just what people need.
Problem is... these distortion generators already exist in abundance. People have no trouble gravitating to as many of their preferred degree of polarity as they have time to surf. The novelty here is that it is adjustable so one site serves all (in theory).
This has a certain subversively educational appeal. Making the issue of bias in providing (or absorbing) information explicit forces people to confront and think about the issue.
Unfortunately only people who are curious, undogmatic and reflective are likely to benefit from experimenting with it so certain segments of the political spectrum may be immune to its education effect.
"Lottery is a tax on people who are bad at math."
And it is different from other forms of gambling, how exactly?
There is curious tendency to pick exclusively on lotteries.
I know a good number of very smart people who are excellent in math, who regularly go to casinos, and almost always leave with less money than they started (though people rarely talk about their losing streaks). Why do they do this? Because it is a form of entertainment, and the money they lose is its price.
When low income people gamble it because they are bad at math. When better off, highly educated people do it its because... of the THRILL of course!
What is the expected return on a Dodger's season pass (which you actually use, not scalp)? Zero. But you got entertained. Gambling is no different, whether rich smart people drop some large ones on roulette, or poor (assumed to be stupid) people buy lottery tickets.
You might be onto something there. Maybe the progressive agenda is to destroy cities' economies and cause all businesses to move elsewhere, with high taxes ...
No, this is the right wing agenda.
Remember - the right wanted GM go under and take down all of its supporting suppliers and ravage what's left of Detroit, and the right wants to destroy infrastructure by chronic underfunding (ya know, taxes are actually needed for stuff...), and wipe out the blue collar middle class through off-shoring (but don't worry white collar workers are now going away also, so you won't be left out of the fun).
The demonstrable fact is - the U.S. economy in general, and the middle class in particular, does consistently better under Democratic than Republican administrations since the 1920s.
But please, carry on with your ideological, fact-free blather. (I know you will.)
As far as ROI goes, I think a better investment might be teachers, books, and paper.
Just sayin'
Yup. Currently the U.S. ranks 33rd in educational achievement:
http://www.geographic.org/country_ranks/educational_score_performance_country_ranks_2009_oecd.html
I suspect it is not because the 32 nations above the U.S. have better chairs.
I guess it depends on your definition of liberal. Most self-proclaimed liberals I know are not very open to other views. The open-mindedness they are interested in is MY open mindedness to THEIR ideas.
...
I can't speak to your personal experiences, but which party is it in which it has become common to denounce long-standing members, whose policy positions were long accepted by the party, as "__ In Name Only"?
Here, I fixed it for you.
Don't tell us people with rich parents don't get hand-outs.
It's got nothing to do with ideology. Heck just look at the Kennedy's, or some of the other liberal New England political families.
The difference though is that the Kennedys are not hypocrites like the Bushs. The Kennedys readily acknowledge that their personal success is largely due to great wealth and powerful connections, in addition to any personal merits, and seek to assist those who are born without the silver spoon.
The privileged right pretend it is only their personal merits that cause them to succeed, and that it is a terrible thing to try helping those lacking a fortune. As Ann Richards said (about GHW Bush) "He was born on third base and thinks he hit a triple." This is infinitely more true of his thoroughly incompetent offspring GW Bush.
.
And then there is this absolutely priceless anecdote about Billy Kristol, the scion of the founder of The Weekly Standard: http://thegspot.typepad.com/blog/2008/10/most-awesome-wi.html .
And all the Patriot Act sunsets removed by who? OH! Right! Obama.
George Bush was no more conservative than Obama is. Stop thinking in terms of Donkeys and Elephants. Think more government and less government.
Expand your political spectrum a bit to actually include liberty. Nothing that George Bush did, with the exception of striking back at the people that attacked us on 9/11, had anything to do with liberty and less government.
You are right to identify Obama as a conservative, he is moderate conservative, well to the right in many areas compared with, say, Richard Nixon. His health care reform plan is very similar to Mitt Romney's for example, and much more conservative than Nixon's plan (not enacted due to the collapse of his presidency). In the Eisenhower era he might well have been a Republican. (Which puts paid to the utterly-disconnected-from-reality ranting about him being a "socialist" much less a Marxist).
Bush was/is however far more right wing than Obama. Being right-wing is not the same thing as being conservative. The right wing radicalism of the "Tea Party" (seeking to remove constitutional amendments, or else suspend their effect?) is not conservative at all.
The gene in question does not "make someone liberal". It is a gene that promotes novelty seeking, and leads to many wide ranging friendships in adolescence, resulting in exposure to many points of view, and this predisposes one to be liberal as an adult (this is all in the TA).
Without the 'wide ranging friendships in adolescence' there is no effect. It is the life experience of being open to other points of view, the additional knowledge gained, that makes you more likely to be liberal.
For the conservatives here crowing nonsense about "curing liberalism", perhaps the fact that absence of this gene promotes the opposite - fewer friends and ignorance of other points of view - should make one be less enthused with this finding. Unless, of course "closed mindedness" is considered a conservative virtue.
The interesting thing, to me at least is that they actually do seem to be researching things like this but it never makes it to market. I've heard different reasons, including infighting between departments, but the end result almost always seems to be that they had something really need going and then it disappears with an accompanying statement of "oh that was just for internal research".
One wonders how big a hidden penalty they are paying now in driving away talent. An ambitious geek with great ideas, but seeking a corporate sponsor (most creative geeks are not entrepreneurs ), would not go to Microsoft since that would most likely lead to burial of all of his/her efforts.
The Supreme Court of the United States has been singularly inept in anticipating the consequences of its decisions for quite a long time. Consider this statement by Judge Stevens in the Court opinion in Clinton v. Jones, 520 U.S. 681 (1997):
"...it appears to us highly unlikely to occupy any substantial amount of petitioner's [Clinton's] time."
This case of course led ultimately to Clinton being impeached in the House, only the second such event in U.S. history, and disrupting national governance for the better part of a year.
Having some sense of how the outside world works is very important in properly deciding a case. Unlike some posters here who seem to believe that court decisions are the mechanical application of immutable principles, a major part of any court decision is balancing competing considerations against each other and unless you understand the true costs the appropriate balance cannot be achieved.
Alternatively - we may suspect that at least some of the justices do have a good idea of how things are outside the marble walls, and approve of the mischief that results, but choose to pretend ignorance to escape responsibility.
... Yet, syntactic matching appears to be exactly what this program is doing.
What constitutes "plagiarism" in a scientific paper is very different from plagiarism in journalism or English literature. In scientific writing, it is expected that authors will use the same flat, impersonal style and repeat definitions and the results of others to save the reader the time of having to look them up. So, simple pattern matching between science papers will result in a great many false positives. In science (and math) writing what matters is the new result which the author is claiming. It seems to me that it would be nearly impossible for a computer program to detect the distinction.
Hours of speculation and typing can save one minute of reading TFA. From the article:
"Unlike other plagiarism detectors, it does not use phrases or similar words to check for copying. Helio Text actually looks at the entirety of the text."
So no, it does not. It uses instead some sort of similarity metric computed from analyzing the entire text. This is possibly similar to the text distance metrics used in vector space search engine models (see: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector_space_model ). They will be publishing a paper online in PLoS ONE.
Okay so they give widely varying estimates of the crater's size - assuming the centre value of 120 Km a +/- 60 Km ia one hell of a margin of error. I imagine that the energy released from such an impact is orders of magnitude greater than any nuke we could ever throw at each other. The article metions the release of CO2, but i thought that by definition asteroids were just lumps of rock. So where does the CO2 come from after the impact?
It is about 100,000 megatons, at its peak the world nuclear arsenal had around 20,000 megatons.
CO2 is released if the asteroid impacts a carbonate rock bed - it then releases the CO2 just like a giant cement kiln (which is a major source of human CO2 release BTW - about 5% of the global release).
On TV you see lots of computer sims but none look realistic to me. Would there be a light covering the sky so bright you couldn't see it or would it traverse the atmosphere so quick it wouldn't have time to heat up and you really would see this huge space rock impact. And what would the explosion look like? WOuld it be a fireball initially or would you simply see billions of tons or rock being launched into orbit?
A very useful source of information is the Asteroid Impact Effects on-line program: http://impact.ese.ic.ac.uk/ImpactEffects/
Taking their upper size estimate (12 km) and average impact parameters (17 km/sec, 45 degree angle of entry) this would light up brilliantly at around 120 km altitude and get brighter all the way down its 10 second transit to the Earth. However you would probably not want to be anywhere you could actually see its entry. At a distance of 1250 km you would just see it light up on entry on the horizon, and thereafter the glow would be indirect until impact. THEN - part of the fireball which appear ~5 times larger and brighter than the Sun would rise above the horizon and irradiate you for about half an hour. This would be quite uncomfortable - a first degree thermal burn would develop after several seconds, but you get roasted for a hundred times longer than that, or until the fine ejecta thrown into space comes down and starts blocking your light after 10 minutes of so. And an hour after the impact a 12 psi blast wave with tornado-speed 335 mph winds would hit. This would likely be fatal.
in Nevada you don't have to identify yourself with a license or anything. You can use, as in most states (dubiously), a utility bill with your name and address, a bank statement, etc. So... there's really only very weak security around verifying of voter identities.
Most (all?) places require the voter to sign a log of some sort - making auditing the election possible to prove fraud.
"Never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence..."
The problem is likely some poor interface design....
Most likely this is the reason .... but it does not matter why the voting system is corrupted - it is just as corrupted. Any election with these machines (until the problem has been corrected, and confirmed by auditing them all) is invalid. Of course even the Supreme Court is willing to certify invalid elections. If the election system corruption were only restricted to the voting machines...
Wait, taxes are usually assessed on business profit, not volume. How is tax per gross product dollar meaningful? Could just mean there are a lot of low/negative/non profit businesses.
This is a nonsensical response - there are many types of business taxes, some are on profit and some aren't (property tax anyone)?
Try reading the referenced report, you might learn something. The amount of business tax collected as a proportion of the total California economy is the most direct measure of the aggregate tax burden you can devise. A high proportion is a high tax burden, a low proportion is a low tax burden.
Possibly you think the eighth largest economy in the world, and 13% of the entire U.S. economy is based on non-profits and money losing businesses?
Funny thing - not one poster here attempting to promote the "high tax" story, or to attack the evidence showing it to be a lie, has offered any evidence whatsoever. Only FUD.