zipdog

As a side note, it was only a few years before this (in 1949) that Robert Busa approached IBM's Tom Watson with the idea of using a computer to make a concordance (of the works of Thomas Aquinas). Tom apparently said it was impossible (IBM was a number-crunching business, and parsing huge volumes of text was an entirely new field). Luckily the company's motto at the time was: “What's difficult we can do straight away, the impossible takes a little longer”

The project is noted by many as the beginning of a computational approach to literature.

The 45 minutes aspect is misleading. They haven't been using the room to test that, its just that no-one has spent longer than that so far.

Advice like this (which itself is good) makes me wonder how much higher education is missing. If a 4.0 is possible with 1.0 hours of work, then surely the expectations of the students are far too low. Its great that its possible for a focused student to achieve a 4.0 with so little work, but doesn't that just mean that all the students should be achieving so much more?

Perhaps there should be a compulsory 101 course that just teaches studying skills (some places may do this already). It seems like that would boost the overall gain from the education experience.

Yes, they should be testing software-based learning against other forms of private (self-directed) learning, as well as (face-to-face) instruction.

Remote-instructor learning through software differs markedly from the same through books in a variety of ways. ie the software can provide more compelling extrinsic motivations, but can also provide increased distractions (both if used on a computer with internet access, and through the affordance of screen-based tools).

So its good not to treat this as an either or problem (does software work as well as face-to-face) because there's a number of other considerations (is the face-to-face personal or lecture hall, is the software highly interactive with immediate feedback, etc

If I recall Dune 2 has no connection to the slightly earlier Dune other than both were produced by studios owned by the same parent, and neither realized that the other team was working on the license. The Dune team finished first, and to 'simplify' things, they just named the RTS version of the game Dune 2.

I think the appeal of the service is the convenience. If the message was important enough to warrant no third-party trust, you'd just go the extra hassle of PGP keys from both parties, etc.

The target seems to be people who were previously just emailing their confidential info. And though trust is an issue, people happily trust anonymous emailers, commercial encryption providers (where source is not available), etc.

I think its aimed at medium priority info where convenience of both parties is a factor. It seems the point is to send information that, although it could still be compromised, you will know if that happens because your recipient won't be able to access the message. So you have peace of mind that there was no silent observation of the info en route. I think if you were trying to send information that you didn't want to be compromised at all, you'd eschew the convenience of this and use proper encryption on the message (both parties PGP keys, etc).

Also, from what I understand, the system requires total trust in the provider's servers to do their job. That is no different than trusting that an anonymous email provider is doing their job (not storing logs, etc) and there's a proven market for that (I think).

The Mars missions suggest we're close to having the tech to get robots onto asteroids, some of which might have a fuel source that can sustain an unmanned operation that launches minerals along trajectories back toward .. the moon perhaps. It seems infeasible to ferry the minerals back and forth, although the value of the minerals might be high enough to justify it.

I wonder what the timeframe is for starting something? Space X has gone from start to regular orbital missions in 10 years and $800 million. Would it be so far-fetched to think of a 20 year timeframe for asteroid mining?

The poll numbers are pretty meaningless without some further info or breakdowns. How many of these are Tesco/Walmart employees? Or at companies with card swipe entrances? I'm not saying someone couldn't use a password in that scenario beneficially, but it changes the dynamic compared to a VPN password for someone with the authority to approve large transactions.

I'd mostly guess that no-one is offering to sell a (to them) meaningful business password on the cheap, but perhaps they underestimate what could be done with it. Or perhaps they see their IT or building infrastructure as sufficient to catch unauthorized people standing at the tills, or at desks (and they may be underestimating again how straightforward it can be)

The beer game is also mentioned in Peter Senge's The Fifth Disciple, where he suggests it originated from MIT in the 1960s. I think he had one less link in the chain (3 players not 4) but still the effect was the same.

btw, His book is a good intro to the way small changes effect integrated systems, particularly in business.

Acceptance by the art community is a key factor, possibly the most important. Other factors include artistic intention, aesthetic qualities, and being considered based on what is already considered art.

The author's key argument is that extractive institutions lead to state failure. Like most theories of state failure, there's some good examples but enough weak or counter examples to discredit it as 'the' answer. At best, I'd argue that extractive institutions are a block to success: countries with them have one fewer barrier to overcome.

I recently researched the thorny issue of what consititutes art, and the leading idea in that field is a cluster theory: a set of ten ideas which commonly associated with things accepted as art. Some objects don't have all ten, but together they provide a powerful guide. My point in mentioning this is that state failure seems to follow the same pattern. Geography (ie Jared Diamond's theory) is a factor in state success and failure. Culture is another factor. Economic system and the nature of institutions (extractive or inclusive) are two more factors. (And there's bound to be a few more).

A state can succeed with only a couple of these. Lacking them all is a sure sign of failure. Having them all likely comes as close to guaranteeing success as possible. But thinking there's some single indicator that determines state failure is a doomed project.

It is possible to steal IP though. If you assert ownership of an intellectual property, then your next step can be to stop the original artist from claiming royalties. An example would be the companies claiming ownership of public domain films and then getting youtube to yank the public domain versions.

So if NBC was claiming they owned the Apple artwork, its stealing because that ownership (if uncontested) allows them to collect royalties, etc.

A warming of two degrees is not about us noticing (as in, gee, time for a tshirt) but about the impact on the ecosystem.

Someone in reddit (http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/reo35/the_discus...) pointed to an article noting that a 7 degree warming would suck moisture from the ground and substantially inhibit plant/food growth.

I'm not sure if you're suggesting that the Earth's temperature has a background variability ...

.. or noting that if the Earth's average temperature warms by 5 degrees it will spike higher than any sustained period in the last 400,000 years.

'Mal' means 'bad' in latin, btw.

A few years back someone wrote an article (to a science journal I think) asking if it was possible that the dinosaurs had high technology but all evidence of it had vanished in the millions of years that have passed.

Some dinosaurs were around for millions of years, which is a phenomenal amount of time compared to human history, and if humans go extinct anytime soon we may leave very little trace of our technology for a species 60 million years after us.

Two factors weighed against it: plant diversity and evidence on the moon.

The first comes from the argument that any sufficiently advanced civilization will travel around the globe, so fossil records will show the same plants everywhere. It's tricky to determine this but the evidence seemed against it.

The second is simply that any high technology civilization will eventually travel to the moon, which allows for a much more undisturbed record.

A similar system is discussed for CEOs as well. The entrepreneur who starts a company is not always a great consolidator who gets everything settled and organised into a functioning whole once the money starts coming in. The next two I think are substantial growth (being able to take an established business and grow it into a dominant player in its industry) and the last I think is something like holding, being able to take a large (and usually somewhat unwieldy) business and keep it from losing ground.

There's probably a few variations on these as well (and I might be misremembering them slightly).

I think you're missing an important piece in your summary. The original page-rank algorithm was based around the idea of authority. A site might contain content entirely relevant to your query for cancer, but if it has no authority then its probably not what you're looking for.

But this no longer works because the original indicators of authority have died out as the web has become less of a network, since search enables everything to exist in isolation (at one of my work sites we just trimmed the majority of the links from our site).

But if you can determine which people have authority, then you can use their browsing habits in order to allocate authority to websites again. Instead of website having and giving authority, you start giving an authority (per topic) score to users, and then use their behaviour to determine authority in pages.

This last aspect is, I think, what jacques is pointing out, and its not that the social graph gives relevant results (which as you say, everyone knows about), but that it gives a different mechanism for authority (which yields better relevance).

Foxconn apparently has almost 1 million employees in its Chinese factories, so its significant enough in its own right, but I suspect its also a shorthand for all Chinese factories (as McDonalds once was for all fast food).

Foxconn makes a lot of products other than Apple, but focusing on Apple products guarantees that most of the target audience will knowlingly own a Foxconn-made product.

As well, I suspect Foxconn allows greater access to its factories than other Chinese manufacturers (and my guess is conditions there are probably better than the median factory)

Try: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting for a starting point (esp. 'Examples'). Also note that states often provide generous tax subsidies to film projects filmed in their territory. Some films can profit their investors without making any money at the box office (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uwe_Boll)

I've done some work for a research team dealing with air exposure to known and suspected carcinogens and (I think) I can appreciate both sides of this. In order to do the research my team signed various agreements related to data and any publication is dependent on approval from the data sources. Science is about free publication but we don't own the data so we have to play by their rules to access it. The primary reason in our case was an earlier publication of preliminary data that had been sent to media and caused a big stir with damning headlines. Unfortunately the legitimately scientific practice of publishing whatever you have and letting the scientific community build on it becomes quite problematic when the media broadcasts interim results as findings (and then land values plummet, or political pressure halts a multimillion dollar project). So there might be a legitimate reason for the legal threats (Though the article implies otherwise)

On the other hand, pinning down environmental causes of cancer is shockingly difficult and even partial results are very useful for the research because we simply can't put a test subject in a box and pump it full of a chemical to see if they get cancer. Most known carcinogens (by the IARC definition) are known through studies on workplace exposure.

It would be a serious blow if the study had concrete evidence but the legal threats managed to delay publication until after IARC finishes its review.

There's a lot to be said for habit for making tasks happen that are hard to motivate. If you can spend a week consciously putting on running shoes every morning before breakfast, then it gets easier to do it on other days. Key to this is to break it down. Instead of a task being a single behemoth (run 5km), it should be a series of small steps that by themselves are easier to take (put on shoes by the bed), each leading onto the other.

A video of the performance is here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v...

(A handful notice)

As a test of whether the public at large can recognize quality musicianship (is the public uncultured, or is the diff between good to great musicians just not significant?) I think playing in the afternoon would have been a better time.

News might entertain us but its chief goal is to sell advertising space. Advertising ultimately pays for almost all news* (esp. newspapers) and so news media focus on getting your attention today, and tomorrow, and using whatever techniques they can to achieve this. Entertainment is just one of these techniques. Disquiet (some might say fear) is another - the sense that things aren't quite right and the associated need to know what isn't quite right.

*BBC (UK taxpayer) and Economist (subscription) are among the exceptions.

Here's a 2008 article pointing out that news' focus on the moment is also a significant failing: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/03/against-news.html

This 2008 article also points out the social function of news: as a common topic for discussion, particularly for determining compatibility with others (whether of belief, intellectual interest, etc)

The HN article makes a great point about how much this info effects you. If news media let their audience know that nothing happening right now was likely to effect their lives in any way for at least a week (at best, more likely never), then audience would only tune in once a week, which drops viewing figures by 86%. Also, only checking news once a week lets the information settle, and often key details emerge which negate previous reports.

Another useful trick, if cold turkey is too much, is to put a one-day or one-week delay on all incoming news (ie waiting a week to read newspapers). If nothing much is lost by a weeks delay, then its easier to go cold turkey.

I wouldn't expect so much. There is ample evidence for the ineffectualness of, say, the CIA. As a simple example, at the time of the fall of the USSR (pretty much their major goal) they had admitted they had no effective agents in Russia

The radio model was not geared to you (as far as I can tell). Up to the 90s, lots of people who heard a song a dozen times on the radio would then go and by the single or album. Even at $8 and $20. I don't know why they did, but they did.

I suspect the big problem with piracy (from RIAA perspective) is that it is teaching those people that its just as easy to get it online. Except that iTunes went and made it even easier to get it for $1, so most people in that market I know just buy it on iTunes.

I've been expecting someone to make this move sooner or later, and I got the impression that Posterous' Spaces was trying to do something like this (but I haven't used it much).

It reminds me of adding tags to blog posts and then having subdomains for different tags

Exactly. An "explain like I'm twelve" for Godel's Incompleteness Theorum itself would revolve around the idea of self-referential statements (such as 'the set of all sets which don't contain themselves', or 'the barber of Seville shaves everybody who doesn't shave themselves').

In my understanding, Godel created a system that mapped statements to numbers, and then looked at the numbers that represented statements like 'this statement is provable' and found a way to show that the equivalent number had a property that wasn't provable.

The uptick after 120 characters would seem to be the natural 'long tail' of the graph, if Twitter didn't have the character limit. Instead of trailing off those people are forced into condensing their tweet down to 140.