In addition to the inter-rater reliability issue, there are also a lot of unanswered questions about the statistical distributions involved. The results are reported as population means, but without information about the underlying distribution of the results it's unclear whether the mean is a meaningful measure of central tendency for the data or how much overlap there was in the distributions. How did the mean compare with the median and mode? What were the standard deviations? Interquartile range? They're using a visual analog scale for the ranking which is reasonable, but it seems that it's just been assumed that the data can be treated as interval data for the analysis and the validity of that assumption hasn't been established. If I were doing the analysis I'd have been inclined to bin the data and report the results as odds ratios with 95% confidence intervals (e.g. people wearing glasses are N + or - 95% CI times more likely to be regarded as "smart", where "smart" is defined as a score >= some reasonable threshold on the "smartness" axis than those without glasses).
"it's just been assumed that the data can be treated as interval data"
Which is especially problematic since user generated ratings are ordinal, not interval data. Since the idea of an interval between points in ordinal data is essentially meaningless the summary statistics you mentioned are not meaningful either.
It's one thing for Amazon to come up with a mean user rating to give you a sense of how people like something, but it's not a valid method of comparing the data we have here, especially when the differences are so small
I mostly agree with the article in the context of distribution of a final mix. However, the article ignores one glaringly obvious reason to distribute in 24/192 format: to allow the listener to be a participant in the creative process, enabling better results for amateur musician listeners who want to sample or remix the audio or for DJs to get better results when altering the tempo for beat matching one track with another, etc. Of course, if you're going to do that, you might as well distribute in a multi-track format instead to maximize flexibility for the end user (Want to sing karaoke? Just turn off the lead vocal track for playback).
Yea, and and if the bandwidth/storage is at all an issue 6x size bloat from 24/192 pays for 6 separated tracks. (Actually more, because multitrack is more losslessly compressible while 24/192 is less). If you're already providing multitrack then 24 bit audio would make sense... otherwise, meh.
I agree that many programmers need to work on improving their writing skills. However, I disagree with the notion that the humanities department is suited to providing an education in the kind of writing skills CS students need. The humanities are full of fuzzy concepts that defy precise definition and the writing styles associated with those fields tolerate a level of ambiguity that is inappropriate for CS, engineering, or the physical sciences. If you really want to learn to be a great writer capable of expressing CS concepts unambiguously and concisely then a course in technical writing taught by science/engineering faculty is what you need. An even better way to improve your writing skills is to get involved in research and publish a paper in the scientific literature. The "biggest pedantic miserable fascist sonofabitch" editors you can find in the university are not in the humanities department. They're the faculty in science and engineering whose livelihood depends upon writing amazingly clear and concise documents that withstand the intense scrutiny of NSF and NIH grant review committees, journal editors, and peer reviewers who genuinely care about whether or not the experiments are described unambiguously and in sufficient detail to enable others to replicate the experimenter's results.
> The humanities are full of fuzzy concepts that defy precise definition
Perhaps its beside your point, but this is exactly what's most important about learning how to write. There's a whole lot more that you learn by exploring 'fuzzy concepts' and non-precise systems. Approaching natural language like a science or system is delusional at best. Reading and writing "amazingly clear and concise documents" is just one way of using language as a tool.
"Fuzzy concepts that defy precise definition" are part of everyone's daily work so its better to learn how to deal with them.
In a normal job, you won't use your skills only for writing official documents but also for writing numerous mails, info-files and participating in chats and online discussions during the day. How well these are written will have a huge impact on the receivers ability to figure out what you are after. More then often the things discussed are not scientific facts.
The books that are beloved by practitioners in a field are not always the best choice in terms of pedagogy. Clearly, these professors think that another book choice will help their students really grok the material. If they're successful, great. If they're not, they'll probably recognize it and supplement with other material or switch to another text. It's certainly possible to be a competent programmer without ever having read SICP in the same way that it's possible to learn linear algebra and calculus without ever having read Strang. My CS program didn't use SICP and I don't feel like I really missed anything of critical importance. There are other very competent authors writing other very good textbooks, after all. I was still exposed to Assembly, Fortran, Pascal, C, C++, Java, Scheme, Lisp, and Prolog in my program and learned core concepts of computer science such as asymptotic complexity, recurrence relations, Boolean logic, countability, Turing machines, finite automata, parsers, interpreters, threads, data structures, grammars, Backus-Naur form, etc.
Apparently, neither of these guys paid attention in high school civics class. Slander involves oral, not written, communication. Libel (not "liable") is the term for a tort involving false and damaging written communication.
These are hardly the "most dangerous" programming mistakes. Nobody is maimed or killed by SQL injection attacks on a website unless there is physical machinery that is under the direct control of the website. The most dangerous programming mistakes occur in software systems that control powerful physical devices or software systems that provide diagnostic information that guides physical interventions by human beings (i.e. a physician utilizes the information to make treatment decisions) and, unlike the rest of computer security, most of the really dangerous mistakes have to do with computing incorrect results for some edge case rather than a failures related to malicious actors.
The really bad news, if they decide to be evil, is that the purchase of MySpace provides a means to circumvent anti-spam and anti-telemarketing laws - if you have a MySpace account, you can be construed to have an existing business relationship, which legitimizes sending you unsolicited email or, for those unlucky folks who used the mobile features of MySpace, telemarketing to you on your cell phone.
Frankly, I wish Amazon would just give up the fight and go ahead and charge sales tax for all 50 states. They're the only retailer that I do any business with that doesn't charge sales tax and, because it's a PITA to remember to save every single receipt from them for tax purposes I don't do so and, therefore, I end up paying stupid use taxes which probably end up costing me more than what it would've cost me if Amazon had just collected the sales tax in the first place.
How do you end up paying more in taxes? A majority of my spending this year was made on Amazon and in my tax return I didn't enter a single one of those purchases as "Out of State Untaxed Purchase" so I didn't get taxed, which I think was illegal but apparently I'm not the only one who neglects to do this.
In any case, all Amazon receipts can be viewed in your account history.
How do I end up paying more in taxes? Because I'm aware that I undoubtedly bought something from Amazon in the past fiscal year and, therefore, in compliance with my state's laws, I check "yes" in the box and pay the flat fee for use tax. That flat fee is set at a level that reflects what the state thinks an average taxpayer owes for their "out of state untaxed" purchases, but the "average" taxpayer in their model buys more stuff than what I would ever actually buy and, thus, they charge me more in use taxes than what it would have cost me if I had just been charged sales tax in the first place. I guess it just plain never occurred to me to look up my account history and compute an exact value instead.
That's what I do. Being the overly honest person that I am, I go through and total up all my Amazon purchases for the year. They should really have a way to compute the total automatically. It always takes me a while to do it by hand. But at least that way, you're paying the right amount.
Sales tax laws are different in all the different states. It's not like there's a lookup table matching state to tax rate. You've got different tax rates on different categories of goods, and different tax rates by county.
It is only a solved problem for all the jurisdictions that have a Target. Sales taxes actually differ beyond the 50 states. For example, MN has a couple difference that cannot be found with 5 digit zip code. You need the whole address / zip+ and map data.
yeah. I mostly avoid going through provantage.com for similar reasons. Keeping track of what I bought for use tax is a pain in the ass, and provantage does some ridiculous "ship it from CA to Oklahoma, then back to me in CA" scheme to allow me to evade sales tax. Well, i end up paying use tax anyhow, so it just costs me extra in shipping and bookkeeping costs.
"Supposedly the same argument could apply to a safe combination, hence a defendant cannot be compelled to reveal a combo but can be compelled to open the safe."
Can the defendant even be compelled to open a safe? Suppose you have a case in which the defendant has either specifically disclaimed ownership of the safe in question or disclaims any knowledge of the combination or has flatly refused to either confirm or deny ownership of the safe or knowledge of its combination on fifth amendment grounds. I'm no lawyer, but I suspect the standard procedure in such cases is that the judge issues a warrant that permits police to access the contents of the safe and no burden is placed on the defendant to do anything at all. Rather, because they have a warrant for the contents of the safe, the police are entitled to open it and they do just that, using a locksmith or mechanical means to force it open. The analogous situation with respect to encrypted data would be that the police are welcome to crack the encryption themselves by whatever means they deem appropriate, but the defendant isn't required to do their work for them.
I believe the police have the right to open the safe, but you aren't required to open it for them. If the police came into your house and said "show us every hidden object" so we can decide if it is illegal. You wouldn't be required to comply.
"Your expectation that you will understand it without the necessary background is misinformed and frankly amusing. That being said, the popular press is there to do exactly that; contact your favorite media source and ask that they cover more advances in "science". They get paid to do this sort of work for you."
The problem is that the people assigned to cover science for the mainstream press generally don't understand what they are writing about and, I strongly suspect, because they operate under constant deadline pressure they never even read the scientific literature. They just interview the scientist who did the research and interview another scientist in the field for another perspective and report the most interesting "sound bites" from those two interviews along with a bunch of horribly naive (and often flatly wrong) conjectures about what it all means. You can't really blame them. They're journalists. Most of them majored in journalism, English literature, political science, or history in college and probably never took a science course above the 100-level at any time in their entire undergraduate program. What we need is more Richard Dawkinses, Michio Kakus, and Carl Sagans - academics who take on the task of explaining science to non-scientists. The way you get that is by creating the funding apparatus to make it happen. Academics are quite sensitive to the priorities of funding agencies - they rapidly become very interested in research topics for which funding exists. :) If funding exists for a professorship focused on enhancing the public understanding of science, there will inevitably be plenty of academics competing to fill that position.
I agree with this, but given that there's barely funding for research itself now, this task has fallen to nonprofits. Hopefully they can do a good job of it.
