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cpikas | November 8, 2009There's a nice rebuttal of the Sirsi Dynix anti-open source white paper done by Mark Leggott that just came out (I found it via Jason Griffey). More thoughtful than some.
There are so many misconceptions on both sides of this. First, open source is not free. You do need people to install and maintain it and maybe customize it. Some open source projects have less documentation than others.
On the other hand, what's worse is when you pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for a large software product only to then have to pay more and more and more and more to buy additional modules,…
tqa | November 7, 2009The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.
Carl Sagan (November 9, 1934 - December 20, 1996)
Pale Blue Dot (p. 6)
gregladen | November 7, 2009This will make you laugh. Then you will realize that there is nothing funny here. Nothing. Then you will cry. With Glenn Beck. Cry for Glenn. Cry for our nation. And if you think I'm joking that's just what they made you think.
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mspringer | November 7, 2009Of late president Obama has taken a little bit of heat for his frequent (and mostly male) golf outings. Before him, president Bush took the same sort of heat for his golf and vacations. If you were willing to dig a bit through the news archives, I'd bet you could find similar tut-tutting about previous presidents taking time off. It's a common theme for criticism of just about any important federal officeholder - it's no coincidence that so many congressional "fact-finding" missions are to tropical paradises or European vacation spots. In that case it's a criticism I vigorously share, as…
ddobbs | November 6, 2009 James Fallows gets the shootings right, as he does so much else:
In the saturation coverage right after the events, the "expert" talking heads are compelled to offer theories about the causes and consequences. In the following days and weeks, newspapers and magazine will have their theories too. Looking back, we can see that all such efforts are futile. The shootings never mean anything. Forty years later, what did the Charles Whitman massacre "mean"? A decade later, do we "know" anything about Columbine? There is chaos and evil in life. Some people go crazy. In America, they do so with…
gregladen | November 6, 2009One of the leading indicators for behavior and intent is gaze direction. Many under cover detectives use this cue to figure out who may be predators in a crowd. In work for NBC Sports, Nils Krahnstoever has shown that we can track the gaze direction of football players providing a whole new level of sports analysis.
Spooky. Check it out.
gregladen | November 6, 2009Two dead. Then alive.
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gregladen | November 6, 2009A campus religious leader is unhappy about a study at Duke University that invites female students to attend parties where they can buy sex toys....the director of the Duke Catholic Center has lodged a complaint with researchers.
The study has of age female students attend "tupperware style" sex toy parties, and complete a survey before and after. They have IRB approval.
source
Note: Abel Pharmboy has blogged about this here.
pharyngula | November 6, 2009Dan Casey has just posted the first installment in a story about the day Pat Robertson's bodyguard pulled a gun on him, which is so far an interesting perspective on the obscenely wealthy life of a televangelist. I wish I could afford to build a mighty mansion on an isolated hilltop that I would only visit once a month!
It's a cruel tease, though. Casey is serializing it: we'll have to remember to check in every Friday to get the full story.
mspringer | November 6, 2009Here's a question which pretty much everyone gets wrong. But the readers of this blog aren't just a random sample, so I bet most of you will get it right:
Two identical vehicles A and B, both traveling at speed V directly toward the other vehicle, collide exactly head-on. At another test track, car C collides with an indestructible concrete barrier at speed V'. All other things being equal, the crash-test dummy occupants of vehicles A, B, and C will experience the same forces (and therefore injuries) if...
1. V' = V/2
2. V' = V
3. V' = 2V
4. Something else (explain)
How might the answer…
cortex | November 6, 2009This is absolutely fascinating, yet another reminder that the structure of language infects everything. Here's Nell Greenfieldboyce, at NPR:
The distinctive sounds of a newborn's first cries may be influenced by the mother tongue of its parents.
A new study of over a thousand recorded cries from 30 French newborns and 30 German newborns found differences in the cries' melody patterns. French cries tended to have a rising melody, while the German cries tended to have a falling melody.
The finding suggests that newborns just a few days old may already be trying to imitate the prevailing…
gregladen | November 6, 2009First,
Paul Ingraham is Vancouver Registered Massage Therapist and science writer who criticizes questionable practices in alternative health care -- and his professional regulator calls it offensively unprofessional and wants to censor his website with tens of thousands of dollars in legal defense expenses at stake.
Science-based alternative health? Rebellion within the alt-health ranks? Juicy.
details
Also, I heard a rumor that Bora of A Blog Around the Clock will be on the show as well.
agelman | November 6, 2009Michel Guillot says:
In the former Soviet republics of Central Asia, ethnic Russians have exhibited higher adult mortality than native ethnic groups (Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Uzbek, etc.) in spite of their higher socioeconomic status. The mortality disadvantage of ethnic Russians at adult ages appears to have even increased since the break-up of the Soviet Union. The most common explanation for this paradox, which we term the "Russian mortality paradox," is that deaths are better reported among ethnic Russians. In this study, we use detailed mortality data from Kyrgyzstan between 1959 and 1999 to…
agelman | November 6, 2009Frank Benford pointed me to this news article listing Statistician as the third best job in America. The article came out in January, so I assume this has already been spread and debunked many times by now.
What really interested me, though, was seeing Lumberjack in the last position. I remember thinking about lumberjacks when reading the work of Peter Dorman, who discussed the fact that, contrary to the usual theory of the "risk premium," risky jobs typically pay less than safe jobs. Lumberjack is about the riskiest job there is, and it doesn't pay well. (I discuss the topic a bit in our…
tqa | November 5, 2009
I don't know why I would have expected anything about the entire incident to make sense, but the more I hear about the alleged shooter - Malik Nidal Hasan - the less sense it seems to make. I'm not going to try to speculate about anything at this point. Here are the things that are known so far:
1: He was born in VA.
2: He received his medical degree at Uniformed Services University of Health Sciences in 2003.
3: He immediately followed this up with a psychiatry residency at Walter Reed, which he completed in 2007.
4: He did a fellowship in Disaster and Preventative Psychiatry back at…
gregladen | November 5, 2009So, we were at the hospital doing a standard midwife visit, and the pediatric nurse managed to fanagle me an H1N1 shot (they want caretakers of infants to have the shot). So I am now fully inoculated. We also probably have a baby name picked out, but I'm not going to say what it is.
Then, leaving the hospital and heading back north, we saw it ...
I think it was an F 15, but I could easily be wrong about that. It was heading south in what looked like a circle-the-airport formation. Then a second one following the first.
I clicked on the radio and in moments heard about the shooting at Fort…