Mod parent up, it's true! My corporate laptop sees very little direct involvement in combat operations...

They should close some of their excess branches. In rural areas/small towns where people might raise more of a stink, make the USPS an in-store mini-office at the nearest grocery store. If banks manage to have secure in-store branches, I imagine the USPS can figure it out too.

So um, I know we spout the correlation != causation line all the time around here, but maybe some airports opened up lines to old timey metal detectors because they were at max capacity and not because opt-outs were significantly disruptive.

I get the joke and I laughed, but it's interesting to note that one of Turkey's conditions of cooperation was that additional nations (beyond Iran) shouldn't be singled out. So "Iran and elsewhere" is actually technically correct!

... it gets dark pretty quick down there. Even at 100ft/30m you've lost a lot of the color spectrum. So they'll take a lot of lights with them. Okay, fine. Don't expect any sweeping vistas -- the background's going to be black.

What are they going to film for Avatar 2 that they can't film a few thousand feet shallower? Neat rock outcroppings? The only thing I can think of are bizarre critters, which will be done in CGI anyway.

I'm all for exploring the depths, but whoever said the Avatar 2 angle is a tax write-off was dead on.

I couldn't help but notice the astrophysicist's last name: Lagrange. Is she related to Joseph-Louis?

Then how is it a useful business simulator? I think PvP (and the horrible learning curve of EVE) are helpful in modeling real world business behavior.

EVE Online already has an elaborate player-driven economy, corporations, an elected council, and so on. Where's the value added in Empire & State?

How do they work?!?

I've collaborated on research using Twitter traffic as a predictor so I applaud their efforts, but a 79% correlation with telephone responses is not as high as it sounds. For example, the minimum acceptable correlation for interrater reliability is typically 80%.

Put simply, the Twitter data can only account for about two thirds of the variation in phone responses. That's useful but there's still a lot of unexplained variance -- we have a long way to go.

Although the Pygmalion effect is typically thought of in a positive light (i.e., expect good performance, get good performance) you're right. Telling a kid they are going to be a criminal doesn't seem like a good way to keep them from becoming one.

You are entirely correct. Social scientists don't need names or addresses (IP or physical). We can figure out who you are with a frighteningly small number of data points. Doubly so for individuals who have a public Facebook profile and therefore probably have public profiles elsewhere on the net. I suspect that this guy, despite his best intentions, did NOT anonymize the data well enough to hide at least 80% of the users.

... can't anyone resell the VDM content (which they have so generously compiled for you) at a slightly lower cost? It seems like their low margin business model relies on "owning" the very content they're repackaging. Oh the irony!

I agree that someone who breaks into your house and doesn't murder you should be punished less than the person who does, but that doesn't mean I'm cool with the former.

I sympathize with this guy in that they'll probably throw the book at him, but should burglary be allowed simply because locks are easy to pick?