Ignorance is bliss?

It's not new. I suppose you could say it already is a meme.

He doesn't mention latency, but he does say he clocked 915 Mb/s both up and down.

You could try reading the article.

The content is in the first link.

It could have been identified better, but it is there.

Academic journals traditionally require the authors to assign the copyright to the publisher. The authors do not get paid directly, but publications are an important factor in tenure decisions and general academic prestige--"publish or perish."

Some journals allow the authors to post the paper on their website, and some journals which do not technically allow it have generally ignored it in the past, but some publishers have been cracking down on the practice recently.

Here's the journal article:

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0031320313002549

Most statisticians consider standard deviation to be a more meaningful/fundamental measure than mean absolute deviation. I agree with Nassim Taleb that mean absolute deviation is easier to understand, but I disagree that we should switch to using the mean absolute deviation.

(I should note that, contrary to the summary, Taleb is not properly a statistician--he's an economist).

I disagree with Mr. Taleb on this point, but I feel I should note that most of his work over the last 10-20 years has been about things which are not Normal. He is quite well known for it.

Hi, I'm a statistician.

It's not so simple to just say "ok, we're going to use the Mean Absolute Deviation from now on." The use of standard deviation is not quite the historical accident that Taleb makes it out to be--there are good reasons for using it. Because it is a one-to-one function of the second central moment (variance), it inherits a bunch of nice properties that the mean absolute deviation does not. There is not a one-to-one correspondence between variance and mean absolute deviation.

Taleb is correct that the mean absolute deviation is easier to explain to people, but this is not just a matter of changing units of measure (where there is a one-to-one correspondence) or changing function and variable names in code (where there is again a one-to-one correspondence). Standard deviation and mean absolute deviation have different theoretical properties. These differences have led most statisticians over the last hundred years to conclude that the standard deviation is a better measure of variability, even though it is harder to explain.

> This is worse than 1984. In Oceania, one at least knew where the cameras were and could at-least try to avoid them.

Have you read 1984 recently? A huge part of the plot revolves around the protagonist thinking he was safe when he was in fact being watched on camera the entire time.

That looks like it just heats and sculpts wax, rather than extruding it. Quite a different thing.

What sort of "ownership" are you talking about other than copyright and patents? If the copyright stays with the author [or publisher] (which you and I agree on), and the work is not patented, I don't see any other recognizable ownership of "intellectual property" on the work that can transfer to the institution. Since it's published it's obviously not trade secret, and I trademarks doesn't seem applicable.

Can you explain what this mysterious non-copyright, non-patent, non-trademark, and non-trade-secret "IP" that the institution owns is?

This is usually the case with patents, but I've never heard of an academic institution claiming an ownership interest in employees' copyrights or having contract clauses about what sort of copyright license is allowable.

I recently read When God Talks Back by T.M. Luhrmann, and she talks about this. She's a (non-religious) anthropologist who spend several years attending and participating in charismatic evangelical churches to try to understand what makes these sorts of religious people tick, and it's fascinating. While some of them are legitimately crazy, she concludes that most of them are not--they are ordinary thoughtful people who do question and examine their faith, and conclude that it holds up.

I highly recommend it.