Oh, for Pete's sake this is not the 1918 Flu; it's not going spread like wildfire in first world sanitary conditions. We're not a third world country, yet. Ebola only spreads from symptomatic patients, and possibly through corpses through West African funeral practices. In the US most people go to the hospital when they're sick and are prepared for burial by a professional undertaker.

It's highly unlikely that the deputy contracted the infection just by walking into a house full of asymptomatic people.

Anyhow, get used to it. Emergent infectious agents emerge because of two things: local ecological disruption, and international commerce. We're going to be seeing a lot more emergent pathogens in this century.

My bet, however, is on the re-emergence of an old, familiar killer. Yellow fever has on multiple occasions depopulated US cities prior to the 20th C. Dengue is making a comeback in the US, and it's transmitted by the same mosquito species: Aedes aegypti.

No, the biggest roadblock to adopting fusion energy is that it doesn't work for long.

The problem isn't just "expense" as the summary pretends. It's that the energy output is less than the energy inputs.

Scaling the reactor is like the old joke about "losing money on every sale, but making up for it on volume."

Don't ever consent to anything if you are the target of a criminal investigation or anything (like a traffic stop) that might turn into a criminal investigation. What you think they're going to do with your consent and what they intend to do may be two different things. You may be surprised at what the courts *allow* them to do with information you've given them permission to access it.

Be scrupulously cooperative with anything the cop is allowed to demand that you do. Don't argue, lecture or harangue, do everything you can to make an encounter with the police, smooth, courteous and above all, brief. But politely and firmly draw the line if they ask you for information about yourself other than your identity (which in some jurisdictions you are required to provide). Do not resist, because that can get you tased. Cooperate, but make it clear you don't consent, then sort things out later with your lawyer.

Be on your guard especially with a polite cop. Many of them are polite because they were brought up that way, but the smart ones know that courtesy is a powerful way to gain cooperation. They get you into a rhythm by politely asking for a series of reasonable things, then slipping in a request for something they can't compel, like you opening your trunk, granting them access to your cell phone, or letting them search your house.

It would be great if all cops abided by Peelian principles, but the "War on Drugs" has undermined the relationship between the police and the public. Fully ONE PERCENT of all Americans are behind bars, most of them on drug charges. If you, any of your family, or any of your friends have so much as smoked a joint, you can't afford to give the police any personal information at all.

Because I'm pretty sure that talking to one's significant other is equally distracting.

You don't get it: inciting impotent rage is a *feature*. When you feel rage, everything becomes clear. That's *so* much more satisfying than gnawing, existential doubt.

Because this method returns a ranking that seems more intuitively "right"?

It's worth asking why that should be. Think about a rating scale of one to four stars. What does *averaging* those ratings mean? Yes, I know the *formula* for computing an average, but being able to *compute* an average isn't the same thing being able to *interpret* that average. Why? Because a two star rated item isn't really "twice as good" as one star, a four star rating isn't really "four times as good" as a one star or "twice as good" as a two star. In other words we're not measuring something like height, or number of widgets sold. We're *characterizing* something as shit, meh, OK, or awesome.

The method proposed is more mathematically defensible. It converts each 1 to 4 score into a coin flip (Bernoulli process for you probability geeks): positive or negative. This actually captures what the rating system does better than treating the ratings as meaningful numbers.

This doesn't automatically mean you'll get more intuitively pleasing results than using weighted averages; YMMV. But I think this system is bound to give more *consistently* intuitive results across applications and datasets. Weighting the average is an easy, but extremely arbitrary operation. As a compromise you might come up with a formula to tweak the score *toward the mean* depending on how few reviews there were; by adjusting the parameters you use you could probably get that formula to yield an intuitively satisfying ranking. The advantage of using a confidence interval as suggested is that approach is highly likely to yield a reasonable result out of the box, across a wide variety of datasets.

And after all, even if it looks like a "hot mess" to people who haven't taken advanced statistics, how hard is it to copy and paste a bit of code?

It's not an algorithm, except in the trivial sense. It's a formula for calculating an adjusted rating value that discounts extreme ratings for items with small numbers of reviewers.

This actually matches what you do intuitively when you see an item with a single rating of 5.0 at the top of a list, just above another item with an average rating of 4.9 from a thousand users. You mentally deduct a bit from the "top rated" item because you know it's probably too high. Likewise a 1.0 rating from a single user is probably too low, so you mentally add a bit to that.

The question is, how much to deduct or add from the score?

The approach suggested is to ask a slightly different question. Instead of "what is the average rating of the product", you ask "what percentage of positive ratings can I be 95% certain the product would score above have if *everyone* rated it?" It turns out there's a number of mathematical formulas that are supposed to tell you precisely that.

There's still a lot of arbitrariness in this approach. Why 95%? I'm reasonably sure that results would be just as intuitively reasonable if we chose 80% instead. But if 95% seems to generate intuitively reasonable results there's no particular reason to monkey with that parameter.

BUT, I think, the level of arbitrariness involved probably means we could choose a simpler approximation than the Wilson interval if we could dream one up. The more familiar Wald interval taught in basic statistics courses is somewhat simpler, but not so much that it's worth worrying about, at least not if you're doing the calculation on a database server which typically has a few CPU cycles to spare.

If I were to attempt something like this on a massive scale in an environment where CPU cycles were precious, I'd probably devise some kind of simple algebraic scaling formula that tweaked scores toward the mean, depending on the number of ratings. The results wouldn't be quite as good as the Wald or Wilson intervals, but maybe not so much less good that anyone would notice.

I suspect the restriction is impossible to enforce, because it's almost certainly the case that the facial recognition isn't performed on the device itself. So it's a bit like saying you can't use the things for pornography; you'd have to know somehow that the user intends to pleasure himself later by looking at pictures of ladies' shoes.

It's a bit too late on that score anway. Having boots on the ground is an anachronism, even if they've got high tech wearables. In 2000 Scotland Yard was able to foil the Millennium Dome diamond heist by tracking all the gang's preparations using a network of public and private security cameras. There was almost no in-person surveillance. The first time the gang was physically near the police was when they were surrounded by an armed response team inside the exhibit hall.

Here in the US, the NYPD has acquired similar, possibly even more advanced capabilities. They can for example find all the six foot-ish blond men wearing blue sweaters in a one block radius of Penn Station then run their images through facial recognition software, then follow their suspect almost anywhere in Manhattan with no chance of being detected.

In comparison to camera networks, having a cop wearing Google glasses isn't that big a deal. A lot of our legal privacy protections are based on the assumption it's too labor intensive to follow people around for frivolous purposes. An army of cops with cameras is expensive to maintain; a network of surveillance cameras is not.

You really think NASA wasn't bureaucratic back in its glory days?

There were two big differences between then and now: then NASA had big-time funding and a clear mission that was stable over the course of a decade.

Bureaucracy is the optimal design pattern for an organization that has to accomplish a fixed set of objectives within a predictable set of constraints and with a stable set of resources. When bureaucracy works well, it becomes practically invisible. For example one of the greatest innovations Scotland Yard introduced to crime fighting is record keeping. That enables them to correlate crimes with evidence from past crimes in their records, including fingerprints. Before Scotland Yard introduced filing to police work, cops didn't fill out reports, and if a criminal got away with a crime the detectival slate was wiped clean for his next crime. But we usually don't think of a well-functioning police force as a record-keeping organization. When it works, you don't notice it.

Bureaucracies under stress are very noticeable. That's why the military is notoriously bureaucratic, because the bureaucracy's need to make it's work predictable and repeatable conflicts with the fluid nature of war. So "bureaucracy" in our minds is associated with malfunctioning or even corrupt organizations.

Bureaucracies are predictable. If you underfund a bureaucracy, it will inevitably put more effort into preserving itself and less into what it's supposed to do. If you ask it to accomplish something the people working in it perceive as impossible, false or contrived information will inevitably clog its record keeping system. If you demand schoolteachers raise score levels, score levels will rise whether or not children are getting better educated. If you demand cops increase the numbers of arrests, the numbers of arrests reported will rise whether or not there is an impact on crime.

So what happened to NASA's bureaucracy? Well, in the glory days, the environment was optimal for the functioning of bureaucracy. Even disasters like Apollo 1 weren't "unpredictable" from a planning standpoint. Things like that were bound to happen. The instant one did, the bureaucracy leapt into action, forming committees and tasks forces, like white blood cells rushing to the location of a wound. But once we'd landed on the Moon, things changed. Funding dropped, and the bureaucracy was asked to deal with conflicting priorities. Conflicting priorities aren't one of the things bureaucracies can handle.

You can't ask a bureaucracy to fix itself. Fixes have to come from a higher level. A company with a malfunctioning management structure needs to be addressed by the board. A malfunctioning government agency has to be addressed at the political level. It's not bureaucracy per se that brought low, it's politicians who don't want to make tough decisions about NASA priorities, nor adequately fund all the agency's objectives.

The FCC certainly regulates the wi-fi spectrum, as you would know if you ever bothered to even glance at all the pieces of paper that come with anything operating in the 2.4 or 5 GHz band.

If those bands were actually unregulated, you'd be able to go on Amazon and buy a 1000 watt wi-fi booster.

Wasting power we're currently throwing away anyhow seems like an odd concern. You could even store the excess energy in a really inefficient storage medium and still come out ahead -- provided that excess power was cheap enough to produce in the first place and the storage mechanism was cheap enough. It's the *financial* return that will determine behavior; the physical efficiency is only a contributing factor.

The real limiting point for percentage generated by solar will be the result of a complicated mix of factors, including technologies, economies and diseconomies of scale, local supply and demand etc. Where diminishing returns will hit zero in thirty-five years is impossible to estimate today using back-of-the-envelope calculations. Thirty-five years is a long time for a technology just hitting its stride. Consider: 35 years ago was roughly when the 8088 CPU was launched.

Well, you can call it a "double standard", but that's how science works. Interpretations of data that contradict the established theory face higher burdens of proof than interpretations that support it.

It's frustrating to climate denialists and perpetual motion inventors that their ideas aren't given equal dignity with the scientific consensus, but that's because by in large they're ignorant of the effort that went into forging that consensus. It took fifty hard fought years for AGW to become the scientific consensus, and as a result it enjoys a privileged position: it gets to play the null hypothesis. To do otherwise isn't fair to the people who fought that fight for decades, and won. You can overturn the scientific consensus, but it's an uphill battle, as it should be.

So if I download lots of copyrighted music and films, but never listen to them -- then I'm apparently okay right?

But help me out here. the water is still in the oceans of the Earth. So what causes the net gravitational change? The change in density from less-dense ice to more-dense water?

I would guess that results in a gravitational increase. Where is the net loss coming from?