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Comment Wine-Economics.org Working Papers hardly working? (Score 2) 11

by DarkStarZumaBeach (#34762970) Attached to: Positive Correlation Between Monogamy and Alcohol

I just had a long hard laugh looking at some of the titles of their working papers, which remind me of the humorous article titles in the "Journal of Irreproducible Results".
Makes me wonder if there is a bright future in enology economics research.

*

AAWE Working Paper No. 67 Economics
Fraternity Membership & Frequent Drinking
Jeffrey S. DeSimone

*

AAWE Working Paper No. 68 Economics
Binge Drinking & Sex in High School
Jeffrey S. DeSimone

*

AAWE Working Paper No. 70 Economics
Return to Wine: a Comparison of the Hedonic, Repeat Sales, and Hybrid Approaches
James J. Fogarty and Callum Jones

*

AAWE Working Paper No. 71 Economics
Does Drinking Impair College Performance? Evidence from a Regression Discontinuity Approach
Scott E. Carrell, Mark Hoekstra and James E. West

*

AAWE Working Paper No. 73 Economics
Collective Reputation Effects: An Empirical Appraisal
Olivier Gergaud and Florine Livat

*

AAWE Working Paper No. 74 Economics
The Role of Viticulture and Enology in the Development of Economic Thought
Stephen Chaikind

--

Well that's an interesting research topic: Is the quantity of economic thought in direct proportion to the quantity of wine consumed?
Guess we would have to drink to that!

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Comment Asimov in 1951 - Buena de Mesquita in 1980s (Score 1) 2

by DarkStarZumaBeach (#34762800) Attached to: Hari Seldon is starting to look less fictional
Today, NYU political scientist Bruce Bueno de Mesquita has a computer program which incorporates game theory and rational choice theory from mathematical economics which reportedly makes probabilistic long-term forecasts about political trends and predicts foreign conflicts, which was first used in the early 1980s and has been continuously refined.

See ScienceNews.org: Mathematical Fortune-Telling

Buena de Mesquita offers his services through Mesquita and Roundell, a company he founded that uses his model to advise businesses and governments. "It's pretty exciting when you sit down with a client," he says, "and you know that they're making decisions involving life and death questions or billions of dollars, and at the end of the day they are relying on a body of equations."

Still, at the end of the day, the client has to be capable of removing all of their existing biases and prejudices to appreciate the forecasts, and then be able to decide to take optimal political action to drive desired results. Many clients are immobilized by the fear of political forces beyond the scope of individual rational actions.

Hence, Shell Oil's recent public forecast of $5 dollar a gallon gasoline in the US before the Fall of 2012 - suggesting a likely collapsing US national economy in a Presidential election campaign year. The potential public backlash forebodes civil disturbances in major metropolitan cities and intermittent to permanent disruptions of energy and food distribution networks.
Check out the DVD "Collapse" featuring author Michael Ruppert.
Games

Submission + - PS3: First ‘Custom Firmware’ now worki (homelinux.net)

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: KaKaRoTo, famous for his work on the PL3 payload, has released a tool that converts a standard Sony retail firmware files, into a custom firmware. The custom firmware allows the installation of homebrew files (via package install), without the need for a jailbreak. "The advantage here is that you can do it for any firmware, if you want to keep version 3.41, then give it the 3.41 update, if you are on 3.55 already and can’t downgrade, then run the script on the official 3.55 firmware and it will create a modified 3.55 firmware."
Science

Submission + - Hari Seldon is starting to look less fictional (physorg.com) 2

Submitted by jthill
jthill writes: "Psychohistory" is the basis for the eentirentire Foundation series. Hari Seldon is a university mathematician, develops models good enough to predict social developments the same way engineers can predict physical ones: given enough individuals, probabilistic aggregate behavior becomes all but completely predictable.

So now some mathematicians at Cornell have developed a probabilistic model that behaves like real social groups. Karate clubs. Republicans and Democrats. From the article:

They plugged in data on international relations prior to World War II and got almost perfect predictions on how the Axis and Allied alliances formed.
Mars

Submission + - Viking DID Find Organics On Mars 30 Years Ago (discovery.com)

Submitted by
astroengine
astroengine writes: "In the 1970's, NASA's Viking Mars landers carried out experiments on the Martian soil to search for organic compounds. For 30 years the results of these experiments have been hotly contested. Long assumed to be contamination from Earth that gave a false positive in one of the key experiments, findings from the 2008 Mars Phoenix lander and recent tests on perchlorate-laced material from the Atacama desert have prompted NASA scientists to believe Viking really did discover organics 30 years ago."
Earth

Submission + - Our Lazy Solar Dynamo: Hello Dalton Minimum? (wildwildweather.com)

Submitted by tetrahedrassface
tetrahedrassface writes: Solar maximum is supposed to be occurring, and everything from satellite communications, to your toaster, or radio could be affected. The only problem is that this just isn't happening, and NASA continues to revise down the original prediction. In fact the new prediction for Solar Cycle 24 is a lot smaller and now is pegged at almost 40% of what was predicted. Recently, two scientists at the National Solar Observatory have followed the lead of a prominent Russian scientist, who forecast a dearth of sunspots, and subsequent cooling of Earth for the next several cycles almost five years ago. With Britain currently experiencing the coldest winter in over 300 years, and no new sunspots for the last week, are we heading for a Dalton Minimum, or worse still, yet another Maunder?

Comment Re:Warp drive / transporter difference? (Score 1) 633

by DarkStarZumaBeach (#34688088) Attached to: Trek Tech That Most Needs To Be Invented Before I Die:
Whereas, with a transporter, you will be subject to quantum oscillators, Heisenberg uncertainty compensators, and active bio-filters that can deactivate weapons in transport - or accidentally blend the passenger with the cargo - as well as accidentally reassemble incorrectly due to an Eigenvalue transformation matrix flip caused by stray cosmic-ray radiation - as demonstrated by Mel Brooks in "Spaceballs" and by Mad Magazine's infamous Star Trek spoof issue. Bones McCoy was right ... I'll take the stairs and the TSA, thank you. BTW: A working quantum oscillator was built and demonstrated this year at UC Santa Barbara by grad student Aaron O'Connell and his advisors Professors Andrew Cleland and John Martinis. See "UCSB Physicists Show Theory of Quantum Mechanics Applies to the Motion of Large Objects". The large object was a miniaturized blade of cryo-cooled semiconductor that literally existed in two locations at the same instant of time. As always, the task of scaling up and then re-animating cryo-cooled humans is strictly an "engineering exercise."

Comment Re:NINJA ROBOT SPACE PLANES!!! -- PIOC?? (Score 1) 55

by DarkStarZumaBeach (#34498990) Attached to: X-37B Robotic Space Plane Returns To Earth
OH - and let's not forget to mention how Warren AFB lost silo comms and power, while X-37B was in orbit - just weeks after former Warren AFB staff reported a 1960's UFO visit with the same effect.

Q: So, just maybe, pulsed-ion orbital cannons don't exist - and a former NASA administrator doesn't fly in planes that suddenly lose all electrical and engine power over Alaska while fishing with a senator of ill-repute??

"Mr. President, sir, shall that be wide or narrow-beam setting? Stun or well-done?"

Comment Re:Not the first one - Bet FedEx leases Buran 2 (Score 1) 55

by DarkStarZumaBeach (#34498858) Attached to: X-37B Robotic Space Plane Returns To Earth
Correction: Make that "Unmanned winged and wheeled-landing reentry vehicle."

"Unmanned reentry vehicles" have been going up since German V-2's and landing with parachutes for years.
BTW: Expect Russia to now pull the plans for Buran out of storage and commercialize the airframe with new nav gear for lease to FedEx.

Q: Who else can you trust to overnight deliver spare modules to orbit for the ISS??

SpaceX can deliver crew and cargo for USPS - but there's nothing like a Proton booster stack to put habitat modules into space.
Image

Advent Calendar For Geeks Screenshot-sm 65

Posted by samzenpus from the geek-christmas dept.
bLanark writes "Well, as children and adults all over the world begin their day with chocolate, with the traditional Advent calendar, I'd like to remind you that there's an alternative for geeks. The Perl Advent calendar will give you a new Perl tip every day right up to Christmas."
Handhelds

Nook Color Rooted — Will B&N Embrace the Tablet? 181

Posted by timothy from the what-technology-wants dept.
itwbennett writes "It can browse the web, edit Office docs, run apps. Is it a low-cost, low-function e-reader? Nope, it's a Nook. And now that XDA has rooted it, how Barnes & Noble responds will determine whether the Nook has a tablet future, says blogger Ryan Faas. 'If the device can be turned into a capable Android tablet (which technically it already is) easily, the $250 price tag certainly beats out some of the competition.'"
Businesses

Japanese Game Developers Go West 84

Posted by Soulskill from the bring-ideas dept.
donniebaseball23 writes "More and more Japanese game studios and publishers are looking toward the West. But as the industry becomes more global, is this really such a bad thing? From the article: 'Gameplay is an art that transcends borders, and it simply makes good business sense to keep your eyes open for opportunities no matter where they present themselves, as Zenimax, EA and THQ clearly have. Far from ruining the Japanese gaming industry, it may in fact save some of the best Japanese developers from considering retirement or a career change. They'll be able to make games on their own terms with their own original IP, and shouldn't it ultimately be about these creative types being able to realize their visions?""
Science

Graphene Nobel Prize Committee Criticized For Inaccuracies 63

Posted by timothy from the you-guys-missed-my-first-monograph dept.
An anonymous reader writes "A leading researcher in the field of graphene has published a letter to the Nobel committee asking them to address significant problems with the factual accuracy of the supporting documents that laid the case for awarding Andrei Geim and Konstantin Novoselov the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics. Nature talks with letter author Walt de Heer about his claims that, aside from factual inaccuracies, the document diminishes the role of other groups and 'reads like a nomination letter.' At least one change has already been made by the committee."
Google

Hard-Coded Bias In Google Search Results? 257

Posted by timothy from the where-the-pigeons-roost dept.
bonch writes "Technology consultant Benjamin Edelman has developed a methodology for determining the existence of a hard-coded bias in Google's search engine which places Google's services at the top of the results page. Searching for a stock ticker places Google Finance at the top along with a price chart, but adding a comma to the end of the query removes the Google link completely. Other variations, such as 'a sore throat' instead of 'sore throat,' removes Google Health from its top position. Queries in other categories provide links to not only Google services but also their preferred partners. Though Google claims it does not bias its results, Edelman cites a 2007 admission from Google's Marissa Mayers that they placed Google Finance at the top of the results page, calling it 'only fair' because they made the search engine. Edelman notes that Google cites its use of unbiased algorithms to dismiss antitrust scrutiny, and he recalls the DOJ's intervention in airlines providing favorable results for their own flights in customer reservation systems they owned."
Upgrades

ARM Readies Cores For 64-Bit Computing 222

Posted by Soulskill from the exponential-growth dept.
snydeq writes "ARM Holdings will unveil new plans for processing cores that support 64-bit computing within the next few weeks, and has already shown samples at private viewings, InfoWorld reports. ARM's move to put out a 64-bit processing core will give its partners more options to design products for more markets, including servers, the source said. The next ARM Cortex processor to be unveiled will support 64-bit computing. An announcement of the processor could come as early as next week, and may provide further evidence of a collision course with Intel."

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