Not only that, there are other hot-button issues of great practical importance we should be debating on Slashdot:

1. Perhaps we need to install an emotion circuit in all household androids to improve their efficiency...but what about corporate androids??
2. The key to a car that runs on garbage is a light alloy body!!
3. Buy a name brand or assemble your own quantum computer?
4. Which lubricant is best for your flying car?
5. The moon or Mars for your next vacation?

And I speak as an AI researcher.

I think the GP was referring to basic math. Assuming that Verizon ties you into a 1 year contract, which is probably the LEAST we could expect for a shiny new phone (more like 2 years), then you end up breaking losing money under the GP's scenario. With the more realistic two year contract -- and let's face it, Verizon is not going to let you walk away on a prepaid plan with the N900 -- you lose a decent chunk of money. Since I think most people, according to recent polls, LIKE money, it's probably better for them.

If you feel that Verizon CEOs are underfed, on the other hand, by all means go ahead and pay more....

You might be referring to the bootstrap or any number of other resampling techniques, and I think you'll find that its often more complicated that turning your dataset into noise.

IAAS, and the answer is no. That goes for the GP as well -- no one is contesting estimation theory, just that the fundamental assumptions are so grossly unmet in this "study" as to render it meaningless. And as someone else already commented, it's dangerous here because it's going to dictate public policy.

If you're going to "adjust" your objective findings, based on some bizarre assumption that a certain percentage of people will lie about file sharing, then why do a survey at all if not to create mathematical/sciency-sounding smoke and mirrors?

Perhaps because it's hard to come up with confidence intervals when you admit to fudging your own data by bumping the estimate up by almost five percentage points.

I presume by "downsides" you mean "reduces"? Well the summary says "That 11.6% was adjusted upwards to 16.3% 'to reflect the assumption that fewer people admit to file sharing than actually do it.'" So they actually UPPED the number of filesharers. This is objection #1 to "good research":
1. You do a survey to objectively measure the support of your hypothesis
2. The survey of a tiny sample indicates that filesharers are a pretty low percentage
3. You "adjust" this number -- otherwise known as "fudging the data" -- to better reflect your own hypothesis.

The same tactics in any scientific endeavor would get your papers retracted, your funding canceled, some sort of disciplinary action initiated, etc.

The second objection, and this applies to other studies too that try to make grand claims from small samples, is that it's A SMALL SAMPLE. For your survey to be representative, your sample has to be representative. It's also difficult to choose people independently at random, and without that assumption, all your basic statistics fall apart. Perhaps they went through a list of BT subscribers and pulled names at random -- but what if downloaders are overrepresented amongst BT subscribers? What if they only polled home internet users, but then used the "total number of internet users" -- which includes corporate subscribers -- to come up with their 11mil number? There are other possible, non-numerical issues too. What if the respondents confused downloading from bittorent with downloading from iTunes?

If you want many other examples of "bad science", read Ben Goldacre's blog

That, and the view of the city from Adler Planetarium is one of the two best views of Lake Michigan and Chicago (the other being from the Signature Lounge on the 95th floor of the John Hancock Tower). You can park in the Field's Museum Lot, and then stroll down to Adler Planetarium, where you can literally sit on the perch along Lake Michigan and see the entire coast and skyline of Chicago curving around the horizon. It's really beautiful; plus points for dawn and sunset.

While I agree in principle with what you say, it's actually much easier than that. My crappy Winamp will auto-tag songs based on a lossy hash, grab the album cover art from some mysterious server, and display some sort of music website with the latest news about the artist, etc. You can install a free plugin that downloads the lyrics to the song, if you want, or you could get off your lazy ass and just Google it.

What these people don't seem to understand about albums is that they were a very physical thing (yes, past tense). You touched it on the shelf at the record store, turned it over to see if you knew any of the songs, then had a little (or big for vinyl) booklet to browse too.

When you put the album in your music playing device, you made a conscious decision to listen to at least a few songs from it. Nobody switched out albums like crazy playing one song after the other. Any sort of "digital album" will necessarily have that functionality, negating the whole album concept. Those who would listen to all the songs would just buy them individually, and those who would not won't.

Unless, they intend on killing the single by forcing albums down our throat. Helllooo, bittorrent...

For the grand prize, there was a final 30-day countdown from the time the first entry that achieved greater than 10% was received, which was a month ago. So it seems like this will indeed come down to an ebay-like sniping situation in the last few hours.

I wouldn't feel too sorry for BellKor/KorBell though -- they've got many, many best paper awards at conferences and a huge degree of publicity out of the whole endeavor. In fact, in KDD 2009, they detailed most of the methods that most likely got them to the top -- i.e. they incorporated the fact that tastes and preferences drift over time. Simple, in retrospect of course. If you have an ACM subscription, you can read the 2009 paper here.

Plus, since they work for AT&T/Yahoo Research, I remember Yehuda Koren stating that the money wouldn't have gone to them anyway -- possibly a large bonus, but I think they're entitled to that anyway. So I wouldn't feel too sorry for them.

They teach concepts instead of implementations for a reason -- you can, and probably will have to, pick up different languages over your career. However, when you start working at corporation X and they need an ultra-fast implementation of some data structure to handle massive amounts of streaming data with performance guarantees, the prize is going to go to the guy who knows about red/black trees and Fibonacci heaps, rather than the language "expert" who codes up a naive implementation that dies the minute it hits real data.

Stick with the department's plan...

That's the funny thing about "momentum"...it takes quite a while to overcome. Or did you really expect that he would change each and every thing you're complaining about overnight. It's been less than half a year, of a very very bad year, give the man a break. I'm not saying he's going to reverse the "momentum" on everything you mentioned, but really (and realistically) would you rather have mccain in there?

Because it doesn't really matter as long as *your* house has one. Metaphorically speaking, if you have the option of making $40k in India -- which goes a LONG way -- and staying at home, living like a king, keeping your social support system, etc. vs. migrating to the states and starting anew for $80k., then a lot of perfectly rational and obscenely talented people will choose to stay there. Money really isn't everything.

This is nothing but the typical "if you don't have anything to hide, then you should be OK giving up your information" defense, slightly rephrased. Please read Daniel Solove's excellent evisceration of this argument here in PDF, and stop accepting the blanket "interests of national security" line without questioning on a case-by-case basis if it is reasonable.

Someone needs to create a privacy argument checklist for /. like the "why your spam solution won't work" checklist.

As far as Ubuntu is concerned, its the same inane neophyte behavior that "obsoleted" Xmms and BMPx in Jaunty in favor of the iTunes wannabe Amarok, which I find much less stable and cumbersome to use. There was absolutely nothing wrong with Xmms as a Winamp-style media player that was quick, efficient and could handle Internet radio and almost all the popular DRM-free formats, yet it was automatically removed with other "obsolete" software. Yes, I can compile it again from source, but it just seems a bit obnoxious. BMPx was another simple media player that was quite nice, albeit with the occassional bug, and it too has been "obsoleted".

For all the evangelism of the Ubuntu community, why are we being driven towards solutions that mimic the proprietary soup-du-jour (iTunes in this case)?