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Comment Re:Not even wrong. (Score 1) 246

Well... If you were as well informed as you think you are, you would have asked how my hypothetical researcher arrived at this result, and I would have answered that he, unaware of the city where he was to sample, ended just in a meeting of the KKK. Welcome to the real world, grasshopper! Your neighborhood may be homogeneous, but when you have a heterogeneous country like mine you can not rely on a small sample, for reasons such as I described.
Transportation

Here's What Your Car Could Look Like In 2030 144

Nerval's Lobster writes: If you took your cubicle, four wheels, powerful AI, and brought them all together in unholy matrimony, their offspring might look something like the self-driving future car created by design consultants IDEO. That's not to say that every car on the road in 2030 will look like a mobile office, but technology could take driving to a place where a car's convenience and onboard software (not to mention smaller size) matter more than, say, speed or handling, especially as urban areas become denser and people potentially look at "driving time" as a time to get things done or relax as the car handles the majority of driving tasks. Then again, if old science-fiction movies have proven anything, it's that visions of automobile design thirty or fifty years down the road (pun intended) tend to be far, far different than the eventual reality. (Blade Runner, for example, posited that the skies above Los Angeles would swarm with flying cars by 2019.) So it's anyone's guess what you'll be driving a couple decades from now.
Security

Nuclear Weapons Create Their Own Security Codes With Radiation 106

Zothecula writes "Nuclear weapons are a paradox. No one in their right mind wants to use one, but if they're to act as a deterrent, they need to be accessible. The trick is to make sure that access is only available to those with the proper authority. To prevent a real life General Jack D Ripper from starting World War III, Livermore National Laboratory's (LLNL) Defense Technologies Division is developing a system that uses a nuclear weapon's own radiation to protect itself from tampering.
Crime

Cops 101: NYC High School Teaches How To Behave During Stop-and-Frisk 481

HughPickens.com writes Kate Briquelet reports in the NY Post that Principal Mark Federman of East Side Community HS has invited the New York Civil Liberties Union to give a two-day training session to 450 students on interacting with police. "We're not going to candy-coat things — we have a problem in our city that's affecting young men of color and all of our students," says Federman. "It's not about the police being bad. This isn't anti-police as much as it's pro-young people ... It's about what to do when kids are put in a position where they feel powerless and uncomfortable." The hourlong workshops — held in small classroom sessions during advisory periods — focused on the NYPD's stop-and-frisk program and how to exercise Fourth Amendment rights when being stopped and questioned in a car or at home.

Some law-enforcement experts say the NYCLU is going beyond civics lessons and doling out criminal-defense advice. "It's unlikely that a high school student would come away with any other conclusion than the police are a fearful group to be avoided at all costs," says Eugene O'Donnell, a former police officer and professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. NYCLU representatives told kids to be polite and to keep their hands out of their pockets. But they also told students they don't have to show ID or consent to searches, that it's best to remain silent, and how to file a complaint against an officer. Candis Tolliver, NYCLU's associate director for advocacy, says was the first time she trained an entire high school. "This is not about teaching kids how to get away with a crime or being disrespectful. This is about making sure both sides are walking away from the situation safe and in control."
Science

Molecular Clusters That Can Retain Charge Could Revolutionize Computer Memory 36

jfruh writes:Computing devices have been gobbling up more and more memory, but storage tech has been hitting its limits, creating a bottleneck. Now researchers in Spain and Scotland have reported a breakthrough in working with metal-oxide clusters that can retain their charge. These molecules could serve as the basis for RAM and flash memory that will be leagues smaller than existing components (abstract).
Science

Fish Tagged For Research Become Lunch For Gray Seals 48

sciencehabit writes: When scientists slap an acoustic tag on a fish, they may be inadvertently helping seals find their next meal. The tags — rods a few centimeters long that give off a ping that can be detected from up to a kilometer away — are often used to follow fish for studies on their migration, hunting, or survival rates. Researchers working with 10 gray seals (Halichoerus grypus) who were captive for a year have now reported that the animals can learn to associate the pings with food. If the findings hold true in the wild, the authors warn, they could skew the results of studies trying to analyze fish survival rates or predation.

Comment Re:Not even wrong. (Score 2) 246

And therein lies one of the weaknesses of a small sample, you have no way to ensure that is random enough. For example, you can have bad luck and get to sample exactly the most discrepant person in the group. And that's assuming that the authors of the pool have spent the money to get opinions from people really at random rather than following the easy route and get the opinions of people in the same location (which may be from the same opinion group).

Comment Re:Wow ... (Score 1) 299

"...Now almost all the news media is very closely tied to the interest of their corporate masters."

This is the business model of Brazilian TV network Rede Globo... In addition to outright fraud, crimes against the country and currently they are trying to put into practice a "white coup" (coup without the violence part). So much to the oath of journalists to display only the truth.

Comment Re:Not even wrong. (Score 1) 246

For your sample, pick.. let me say... 30 people. You got 30 people but you did not know they were all KKK members and now your pool says that everyone in the US is racist! Let's try to improve, but I can not have an interviewer in each city so I do phone interviews. Now looks like it will work, but in my country a good deal of people do not have phones. Oops, now my pool sees just a biased portion of the population (excluded because they have no phone). Let's try once more, spend more and put an interviewer in state capitals. But still I'm getting a biased sample because it represents only the opinions of those living in capital cities (and they have a different view of living in the countryside).

Short version: Do not come insulting me wanting to force me to believe that a sample of half a dozen people is enough to deduce the opinion of a whole country with millions of people with the most varied possible opinions.

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