Searching and indexing information isn't a computer problem. We can already find information in massive databases--MongoDB and PostgreSQL handle that well.

It's tagging information that's difficult. Contextual full-text searches often fail to find relevant context. Google does an okay job until you're looking for something specific. General information like melting arctic ice sheets or the spread of Ebola find something relevant; but try finding the particular documents covering the timeline Wikipedia gave for Thomas Duncan's infection, and each of the things the nurse said. You'll find all kinds of shit repeated in the media, but not how they originated. Some of the things in there are notoriously hard to find at all.

I've thought about how to structure a Project Management Information System for searching and retrieving important data. Work performance information, lessons learned, projects related to a topic themselves. This steps beyond multi-criteria search to multi-dimensional search: I want to find all Lessons Learned about building bridges; I want to find all Programming projects which implemented MongoDB and pull all Work Performance Information and Lessons Learned about Schema Development; etc. I need to know about specific things, but only in specific contexts.

For this to work well, people need to tag and describe the project properly. The Project Overview must carry ample wording for full-text search; but should also be tagged for explicit keywords, such that I can eschew full-text search and say "find these keywords". It would help if project managers marked projects as similar to other projects, and tagged those similarities (why is it similar?). A human can highlight what particular attributes are strongly relevant, rather than allowing the computer to notice what's related.

With so much information, searching requires this human action to improve the results. It may also be enhanced by individualized human action: what humans produce what tags and relationship? What humans do you feel provide useful tagging and relationships? What particular relationships do *you* find important? What relationships do you want to add yourself? This will allow an individual human to tailor the search to his own experiences and needs.

On top of that, such things require memory: a human must remember certain things to know what to search for. I remember working on a project where... ...and so this becomes relevant to this search, and let me find similar things.

Computer searching is a crude form of human memory: human memory is associative, and computer searching is keyword-driven. Humans need to use their own memories, to tell the computer how they see things, and then to tell the computer how they think about what they want to know--what it's related to, what it's similar to, who they think knows best about it--and have the computer use all that information to retrieve a data set. To do that, humans must manually remember in the computer and in their brains.

The holy grail of searching is a strong AI that takes an abstract question, considers what you mean by its experience with you and its database of every other experience, pulls up everything relevant, decides what you would want to see, and discards the rest. Such a machine is largely doing your job: it's thinking for you, deciding what you'll remember, and making your decisions by occluding information which would affect your decisions. Anything less is a tool, and faulty, and requires your expertise to leverage properly.

Actually, a jeep would produce soil (sand) compaction and more destruction of habitat. Its high-torque tires would roll in a straight line, rather than stepping, increasing the likelihood of injury and death of small desert animals. Largely, rolling vehicles over non-developed land kills a whole bunch of animals in the process.

Edward Elrich would agree with you there.

It would not be awesome; it would be sacrilege!

This thing converts nickel into copper. Copper! Nickel is itself rare, and incredibly useful. Steel, the all-powerful metal used for everything which requires strength, the metal used for swords and shields and war machines, the metal used to stand up buildings and build great engines. Nickel, mixed with iron, strengthens steel: most strong steels and superalloys involve a not-insignificant quantity of nickel, between 0.2% and 8%.

If anything, we need more nickel, vanadium, and molybdenum! We already produce molybdenum by fusion reaction, though.

It doesn't make scientific sense because fusing nickel into copper would be easy for me to comment on if I had bothered to put the periodic table in my mind palace.

Nickel is heavier than Iron; fusing it requires input energy. Nuclear binding energy is highest at iron: fusing heavier elements takes energy, and fusing lighter elements releases energy. There is more energy in Copper's nuclear bindings than Nickel's; there's more energy in Carbon's nuclear bindings than Nitrogen's. Fusing Carbon to create Nitrogen would release energy; fusing Nickel to create Copper would consume energy.

It is, but that's not the point. The Internet is an additional vector, and one in which the perception of anonymity is largely available as a starting point. Children like anonymity: they don't want their teachers telling their parents about stuff.

Interaction with a teacher means the child has a direct, plausible link to the teacher, and everyone knows who the teacher is in relation to the child. Interaction with a stranger means the child doesn't expect the stranger to regularly talk to his parents (although may worry about the stranger coming to FIND his parents), and the stranger doesn't expect anyone to know who the hell he is if the child tattles (he may even be out of his local area, and picking up a target while 100 miles from home, thus the man-hunt will likely fail). People are too dull-minded to realize the child on the other end is not actually a child, but Chris Hansen, so rational arguments here are unimportant: sometimes it works, and often people are idiots.

And, still, the heavy crackdown creates all kinds of problems where a young adult (not a child) of high school age may wind up indicted and arrested for doing things teenagers do, like showing their dicks to other teenagers. E-mail your penis to a 14-year-old once, and involve the cops--you'll get arrested. The big secret is you'll get arrested EVEN IF YOU'RE 15. In some states, two 17-year-olds having sex would both be arrested and charged with rape (yes, they both raped each other). Imagine what this does.

The law at least needs reasonable exemptions. I'm a fan of age-exemptions and good faith: If you're 19, and you have a 17-year-old girlfriend or acquaintance or whatever, that's close enough. If you bone her and 18 is legal, well, look, you're like... either pre-existing romantic-sexual relationship, consideration of pre-existing non-sexual relationship (yeah, you've known this girl since you were 14, and now you've started to bone? Look, I can let that slide), or narrow gap (she's only 2 years younger than you--of course you can bone her). If she sends you pics of her boobs... you should probably delete them; but I would suggest jurisprudence provide leniency for a barely-out-of-high-school kid who has a collection of boob picks high school girls sent him, and hasn't shared them: this isn't a child pornography distribution ring, and you should probably just order the images destroyed and tell everyone to stop being idiots before they wind up on the sex offender registry.

We treat this kind of shit like we've just stumbled over 40-year-old teachers boning 7th grade girls and distributing MPEGs and live streaming video all over Vietnam and Canada. It's stupid that sexting a girl you share a class with can get you tried as an adult and branded a sex offender for life. Unless you're her teacher, of course; then you get the hammer, because lol u dum.

You're comparing failure rate (in mice, not rats) to data gathering.

If we have a drug that appears, statistically, to affect humans, and it also affects rats, we can use that drug on rats and then vivisect them to examine their mechanism of action. Do you know the last time we vivisected a human for medical science? I'll give you a hint: the human was a Jew.

The most important benchmark is this: if a thing gives advantage X with a great deal of knowledge, skill, care, or some combination; and advantage X is not significantly better than some other implementation which solves the same problem but isn't as easily screwed up and, thus, produces better results with less knowledge, skill, and care; then the other implementation is better, and will produce as-good or better results more often.

Basically, advantage of consistent suitability versus advantage of a powerful tool requiring an exquisitely trained and rigorously practiced specialist. Of course, we take this to an unfortunate extreme in our society, making things wholly unsuitable for all but the most narrow and inadequate cases, but usable by idiots with zero knowledge or understanding. The goal is for your simpler tool to produce the same value with almost exactly the same efficiency (if not better) when similarly skilled as to be able to use the more complex tool, not to cut away features and call it "better" because there are fewer things to do and, thus, fewer ways to fuck up.

with experience graffiti worked fine with finger tips. the stylus just let you see things better

my thought exactly, and then I recall how blackberry took a big chunk of the pda market from palm. perhaps the smaller form factor will make it compelling again.

on the otherhand apple watch already demoed transmitting drawn shapes on their watch presumably for the same rationale of input to a small form factor.

It feels like the message is "fear, citizen! But don't fear too much! Fear, but trust your glorious leaders!"

The last message was "Fear, citizen! Be very afraid! But the enemy has a face, and your glorious leaders will protect you! FEAR, AND GIVE US POWER TO PROTECT YOU!"

Our enemy has no face. Ebola simply appears, invisible, silent, and then bursts from within in blood and gore and leaves you not knowing if you, too, will soon die. The government wants you to not fear, but to fear it enough: to know that it is out there, but not scary because it can't come here, because they protect you.

With terrorists, you should be pants-shitting scared; but terrorists can't hurt you unless you can see them here, moving, and thus we can see them and catch them, and you should give us every tool to see all and stop all. The pants-shitting terror is over there, and you can see plainly that it's not moving here, not silently and invisibly as would Ebola.

When I am famous and well-respected, I will still use terms like "pants-shitting fear" in public forum, where appropriate. At times, a man must call a spade a fucking shovel.

Your arguments are silly. My way is a known, standard, valid statistical method; it's not my fault some people mis-apply them to falsify information. I can do randomized, controlled tests and produce a variety of results based on analysis. This has been done for everything from hospital survival rates to psychological studies.

It's been shown, for example, that you can take two hospitals with inpatient and outpatient surgeries and show that either is statistically more survivable. One hospital may show a greater percentage of outpatients recover (or simply survive), and a greater percentage of inpatients recover (or survive), making it the better chance for both types of surgery; yet show that a lower percentage of total surgeries end in success (or survival) than the same rival hospital that has less success (or survivability) of each type of surgery.

Surgeries and survival rates are a fictional example from any statistics textbook; the real-life example is actually on Wikipedia, and covers kidney stones.

Likewise, randomized, controlled studies on memory have had similar results. Studies covering mnemonic systems have shown that mnemonics help retention when comparing *the amount remembered* (more items remembered when using mnemonics); that they harm retention when comparing *the amount forgotten* (more items forgotten when using mnemonics); and that there is no difference when *percentage* is compared. The same data has shown that memorization strategies are helpful, harmful, and non-effective.

Those studies often have fundamental flaws in methodology, as well. The above mnemonics studies measure bare memory of lists of numbers or words or objects. In practice, mnemonics decrease learning time and increase capacity: the mnemonic helps a topic stick for a while, while further study helps solidify retention. Drawing conclusions outside this context is misleading: it can suggest that these techniques are either magic bullets to memorizing everything or bullshit that doesn't help in any case. Limiting medical studies is a similar tactic: study a drug's very short-term effects or its biochemical effects and claim it's a powerful treatment for some off-label use, even if it's non-viable long-term or even in practice at all.

Science is based on peer-reviewied empirical studies, not on results. Method and methodology are both far more important than outcome, as the data can be made to bark and do back-flips.

Good, then you should be able to overload 'if' and '{' in C, right?

Summary is trying to suggest that drugs are good and that marijuana is beneficial. I'm reading from the direct quote by Carl Sagan and seeing "our society is a fucking polished turd".

Short version: You've read some medical papers, which make use of statistics in experiments. I've been told I'm the only person in history to get a perfect score on the advanced placement statistics and probability exam, although I'm sure that was just the excited babble of an obsessive asian math teacher. I do have a founding grasp on statistical analysis, experimental design, and the complexities and shortcomings of studies over experiments.

You went on a long tirade about how something "works half the time" like that's actually meaningful, and how they wouldn't get so much success in Africa. Being right half the time means your procedure isn't accurate AT ALL: it's a coin toss, it's random, it's about as good as chance. Half is zero; always and never are perfect, except one side indicates some procedural interpretation error.

You don't have to. You already know the results of the handling procedures in each facility, with the staff they have, and with the turn-over rate they have (from staff falling ill and, occasionally, dying). You just vaccinate the whole facility and see if there's a change. You can readily identify any changes in handling procedure, so you can detect those types of confounding.

As for facilities with poor handling, they're even less likely to fix their handling procedures, so they also make better test beds. Likewise, they're at greater risk, and the impact of successful vaccination is greater, so they should produce more striking results--which means more confidence, less data needed to show that there is a real impact.

To illustrate, let's assume that Africans are terrible at running medical facilities and experience a 75% transmission rate per week: 3/4 of their healthcare providers in Ebola treatment facilities contract ebola EVERY WEEK. European facilities with similar load experience a 1% transmission rate. If your drug is 50% effective, you should immediately see a 37.5% drop in Ebola transmission in African facilities; in European facilities, you'll see a 0.5% drop.

A 0.5% drop is 1 doctor out of 200, so a facility may not even show a difference without months of data collection; and it will take years to determine if that difference is outside of variation, by collecting just massive amounts of data that should show +0.3% or -0.3% but is showing -0.5% and thus shows vaccination success with a 0.2% margin of error. Meanwhile the 37.5% drop in Africa looks like a fuckin' miracle, and the numbers you're getting are far outside of normal variance: facilities should not have anywhere near this low transmission rate, ever, for any period of time, and so something has changed dramatically.

Of course, a highly-successful vaccine will produce meaningful more readily. Even in well-handled facilities, when an epidemic is large, someone occasionally gets ill; if we're seeing illness, and we suddenly stop seeing illness, even if the original transmission rate is small, sudden cessation is bluntly significant. As it stands, our more developed facilities have roughly 0 transmission rate due to low load and fantastic handling procedures; even a 100% successful vaccine would be difficult to measure there--even with an experimental control group, rather than historical control.

Statistics r hard. Experimental design r hard. Ethics r hard. But shit, kid, life is hard.