Well, it's not my media -- I'm Canadian, and have never lived in the US. I visit from time to time, and have had some business related trips here and there, but it's not my country.

Still, if you want a more impartial view of things that are happening in the US, you can do worse than talking to a Canadian. Canadians are the great American watchers. It's somewhat hard to avoid -- we share a continent, they have 10 times our population, and we get most of their television channels. Their politics and business often affects us quite intimately, so we have a collective habit of paying a lot of attention to what they're doing down there. To paraphrase one of our greatest Prime Ministers, we're a mouse in bed with an elephant. It's certainly good policy to keep an eye on the elephant, in case it decides to roll over.

I've never been to Sweden, so I can't really say much about your experiences there.

What I can say is that anytime an American has decided they need more freedom, they come to Canada. There are a lot of examples over the last few hundred years: the United Empire Loyalists (basically, people loyal to England during the American Revolution), black slaves via the Underground Railroad, Vietnam draft dodgers, Iraq veterans who did't want to be redeployed yet again -- the list is long and varied.

This debate has also occurred within the US, in conjunction with illegal immigrants from Mexico, particularly in places like Arizona, which tried to pass laws permitting law enforcement to target people like this. IIRC, the measure failed in the end due to the fact they were targeting people who "looked Mexican", even if they were long-time American citizens. So that's hardly unique to Sweden.

There is a big difference between the propaganda and how Hollywood would like everyone to see the US, and reality here too, unfortunately.

It's hard to be free when you can't afford health care, and a member of your family gets ill. It's hard to be free when the state you live in has a history of serious racial segregation. It's hard to be free when you're homosexual and your employer is 100% legally entitled to fire you from your job, or your landlord to evict you because of your sexual orientation. And the US has the largest incarcerated population of any country in the world (more than 2.2 million Americans are in jail, giving it the second highest per capita incarceration rate in the world). There are a lot of people in the US for whom "land of the free" has never lived up to the hype.

You'd probably find that Sweden would be a whole lot richer if it had 330 million people living there.

A very large part of the US's wealth really comes down to the number of people. That's not to put down the fact that they have developed a very advanced nation, of course -- it still takes a lot of work to get to the Western worlds level of development, and to maintain a high level of productivity. However, Sweden is also an advanced nation, and if it had the population of the US, you'd probably find that Sweden would be a whole lot richer as well.

I don't mean to put down the US. But there is a difference between the nationalistic/super-patriotic way they see themselves, and reality. I invite you to travel there and see the reality for yourself. There are amazing people and places there, but there is also a lot of unnecessary social ills. How you are treated there will depends a lot on where you are, what colour your skin is, what religion you follow, immigration status, and what your sexual orientation is. Different people will have wildly different experiences, because there is still a huge amount of prejudice there. People in those groups hardly feel all that "free". As the great American President JFK once said, "...this Nation, for all its hopes and all its boasts, will not be fully free until all its citizens are free."

Yaz

You seriously need to take off those rose-tinted glasses.

Or maybe just read a US news website once in a while. The US is a country where a) justice is applied very unequally, depending on your race (ref: the recent analysis of Ferguson, Missouri); b) where there are all sorts of political battles raging right now over the number of illegal immigrants living in the US (estimated in 2008 as 12 million people; more than the entire population of Sweden! The basis is often about how the President isn't doing enough to "protect the border"), and has the highest murder rate of any of the western, industrialized nations (by quite a bit -- you're nearly 7 times more likely to be murdered in the US than in Sweden, for example).

There are a lot of things to laud the United States over -- but the ones you specifically picked aren't them. Unless you were going for sarcasm, in which case "whoosh!" to me.

Yaz

I'm not convinced you know your history of devices at the time all that well.

WinCE/Windows Mobile/etc. didn't start to succeed against Palm because of great improvements in Windows for devices; it started to take over because of overt stagnation in PalmOS-based devices.

Palm become successful with the PalmPilot and PalmPilot Pro, in part because it was simple, quick, and worked. It avoided many of the complexities of the PC ecosystem, such as the notion of everything being in a "file" (PalmOS used an in-memory record-based storage model instead), so that people could work with the kinds of PDA data they wanted to work with in a more natural manner.

Unfortunately, Palm saw great success, and pretty much decided to keep on doing what they were doing, without really pushing any significant boundaries. They dragged their feet on implementing a colour display. They dragged their feet adding any form of wireless communication (before the Tungsten era, they only communications you could get were either via the serial interface, or via a modem over the serial interface). Palm OS 6.0 (Cobalt) was in development for a good part of a decade, and in the end never shipped on any device. The business itself went from being a stand-alone business to being bought out by US Robotics, which was then bought out by 3Com two years later. The founders didn't like the direction 3Com was taking the company, bailed, and formed Handspring. Meanwhile, only two years later, 3Com spun Palm off into it's own, separate company again. Two years after that, Palm broke itself into palmOne (hardware) and PalmSource (software)...in another two years, palmOne bought out some of PalmSources IP, and the rest of PalmSource was sold to ACCESS. palmOne became Palm again, merged with Handspring, developed webOS -- and a few short years later was bought out by HP.

Now I didn't have a very large peek behind the scenes -- I was out on the sidelines writing the jSyncManager, once in a while hearing from a manager at Palm, but even from the outside it was easy to see that the serious game of Hot Potato being played with/by Palm led to some serious issues with innovation. There really wasn't any. Developments were iterative and slow. Where they were once ahead of the curve, by the year 2000 they were already falling behind. It took them ages just to integrate their system with a phone! The device and platform was nearly stagnant by the time webOS was released, and while innovative, in the end it was too little, too late -- especially when compared to what Apple showed the world with iOS.

The point being, Windows on mobile devices didn't rise in prominence because they suddenly were seen as extremely good devices. They had a UI with lots of small items that needed a stylus to manipulate, their browser was substandard, and the devices needed frequent rebooting. Battery life wasn't great, and when compared to Palm with it's simplified interface, were a PITA to use for normal PDA uses. Sure, they were great for the Windows geek who wanted to show how they had an underpowered Windows PC in their pocket, and became somewhat the standard for use in embedded systems like barcode scanners, but for virtually everyone else, they were nearly useless. However, they did suck much less than Palm did by that time. PalmOS pretty much hadn't changed in 10 years. It took ages for them to add simple things like colour and wireless networking (and even when they did, that was a feature relegated to only one or two models). The core of the OS was pretty close to stagnant -- they used pretty much the same non-threaded kernel from the original Pilot 1000 all the way up to PalmOS 4. Windows for mobile devices only looked good in comparison to how badly Palm continually fumbled around instead of innovating.

Looking back, considering that Windows on mobile devices (in its various incarnations) was only better in that it sucked less than Palm did, it shouldn't come as any surprise that Apple came in and ate everyones lunches overnight. Microsoft than, as now, took the wrong approach, and Palm just sat around and frittered away their lead until they didn't matter anymore (not entirely their fault -- all the resets and restarts and changes in direction from being bought and sold every 2 - 3 years for 15 years was as much to blame as anything). Microsoft only had the distinction of being the best of the worst -- which is still better than Palm's giving away the market entirely.

In summation, Windows Mobile 5 didn't knock "Palm down several notches". Palm was already actively falling down a notch-filled pit of doom. Sure, this helped Windows Mobile for a short while, but I'm not so sure that "sucking less than Palm" is really all that much to brag about. In the end, the market certainly didn't find it all that exciting.

Yaz

Because it violates the standard definition of "refactoring".

Refactoring is about changing the structure of the code, and not the algorithms used within the code. The goal is typically to reduce coupling, increase cohesion, and (frequently) to improve testability.

Replacing an algorithm with a better algorithm isn't "refactoring", it's "rewriting".

Taking your giant brute-force method and breaking it into smaller parts in a cohesive unit (source file, class, package, etc.) with lowered coupling (perhaps by genericizing previously tightly-coupled bits), in such a way that the individual units have a smaller testing surface -- but is otherwise the same algorithm -- then you've refactored the code, by definition.

Yaz

Objective-C++!

(Yes, there is such a thing. And yes, I'm being facetious.)

Yaz

It isn't that hard -- Macs haven't had any sort of specialty printer port on any model that I'm aware of for at least 15 years now.

Yaz

Unfortunately, the experiment came to an abrupt end when they threw "ET: The Extra Terrestrial" at the AI, whereupon after an hour of trying different tactics the AI decided that the only way to win was to send a power surge through the system, frying the only working Atari 2600 the researchers could dig up.

This still classifies the AI as coming up with the best solution to the game ever implemented.

Yaz

I agree -- however, I find most people with some background in at least one science can at least glean something from reading the abstract, and hopefully some bits and pieces of the statistical analysis (something I admittedly wish I had better background in. If I could afford the time and money to go back to University, I'd love to take stats and philosophy of science).

I think part of the problem for many peoples that the state of knowledge in science isn't a binary proposition. In much of science, the answer to 'Is X true?" boils down to five possibilities: 'yes', 'yes with caveats', 'no', 'no with caveats', and 'uncertain' ("more research in this area is required"). So if you're seeing only a few studies, and they seem to be contradictory, the conclusion you need to take is simply "this area requires more research".

And that is my problem with how most people approach science. They see one study, and say 'Science says X!", when in reality, it's really just one study that says X. Unless you have a massive body of scientific work behind a concept (such as evolution, or gravitation), one can't really make any claims as to what "science" says. Consequently, you also shouldn't be disappointed if future research on a new or lightly researched area of science later produces a paper with a contradictory view -- you can't feel that this means that "Science was wrong!". Science is seldom, if ever, "wrong" -- but how much importance people put into preliminary/early/initial results can certainly make them mistakenly feel that way.

I'm somewhat reminded of how people with multiple sclerosis reacted to Dr. Paolo Zamboni's "liberation therapy". Here was a medical doctor who produced a paper where he looked at the neck veins of a group of people with MS, found they had some narrowing of the veins and iron deposits in the brain, and came up with an angioplasty procedure to open these veins up, believing that MS was caused by "chronic cerebrospinal venous insufficiency" (basically, insufficient blood drainage from the brain). He tried it on his own wife, she subjectively said she felt a bit better, and suddenly MS sufferers around the world were flying to third-world countries to have this done to them (for a fee, of course), and in some countries (like Canada) were begging their national governments to bring the procedure on-shore and to make it part of the social healthcare system.

Unfortunately, Dr. Zamboni's research was deeply flawed. Firstly, his study wasn't "blinded". It also didn't have a comparison group -- he didn't even look for vein narrowing in non-MS populations. Thirdly, he didn't disclose that he had financial ties to a company that made equipment to treat the condition he had "discovered". These are all problematic, but IMO the worst was really the lack of a comparison group for control purposes. As two further studies have shown, the type of vein narrowing Dr. Zamboni detected are equally prevalent in both people with MS and people without MS.

Now MS is a terrible disease. People who suffer from MS live in a sort of quiet bravery, in constant struggle against their condition, and with a lot of hope for a cure. I hope one is found. Unfortunately, all too many of them jumped on this one, and got ill-advised procedures done, which in some cases has led to a worsening of their symptoms, and even death. Damage has been done, all because one paper made a lot of hopeful people jump up and say "Science says X!", when really all that "science" should be saying (and what most scientists in this area actually said) was "this is a potentially interesting result -- let's do more research in this area to see if it goes anywhere".

Truth be told, the vast bulk of science output tends to come down to "more research in this area is needed". That's what the "common man on the street" misses when they see a "result" in a single paper. Sure research needs to be taken only as a stating point for more research -- and not an end-point recommending what people need to do. As a process, science requires a lot of time to really get to the point where it can say 'X is true (with caveats)'.

(As an aside, one general scientific area that I'm interested in is negative results: science that doesn't work. The kind of science where the preliminary result says "we hypothesized this might be true, but we now know it isn't". Not enough of this sort of science seems to happen (or get good funding/publicity) anymore, unless you're disproving someone else original, positive result. The negative result is extremely scientifically honest, and sets up some useful boundaries for what we think might be true. Unfortunately, even scientists want to be the people who discover the next big thing, and many funding organizations want to fund science that leads directly to some result they can sell, making it harder to do science that discovers where the edges of knowledge are.)

Yaz

(For the record, educated as a scientist, but not currently working in primary research)

Do you not have children?

Yup -- we have a 4yo. The recommendation we received was to give her some small smears of peanut butter around the age of 1 now and then, and to simply watch for any negative reactions.

She had none, which of course doesn't prove anything in and of itself.

I should note that the results from the recent study aren't new. Here are a few papers worth checking out on the subject:

• Early consumption of peanuts in infancy is associated with a low prevalence of peanut allergy (2008 - an interesting study, although I will note it was apparently funded by the US National Peanut Board),
• Factors Associated with the Development of Peanut Allergy in Childhood(2003 - an interesting part of this article link is that it contains a tab to read all of the letters the journal received concerning this research. It's a useful read for you, as it shows how research is commented on, and potentially refined within the scientific community).

Interestingly, the above link does mention that the advice you received was common advice (at the time of publication in 2008) in the UK, Australia, and in the past in North America (so I don't disbelieve that you received this advice -- although "common" doesn't necessarily imply "supported by research").

Yaz

Yes, but I have kids and we've always been told not to feed them peanuts till they are a certain age. Now it looks like that was bad advice.

Yes, but who was the one telling you this? Did you read it in a paper in a peer-reviewed scientific journal? Or was it something your co-workers mother told you because she saw it on Oprah? Or did you just read it in the newspaper?

The problem with what most people "believe" about science is that they don't read the actual science. They read someone else's summary of what they think the science says, and then go by that, believing they "know what science has to say on a subject".

I'll note here FWIW that in my experience, most Medical Doctors are bad scientists. They don't do primary research, and don't necessarily read the primary research. And if they do, they don't necessarily understand the limitations of the primary research. Or they might make a recommendation based upon an overabundance of caution based on incomplete research (which is probably the case of what you thought you knew about peanuts).

Again, as I extolled in another recent post to you -- read the actual research if you want to get an idea of what "science" has to say about a subject. And don't take what you read as cannon until it's been backed up by a number of studies reproducing the first, along with a meta-analysis of all such papers published. Until the scientific community has labelled something as either a "law" or a "theory", it pretty much needs to be considered as not-necessarily-100%-reliable.

Yaz

The question is, when do you know the science is "finished"? I swear every year there is a new study saying something is good for you, followed by more studies saying it's bad for you, then more saying it's good for you.

My guess is you don't read the studies, but just go by what you read in the press.

Look, learning about new discoveries from the newspaper/radio/TV/Internet isn't a bad thing -- but it's only a first step. Unless you're reading specialized research magazines or journals, however, you're probably not getting more than a glimmer of useful information.

As an example (not to be confused with a real-life example; I'm too tired to start researching references for a /. post...), a researcher may do a study, and release a paper saying "X dose of compound Y, commonly found in alcoholic beverage B, lessens human cell type Z mortality by K% in a petrie dish". It will also include a whole pile of caveats, and probably the statement "more research is needed" somewhere towards the end, along with a section on some future research directions.

Mr. Science Desk Writer hears about it from somewhere, looks up the average human lifespan L, and publishes an article with the headline "New research shows drinking alcoholic beverage B will increase your lifespan by K%!". You read it, and decide to go and hit your alcohol cabinet for a drink.

Of course, the column doesn't properly represent the research. It takes data out of context: in this case a) by not properly correlating the dose X of compound Y with how much alcohol you would need to drink to get those dose, b) whether that chemical is converted by your liver to something else before it gets to where it needs to go, c) whether that chemical is even absorbed by the bloodstream to get to human cell type Z, d) whether what was found to be true in a petrie dish will also be true inside a human body, e) that what is found to be true of cell type Z may not hold true for other types of cells, f) whether any benefits attributable to cell type Z are negated by negative effects on any other types of human cells, or any other part of human physiology, and g) that you can't correlate a reduction of cell death to a whole body (i.e.: you can't just take two numbers you read in studies and multiply them together, in this case human lifespan and some cell death reduction percentage).

On top of this, as things turn out, a year later some other researcher (Researcher B) gets some research funding, and decides to replicate the experiments from the original paper. Maybe they do this because they find the statistical methods used by the original researcher don't make for a particularly strong case, or maybe they just want to verify the results. Researcher B sets up the experiment, but does it on a much larger scale (perhaps they have better funding) in order to get more data. After doing a detailed analysis of the data, they find that the effect either a) isn't anywhere as strong as the original paper described, or b) the effect doesn't exist at all, or c) that there was an error in the experimental setup that accounts for the effect (i.e: they found out that in order to help prevent compound Y from breaking down too easily for the experiment, that it had been refrigerated to 5C before being applied to the cells in the culture, and this had a sort of cryonic effect on the cells that extended their lifespan -- that the nature of the compound Y had nothing to do with the measured results). They publish their own paper, again with "more research needed" caveat, and a list of possible future directions.

Mr. Science Desk Writer, of course, may never see this paper, and so may continue to report on the original research. Or they may have moved on to some other area, like whatever the latest NASA probe photographed. Or perhaps they even wind up reporting on the latest research -- and you read it, and suddenly decide "those crazy scientists don't know what they're talking about! They keep changing their minds!".

The disconnect, however, is a) the bad science reporting in the first place, which over-emphasizes what the research actually says, and b) people who get their science reporting from mass media and take it "As What Science Says About The Subject", as if it were written in the Holy Bible of Science.

If you really want to know what science has to say, read the papers. I'll admit that can be difficult if you don't have access to a University library online database, and don't subscribe to journals in every area of science -- but that's the only way you'll actually know what the science says. Typically, you'll find the research so filled with caveats, especially with new discoveries that haven't been replicated, that you won't find the discovery quite as interesting anymore. That doesn't make it bad research -- they make for starting points. Many will lead down blind alleys. Some will lead to places we don't currently find useful. Some may lead to interesting discoveries. A precious few might give some other researcher a spark of an idea that leads down a completely different avenue of discovery. That is what makes such papers important to scientists.

So go to the source when you can. Don't trust the science reporting you read in the papers, especially if they're based on a single paper or a single researcher (or even research group). Read the papers when you can, even if just the executive summaries and the limitations sections (and I'll admit -- I'm not conversant in every research area of science; some of them have math and language hard to penetrate if you come from a completely different background. Still, you can usually get some idea of what was actually claimed by reading the abstract, and what the researcher feels is the limits of their research by reading the appropriate section of the paper(s)).

(Given all of the above, it amazes me how quick people are to believe that red wine extends your life, or that vaccines cause autism based on single papers being published, but doubt human-centric climate change which has thousands of papers backing it.)

Yaz

Just in case anyone reading your message jumps to the wrong conclusion, I'll remind everyone that correlation != causation, even in this case.

There is, however, growing evidence that microexons -- tiny gene fragments that aren't well understood -- that are linked to altered brain development in individuals with autism (paper).

And (IIRC) there is a certain amount of correlation between problems with microexons and older fathers. Due to the cost and length of their education, engineers may not be having children until they are older (and perhaps more established in their careers), increasing the risk factor (it has been well established that older fathers are more likely to sire autistic children).

I'm not accusing you of having much such an assumption. The correlation is interesting and needs further investigation, however it may just stems from age of fathers, rather than any special mental makeup of engineers.

Yaz

What, and you can absolutely guarantee that your monogamous partner has never been with someone else and contracted the disease?

You can see into the future and (goodness forbid) know you'll never lose your partner in some unfortunate way, and won't ever be in a new relationship again?

Yaz

Maybe where you live, but the cost of my iPad 2 3G service is $15 a month. On top of that, if you I've in an urban centre, you're probably well covered by WiFi anyway. So that $15 goes quite a long way. I can pay for 2 years of 3G service at the cost of what a Windows laptop would cost me, with the benefit being (wait for it)...I don't have to carry a crappy sub-$300 Windows laptop with me everywhere I go. The EC2 Windows instance living in the cloud I use most frequently is a quad-core with 24GB of RAM and a few TB of hard disk space -- and you're not going to find a cheap sub-$300 Windows laptop with those sorts of specs.

Yaz

Of course there is. You install an RDP or VNC client on your phone or tablet, take a few minutes to setup a cloud OS instance on your favourite cloud service (EC2, Azure, whatever), and connect. You now have the full PC experience on your phone or tablet, running whatever you want, from wherever you want, for however long you want it.

Yaz