Reminds me of one of Lloyd Trefethen's maxims about numerical mathematics (http://people.maths.ox.ac.uk/trefethen/maxims.html ):

"If the answer is highly sensitive to perturbations, you have probably asked the wrong question."

Maybe a more accurate headline is "US Government Shutdown on temporary hiatus"? It's only a few months funding, and there's no guarantee we won't go through the entire thing again come January 15th...

"Statistically Significant" doesn't really make sense here...that sort of computation assumes that the people being surveyed are a representative sample of all users.

In this case we've got a pretty strong selection bias going on where people who are most upset about the new policy are the most likely to vote.

It's an ingenious little device that's sort of a cross between a French Press and a pour-over filter. You pour the coffee and hot water in a paper filter at the top and let it infuse for a few minutes. Once your coffee's sufficiently strong, you place it on top of your cup, which lifts the stopper and lets the coffee drip out the bottom. For more on this. See http://www.sweetmarias.com/clevercoffeedripperpictorial.php for more information.

For me its just the opposite. An advertisement is an attempt to get me to trust the advertiser's word on their product. If they want to convince me, the way to start is by being honest about what they're doing and not try and disguise it as something else.

If the balance right now is Google's superior search vs. Amazon's superior convenience/prime shipping, I think that still gives the advantage to Amazon.

Amazon can improve their search mechanism over time, but it's much harder for Google to match Amazon's advantages.

An example of Astroturfing on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/The-Twelfth-Cliburn-Piano-Competition/product-reviews/B000BZ8IA8/ref=cm_cr_pr_btm_link_4?ie=UTF8&filterBy=addFiveStar&pageNumber=4&showViewpoints=0

Of the 35 five star reviews, about 30 were posted in a 1 week period by people who have no other reviews. Of course, each of those reviewers carefully voted up all the previous other 5 star reviews to promote them in the review rankings (so

As a non-fencer, I actually found the epee much easier to follow than the other events (mainly because there was no need to worry about right of way). The other events were enjoyable to watch, but I did a lot of taking the scoring on faith/outright ignoring the scoring and just watching the fencing.

For me the lack of commentary (or in some cases the inclusion of feed commentators who weren't as biased as NBC's) was one of the best things about the streaming.

From the abstract of Tao's paper: Our argument relies on some previous numerical work, namely the verification of Richstein of the even Goldbach conjecture up to $4 \times 10^{14}$, and the verification of van de Lune and (independently) of Wedeniwski of the Riemann hypothesis up to height $3.29 \times 10^9$.

Richstein's work (available at http://www.ams.org/journals/mcom/2001-70-236/S0025-5718-00-01290-4/S0025-5718-00-01290-4.pdf ) definitely involves a computer, and I assume the Riemann hypothesis verification does as well.

Tor has links to online versions of the nominees for Short Story, for Novellette and for four out of the five Novellas.

Of Ted Chiang's six stories written since 2001, four have won the Hugo award, one was nominated for the Hugo award before Chiang withdrew it from consideration (saying "The story that was published isn’t the story I wanted it to be."), and the sixth was a 1 page speculation for Nature magazine.

After all, it deals with a graph whose nodes and connections are already known exactly.

The more interesting part comes when you move to a graph like the link structure or underlying router structure of the internet, which is both orders of magnitude larger and changing rapidly -- even if you could take a perfect snapshot of it, by the time you finished analyzing that snapshot the network would have changed quite a bit in the meantime.

What Lovasz has been doing recently with his work on "graph limits" is providing a framework for analyzing such graphs. You can imagine global properties of the network approaching some sort of fixed equilibrium and hope to analyze that equilibrium without actually knowing the details of how the network is changing. I don't actually know if the work has been used in practical applications yet, but the concept goes far beyond just redrawing planar graphs.