If you want statistics on Harvard, here they are:

http://www.gradeinflation.com/Harvard.html

The rest of gradeinflation.com gives much more information you may find interesting.

This is also incorrect. Far more important in the school's rankings are (a) the percent of their admitted class to accept the admissions offer, and (b) a higher number of students who get job offers after graduating. This incentivizes schools to lower failure rates (US News and World Report reports graduation rates and rolls them into rankings because they know it turns off most prospective students), and also to increase grades to make their students' resumes look better.

At least as far as parallel computing goes. CPUs have been designed for decades to handle sequential problems, where each new computation is likely to have dependencies on the results of recent computations. GPUs, on the other hand, are designed for situations where most of the operations happen on huge vectors of data; the reason they work well isn't really that they have many cores, but that the operations for splitting up the data and distributing it to the cores is (supposedly) done in hardware. In a CPU, the programmer has to deal with splitting up the data, and allowing the programmer to control that process makes many hardware optimizations impossible.

The surprising thing in TFA is that Intel is claiming to have done almost as well on a problem that NVIDIA used to tout their GPUs. It really makes me wonder what problem it was. The claim that "performance on both CPUs and GPUs is limited by memory bandwidth" seems particularly suspect, since on a good GPU the memory access should be parallelized.

It's clear that Intel wants a piece of the growing CUDA userbase, but I think it will be a while before any x86 processor can compete with a GPU on the problems that a GPU's architecture was specifically designed to address.

What an awful article...this one, and the HIV one that everyone keeps citing. This one starts off with the statement from the director of the institute that created it, "male circumcision is a scientifically proven method for reducing a man's risk of acquiring HIV infection." No real scientist would ever make this claim--science does not prove anything.

It gets worse. The way they conducted the studies (in both cases) was to start off with a large group of men, circumcise half of them, and see who comes back with more infections. There's no way to do blinding here, since you're going to know whether or not you've been circumcised. For example, one confounding factor may simply be that circumcisions hurt--maybe the controlled group just had less sex. Unfortunately, they didn't give any evidence for a mechanism, which makes it somewhat difficult to believe it. (As an aside, the mechanism they suggest is that the foreskin helps the HPV cells enter the cells on the surface of the penis--which suggests that it could prevented by simply pulling the foreskin back for a while after sex).

Another odd part about the study--the Herpes/HPV study was done in Uganda, and the one on HIV was done in Kenya. Of course, applying the results of a study to a population different from the one used in the study is generally a problem, but it's even worse in this case, because this whole conversation started because we believed circumcision stops people from using condoms. Kenya and Uganda are both known for disliking condoms, and so the effects of circumcision reducing the use of condoms has been minimized.

I'm interested to hear how you define "lie". I think analytic philosophy has shown that it's nearly impossible to decide whether a statement is "true" or "false" in a completely black-and-white sense.

For me, a lie is any attempt to convince someone else of something that you yourself don't believe. And Bush certainly did this; he knew that the intelligence wasn't nearly as condemning as he wanted America to believe.