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Comment Doesn't really answer the question (Score 1) 1469

The statistics does tell us that pregnancy after rape isn't rare, but it doesn't fully answer the question raised at the beginning of the article. Ceteris paribus (that is, controlling for condom use, contraceptive use, day of the cycle, age, race, etc) is a woman less likely to get pregnant through rape. I don't think it *relevant* as far as the abortion debate goes, but I'm genuinely *curious*. One would expect an evolutionary arm race to have equipped women with some mechanism to avoid rape pregnancies and men with some counter measures to said mechanisms. I wonder who has the edge.

Comment Re:Sensor fusion (Score 1) 104

erratum:
In order to combine all the sources of information, are you relying on a messy approach, something based on some classic machine learning algorithms (think boosting, SVNs, random forests etc) or are you writing an explicit generative model for the (trajectory, sensor output) and then apply filtering to it?

Comment Sensor fusion (Score 2) 104

In order to combine all the sources of information, are you relying on a messy approach, something based on many signature machine learning algorithms (think boosting, SVNs, random forests etc) or are you writing an explicit generative model for the noise and then applying filtering to it, with a particle filter for instance?

Comment Conclusion (Score 5, Insightful) 567

We live around 90% slouches who would rather waste thousand of hours in the future than take 10 minutes now to learn to use a piece software correctly. The same applies to touch typing, but also eating junk, shopping with a 20% APY credit, etc. High time preference leads to social decay. Now stay out of my lawn.

Comment Re:Mama don't..... (Score 0) 732

Insightful? Really?

During the financial crisis, it seems everyone became a self professed financial expert. This is not an insightful comment, this is barroom economics.

"Bundle a bunch of bad loans". How? Do you know how a CDO is structured? What is a bad loan exactly? The word "bad" is assuming the consequent. What banks did was aggregate risky loans into structure product, and form tranches. This procedure allows investors with different risk appetite to essentially offer credit to risky borrowers. Yes, the modelling of CDO was poor, and the pumping of liquidity by the fed in the short term lending market didn't help, neither did the guarantee offered by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac for MBC.

"Sell them claiming their good loans". To whom and how? It's not like the product was secretive or anything. Caveat emptor. Did it help that rating agencies are an oligopoly that prevented competitive rating of bond quality? Hell no! Does it mean that the banks had a sure fire way of making money? No!

Bet money that they'll fail? You're probably referring to Goldman here.... hum funny but that didn't happen. How about reading the case?

Laying off a bunch of worker so that the stock price jump? Wow that's magic. Why exactly the stock price jumps if you're laying worker obviously doesn't need an explanation, just a conceited approving nod I guess.

Summary: if you don't know shit about finance, shut the fuck up.

Comment Bullshit (Score 1) 105

The 5-year, National Science Foundation-funded RoboBee project could lead to a better understanding of how to mimic artificially the unique collective behavior and intelligence of a bee colony;

Technically true, but the same can be achieved with far cheaper computer simulations. In fact I suspect said simulation would be run *before* said behavior is implemented in the pricey flying robots.

Comment Re:Unschooling rocks (Score 1) 1345

Poor argument. People don't care only for their paycheck, otherwise they would be working much longer hours.

Among other things, they care about status, and having no clue what your friends are talking about is bad. They care about impressing women and some knowledge is useful for this (*not* technical knowledge, *not* professional knowledge, *not* knowledge signaling immaturity)

Comment Unschooling rocks (Score 1) 1345

How many of us earn a living using skills they learned at school ? Certainly some of us do, but I bet a large fraction don't. I personally don't... my most marketable skills are computer science and statistics, I learned these by myself and never attended a course in these subjects.

Reading and counting are the base curriculum, the rest should be left to follow one's interest.

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