Be careful what you do with statistics. My guess is that New York City's rate is only slightly lower because, in addition to having a lot of walkers, it has a lot of poor people. For example, Manhattan has a much lower obesity rate, and while I could state that this is because Manhattan is the most easily walkable of all the boroughs, it's much more likely that it's because Manhattan has the most rich people.

See http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/22/nyregion/22fat.html for some good information

The summary is wrong when it talks about "an off by ten error in btrees". In fact, the article talks about how normal binary heap implementations are slow when virtual memory is taken into account.

In fact, b-trees ARE cache aware and ARE optimized to limit paging on disk. PHK's algorithm is essentially a cache-aware version of a binary heap.

That is, binary tree is to b-tree as binary heap is to PHK's b-heap.

Mod parent up. There was a comment on the article that referenced cache oblivious algorithms, which was a new concept to me and very interesting. Basically, this set of algorithms assumes a memory hierarchy (e.g. fast ram vs slow disk) that is optimized to limit the number of times the slower memory is accessed. Importantly, cache oblivious algorithms are optimal REGARDLESS of the size of the cache. That's opposed to a cache aware algorithm, like a normal b-tree, where the size of each node is set according to the page size of the machine.

A very helpful overview here from MIT Opencourseware: http://www.catonmat.net/blog/mit-introduction-to-algorithms-part-fourteen/

In truth, identifying bubbles is actually remarkably easy. Famed investor Jeremy Grantham defines a bubble as a "3-sigma" event - that is, times when some fundamental ratio of value (such as P/E ratios, price-to-income ratios for housing affordability, price-to-rent ratios, etc.) - is more that 3 standard deviations above the mean for that ratio. Importantly, he showed that of 30-some odd historical bubbles, they ALWAYS popped, ALWAYS giving up more than 100% of the gains during the bubble period.

What is difficult, though, is trying to figure out WHEN a bubble will pop. The Nasdaq was far overvalued in mid 99 - that still didn't prevent it from DOUBLING in early 2000 before it burst.

Grantham also makes a good case as to why bubbles form. Tons of people in the financial world saw that risk was being underpriced in 2006/07. However, what would have happened if a CEO of a major bank would have said back in late 2005 / early 2006 "This is crazy, we're not going be backing these loans given to anyone who can fog a mirror"? That bank would have seriously underperformed its peers for the next two years, and that CEO would have been ousted long before his prudence would have been proven correct.

Mod parent up. This is from the docs:

Interoperability
Google Storage is interoperable with a large number of cloud storage tools and libraries that work with services such as Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Eucalyptus Systems, Inc.

Basiacally, google is essentially building on what has become an industry standard for cloud storage.

This article submission is either from an idiot or a troll.

Mod parent up. When I originally read the article about Diaspora in the NYT, all I could think was "hey, cool idea, but this is BEYOND vaporware." I worry that with all the press it's getting, if it comes out and totally sucks (which is more likely than not), it will just strengthen Facebook's position.

I'm sure UVA will resist the subpoena, but as a UVA grad, shit like this is going to KILL the university. Please tell me what self-respecting scientist would want to work there now?

Politics in Virginia is always a battle between liberal northern VA, which has had huge growth in recent years and is very socially tolerant due to large numbers of highly educated immigrants, and the more rural rest of the state. The one thing I'm hopeful about is that this will royally piss off tons of northern VA voters because they will see it as lowering the quality of UVA, which is seen as a great value as one of the best public universities in the US.

No, that's not what either timholman or my post said. As a personal example, my partner is an interventional radiologist and the chief of radiology at one of the major hospitals in Austin TX. My sister is an OB/GYN. Both of them are very smart and do things every day that are leaps and bounds beyond what I am, or could be, capable of.

That said, a general purpose computer is NOT the right tool for either of them. It's not that they are too stupid. Quite the opposite, it's that they have better things to do than worry about malware and driver incompatibilities, etc. etc. While I don't necessarily think an IPad would be good for them now, once Apple figures out a better keyboard setup to work with the IPad, it probably would be.

Kudos to timholman and the mods. This post is a great (though perhaps rare) example of what I love about slashdot - a post that actually got me to change my opinion.

While I've been bemoaning the locked down nature of where Apple is going, I think for the majority of internet users this is exactly what they need.

What do you mean by "your browsers HTML editing feature"? It's not like browsers have a native "edit HTML" widget, AFAIK.

Well, that's the whole point on why the agreement to not poach employees is illegal. This is price fixing, plain and simple, except that instead of colluding to raise the price of a product they sell, the companies are colluding to artificially keep the cost of employee salaries lower than they should be.

I'm confused - regardless of its merits, how is this an argument AGAINST the iPad?

I see the iPad as a divergence from a laptop - you can do all the things and more that you can do on an iPad on a laptop. In fact, that's why I think it will fail. Coming from someone who loves Apple products, I don't see any reason to get an iPad if I've got a MacBookPro. People say it's a great eReader, but without eInk (or any other kind of reflective as opposed to emissive display), I think most hardcore book readers will disagree.

Besides all the other obvious problems with this idea, the author seems to assume that DNA profiles are unique. While duplicates ARE exceedingly rare, the birthday paradox ensures that you DO get lots of false positive matches if everyone in the US is indexed. Juries already assume DNA matches are 100%, and since there is no chance they understand statistics, they are going to put a lot of innocent people in jail if a scheme like this goes through.