The article is astoundingly hard to read. Apparently they took a bunch of GPS devices, gave each one to a driver, who was in a different car. They all started at the same place and time, and were told to go to the same destination. They had to follow the instructions of their device and follow the speed limit. OK. Sounds good.

But they all did this only one time. You would need to do this many times before you could start to draw conclusions from it. Sure, it is fun to play scientist and get out in the world and do some sciency fieldwork, but seriously. Anybody who has taken basic statistics ought to understand that meaningful conclusions can't be drawn from this because of the huge variance of travel times as a function of local traffic. Sure, the cars all start and end at the same spots, but they take different paths. If one path that would otherwise be the fastest is slowed down because of a car accident or an adorable family of ducks is walking on the roadside, that will skew the results for this single trial only.

It makes me sad that this sort of thing passes for research, and it makes me even sadder that people don't think critically enough to realize it is not reliable.

Agreed.

I'd say yes for two reasons: First, communication methods will always evolve, and people like this girl will use them. Though it seems it worked out pretty well even without a formal direct channel. Second, it would allow people to report non-critical things in a public, transparent manner. E.g. "pothole at 5th and Main is getting bigger", or "somebody is double parked at X location".

I'd say no for a couple reasons: We might end up formalizing on a proprietary communication channel that is controlled by somebody like Mark Zoidberg, and that can only end in tears if the public relies on it. Second, it might lead to harrasment in new ways, e.g. reporting that your neighbor did something when he really didn't, just because you don't like what he did with his lawn.

The fact that he's asking Slashdot tells me he's willing to listen to the lunatic ravings of people on Slashdot (such as myself), indicating that he's aware that he doesn't know best. If he thought he knew best, he wouldn't ask.

I was going to post something very similar to this. Yes, this thread is full of nasty naysayers insulting the original poster for asking a basic question. Just ignore them. The parent speaks the truth.

Two things that I want to stress: First, if you end up getting advice from profs, do it in person. They will be much more willing to give you honest opinions when you're in the room, and it will be interactive so you can have an actual dialog. Keep the email exchanges to a minimum.

Second: getting a PhD takes a long, long time. The parent poster mentions finding mentor that you can work with for 2--3 years---that is IMHO quite an optimistic view. Even if you've finished your quals/comps/whatever and are a bonafide Candidate, it still might take 4--5 years to finish. Be sure to get involved with a _group_ of some sort, such as a lab or a center. Having a variety of people around is indispensable. I have found this out the hard way. If you end up having bad mojo with one person, even if it is your advisor, you should give yourself the option of switching (though that can have political implications as well, so that's a situational call, and switching should be a last resort.)

Anyway, good luck.

I'm not sure about that. While Brooks was talking about software and computer hardware engineers, I'm sure you weren't literally talking about plugging the hole with BP engineers. It would be more logical to use BP executives, since they know more about oil flow than computer nerds. Just a hypothesis to test: We would have to actually try stuffing the pipe with BP executives to see if that would stop the flow. And unlike Brooks's theory, I suspect using more BP executives would improve improve the pipe somewhat linearly. Once you run out of C-level and VP-level BP people you could move on to Haliburton.

I suppose getting past IRB on that little science experiment would be rather difficult, however.

From http://www.eve-offline.net/?server=tranquility

Player statistics

Currently online: 55,783
Max today: 60,453
Current record: 60,453

It seems the tourney and this slashvertisement is doing them some good.

No slashdot discussion of the stupidity of textbooks would be complete without a reference to Richard Feynman's little thing on the horribleness of how textbooks get approved. Spoilers: it involves sex, lies, bribery, political cronyism, plagiarism, and other delicious things.

Thanks. I'm particularly interested in all the other stuff on the DVDs:

btw that order page doesn't mention the name of the film, so at first I thought I was in the wrong spot.

That's one of the funniest /. posts I've ever read.

I thought that 'room full of empty people' thing was +1 Insightful, actually. My FB friends are people, yes, but they're empty.

It is funny to me that this story comes up on slashdot now. Just two days ago, I went to pick up my dog from the day care place, and the owner asked me if I use Yelp. I told her it was crap and that you can never believe anything you see there, but she (rightfully) said that other people don't see it that way. It seems Yelp had deleted all their positive reviews, and only kept the one bad one. This is a business started by a couple young people who have obviously put all of their eggs into this particular basket. It makes me really angry, but I don't know what I can do to Yelp to get them to stop. Ignoring them would do no good, because that's what I was doing before and that obviously wasn't working.

The world needs a way to hold companies like Yelp accountable. My experience with the dog place made me wonder if maybe there was some legal structure a company could use. For example, NotYelp.com does what Yelp does, but sells $1 contracts with anybody who will buy them that the reviewing system meets certain requirements, like not purging positive reviews from businesses that don't advertise with you. This would create an assurance for other people that NotYelp.com would have to be crazy to do untrustworthy things, which should make NotYelp.com reliable and worthy of your trust.

I don't think anomolous was saying that innovation has stopped in the realm of language syntax and structure. There's a cyclic relationship between language and application design. New application areas or computational paradigms will feed back to basic language design.

For example, the mature languages of today were developed in an era based on single-core processors. We currently have multi-core processors that are a total bitch to optimize code for because our tools are based on an opposing paradigm. A post nearby by Tabilizer gives another example: GUI programming for web interaction is currently a pain in the ass, but a new language might just be the thing that serves as a killer app.

So, we might be in the part of the cycle where innovation is easier in the high-level application areas, but I promise there's still loads of compelling work to be done at lower levels as well.

And even once you've figured out how to make your Facebookery private (or approximately private), this doesn't address (1) things your friends say or pictures tagged as you, and (2) privacy changes Facebook makes in the future without warning.

I am on Facebook but I take the view that absolutely everything I say might eventually be up for scrutiny. There's lots of rumors flying around about Zoidberg, Facebook's founder, and even if 10% of it is true, I think it is merely a matter of time until Facebook has betrayed the last shred of trust.

Indeed, the professors work for the students

The professors work for the university.

The university gets a substantial portion of their funding from tuition, it is true, but also from grants, endowments, and sometimes other for-profit ventures the university has set up (e.g. athletics, museums, adult continuing ed, etc.), subject to budgetary bucketing. Grants are based on the faculty's ability to turn out quality research. Endowments are based on donations by past graduates (which is often dominated by a small but rich segment).

The attitude that professors work for students is pretty destructive. Take, for example, your average lecture-hall class (Calculus, programming languages, intro to theater, etc.), and assume there are maybe 100 students attending. Does this mean that for this class, the professor has 100 bosses? 100 bosses to manage one employee? How could that professor possibly be expected to maintain standards of quality with 100 contending perspectives of how things ought to be run? If professors work for the students, the inmates are running the asylum.

None of this is to say the professor should be indifferent to the needs of students. But the attitude of "X works for Y" implies that X must do what Y wants, and this is completely backwards. I think a healthier attitude is that students and professors agree that an academic course is an opportunity for students to learn something, and the professor will try their best to make that happen as long as the students do as well. Profs are not babysitters, and they are most certainly not employees of the students.

Why on earth is this comment marked as Flamebait? This is a fair point.

As for the grandparent:

there is absolutely nothing positive about them, they cannot "teach us" anything

If you are committed to not learning from extreme situations, you are committed to ignorance. Brand's goal is to find a way for the human population to live on this planet in a sustainable way before something catastrophic happens. Slums are dirty, nasty places, for sure. But they exemplify a social self-organization that does have positive consequences from a sustainability perspective. So if we can learn how the positive aspects of slums work, we might be able to see the pattern and apply it to a non-slum.

Stewart Brand is part of the Long Now Foundation, an organization to foster long-term thinking about how to live on Earth without killing each other. I highly, highly recommend listening to Brian Eno's lecture about how the foundation got its name, and what the whole thing is about.