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Comment Re:Why the 99% confidence interval? (Score 1) 508

by Thatmushroom (#41472585) Attached to: California Legalizes Self Driving Cars

A 95% confidence interval is the usual convention, but there's nothing sacred about that number. In my view, it's usually more important to consider expected loss, where you multiply the probability of something going wrong by how much damage would occur for each possible outcome. Let's take a walk and see why you might want a much tighter CI for something like this:

At some point, an automated car will be involved in an accident that causes a fatality. It might be the other car's fault, it might be equipment failure, it might be the AI's fault, but it will happen. People are not very good at understanding risk or teasing out causality, so there will be an outcry calling for heads at Google to roll for this. People will see a new process that takes away control from them, freak out, think that they would do better with their own hands on the steering wheel, and there will be a major push to ban driverless cars. States like California might not give in, since their economy is closely tied into tech companies, but red states? Fuggedaboutit. Emotions trump statistics, and the longer we have to adjust to the idea of driverless cars, the less likely it is that there will be a strong resistance. At this point, we're considering a 5% chance that we were wrong and that driverless cars aren't demonstrably better than humans behind the wheel. A 5% probability of driverless cars being just as unsafe as manually driven cars, multiplied by the lives lost because of delays in implementation after the general public freaks out, is a pretty big expected loss. Truth be told, this probably understates the expected loss, because we're shooting to prove that driverless cars are safer, but it will take a lot of time before we know how much safer. We've been driving for a century, our country is permeated with the car culture, and we have a reasonable grasp of the risks involved (from a statistical, not emotional, level). It will take a while to accumulate the same kind of data on driverless cars.

This also considers a driverless car surrounded by cars with human drivers in the state of California. It's important to keep the scope of the testing in context. It's probably true that we can extend this to the roads in various conditions with varying compositions of driver+driverless cars, but it's easy to see how many people will have reservations about that. Heck, look at this thread.

I can't wait for driverless cars to roll out en masse, not least because of how many lives they will save, but it really is the cultural and legal side that will hold things up across the country. If we have to wait a little longer for the rollout to happen because we're looking for a higher standard of proof, that might be an optimal course of action once you consider that we're dealing with the general public.

Yes, IAAStatistician.

Comment SAS is running scared (Score 4, Insightful) 215

by Thatmushroom (#39875661) Attached to: EU Court Rules APIs, Programming Languages Not Copyrightable

WPS (the SAS-compatible software produced by WPL) is a pretty darned good SAS clone for a fraction of the cost. I'm positive that they thought suing was a good business decision, even if they knew they didn't have a leg to stand on. The impact of WPL's existence is going to hurt their bottom line much more than what they had to pay their legal team. I don't have anything in the fight (other than being a user of both), I'm just happy to see something that'll either make SAS drop the price, or that we've found a good replacement.
Crime

Looking For iPad, Police Find 750 Pounds of Meth 195

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the youtube-more-addictive-than-meth dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Hot on the trail of a stolen iPad using the 'Find my iPad' feature in iOS, Police in San Jose tracked the stolen device back to an apartment complex where they then stumbled onto 750 pounds of meth. All told, the meth is worth about $35 million on the street. The seizure was one of the largest drug busts in recent memory."
Bitcoin

Bitcoin Mining Tests On 16 NVIDIA and AMD GPUs 403

Posted by samzenpus from the mine-faster dept.
Vigile writes "For users that have known about the process of bitcoin mining the obvious tool for the job has been the GPU. Miners have been buying up graphics cards during sales across the web but which GPUs offer the most dollar efficient, power efficient and quickest payoff for the bitcoin currency? A series of tests over at PC Perspective goes through 16 different GPU configurations including older high-end cards through modern low-cost options and even a $1700+ collection with multiple dual-GPU cards installed. The article gives details on how the mining programs work, why GPUs are faster than CPUs inherently and why AMD seems to be so much faster than NVIDIA."
Image

Competition Aims To Make Cybergeeks Cool 134

Posted by samzenpus from the good-luck-with-that dept.
itwbennett writes "The organizers of the Cyber Foundations program have some lofty goals. In addition to identifying a new generation of security experts, they want to make cybergeeks as cool as sports stars, said Alan Paller, director of research at the SANS Institute, a sponsor of the competition. The competition includes tests in computer networking, operating systems and systems administration. Registration is open until Feb. 18. and prizes include four full-ride college scholarships sponsored by the U.S. Navy, gift certificates, and letters of recognition from governors and members of the U.S. Congress."
Communications

Truthy Project Uncovers Political Astroturfing On Twitter 99

Posted by Soulskill from the no-really-go-vote dept.
An anonymous reader writes with a follow-up to the launch of the Truthy Project we discussed last month. "Tens of thousands of tweets this election season have turned out to be automated messages generated by employees of political campaigns, Indiana University researchers have found. Quoting: 'In one case, a network of nine Twitter accounts, all created within 13 minutes of one another, sent out 929 messages in about two hours as replies to real account holders in the hopes that these users would retweet the messages. The fake accounts were probably controlled by a script that randomly picked a Twitter user to reply to, and a message and a Web link to include. Although Twitter shut the accounts down soon after, the messages still reached 61,732 users.'"
Biotech

Laptop Heat May Cause 'Toasted Skin Syndrome' 195

Posted by CmdrTaco from the protect-your-crotch dept.
mrvook submitted an item that might affect a lot of you "Working with a laptop on one's lap for extended periods of time has been found to cause heat damage and skin discoloration in a handful of cases, prompting researchers examining the phenomenon to recommend thermal protection for laptop users and warnings labels on laptop device packaging." Only 10 cases have actually been reported, so this might just be a case of media hyping something, or it could be the end of the world with a generation of nerds doomed to sterility and crunchy crotches.
Medicine

Are Human Beings Organisms Or Living Ecosystems? 397

Posted by Soulskill from the little-of-column-a,-little-of-column-b dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "Every human body harbors about 100 trillion bacterial cells, outnumbering human cells 10 to one. There's been a growing consensus among scientists that bacteria are not simply random squatters, but organized communities that evolve with us and are passed down from generation to generation. 'Human beings are not really individuals; they're communities of organisms,' says microbiologist Margaret McFall-Ngai. 'This could be the basis of a whole new way of looking at disease.' Recently, for example, evidence has surfaced that obesity may well include a microbial component. Jeffrey Gordon's lab at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis published findings that lean and obese twins — whether identical or fraternal — harbor strikingly different bacterial communities that are not just helping to process food directly; they actually influence whether that energy is ultimately stored as fat in the body. Last year, the National Institutes of Health launched the Human Microbiome Project to characterize the role of microbes in the human body, a formal recognition of bacteria's far-reaching influence, including their contributions to human health and certain illnesses. William Karasov, a physiologist and ecologist at University of Wisconsin-Madison, believes that the consequences of this new approach will be profound. 'We've all been trained to think of ourselves as human,' says Karasov, adding that bacteria have usually been considered only as the source of infections, or as something benign living in the body. Now, Karasov says, it appears 'we are so interconnected with our microbes that anything studied before could have a microbial component that we hadn't thought about.'"

Comment John Allen Paulos books (Score 2, Interesting) 630

by Thatmushroom (#26777083) Attached to: Mathematics Reading List For High School Students?

"Innumeracy" and others are very good general introductions to how math is used in the real world. The kids who are going to do an extra-credit reading list will likely be right at the target level you're going for. A lot of them are also structured so you can take in a couple small chapters at a time and move on.
The Internet

We're In Danger of Losing Our Memories 398

Posted by kdawson from the black-hole-of-history dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "The chief executive of the British Library, Lynne Brindley, says that our cultural heritage is at risk as the Internet evolves and technologies become obsolete, and that historians and citizens face a 'black hole' in the knowledge base of the 21st century unless urgent action is taken to preserve websites and other digital records. For example, when Barack Obama was inaugurated as US president last week, all traces of George W. Bush disappeared from the White House website. There were more than 150 websites relating to the 2000 Olympics in Sydney that vanished instantly at the end of the games and are now stored only by the National Library of Australia. 'If websites continue to disappear in the same way as those on President Bush and the Sydney Olympics... the memory of the nation disappears too,' says Brindley. The library plans to create a comprehensive archive of material from the 8M .uk domain websites, and also is organizing a collecting and archiving project for the London 2012 Olympics. 'The task of capturing our online intellectual heritage and preserving it for the long term falls, quite rightly, to the same libraries and archives that have over centuries systematically collected books, periodicals, newspapers, and recordings...'" Over the years we've discussed various aspects of this archiving problem.

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