My only regret is their focus on "fair-weather" states, if they ever come to Wisconsin, I'll be the first in line.
That and I'm waiting for the plug-in hybrid model. Actually, what I'd really like is a direct-drive diesel version, like their very first prototype. It got 230 mpg. Still, the hybrid gas-electric prototype supposedly gets 120 mpg starting with an empty battery. The battery in the hybrid will be smaller, holding a 40-mile charge.
I already have five gasoline-powered vehicles (two cars and three motorcycles) capable of good mileage and long range, so I'm looking for something with the simplicity and elegance of pure electric drive.
So it's about 1%, assuming uniform distribution of birthdays. Since they're not quite uniformly distributed, the actual odds of 60 people with no common birthdays is a little lower than that.
However, given the thousands of people reading HN who experienced such a classroom exercise, the odds are very good that someone like you will pipe up ;-)
With IBM it was a forgone conclusion that Solaris would have vanished
IBM currently sells OS/390, OS/400 and AIX while also pushing Linux and only recently stopped selling OS/2. I think it's quite likely that Solaris would have just joined the list.
Solaris 2.5 and 2.5.1 were ported to IBM PReP systems in the 90s. You could order certain models of PPC workstation with AIX, Solaris, Windows NT, or OS/2 preloaded.
Because rightly or wrongly the player feels like at different moments there are different probabilities that they will make the shot based on all sorts of things.
That is certainly true... but does the player's feeling have anything to do with the actual probability that the ball will go into the hole? According to the Cornell study mentioned by the article, the answer is generally "no".
Maybe not a great deal but there is something going on there. Discussing basketball in terms of coin flips which takes skill and technique out of the equation is definetely missing something key or so it would seem to the player. If you can prove that statistically it doesn't matter then so be it.
Probably no one is ever going to see this, but a cool idea just occurred to me: what if your ability to attend is stochastic?
I play basketball too, and have had 'hot' nights and crummy nights -- and subjectively, on the few really good nights I've had, I knew when shots are going to go in, and when they were going to miss, and I knew, much more clearly than normal, where the hoop was and how to get the ball there. This did not feel like post-hoc rationalization of a successful basket. I was predicting accurately which shots would hit, and which would miss, before the ball when in.
Yet, analyzing players' performance, their streaks are indistinguishable from what would be expected statistically.
The explanation that reconciles both set of observations is that the ability to attend to salient data (weight of ball, position of feet, etc.) is itself a random process.
Note also that this attention may not be conscious: your motor control circuitry is doing huge amounts of processing that you're not at all aware of during a game.
Yeah doing some more thought on the issue I reached the same conclusion. It would be great if someone could prove that I am consistent enough in what I can control and my body is also producing a roughly consistent random factor on top of that. If so, this would make the relationship to a coin flip a lot more sensible.
I've recently come to the same conclusion, at least with my daughter. My wife and I seem to be able to exercise greater influence over my sons, but it's become clear that my daughter's peers exert vastly more influence over her than we can -- and she has unfortunately chosen a set of friends who have a very negative influence. By "negative" I don't mean "funny hairstyles", I mean hanging around with them, or even just talking to them over the phone or via computer, has pushed her into depression, self-injury, complete disregard for school, etc. Ultimately it lead to a suicide attempt, at which point we shifted from trying to be influential, supporting parents to unabashedly controlling her life. She's 13.
We're attempting to intervene with medication and professional counseling to help with the depression and injury. We're also attempting to remove the negative peers from her life by removing her from school (homeschooling) and controlling who she's allowed to spend time with.
It's helping, but modern technology has created some challenges. Like most geek homes, mine is filled with technology, and my kids are adept in its use. I've had to block Facebook and all of the free e-mail services on the kids' computers, but short of intensively supervising her computer usage there's effectively no way to cut off that avenue of communication with her negative friends.
I finally resorted to writing a script that notifies me whenever she logs in, and then hacking the GNOME remote desktop tool so that it doesn't display a notification when I remotely connect to her desktop. Oh, we've used the low-tech solution of putting the computer in a public area of the house and paying attention, but that just means she has to pick the right moment. Knowing that I may be virtually looking over her shoulder at any moment, and there's no way she can know when that's happening, seems to have closed off that avenue. Finally. When she's at home.
However, phones have proven much more difficult. We've taken her cellphone away, and the home phone has no long distance service (her problem friends happen to be outside the local calling area; she had to cast a wide net to find a group this bad), but my home office line does, and there are three other cellphones around the house, not to mention that all of her local friends and cousins have cellphones.
Short of keeping all of our phones locked up and not allowing her out of the house, there's effectively no way we can keep her from getting in touch with her friends. And these friends are so important to her that there seems to be no punishment, no bribe, no consequence that will keep her from contacting them.
Without modern communications technology, it's unlikely that she ever would have found this group of negative peers, and it's certain that we as her parents would be able isolate her from them. As it is, as long as she's willing to sneak behind our backs, it is effectively impossible for us to control her access to them. We can limit it significantly, of course, but unless we could watch her every minute of every day, as soon as our backs are turned she'll find a way to contact them.
So far, reducing her communication with them seems to be limiting their effect on her. The anti-depressants are having an effect as well, and the therapy seems also to be helping her to understand herself and her value a little better. However, as you can imagine, the constant close supervision and tight control is also basically destroying our relationship with her, and reducing our ability to directly influence her thinking to zero. She sees us as the enemy.
That saddens us greatly, but we don't see any other option. She was in a downward spiral last year and we intervened aggressively and she pulled out of it. Then she convinced us that she could handle herself if we relaxed the grip. We did, and within three months she attempted suicide (which her peers think is cool).
So, this has been long and rambling, but the point is that my anecdotal experience with my daughter supports this researcher's claims. Our influence over our daughter's behavior and thinking is minimal at best, and I'm questioning whether it was ever as great as we thought it was. Our influence over her environment is substantial and we're working that influence for all it's worth. I guess we'll know in a few years if that approach worked. Well, sort of. We'll only know the results of what we do. There's no way to know what might have happened if we'd acted differently.
That, of course, is the hard part of being a parent. You can only do what you think is best, and there's really no way to know if you're doing the right things, or how much what you're doing even matters. Still, you have to do the best you can.
To correct something I said, I was thinking it's better if someone else than you to send her the books, because your relationship is so bad at this point she won't trust it to be a good thing and not care to read.
You're doing it wrong. I am surprised that what you are doing is even legal, not to mention you are giving homeschooling a very bad name.
We only imprison a suicidal person to make death impossible for her, having in mind that the person's life is her own and that if the person could think rationally she would want to live. This is never to be done at home, though. It's done in a hospital or clinic, because it's a place that will be hated and where the person rightly won't want to return to.
I remember being in a mental hospital ward as a young adult and thoughts going from "I hate the world and I wish I was dead" to "If only I could go out in the sun and get some ice cream." This hospital had a beautiful garden outside which you could see from the barred windows and a quiosk where they sold ice cream. Man, did I enjoy that ice cream once I was allowed to go out for it! When was I finally released from the hospital (on the condition of doing therapy, which I quit soon I could, because it was humilliating) my family took me out to the cinema, to buy videogames and I had no restrictions on Internet and going out with my friends (I was not a minor anymore, so I guess it was easier for them to respect me.)
The experience was undignifying and I still have a grudge against my parents for it, since they got the necessary documents to forcefully sign me into hospital. I still love them and we talk but I prefer to live in another country. I also never completely got rid of my suicidal thoughts up to this day (over a decade after) nor did the experience scared me out to try suicide a second time. Still, it might have solved the immediate emergency then. I don't know.
The most terrible thing about hospitalization is the forced medication, which is brain damaging and useless. The mind is not ill, just wrong.
So I'm sure there is a better way to help. But whatever you do, have this in mind:
One's home should always be one's home. It should be a person's private space. It should be a welcoming place where the person longs to be in. Your daugher should have her own room, her own computer, her own things, her own friends and her freedom back. She should not be spyed upon by her own family. That will just make her paranoid. If her own family is out to get her, who isn't?
Understand that a person is motivated to live when they can be free, when they can have a good life by their own standards. So help her get a life she wants to live. listen to her. What does she like? Get her more of that.
Also, get her some Ayn Rand. Ayn Rand is great because she gets to the roots of the self-esteem problem. Teenagers that read Ayn Rand love life, and behave like they are invincible. I wish I had read her then. Your daughter is more likely to not be influenced by bad friends when she learns why she shouldn't care for what others think. The Virtue of Selfishness is brilliant. Get that one or Anthem for a starter.
The same was true 100-150 years ago in the US. The US Army Infantry routinely marched 35-40 miles per day, seven days per week for weeks on end. The cavalry simply could not maintain that pace; it killed the horses.
I think D&D gets the hack'n'slash reputation mostly because people start playing it when they're too young to really understand role playing.
I play with my wife and kids, and I'd really like to push more roleplaying because that would allow my wife to enjoy the game a lot more (she really only plays because the kids like it), but the kids (ages 7, 11, 13, 15) just don't get it. They get bored with any sort of play that isn't heavy on combat -- a couple of days ago we played through a section of an ancient wizard's keep that was loaded with traps, tricks and puzzles and all but one of them got really bored, though my wife thought it was somewhat interesting.
I'm kind of curious/concerned about the future of role-playing -- will it get picked up by kids today? What's your perspective on this a as a father of today's children? Seems like the 15-year-old at least could get into the role-playing aspect.
That said I have buddies in their 30's who still love the hack-n-slash aspect, the superhero, rolling dice, throwing fireballs fun of it all, and who kind of get bored & check out when role-playing comes to the fore of a gaming session. So it could just be a component of the gamer's personality.
Related quote from Dave Arneson:
"Pegasus: What other changes have you seen in gamers, rather than in gaming itself? How are we different?
"Dave: Well, it seems like they're a lot older. Used to all be young – high school kids, college kids – you don't see that too much any more. I don't know if that's because they're off playing video games or card games, or they're just not interested. I think some of it's the video games because you get much more of an instant feedback response from a video game than you do from a roleplaying game. Again, is that good or bad? I think that's bad, because I think they ultimately have a lot more fun playing roleplaying games than shooting up spaceships and aliens."
What happens when two drowning people grab onto one another is that they both start trying to push the other down in order to push themselves up. The result is that both of them drown.
One of the things any lifesaving class will teach you is to always approach a drowning person from behind, because if they can get their hands on you they try to push you under.
This is what I was thinking of when I wrote the original comment. Lifesaving techniques are a bizarre mix of completely control them/help them.
It just came to mind as soon as I saw this headline. I read it as TWO COMPANIES WITH ABSOLUTELY DOOMED CURRENT BUSINESS MODELS JOIN FORCES TO ANSWER A QUESTION NO IS ASKING
Very interesting! So people really get so frantic as to not understand that someone is trying to save them. Reminds me of Survival by John Wyndham (good, quick read of sci-fi horror). The ending was not so scary as it was baffling.
Could you assume a review was helpful because you saw that a user had read it and then purchased the item?
Interesting idea. That would tend to "upvote" reviews that sell the product, pushing the negative (or even positive but ineffectual) reviews off the page. That's a good thing if what you want to do is motivate sales, but a bad thing if what you want is to promote useful reviews.
I've jokingly suggested for years that the right approach is to make your best estimate, then multiply by pi.
Not only does it boost the estimate enough that you're likely to hit the target, it also adds a lot of bogus precision to the numbers that the less-than-clueful will interpret as accuracy.
That and I'm waiting for the plug-in hybrid model. Actually, what I'd really like is a direct-drive diesel version, like their very first prototype. It got 230 mpg. Still, the hybrid gas-electric prototype supposedly gets 120 mpg starting with an empty battery. The battery in the hybrid will be smaller, holding a 40-mile charge.