infoverse - octomatics One Hundred Interesting Mathematical Calculations, Number 9: Archive Entry From Brad DeLong's Webjournal One Hundred Interesting Mathematical Calculations, Number 9 One Hundred Interesting Mathematical Calculations, Number 9: False Positives Suppose that we have a test for a disease that is 98% accurate: if one has the disease, the test comes back "yes" 98% of the time (and "no" 2% of the time), and if one does not have the disease, the test comes back "no" 98% of the time (and "yes" 2% of the time). Your test comes back "yes." Suppose just for ease of calculation that we have a population of 10000, of whom 50--one in every two hundred--have the disease. If you test "no" you can be very happy indeed: there is only one chance in 9752 that you are the unlucky guy who had the disease and yet tested negative. If you test "yes" you are less happy. From John Allen Paulos's Innumeracy .
Ten Fun Facts Of The Week ← Previous Post Next Post → Ten Fun Facts Of The Week jon July 8, 2011 1 For more fun facts, click HERE Related Pic Dumps: 23 Scary Moments Chuck Norris Facts (11 Pics) The Trees Are Hungry (13 Pics) Oh Shit Moments (45 Pics) Bad Jobs (23 Pics) Other Stuff You Might Also Like» The 9 Most Unusual Models On The Planet The Greatest Resignation Letter Of All Time The 20 Most Horrifying Sports Faces How Dead Rock & Roll Legends Would Look Today Were Your Prom Pictures This Embarrassing? How Deaf People Think How Spam Came to Mean Junk Mail How to Remove Stripped Screws Origin of the Words Geek and Nerd 10 Interesting Celebrity Facts 10 Interesting Human Body Facts 8 Interesting Facts About Businesses Quick Facts Rage Comics This Day in History One Comment » GOSH!! Leave A Response » Facts via TodayIFoundOut.com 23,775 SubscribersEmail marketing powered by MailChimp Interesting Facts on Facebook Recent Posts Famous Quotes (5 Pics) March 26, 2012, No Comments Funny Definitions (10 Pics) March 26, 2012, No Comments Popular
8 Things Everybody Ought to Know About Concentrating “Music helps me concentrate,” Mike said to me glancing briefly over his shoulder. Mike was in his room writing a paper for his U.S. History class. On his desk next to his computer sat crunched Red Bulls, empty Gatorade bottles, some extra pocket change and scattered pieces of paper. In the pocket of his sweat pants rested a blaring iPod with a chord that dangled near the floor, almost touching against his Adidas sandals. On his computer sat even more stray objects than his surrounding environment. Mike made a shift about every thirty seconds between all of the above. Do you know a person like this? The Science Behind Concentration In the above account, Mike’s obviously stuck in a routine that many of us may have found ourselves in, yet in the moment we feel it’s almost an impossible routine to get out of. When we constantly multitask to get things done, we’re not multitasking, we’re rapidly shifting our attention. Phase 1: Blood Rush Alert Phase 2: Find and Execute Phase 3: Disengagement
How to Disagree March 2008 The web is turning writing into a conversation. Twenty years ago, writers wrote and readers read. The web lets readers respond, and increasingly they do—in comment threads, on forums, and in their own blog posts. Many who respond to something disagree with it. That's to be expected. The result is there's a lot more disagreeing going on, especially measured by the word. If we're all going to be disagreeing more, we should be careful to do it well. DH0. This is the lowest form of disagreement, and probably also the most common. u r a fag!!!!!!!!!! But it's important to realize that more articulate name-calling has just as little weight. The author is a self-important dilettante. is really nothing more than a pretentious version of "u r a fag." DH1. An ad hominem attack is not quite as weak as mere name-calling. Of course he would say that. This wouldn't refute the author's argument, but it may at least be relevant to the case. DH2. DH3. DH4. DH5. DH6. What It Means Related:
Industry veteran: LimeWire pirates were iTunes’ best customers Internet pirates are always portrayed as parasitic freeloaders responsible for countless instances of DRM, the "death" of PC gaming, ISP bandwidth caps and more, but according to one industry veteran, that's entirely unfair. During a keynote speech at CA Expo in Sydney, former Google CIO and EMI executive Douglas C. Merrill said that he believes filesharers shouldn't be punished for downloading copyrighted material because it often drives them to make legitimate purchases. While employed by EMI (one of the world's largest music labels and an RIAA member), Merrill supposedly profiled LimeWire users and discovered that they were actually some of the biggest spenders on iTunes. "That's not theft, that's try-before-you-buy marketing and we weren't even paying for it… so it makes sense to sue them," Merrill said sarcastically. In an amusing analogy, he said that suing people for filesharing "is like trying to sell soap by throwing dirt on your customers."
What You'll Wish You'd Known January 2005 (I wrote this talk for a high school. I never actually gave it, because the school authorities vetoed the plan to invite me.) When I said I was speaking at a high school, my friends were curious. I'll start by telling you something you don't have to know in high school: what you want to do with your life. If I were back in high school and someone asked about my plans, I'd say that my first priority was to learn what the options were. It might seem that nothing would be easier than deciding what you like, but it turns out to be hard, partly because it's hard to get an accurate picture of most jobs. But there are other jobs you can't learn about, because no one is doing them yet. And yet every May, speakers all over the country fire up the Standard Graduation Speech, the theme of which is: don't give up on your dreams. What they really mean is, don't get demoralized. Which is an uncomfortable thought. I'm not saying there's no such thing as genius. Upwind Ambition Corruption Now
The NASA Space Pen In this week's Friday funny, journalist and author Eugene Byrne looks at an amusing urban legend much beloved of engineers, and frequently used in management seminars because of its powerful moral about overcomplicated solutions. The story In the 1960s, the story goes, NASA realised that astronauts would need a special pen for recording data, instrument readings etc. when in space. NASA enlisted some of the finest minds in the country and set them to work. The truth Initially, American astronauts used pencils, too, but they weren't popular. It was actually an American pen manufacturer, Paul C Fisher (1913-2006) who came up with the solution in 1965. True, it did cost around a million dollars to develop, but that was all Fisher's money.
The Acceleration of Addictiveness July 2010 What hard liquor, cigarettes, heroin, and crack have in common is that they're all more concentrated forms of less addictive predecessors. Most if not all the things we describe as addictive are. And the scary thing is, the process that created them is accelerating. We wouldn't want to stop it. No one doubts this process is accelerating, which means increasing numbers of things we like will be transformed into things we like too much. [2] As far as I know there's no word for something we like too much. The world is more addictive than it was 40 years ago. The next 40 years will bring us some wonderful things. Most people won't, unfortunately. These two senses are already quite far apart. Societies eventually develop antibodies to addictive new things. As knowledge spread about the dangers of smoking, customs changed. It took a while though—on the order of 100 years. In fact, even that won't be enough. Most people I know have problems with Internet addiction. Notes
Math Isn't Just Computation. So Why Is That All We Teach? - Education \n A reader named Monika Hardy recently noticed that I harp a lot on the importance of math when blogging about education. (Guilty as charged.) So, she sent me an excellent talk from the recent TEDGlobal event from this summer. The speaker is Conrad Wolfram, brother of Stephen Wolfram, the polyglot behind the applications Mathematica and Wolfram|Alpha, who runs the firm Wolfram Research. The elements of math, according to Wolfram are: posing questions, translating real world problems into mathematical language, performing computation, and translating mathematical answers into real world solutions. Computers should be doing those calculations. What about the processes needed to solve mathematical problems? Check out the video, it's really good stuff—at least, I think so. \n A reader named Monika Hardy recently noticed that I harp a lot on the importance of math when blogging about education. Computers should be doing those calculations.
[Infographic] Combating Mass Incarceration - The Facts June 17, 2011 The war on drugs has helped make the U.S. the world's largest incarcerator. America’s criminal justice system should keep communities safe, treat people fairly, and use fiscal resources wisely. But more Americans are deprived of their liberty than ever before - unfairly and unnecessarily, with no benefit to public safety. Especially in the face of economic crisis, our government should invest in alternatives to incarceration and make prisons options of last – not first – resort. Download the graphic here » View the plain-text version » Learn More: Safe Communities, Fair Sentences: Combating Mass Incarceration Recent coverage: Breaking the Addiction to Incarceration: Weekly Highlights References
8 Reasons Young Americans Don't Fight Back: How the US Crushed Youth Resistance The ruling elite has created social institutions that have subdued young Americans and broken their spirit of resistance.Bruce E. LevineAlterNet Traditionally, young people have energized democratic movements. Young Americans—even more so than older Americans—appear to have acquiesced to the idea that the corporatocracy can completely screw them and that they are helpless to do anything about it. How exactly has American society subdued young Americans? 1. There was no tuition at the City University of New York when I attended one of its colleges in the 1970s, a time when tuition at many U.S. public universities was so affordable that it was easy to get a B.A. and even a graduate degree without accruing any student-loan debt. Today in the United States, two-thirds of graduating seniors at four-year colleges have student-loan debt, including over 62 percent of public university graduates. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. The fear of being surveilled makes a population easier to control. 7. 8.