Dave

The algorithm above sounds pretty good but still (potentially) has the issue of adverts which never (or virtually) never getting clicked failing to appear. Perhaps instead of ordering them according to expectation you might try picking one with a probability relating to their probability of being clicked. If you choose this so that each advert has a non-zero probability, for instance choosing the max of say 0.01 and their calculated probability, then you might get a better algorithm. But it's all speculation really, you need to try it out

Not that I think you're wrong to try and see benefits in what Assange is doing (and maybe there are some). Where I think you're wrong (again, just my opinion) is in applying altruistic intent and objectivity to this person. He's an ideologue, just like any other.

 

I don't know, maybe that's the best we can hope for in this post-impartial, Fox News Channel-driven world. Like I said earlier, I don't have the same reaction to this most recent release that I had to the earlier release because Iraqi civilians aren't being exposed and endangered. Maybe he's learned from his mistakes and takes that problem seriously, which is a good thing.

I gave this quite a bit of thought on my way to work this morning. I can see where you're coming from with this, but ultimately we're probably not going to see eye to eye

Personally, I just don't see Assange in this light, and in my mind, impartiality has nothing to do with it. Reporters are not, have never been, and never will be entirely impartial. They will always have their personal opinions on a matter, and this often shines through in both their choice of who they work for and, of course, the wording of their articles. There are fundamental differences between what a journalist does and what Assange/Wikileaks does.

A reporter will take a leaked document, write a short story (relative to the size of the leak), and publish it. Maybe he will show extracts of the leaked documents to other journalists/news organisations proving that he has them and his analysis is correct. But essentially, that's it. The public is left to draw conclusions from the article.

On the other hand, Wikileaks takes documents and publishes them in full. They draw some basic conclusions from them, and, depending on the size of the leak, attempt to draw the general media's attention to the story. But, at the end of the day, anyone can come along, read the documents and draw their own conclusions, independently of any reporter. In my mind, this is a far better system.

Of course (and this is where my argument falls down somewhat), with a leak this big, it is left to the media organisations to summarise it for us. But at least this way, they all have access to the same material, and therefore we can get a better overview of what is actually contained in the documents. I suspect that this is why we're only seeing a very small selection of memos thus far; something along the lines of "here's some interesting stuff which you can read, have a look first then we'll move onto more", and potentially I think this is where they went wrong with the Iraq/Afghan war logs. But eventually there is no doubt that the entire collection will be released, and anyone can sit down and look through it.

That last bit is my objection. Secrecy is required sometimes in order to provide safety and to facilitate work. Why is that true for wikileaks but not governments?

 

I don't have a problem with whistleblowing and I have no doubt that governments tend to classify documents for the sole purpose of preventing embarrassment rather than protecting legitimate national security secrets. But legitimate national security secrets do exist.

I'm not arguing with that at all. It's completely necessary for the government to have some secrets. And I would be arguing against wikileaks if its goal in life was to reveal all secrets a government held. But they are nothing more than a vessel: they only publish what they receive from whistleblowers. They exist to expose transgressions which have been covered up, nothing more.

It's not that they declined to draw the line. They had already drawn the line when they classified the documents, and they declined to move it.

This is fine - assuming that the people in charge of the US military and organisations like it have 100% objectivity, 100% of the time; or perhaps that there is some independent oversight into what should be deemed classified. But they don't. And that's why whistleblowing exists.

To be honest, I don't understand your argument here. You're basically saying that sites like Wikileaks shouldn't exist because they might potentially leak information which is classified and perhaps isn't embarrassing; i.e. they're just doing it for the hell of it? I don't believe this is the case. It seems to me like whistleblowers, especially those who are in contact with classified information, take extreme risks when leaking information. They do so because, presumably, they feel morally compelled in the face of something which they see is wrong and perhaps because they feel it is in the national interest to out the information.

It is also perfectly clear why Wikileaks operates under a certain guise of anonymity. Their job is obviously unpopular with those high powers in government, and possibly of dubious legality. Were they exposed publicly: (a) their job would become far more difficult; (B) they themselves then face possible risk of prosecution or worse, bodily harm.

He can be doing both, you know. And he has made a particular point of his outrage at the US government in numerous interviews. Just because he has a mission of "transparency" doesn't mean he doesn't have specific targets in mind.

I don't think this is true. I read the Forbes interview with him (which I encourage anyone to read as I thought it was excellent), and in that he classifies the Iraq/Afghan war logs and this as 'megaleaks', saying that because they were so large and on such contentious issues, they warrant special attention. I believe he is right.

I simply cannot agree with the notion that he is 'at war' because that phrase itself doesn't make any sense in this context. Wikileaks is designed to hold people, companies and countries accountable should someone in that organisation believe that a particular action is unethical. They are a convenient channel for whistleblowers to publish their leaks and promote them to the general public.

This job used to be done by the general media, but it seems that in recent years they have refrained from doing so, presumably in lieu of losing their access to key political figures. In a day and age where these same individuals abuse the classification system to cover up abuses or power (and in many cases abuses where people are hurt, tortured or unlawfully killed), I see Wikileaks as an absolute necessity.

Julian Assanage is a terrorist.

Sorry, did you just draw a comparison between someone who leaks classified documents to hold government accountable in a non-violent fashion, and individuals who actually blow up buildings and kill people? Would you say the same thing about Daniel Ellsburg, leaker of the Pentagon Papers?

By the way, for anyone in the UK, the BBC did a great interview with Daniel Ellsberg.

Not really seen a huge amount on. It doesn't seem like we've had any decent science shows broadcast anywhere in ages. I used to watch Horizon et al, but quickly got very frustrated with them. The most recent ones seem pretty trashy.

Although it's not English, I, personally, like MythBusters quite a lot, although I'm hesitant to call that science

I think Julian Assange is at war with the United States government.

I have to disagree with this. If you go look on Wikileaks (when it's not being hammered by traffic), there are plenty of documents that do not relate to the US at all. It just happens that the biggest leaks in recent times have come from the US. I mean, one of their major victories was publishing documents that probably tipped the vote against a corrupt Kenyan government - I'd say that was far more along the lines of 'war' than a few embarrassing cables from diplomats, and yet it garnered very little attention from anyone in the press.

Also remember that it's not just Julian Assange here. Wikileaks is pretty big and they have volunteers all over the world responsible for vetting leaks and going through the process. It just so happens that he has a big enough ego (and frankly, balls the size of freaking coconuts) to be their public face.

Can't help but post the solution up here so others can see where I'm coming from. In the last post I got as far as any possible values of [math]x^3=(p^2+q)x+pq[/math]. In particular, notice that all of your possible solutions are of the form [math]ax+b[/math] and [math]b[/math] is prime. Equating co-efficients of the two, you must have [math]pq=b[/math] which therefore yields two solutions [math](p,q) = (b,1)[/math] or (1,B). If the candidate solution is possible, then evaluating [math]p^2+q[/math] should equal a for at least one of these combinations.

Quickly looking at the candidate solutions, you see that B requires [math]pq=5 \Rightarrow (p,q) = (1,5)[/math] or [math](5,1)[/math] and hence [math]p^2+q = 6[/math] or 26. Since neither of these equal 8, [math]x^3[/math] cannot be equal to [math]8x+3[/math].

Unfortunately I've never used the textbook so can't give you any feedback. That being said if you have problems you can't understand then you're more than welcome to post them here for some assistance

cypress, the other moderators have been viewing your posts carefully over the past couple of weeks. You are shifting goalposts very heavily and not responding to valid points (as well as throwing out some rather large curveballs like the eugenics reference above). Please keep your discussions on-topic and relevant, otherwise your access to the speculations forum will be reviewed.

I'm thinking of making a science forum , so what are the steps I should follow for doing this !?

Realistically, you're not going to get too much advice here about doing this

I've heard that you must pay money for this

We spend quite a bit of money on the infrastructure of SFN.

I've also heard that you can steal the design of a website and change text .. !?

I find this a little disturbing - copying artwork and soforth from other websites can potentially get you into quite a bit of trouble. Please don't do this.

Good points above. I totally agree that you shouldn't spend more than a couple of minutes estimating your mark (at MOST). For what it's worth, I very rarely sat multiple choice tests; the one occasion I did, it was for a module called Foundations which taught basic mathematical theory (countability, functions, etc), and this was done in a clever way to trick you out as much as possible. Wasn't much time left at the end as a result of this

Come on guys, I think we've all been in quite a few exams with a substantial amount of time to play with at the end. I agree that it's often useful to have some kind of predicator at the end of an exam, especially if its relatively easy to do so.

In terms of the method, statistically what you have done is calculated the expectation of a random variable, and it seems to have been done in a reasonably intuitive and competent way, so I have no reason to question the method as such.

Improvements are always possible. For example, you haven't factored in the possibility of getting a "100% certain" question wrong, and the probability of that happening (at least for me) is quite high You could account for the possibility that you answered a question correctly but marked the wrong answer on the answer sheet. But as you say, since this should be done quickly at the end, such things are probably not necessary.

And a lot of people do solve all kinds of non-linear equations (differential and so on) using numerical methods. However, I think one looses a real understanding when doing so. Though I am not so naive to think that numerical methods have no place in mathematics. Sometimes things are too difficult (usually not even clear if a solution exists in a nice form!) or you need a quick direct answer. Numerical methods are great for exploring systems and getting a good feel for what is going on.

I agree to a certain extent, but I'm not sure I agree with the idea that you're always losing out by using numerics. For instance, I do CFD and we're looking at pipe flow. Nobody is even close to explaining, theoretically, the kinds of localised structures that I simulate on a daily basis. Hopefully, eventually, it will come -- before then, we have to settle with numerics

Even in fully-understood nonlinear systems (if any exist), numerics provides a very handy way of checking your theory, and allows you to actually visualise systems.

Depends on how far you want to go. I used Stewart and Tall (ISBN 0521287634), which I thought was very clear, should be good for self-study.

Howdy,

I know I'm extremely late in replying but I can't resist looking at the BMA questions

I don't have a huge amount of time to look, but the first one looks pretty doable. For instance, I noticed that if [math]x^2-px-q=0[/math] then [math]x^2 = px+q[/math] and so [math]x^3 = px^2 + qx = p(px+q) + qx = (p^2+q)x +pq[/math]. Now equate co-efficients to your possible solutions and see if you can figure out which one doesn't have solutions. Another hint: you don't have to solve five sets of simultaneous equations

Hi all,

We've had a notification from our data centre that they need to kill power to our server (amongst others) to repair some of the systems. As a result of this, SFN will be unavailable on 2nd October from 00:00 to 08:00 GMT+1 (17:00-03:00 EDT).

Apologies in advance for any inconvenience this might cause.

Dave

I struggled for quite a while as to how to reply to the posts that you've made, Pangloss, for the simple reason that I utterly disagree with every single one of them. So I will try and keep my arguments reasonably succinct.

Classification of documents is clearly misused and abused to cover political ass, especially when it comes to high-profile stuff like wars and the like. It has been shown time after time that politicians simply cannot be trusted to make the right choice to make embarrassing information public knowledge. When it comes to the killing of other human beings by a government, then the public in my mind has a right to know why that's being done, especially if they were killed by mistake. From a purely democratic point of view, hiding this information doesn't allow the public to have a fully informed view at the ballot box, and morally I believe it's equivalent to pure cold-blooded murder. Clearly some people in the armed forces (namely the ones behind these '

Now, to answer your general points of the last few posts; yes, Assange clearly has an ideology. My problem with your posts is that you've now twisted things around to saying that the documents were released without any care for what they contained and that Assange actively hopes that people are killed as a result of their release, as it will bring in a bit more publicity for Wikileaks. I don't have to tell you how baseless and ridiculous I think either of those points are.

Wikileaks is well-established and has a very good track record of checking their material, especially in high-profile cases. (See the leaked military helicopter video a few months back - their research was very well done indeed). At this point in time I'm more inclined to trust that they didn't release this information in a hap-hazard fashion, especially since this is backed up by reputable newspapers and third parties. On the second point, I don't even know what I could possibly retort with - I mean, can you actually back that up with something other than a couple of thoughts, or are you just saying it to provoke someone?

I just don't understand why anyone wouldn't want this material released.

Unrelated to all of the above, I also read this evening that Robert Gates has said that Assange (and presumably Wikileaks) have "blood on their hands" as a result of leaking this material. I can't tell you how sick this makes me feel. I mean, sure, it's totally okay for the US government to cover up civilian deaths/torture people/imprison innocents indefinitely/kill 20,000 people, but if someone calls them out on it in a way which embarrasses them then they're morally the equivalent of murderers? Give me a break.

You'll also find it useful to note that

[math]\lim_{n\to\infty} \left(1+\frac{x}{n}\right)^n = e^x[/math].

I'm 25, a PhD student in Mathematics, although I only have about a year or so left on that front.

Well hopefully h/h = 1, so I imagine its well defined!

I think the problem may be that the password hash is being regenerated. I need to have a bit more of a peek into the internals before I'm able to fix it - it may be a couple of days yet.

[pgf]

\draw (0,0) circle(1cm);

[/pgf]

rororo

We can basically add any package that's included in TeXLive 2009.

Thanks I spent quite a lot of time tweaking the image settings this time around so the output now looks quite nice.