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Weight Loss in Men versus Weight Loss in Women – The Facts
The fact is men easily lose weight more than women do which is the saddest part. There are several reasons beyond this but the bottom line is if both man and woman lie back on the field and stare at the sky for one hour, the man burns more calories than what the woman do. This statement given, there are notable differences between weight loss in men and weight loss in women.Weight Loss in Men versus Weight Loss in Women
Fact #1: Metabolism is Faster in Men than in Women
During the resting period, men burn more calories than women do since they are bigger. The resting metabolic rate (RMR) for women is about 10 calories per pound while in men their RMR is 11 calories per pound. RMR is the amount of calories you use up when you are completely at rest just for your bodily functions in order to work properly. If your body is big, the more calories it burns. Take for example a man weighing 180 pounds would burn 1,980 calories if he just lies and stares at the sky all day while a woman weighing 140 pounds doing the same thing will only burn 1,400 calories.
Fact #2: Fat Stores are More in Women than in Men
In order to lose weight averaging to one pound a week, a person must reduce his caloric intake of 500 calories a day or must burn another 500 calories a day or rather create the deficit through cutting back on calories or performing calorie burning activity. This pound should come from body fat. The mere fact that women carry more body fat than men do is because the woman’s body is designated for pregnancy and breastfeeding and this body fat is essential for both of these biological processes. One pound of fat deducted from a woman’s body would still leave more fat behind the same pound which comes from a man of the same height and weight.
Fact #3: Lifestyle is Crucial to Weight Loss in Both Genders
Lifestyle has something to do with the differences between men and women as they lose weight. Naturally, women burn fewer calories than the amount of calories men usually burn in a day merely because of metabolism and according to Weight Watchers, women are not as active as men. Men usually burn 37 % more calories just by moving compare to how much women burn in an average 24 hour period. The reason is men tend to engage in skilled and manual work which women do not and men are inclined to throw a football together with their friends on Sunday afternoon.
Fact #4: There are Recommendations for Women
Because women have a hard time of losing weight, they must set a goal to lose weight and try to do as efficiently as men do. Since it takes longer for women to lose weight, choosing a diet is very important and you must do something that you can sustain for some time. Doing a crash diet can probably help you take off weight quickly but the pounds are not likely to stay off. Make your goal to create a deficit of about 500 calories per day and do it constantly to trim off one pound a week through combination of eating healthy and exercising 30 minutes a day.
Weight loss in men and in women is affected by different factors. One must know the differences between these two issues.
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What's New in Entity Framework 5.0?
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In this blog post, I will be talking about the new 5.0 release of Entity Framework. I hope you find it informative and enjoyable.
Agenda (Click to jump)
Performance optimizations
Enum support
Spatial data types
Code first improvements
DbContext generation
Multiple diagrams per model
Table-valued functions
Batch import of stored procedures
Performance Optimizations
For years, I have been working with various platforms and languages, utilizing different data access technologies – from JDBC to ADO.NET and Entity Framework. Back in the days when I was a Java developer working with Hibernate, writing my own XML mapping configuration (no Generate from Database option), there is one question that is still valid today. What's the catch? We have automatic configuration, generation, and mapping. We have LINQ to Entities doing all the work for us including generating the SQL and allowing us to use the build-in CLR functionality in order to produce working queries relatively easily. So really, what's the catch?
Well, you saw the title of the section.
The main problem is that all of this goodness comes with a price in terms of performance. All object relational mappers produce a well-known overhead and many companies, which require high-performance applications, ask themselves: “Is it worth it? Is it too slow or too heavy?”
The answer? Yes, it is. But that's why we, the engineers, are here - to make it work faster and keep the benefits measured in production time. If you just install Entity Framework (EF) and start it, you'll need to make a refactor sooner or later.
Getting straight to the point, Entity Framework 5.0 uses the so-called "auto-compiled" queries feature which compiles (read "translates") the Entity SQL or LINQ to Entities expression tree in a pure SQL (or T-SQL) code. In order to do some accurate measurements, we need to get few things straight:
1. Don't look at the very first query sent. During that query, the framework "warms up" and configures the views and all other components it needs.
2. Next, don't look at the first invocation of a given query. During that time, EF caches parts of the query, so the subsequent calls can be faster. This doesn't mean the query is compiled. It's not...yet.
3. Take into consideration that .NET 4.5 is an "in-place" upgrade, meaning that once it is installed, you will not have any indications that the new version is actually installed (no GAC folder, no 4.5 assemblies, no registry entry). You also can’t go back to .NET 4.0 so even if you target 4.0 in project properties, it will still use the 4.5 run-time.
I've run a few performance tests here. I created a slow query (few joins, dozens of filters, and ternary operators) and measured its performance via .NET 4.0 with Entity Framework 4.0 (on another machine, of course), and .NET 4.5 with Entity Framework 5.0.
The results (tested with 4 core CPU and 8GB of RAM, Windows 7, and SQL Server 2008):
• Without auto-compiled query - 40ms
• With auto-complied query - 10ms
• With manual use of the CompliedQuery class - 5ms
You are going to get some out-of-the-box performance benefits by simply installing EF5 and .NET 4.5. If you want faster query generation, use the CompiledQuery class instead, but be prepared to change your current DAL architecture to support this.
Enum Support
There is a support for enumerations in EF 5.0. In order to activate it, create a scalar property of structure Int32 in the .edmx, right-click on it, and select “Convert to Enum”.
Spatial Data Types
Another interesting feature is the support of spatial data types in SQL server. For those who are not aware of them, these types are geography and geometry related classes which allow us to work directly with such data inside the SQL Server (like geographic locations or geometrical representation of something). Below are the related available CLR types. The blue boxes are concrete classes.
It is actually quite impressive. For example, if you have a table with points (longitude and latitude) of office locations, you can visualize them directly in SQL Server. You can also utilize a number of functions such as calculating the distance between two points. With EF 5.0 , we can do it in C# (or any CLS supported language for that matter). Note that there are still too few resources on the internet related to this feature, so prepare to dig if you plan to use it.
Code First now works with LocalDB
DbContext is now the default generated context
DbContext is nothing new. A wrapper around ObjectContext, generated with the help of T4 templates, utilizing the convention-over-configuration principle with POCO classes. It generates something like this:
public partial class AdventureWorks2008Entities : DbContext
public AdventureWorks2008Entities()
: base("name=AdventureWorks2008Entities")
protected override void OnModelCreating(DbModelBuilder modelBuilder)
throw new UnintentionalCodeFirstException();
public DbSet Products { get; set; }
public DbSet ProductModels { get; set; }
public DbSet ProductSubcategories { get; set; }
public DbSet UnitMeasures { get; set; }
And the entities look like this:
public partial class ProductSubcategory
public ProductSubcategory()
this.Products = new HashSet();
public int ProductSubcategoryID { get; set; }
public int ProductCategoryID { get; set; }
public string Name { get; set; }
public System.Guid rowguid { get; set; }
public System.DateTime ModifiedDate { get; set; }
public virtual ICollection Products { get; set; }
Multiple diagrams per model
Table-valued functions
CREATE FUNCTION [dbo].[GetCategories]()
SELECT [CategoryID],
FROM [dbo].[Categories]
var query = from c in context.GetCategoriesDirect()
select c;
Batch import of stored procedures
What about Entity Framework 6.0?
Actually, the alpha version of Entity Framework 6.0 is now available in NuGet. You can download it if you like.
Here is a list of pre-announced features:
Task-based Async - Allowing EF to take advantage of .NET 4.5 async support with async queries, updates, etc.
Custom Code First Conventions - Allowing custom conventions to be written and registered with Code First.
That is all from me. I hope you learned something new!
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When looking at the profile page for a user, the summaries for questions and answers have a maximum length which, when exceeded, turns into an ellipsis. When a question gets closed, the normal [closed] text is appended to the end of the title, like so:
I know this one is closed.
However, the tooltip for hovering doesn't contain that same [closed] text. So what? Well, it becomes more annoying for questions which do get cut off, because the text isn't there, and the tooltip doesn't contain it either.
I don't know this one is closed.
The question above is closed. However, since the end is ellipsed and the tooltip doesn't have the [closed] text to indicate this, I wouldn't know that unless I actually clicked through to the question itself. Even then, if it's an answer I may not be scrolled by default to a position where I'd even be able to tell if the question is closed or not.
Can we append the [closed] text (and other appended texts) to the hover tooltip in these summary boxes? It's natural behavior to hover over text to get the full title of something when the end is ellipsed to indicate more follows. It's not as helpful when that text doesn't contain all the information you'd normally expect to find there.
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Good suggestion, I would go even further and suggest changing the background of closed questions - deleted posts have pale red background in the profile (e.g. in the favorites tab) maybe closed posts can have pale yellow or something like that to clearly indicate they are closed without even having to read the title. – Sha Wiz Dow Ard Jun 27 '12 at 6:21
@ShaWizDowArd Nice idea! I didn't think of that. – Alenanno Jun 27 '12 at 10:16
Thanks, I think it was suggested before though (as part of something else, but still) and pretty much ignored. Might be worth looking for it and bumping? – Sha Wiz Dow Ard Jun 27 '12 at 10:18
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It was already discussed before with some suggestions (even from me) but here is a final and simple suggestion that in my opinion will hunt down the badge hunters.
Now that the number of reviewers was raised to at least 3 on Stack Overflow, when there is a suggested edit rejected by three and approved by one user we can assume for almost certain that the one user was utterly wrong; either badge hunting, random vote just for fun or whatever.
I suggest that same way that users are blocked from suggesting further edits for X days after Y suggestions are rejected, users who were in 1-3 minority in the review for A times in a row, will be blocked from reviewing any further suggested edits for B hours, instead getting a friendly message.
Sensible numbers are 3 for A and 24 for B, but it doesn't really matter as long as something is done with those users.
Can't do without example so here they are. Same user, several really bad approvals. Exhibit #1 and Exhibit #2. Don't think I need to explain why those two edits are invalid.
Note: unlike other past suggestions, I'm not asking to check approve/reject rate of the user; it's totally fine to only approve suggestions without ever rejecting, as long as all the approvals are valid.
share|improve this question
Probably a separate feature request, but I would love to see my own track record of reviewing to see where I am approving or rejecting edits that the majority agree or disagree, so i can keep tabs on my own review performance. – psubsee2003 Oct 25 '12 at 13:06
@psubsee2003 you mean this? – Sha Wiz Dow Ard Oct 25 '12 at 13:08
Not specifically, I do check that as I go now, but I was thinking of something more along the lines of a running total. Something like a quick 2 or 3 line statistic that shows 25% of rejected suggestions approved and 12% of accepted suggestions rejected. Or even more details so I can see how many I am the only accept vote or the only reject vote. – psubsee2003 Oct 25 '12 at 13:19
I know I said I wouldn't comment on this issue anymore, but... is that really TheTXI? (It sure looks a hell of a lot like it.) – BoltClock's a Unicorn Oct 25 '12 at 13:20
By the way, one of my old posts caught the eyes of a couple of rogue reviewers. Let it be known to the lovable meta-monsters here that I have now set up a little hit list of users who make bad reviews on my posts, starting with the two users who approved that edit. No word on publicity yet ;) – BoltClock's a Unicorn Oct 25 '12 at 13:32
@psubsee2003 interesting, but probably "too much". You can probably construct a query in here to find those exotic details. :) – Sha Wiz Dow Ard Oct 25 '12 at 13:38
@ShaWizDowArd probably right, but would be useful for new 2K users who really want to see if they are doing things right. I didn't think of using DE, but since the data is from June and I didn't get to 2K until Sept, probably not going to help me too much initially. – psubsee2003 Oct 25 '12 at 13:48
@psu just sift through some of the reviews.. looking at 20 of those should give you good enough prospective. – Sha Wiz Dow Ard Oct 25 '12 at 13:51
I think you need another variable - C would be the timeframe. "Users who were in 1-3 minority in the review for A times within C timeframe, will be blocked from reviewing any further suggested edits for B hours". Also, I think percentages would be better than hard numbers, since if you go through a very high number of reviews a day you are much more likely to hit the "ban" threshold than if you only go through a few a day. – Rachel Oct 25 '12 at 15:22
This has been suggested, in various froms, by several people in the main "how to fix reviews" question. When you assume that the majority was correct and the minority was wrong the system fall flat on it's face when there are a significant number of bad reviewers, often enough to even outnumber the good reviewers (at least some of the time). I can't count the number of times I made a good review and several others rubber-stamped the wrong review. This system would punish me for that. This system only works if there are very few bad reviewers. – Servy Oct 25 '12 at 16:16
It seems that so few people have noticed that these problems became much more pronounced with the new /review changes. Two of the big changes are adding badges, and a leaderboard to show who has done the most reviews. This has caused a lot of people who never cared to do reviews for reviews sake to start doing them just for the acknowledgement. Take away the acknowledgement and those reviewers will go away again. Yes, these problems all existed before those changes, but they were much less pronounced. – Servy Oct 25 '12 at 16:40
@Servy It's not just rewards, but oddly ease of use of the new review system. Previously, it took more effort to review. I wonder how visibility of both review items and their result comes in to play with the new review system. – Jason Sturges Oct 25 '12 at 17:03
@gnat good point; having that will indeed render this request pretty much obsolete. :) – Sha Wiz Dow Ard Oct 25 '12 at 19:49
@Servy indeed, my request heavily relies on the majority of reviewers to be educated. So maybe wait a little until such thing is achieved.. :/ – Sha Wiz Dow Ard Oct 25 '12 at 20:05
-1 If I get unlucky and have 3 morons doing a bad review 3 times in a row, I should get banned from reviewing? – Stijn Aug 12 at 7:14
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5 Answers
This is all a probability game, right? Hypothetically, if 1% of reviewers are bad, then the chance of this working would be
99% * 99% * 1% * 3 = 2.94% (two correct reviews and one incorrect review)
while the chance of a false positive would be
1% * 1% * 99% * 3 = 0.03% (two incorrect reviewers overruling a correct reviewer)
The rest of the time, you get agreement, in which case the review doesn't count against anyone. Okay, not super-effective, but it would probably help some in the long run. If you increase the number of bad reviewers to 20%, the numbers become
80% * 80% * 80% = 51.2% (good result: correct review)
80% * 80% * 20% * 3 = 38.4% (best result: correct review and bad reviewer caught)
20% * 20% * 80% * 3 = 9.6% (worst result: wrong review and good reviewer caught)
20% * 20% * 20% = 0.8% (bad result: incorrect review)
How often do we get bad reviews in practice? Remember, the figure has to include not only idiot badge grinders but also well-meaning users who just aren't good at reviewing and occasional bad choices from good reviewers. Twenty percent doesn't seem unreasonable, and at that point, this feature would ding a good reviewer once for every four times it gets a bad one.
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Sorry for being heavy, read your answer twice and still not sure I understand if you think it's a good idea or bad idea? – Sha Wiz Dow Ard Oct 25 '12 at 17:12
I presented some numbers. It's up to you to decide whether a 1:4 ratio is acceptable or not (or whether 20% was an accurate estimate). If you really want my opinion: I think the proposal is a bad idea. – Pops Oct 25 '12 at 17:19
OK valid point; now that I changed to "users who were in 1-3 minority in the review for A times in a row" the numbers greatly change; User who repeatedly act against the majority decision isn't likely to be innocent victim. – Sha Wiz Dow Ard Oct 25 '12 at 20:07
@ShaWizDowArd That depends on what you fix all of the numbers to, and how accurate they are. If the number of poor reviewers is sufficiently high, or A is set to just a few items, you'll still get lots of false positives. As A goes up it will reduce false positives, but also increase false negatives. – Servy Oct 25 '12 at 20:09
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So what is the underlying problem here, given that we agree that there are poor quality reviewers in the queue frequently performing the incorrect review action?
Is the problem that posts are being approved when they should be rejected, or rejected when they should be approved? That's what I would assert is the main problem.
Another problem that some people seem to have is that people are getting shiny badges when they didn't actually do the work the badge is designed to recognize. Personally, I don't much care about this. I'd be willing to give everyone the gold reviewer badge for free if it meant perfect reviews (unfortunately it won't).
If we build a system by which we assume that the majority is correct, and therefore punish those not voting with the majority, then we're saying that all, or almost all, of the items going through the current review queue are being properly handled. Some people, here or there, are performing the wrong action, but it's never enough to actually result in the majority action being incorrect. That is the only situation in which it would be appropriate to punish the minority voter.
If that's the situation we're in then we don't even have a problem. The correct actions are being taken, so there is nothing to worry about. A few people might get an undeserved badge here or there, but the review process is still solving it's actual duty of improving the content on the site.
If we still have a problem then the problem is a result of there being enough poor reviewers that they actually make a majority decision to perform the wrong action, and they do it frequently enough to make a significant difference. This means that if we have a problem at all that this proposed solution won't actually help solve it. It would mean that "correct" reviewers would be punished and incorrect reviewers would not.
So if there is a problem it doesn't help solve it (or even makes it worse) and if there is no problem then well...there's no problem and we don't need to add a solution.
There is no case where implementing this proposed change would result in improving the site.
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This does not work. The problem is in the fact that you are choosing to do this based on it happening three times in a row. This assumes that such a bad reviewer does most of his or her reviewer incorrectly.
However, when an edit is approved, the poor reviewer will have reviewed correctly and as such, the counter will be reset according to this plan. As such, you would need three consecutive rejected edits in order to be able to catch anyone in this proposed system.
In my experience the large majority of edits is approved, and as such it will rarely happen that three consecutive edits are rejected. This means this system does not work.
I decided to do some number crunching. I said in the comments I wasn't sure about how to do the math, but at that time I was trying to do some rules I was taught that I both didn't know too well and were hard (if at all possible) to apply to this problem. As it turned out, I just needed to step back and use some general math knowledge instead.
Basically, this involves three cases. First off, you might just have had two rejects last. In this case, you have either the chance p that it's done by the next edit review (p * 1) and the inverse chance that we're going to do have an approved edit and have to start over. (p is the part of the edits that get approved). If we have only just had our first reject in a row, then we have a p chance we reject another review and from there we go to the two rejects we discussed above, and otherwise we once again have an approved edit and have to start over. Finally if we start without any streak of rejected edits, have a p chance to advance to the previous case of having a streak of one, and otherwise we do a review and end up right where we started: without a streak.
Now I know that may not have been too clear, but maybe it'll be clearer if I put it in formulas:
M(n): the number of moves we'll expect before three consecutive rejected reviews
when we currently have a running streak of n rejected reviews
M(2): p + (1 - p) * (M(0) + 1)
M(1): p * (M(2) + 1) + (1 - p) * (M(0) + 1)
M(0): p * (M(1) + 1) + (1 - p) * (M(0) + 1)
Substitution gives us:
M(0) = p*(p*(p + (1 - p)*(S0 + 1) + 1) + (1 - p)*(S0 + 1) + 1) + (1 - p)*(S0 + 1)
Which can be rewritten as (I renamed M(0) to M here as we're only looking at the whole thing from the beginning now):
M = p^2 + p + 1 + (-p^3 + 1) * M
The first thing I was going to calculate was how long it takes when we only assume that 50% of all edits is rejected. Filling in p = 0.5 gives you M = 14, which is exactly what the web has to say about the topic (just google consecutive coin flips). From there, let's add a bit more realism to our model.
Let's say that 45% of edits are unanimously accepted, 45% are unanimously rejected and 10% of all edits are disputed by true reviewers. Let's say that on those question, 50% of all valid reviewers votes to reject and 50% votes to accept. Now let's see what that means for our badge hunter.
A question that our badge hunter sees has him in it. The undisputed questions are simple, but the disputed questions are a little harder. The idea is that whenever he ends up voting to accept a disputed edit, we'll need the first three other reviewers that are reviewing the question to reject it, or otherwise it won't be a 3v1 and won't count against his streak. Like we did silently before, let's assume that there are no other malicious reviewers for now.
The chance of having three consecutive reject votes on a disputed question are 0.5 * 0.5 * 0.5 = 0.125. As such, 87.5% of all disputed questions will be combo breakers. We had 10% disputed questions, so that brings us to 8.75%. So our combo breakers are now 0.45 + 0.0875 = 0.5375, which means that p drops to 0.4625. Throwing p into our function gives us: M = 16.945, we're almost down to triggering the system only once a day.
Now let's add other badge hunters into the mix. If we meet another badge hunter on any question that would otherwise be a 3v1, it becomes a combo breaker, as he'll also accept it. Assuming one percent of the reviewers are bad apples, the chance of that happening is: 0.01 * 1 * 1 * 3 = 0.03 As such we have to decrease our 3v1 losses by 0.4625 * 0.03 = 0.013875. Now p = 0.448725. Fill it in and we get M = 18.2626.
With the maximum number of reviews per day being 20, this means on average each bad reviewer will get banned only once per day. This means that a single day ban won't do any real good for the system - I believe it may mean a decrease of badge hunter reviews by somewhere between 25% - 50%, but I don't feel like doing the math on that as well (nor do I feel like recombining this result with my previous results and take this into account for the number of other badge hunters encountered). Of course, this system could be manipulated by punishing harder on multiple day-bans in a short period of time, but I think the situation is actually quite a bit worse than what I described here, as the numbers I used are pretty generous.
So can we just up the number of days you are review-banned for? Let's take a look at the false positives for that:
On a disputed question, you have 50% chance to vote to accept. If you do and the first three other people to vote on it are either badge hunters or happen to vote to reject. The chances of this happening on any disputed question are: 0.5 * (0.01 + 0.99 * 0.5) * (0.01 + 0.99 * 0.5) * (0.01 + 0.99 * 0.5) = 0.06439. On a clear reject, the chances of a false positive are 0.01 * 0.01 * 0.01 = 0.000001. The total chance of a false positive on any question our real reviewer reviews is thus 0.06439 * 0.1 + 0.000001 * 0.45 = 0.0064394. Usiong p = 0.0064394 we get M = 3769375. A reviewer doing 20 reviews each day would on average be banned for more than a day each 3769375 / 20 = 188468 days. If he does his 20 reviews every single day of the year, that's once every 3769375 / 365 = 10327 years. This sounds acceptable enough to me. Let's take a look at this from one more angle. Going back to M = 3769375, and let's say this time that a 1000 valid reviews are done every day, giving us an average 3769375 / 1000 = 3769 days before any legitimate reviewer is banned, which still over 10 years, which again is acceptable in my opinion.
So it looks like a ban longer than a single day is needed for enough of a punishment on a three streak of 3v1s. However, one should note that I believe the numbers I used are quite optimistic and as such, I believe you would need a ban of quite a bit more than a day to make this effective. It also looks like the false positive won't be too much of a problem. However, here we have the same problems with the numbers we used and on top of that we're not dealing with fact that some people accept more easily than others, meaning that someone who may not be too good a reviewer but isn't a badge hunter may well be banned by this system. The question is how long a ban you're willing to give this person.
Before we wrap this up, I want to look at one more thing: varying the length of the streak required for a ban. Let's start off with a streak of 2. Here the problem is false positives, so let's look at that. Our function becomes M = p + 1 (-p^2 + 1) * M Filling in p = 0.06439 from above, we get M = 155, meaning that for every eight days a legitimate reviewer does his 20 reviews, he'll get banned once (on average of course). This might be acceptable if you realize that most people spending much time on this website will have a lot of experience so might well have too much experience to be affected by this. However, if we add to the mix that my numbers were optimistic estimates and that some people are more inclined to accept than others without being badge hunters, and I don't think this system holds up. So how about making the streak size 4 then? In that case, our function becomes M = p^3 + p^2 + p + 1 + (-p^4 + 1) * M. Here the problem is how long it takes to catch our bad guys, so we input p = 0.448725 from above. We get M = 42.9275, which is over 2 days and is already getting into dangerous territory. A quick look also show that if the real chance is 0.1 lower, this has the effect of increasing the time to catch a bad reviewer to over 5 days, whereas it would still be about one and a half day with a streak of three. This gets out of hand pretty quickly and I'd say that this is not in any way effective (and we're getting into territory where a ban has to be so long that a single false positive is unacceptable) unless my estimates are actually quite accurate (or the difference is on the other side of what I thought them to be). In brief, I don't think using different streak lengths is a possibility.
In the end, the number crunching provided nothing surprising (to me anyway) but I hope it provides the numbers to back up my original claims that this system doesn't work.
And for good measure, here is all the assumptions I made in my calculations:
45% of all edits are rejected by all good reviewers
45% of all edits are accepted by all good reviewers
10% of all edits are disputed
A good reviewer will accept 50% and reject 50% of all contested questions
(There is no difference between contested questions.)
1% of all reviewers are bad
bad reviewers accept in 100% of cases
Each day, an average of 1000 times someone votes to reject or accept an edit
(For the last one goes that I have only used it in one calculation, which
wasn't too exact anyway)
As per request, here's the math for 25% bad apples:
Once again, we'll add other badge hunters into the mix. The chance of any question that was otherwise going to be a 3v1 having another badge hunter is: 0.25 * 1 * 1 * 3 = 0.75 As such we have to decrease our 3v1 losses by 0.4625 * 0.75 = 0.346875. Now p = 0.115625. Fill it in and we get M = 730.359. Basically we won't catch people legitimately.
The chance of a false positive becomes 0.1 * 0.5 * (0.25 + 0.75 * 0.5) * (0.25 + 0.75 * 0.5) * (0.25 + 0.75 * 0.5) + 0.45 * 0.25 * 0.25 * 0.25 = 0.01923 filling it in we get that it takes 143381 edits on average to get a false positive, which is still sort of acceptable until we start adding poor sincere reviewers and the dynamics of the real world.
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Actually, I find that close to 50% of suggested edits, on average, should be rejected. At least, that's my historical voting record. I tend to be a bit more strict than others, so maybe a 35-40% rejection rate would be a more conservative estimate, but that's still quite high, really. – Servy Nov 14 '12 at 16:52
@Servy: you shouldn't look at what should be rejected, but at what is rejected. The proposed system is based on majority vote, not on "what should be done". As for the math on 50% votes, my gut says it still takes a long time to get to three consecutive rejected answers, but I'm having some trouble coming up with the exact math. – Jasper Nov 14 '12 at 17:17
If 50% of the reviews should actually be rejected then the odds of getting three in a row are (.5)^3, which is 0.125, not all that low. As Pop.'s answer shows, if the percentage of bad reviewers isn't small the false positive rate can get not so small as well. – Servy Nov 14 '12 at 17:21
@Servy That's not what I was talking about. I was talking about how long it would take before you get three consecutive rejected edits. It's not all that relevant, though. – Jasper Nov 15 '12 at 0:50
@Servy: I added the math now. – Jasper Nov 15 '12 at 15:25
"1% of all reviewers are bad" I reject that assumption. I would use something much, much higher than that. Somewhere in the ballpark of 25% at least. – Servy Nov 15 '12 at 15:27
@Servy The point is that it will only make things worse on both the side of catching legitimate badge hunters and the side of false positives. However, I've added the math as per your request. – Jasper Nov 15 '12 at 16:07
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I do think a quality review system based on statistics is appropriate, but using the pure number of disagreements with the crowd rather than relative number of times they disagree is a bad call. Especially when you consider that out of the two examples you hand-selected to demonstrate the need to punish minority reviewers, one of them is wrong! #Exhibit 1 is a perfectly legitimate edit that should have been accepted! The reviewer removed extraneous code that wasn't being referenced anywhere and therefore wasn't germane to the question in a generalized sense. We WANT people to do this type of cleanup, but three reviewers looked at it, didn't bother to understand why lines of code were being removed and said "Nope!"... it's the majority who are wrong here, and this happens A LOT.
With some non-trivial frequency, the obvious review is not the correct review, so we need to be very very careful with any filter that blindly presumes that the popular vote is the correct vote.
I want to clarify that just because our friend TheTXI was correct and the majority was wrong in Exhibit 1, it does not make TheTXI a good reviewer. His approval on Exhibit 2 is basically unforgivable: Approving an incorrect edit to the code of a four-year old accepted answer to a core question with 95 upvotes, and which is likely a core resource for many programmers is downright dangerous. I suspect that his reasonable approval in case #1 was incidental rather than intentional and there should be a system for hitting his rep or suspending his review privileges. It just shouldn't rely on a simple and often-wrong heuristic like disagreeing with the majority. There's a huge amount of subjectivity in some of the review process (definitions of "trivial" vary by reviewer; some people prefer that certain types of edits be referred back to the original author as a comment rather than making the correction themselves; the term "off topic" has as many definitions as there are reviewers, etc etc).
We clearly need to do something to improve the review process, but basing it on whether you agree with the majority is not it.
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I have seen many edits like that which were rejected for being too trivial (a very easy reason to use), the situation is unlikely to improve unless the review eligibility also takes tag participation into account. – prusswan Oct 25 '12 at 16:10
Ben is correct here, the answer in Example 1 will actually fail as those columns don't exist – Nathan Koop Oct 25 '12 at 16:10
Instead of editing the question, perhaps that should have been pointed out to the OP for the OP to edit. Maybe it contributes to the problem, and now the context is lost. Certainly it decouples the answers which included that code. This should have been addressed in the answer. – Jason Sturges Oct 25 '12 at 16:18
@JasonSturges -If the reviewers had bothered to look at the original question (and noted that the question had been edited to a way that left the answers incorrect) it would have been obvious that the subsequent suggested edits to Lews Therin's answer were appropriate. I simply see this as lazy reviewing (and another reason why the review system should show more context) – Ben D Oct 25 '12 at 16:23
@BenD Saloni attempted to alter both question and answer, and the only comment given is "code changes". I think the entire review system is broken. – Jason Sturges Oct 25 '12 at 16:30
@JasonSturges - I'm starting to agree. Abuse is rampant and actively discourages thoughtful review. There are "obvious" reviews (incomprehensible posts, link-only answers, three word questions, etc) but must reviews should take time, and I think we're starting to see the fastest gun in the west problem emerging in the review queue. – Ben D Oct 25 '12 at 16:39
@BenD Yep, and the result is that either good reviewers become bad reviewers so that they can actually get credit for their reviews, or they just stop reviewing (from the queues) entirely (I fall into this bucket) both of which increase the ratio of bad reviewers to good reviewers, thus feeding the cycle and making the problem worse. – Servy Oct 25 '12 at 16:44
I feel your pain. I've moved into (almost) only reviewing close votes so I actually have time to read through it. And even then you sometimes miss your window of opportunity when you actually try to vote. – Ben D Oct 25 '12 at 16:48
Totally disagree about "perfectly legitimate edit". Removing or changing code in posts is sure recipe for errors and disasters. Think that something is wrong/not needed? Post comment and let the author change it. I will always reject those suggestions. – Sha Wiz Dow Ard Oct 25 '12 at 17:15
@ShaWizDowArd - Why? Perhaps Saloni should not have edited the question in the first place, but why request an edit rather than just making the edit when it's obvious and makes a no-longer-accurate answer correct? Why would you reject an edit that is both substantive and makes the answer more applicable and accurate? How could this possibly constitute a "really bad approval[]"? – Ben D Oct 25 '12 at 18:10
@ShaWizDowArd Consider the case where the person did post a comment an the OP said, "sure, you're right, that should be removed" but didn't edit the actual question. (I see things like this a lot where new users don't know they can edit their content.) I will then go in and edit the code/post/whatever to reflect the proposed changes in comments. – Servy Oct 25 '12 at 19:29
@Servy and Ben - I don't argue that sometimes such edit might be valid. But removing lines of code just because they are not vital part of the answer/question is not a valid edit in my opinion. I won't rollback or start edit combat in such case but also won't approve it. – Sha Wiz Dow Ard Oct 25 '12 at 19:56
@ShaWizDowArd - this might sometimes be the case, but extraneous code makes answers less clear, and in this case might confuse future visitors (especially ones who don't know to look at edit histories). Why not just have it be concise and correct. Regardless, this whole discussion is exactly why an automatic review-lock based on majority opinion won't work: subjectivity. We disagree on what constitutes a reasonable edit but I don't think either of us is doing a disservice to the review process when we vote... so long as we're being thoughtful and thorough. – Ben D Oct 25 '12 at 20:06
I just want it to be consistent with the current auto block system for suggested edits. User who keep suggesting code changes might be successful sometimes, but enough rejections and he'll be blocked. – Sha Wiz Dow Ard Oct 25 '12 at 20:10
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In the name of fun and games, why not have the minority reviewer(s) "donate" rep to the other reviewers? This will "encourage" reviewers to carefully consider the actions of their peers and affirm the majority decision.
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That's not what I meant. So far there are no "fines" and I don't want this to be the first. – Sha Wiz Dow Ard Oct 25 '12 at 17:11
@Sha I prefer to see it as a wager that overturns the isolated nature of the reviewing process. A bunch of people farming their own gear in a MMO isn't how the game is meant to be played. – prusswan Oct 25 '12 at 17:14
It's not a game and I'm sorry you see it that way. – Sha Wiz Dow Ard Oct 25 '12 at 17:16
Unless you take away the badges and rep and whatnot, it will remain a game. – prusswan Oct 25 '12 at 17:20
I disagree with this, but it does have an interesting grain to it. Rep is supposed to be a "measurement of how much the community trusts you"... your rep SHOULD suffer if your reviews make you untrustworthy. I vehemently disagree with using simple majorities, but perhaps a "I challenge this review" trigger, which subjects the review to scrutiny, with rep docked from the reviewer if it's found wanting. – Ben D Oct 25 '12 at 18:17
I didn't downvote the answer because I feel that losing rep for a bad review is a bad idea, I docked it because I don't feel that a simple majority is a good measure of the quality of a review. I am often in the majority because I took the time to look in depth, beyond the obvious, or because I took a stand on a borderline suggestion. This would punish me for that. – Servy Oct 25 '12 at 19:27
@Servy in that case the rules of determining the majority should be improved, right now it is too "simple" – prusswan Oct 26 '12 at 8:32
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I just heard Careers is going to hide your CV from at least your current employer. would it be possible to allow us (the programmers waging the wars against the oppressive pointy haired bosses) to input aliases for companies also to prevent them from finding us under different names. My problem is that my current company has: an official name, a nickname which everyone refers to it as, we were bought out, and our parent company then was bought out. The company could search careers with any of these four names exposing my search to my boss.
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This is a good point. I work for the parent company of a lot of regional companies and I wouldn't want to appear on any of their searches. +1 – XMLbog Oct 16 '09 at 13:00
That is to say I work for the Mushroom Kingdom, which reigns over various worlds, castles, dungeons and star roads. – XMLbog Oct 16 '09 at 13:01
My fear especially is that for those of who have larger scores (even people who have over 10k is relatively small when compared to the overall pool of programmers in the world), it's really hard for us to hide in plain view. – Kevin Oct 16 '09 at 13:03
I think I came up with a more generic solution: meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/29424/… – flybywire Feb 1 '10 at 14:24
Why would you want to do this? It's not like my employer doesn't already know what my CV looks like – warren Nov 30 '10 at 14:56
Because if it's available for employers to search on it, it will tip them off that you are potentially looking for another job. – Kevin Dec 1 '10 at 17:58
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4 Answers
up vote 9 down vote accepted
This is implemented already in part -- if any of the companies you worked for are a case-insensitive match to the company name of the employer doing the search, you are automatically removed from any of their search results.
This is fully 100% automatic and requires no intervention on your part (other than populating the company names accurately).
Company doing the search is ACME Incorporated
You've worked for the following companies: Initech, Foo Astronomical Instruments, and Acme Incorporated
You will not show up in this company's searches because your employment history includes an exact string match to ACME Incorporated.
Usual caveats apply, this is string matching ...
In Careers 2.0, you can mark yourself as "not actively looking for a job" while still remaining searchable. The UI makes it very clear to employers that these are just people in our database, not people actively looking for a job. See Not actively seeking work in Careers: I'd like to display this for more information
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As always, you are the man Jeff. (btw, congrats on being ranked as one of the top 30 most influential developers). – Kevin Nov 13 '09 at 14:17
Have you considered this: meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/29424/… ? – flybywire Feb 1 '10 at 14:24
any progress on the regex mentioned here? – Kip Nov 28 '10 at 0:01
@David Hypothetically speaking, what if I were looking for a job, but didn't want to reveal that to my employer? – Anna Lear May 13 '11 at 20:23
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Will it be possible for me to view other CV's as somebody that looks for a job? How would you then filter out employees I should not see? Overlapping current employers?
My current employer will probably have a normal account and not use the company name. What name he will use will be impossible to foresee. The RegEx has to be very general to do what you ask for, something like .*
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It better not be possible for job seekers to view other private CVs - I really don't want folks plagiarizing my awesome works of fiction! – Shog9 Oct 16 '09 at 14:10
This should be made into its own question. I want to know! – TM. Oct 19 '09 at 22:25
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Podcast 70 suggests that you'll be able to supply a regular expression to match employers against. That should be flexible enough to do what you need.
Or to put it another way: currently, you have one problem (hiding your CV from your current employer). When you have the option of using regular expressions, you'll have two problems :)
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wow I totally missed, that....I must not have enough coffee. – Kevin Oct 16 '09 at 13:09
+1 for relevant quoting of "2 problems" :) – DVK Oct 16 '09 at 14:30
We are no longer planning on providing a regex, since being able to flag yourself as passively looking for a job should make it less awkward if your current employer finds you. See meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/80893/… – David Fullerton May 13 '11 at 20:23
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Would it not just be easier to allow you to hide your CV from any employer matching a set of terms you can set yourself?
Edit: As Jon said, you will be allowed to use the power of REGULAR EXPRESSIONS to filter out who you do not want to view your CV.
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+1 if we can use wildcards. – XMLbog Oct 16 '09 at 13:06
yeah, that's what I was thinking, sorry I wasn't clear. – Kevin Oct 16 '09 at 13:07
I really love the regular expression bit - you could consider it as a minus first interview question - can you write a regex that effectively filters out your previous employers? – Tamas Czinege Oct 16 '09 at 13:15
@DrJokepu: No dice. My employer's name is written in XML. – XMLbog Oct 16 '09 at 13:17
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I am trying to figure out the best way to learn new things on Stack Exchange, and ultimately design a study plan to help myself and others. To this end, I'd like to hear how others use these websites to achieve this end.
I am a programmer, and thus naturally inclined to use Stack Overflow.
Here is what I currently do:
• I have a list of interested tags
• I try to read questions from each tag, as much as I can (sort of random)
• If a question that I can answer catches my eye, which happens rarely, I give it a shot
• I occasionally ask questions regarding problems I confront at work or encounter while reading technical books/articles or watching video lectures
I am not sure if this is an effective way to achieve my goal of learning new things on this site, and I want to refine it.
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2 Answers
up vote 7 down vote accepted
Frequently I'll try to answer a question that I don't already know the answer too. I'll go digging through google and documentation and stuff and see if I can get an answer that will help the asker. Even if I'm unsure of it, I'll post it anyway. If it's incorrect it gets down-voted and its no big deal, I wasn't planning on it being 100% correct anyway. Then I'll go and read the up-voted answers to see what I did wrong/how it should have been answered.
This is actually how I taught myself how to program a few years back.
Plus, you get them right more frequently then you would expect.
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When I find an interesting question but don't know the answer to it, I'll research the answer. Once I've found a solution that works, I'll go back and refresh the page - usually, someone else will have posted an answer by that point, so I'll compare what I found with what they suggest - thereby learning both from my own research and that of others.
I'm absolutely terrible at asking questions, being much too impatient when it comes to finding answers for the problems I face day-to-day... Indeed, all but one of the questions I've asked on Stack Overflow were prompted by other questions on Stack Overflow. So I tend to avoid asking questions - there are plenty of people with real problems who can use the help.
I also try to spend a bit of time editing questions and answers. Plenty of folks struggle with English and/or Markdown and can use the help. A nice side-effect of this is that it exposes me to topics I'd otherwise avoid.
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Agree with your second point. I, however, am completely different in relation to #1 - I post first, ask questions later. If I'm not totally sure, I Google it. Once, I answered a one-sentence question right, thought I had it wrong (edited it again), then rolled it back. Needless to say, the asker (who was watching carefully) got a bit confused :). – Lucas Jones Jul 15 '09 at 23:04
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Thursday, September 17, 2009
Home Office comes clean over 100% SWINE FLU vaccination
Now, remember, the vaccine for this three parts swine, two parts bird, one part human novel virus is basically untested. Pertinent questions about the amounts of aluminium hydroxide, mercury, squalene-based adjuvants and CANCER VIRUSES in the swine flu(sic) vaccine still remain. On top of this, a document has fallen into certain hands that outlines plans for 100% vaccination of the UK population agaisnt 'swine flu'.
A UK government document dated July 20th has surfaced that issues instructions to local government officials responsible for managing a "swine flu" pandemic emergency to establish centralised "specialist mass vaccination centers".
It is stated that the document is meant "only" for emergency planning agencies such as Regional Resilience Teams (RRT), and Local Resilence Teams (LRTs), and "not for wider circulation."
An emphasis is given to the need to plan for "mass fatalities" as a matter of inevitability rather than as a possibility and with crematoria to play a critical role.
Also, it is stated that the UK government has the capacity to purchase up to 132 million doses from Baxter and GSK to accomplish the goal of 100% "coverage".
Either this is a BLATANT EUGENICS ENDGAME ATTACK on all of us or our governments are innoculating us against a Global Bioweapons attack. It really is time for the Home Office to come clean about why they intend to 100% vaccinate this country against a flu that shouldn't exist, an engineered novel virus that's nothing like 'seasonal flu'. Give us the truth, no matter how bad and we'll deal with the fallout.
Here's the kicker, did you know that the World Health Organisation was a Rothschild-Rockefeller creation? Do your fucking research, people. Beat this game.
1 comment:
nomadrush said...
It just gets more unbelievable by the day doesn't it!
They are now saying in the USA that soon you won't be able to travel away from your home, unless you are wearing a micro-chipped bracelet proving you have had the vaccine.
This stinks!
Ross Hemsworth
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Wednesday, September 23, 2009
Klingonomics 2
Kling's argument that the current recession involves a need to reallocate resources, is plausible. It seems likely that resources need to be moved away from producing single family homes, building SUV's and other low mileage vehicles, and perhaps less financial engineering on Wall Street. The resources need to be redeployed to more valuable uses. Because this adjustment takes time, the productive capacity of the economy will be temporarily depressed.
What is remarkable, however, is Kling's view that the decrease in productive capacity somehow generates a matching decrease in nominal expenditure. He argues that "recalculation" generates a reduction in "y," that is real income. Given "P," the price level, that implies a decrease in "Y," nominal income and nominal expenditure. And given "M," the quantity of money, this necessarily implies a decrease in "V," the income velocity of money. From the equation of exchange MV = Py, V = Py/M.
However, the income velocity of money is equal to the reciprocal of the ratio of real money balances to real income, or k. This decrease in "V" is simultaneously an increase in k. Somehow, the readjustment in the allocation of resources that is temporarily causing depressed productive capacity must be causing people to be willing to hold increased real money balances, despite being made poorer by that lower real income. Not only is this implausible on its face, it would be remarkable that they would be willing to expand money holdings the exact amount necessary to cause nominal expenditure and income to drop with the productive capacity of the economy.
The usual market-clearing, real business cycle approach would be to argue that P instantly and smoothly adjusts so that real expenditure (MV/P) is equal to the productive capacity of the economy. From deep within this perspective, the current value of P is always at the level such that the real volume of expenditures matches the productive capacity of the economy. If observed real output has fallen, then it must be that productive capacity has fallen. From that perspective, real income (y) is always equal to productive capacity, and MV simply determines the value of P needed to make real expenditure equal to that capacity.
If, on the other hand, prices are sticky, then real expenditures are not necessarily equal to productive capacity. If one simply asserts that nominal expenditures drop so that at current prices, real expenditures are equal to capacity, then it is evident that velocity, and more fundamentally, the demand to hold money must be adjusting. Why would people adjust the amount of money they choose to hold so that nominal expenditures exactly track the adjustment in resource allocation from relatively less valued to relatively more valued goods?
The most likely answer is that there is no such reason. Kling is simply mistaken. There is no particular reason to believe that the current level of nominal or real expenditure is equal to the productive capacity of the economy. A great recalculation may have depressed the productive capacity of the economy, but a drop in nominal expenditure may have caused real expenditure and real income to fall well below that productive capacity. The great recalculation may have increased structural unemployment, and so the natural rate of unemployment, but the drop in nominal expenditure, may have caused the unemployment rate to rise above the natural unemployment rate.
1 comment:
1. Bill: it's good to see you blogging!
One wonders what Arnold would draw if forced to draw an AD curve? His AS curve is presumably vertical, but would his AD curve be horizontal? If not, what is holding the price level fixed? And if it is horizontal, what determines its height?
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When Steven Seagal was sued earlier this week for sexual assault and trafficking women for sex, CBS News dug up an excerpt from a 1998 interview with Movieline where actress Jenny McCarthy appeared to confirm Seagal's tendency for inappropriate behavior. We reached into our back issues to provide you with the entire anecdote.
Movieline's Stephen Rebello conducted the interview with McCarthy to promote her new film BASEketball, and the actress was unusually candid, discussing all the film parts she'd lost, like Mallrats ("Kevin Smith didn't even wait until I was out of the office to start laughing. So rude"), and the ones she'd turned down, like Drew Barrymore's role in Batman Forever ("I didn't want to play a fluff") and Elizabeth Berkeley's in The First Wives Club ("Even though that movie would have let me work with one of my absolute idols, Goldie Hawn, I wouldn't play a girl who sleeps with someone to get fame").
The audition that really wounded her, as Rebello would find out, was the one she had to do in front of Seagal:
When I press her on the subject, the hurt in her voice says she's still freaked. "I went to the audition for Under Siege 2 with, like, 15 other Jenny McCarthys. These girls came in and out of his office and I was last. Steven comes out and goes, 'Hmm, so you're last.' I'm thinking, 'Shouldn't a casting person be doing this?' I go inside his carpet, which has shag carpet and this huge couch, and he's by himself and says, 'Sit on the couch.' I have my [script pages] and I say, 'OK, I'm ready,' but he says, 'No, I want to find out about you.' I knew what was coming. He goes, 'So, you were Playmate of the Year,' and I was trying to go--" Here, McCarthy breaks off and adopts a Laverne & Shirley blue-collar foghorn delivery: "Yeah, but, like, I lived in Chicago, see, and..."
The accent was apparently no turnoff. "I was wearing this very baggy dress," she continues, "which I always wear to auditions, with my hair pulled back. I'm listening to him go on and on about how he found his soul in Asia and is one with himself and whatever. When I said, 'Well, I'm ready to read,' he said, 'Stand up, you have to be kind of sexy in the movie and in that dress, I can't tell.' I stand up and he goes, 'Take off your dress.' I said, 'What?' and he said, 'There's nudity.' I said, 'No, there's not, or I wouldn't be here right now.' He said again, 'There's nudity,' and I said, 'The pages are right in front of me. There's no nudity.' He goes, 'Take off your dress.' I just started crying and said, 'Rent my [Playboy] video, you a**hole!' and ran out to the car." That wasn't quite the end of it. "I'm closing my car door and he grabs me and says, 'Don't you ever tell anybody.' He won't sue me or say anything because he knows it's true. If I saw him today, I would still say, 'You're a f***ing a**hole and I really hope you change your ways.'"
Seagal's lawyer, Marty Singer, said this week about the sex claims: "The lawsuit filed by Kayden Nguyen against Steven Seagal is a ridiculous and absurd claim by a disgruntled ex-employee who was fired for using illegal narcotics." He also called the suit a "complete fabrication without a scintilla of truth."
• Sheepypie says:
Why are people saying that JM is doing this to get attention? The "Exclusive" interview they are referencing was given 12 YEARS AGO! They are just trying to get in on a new story by showing a pattern of behavior for SS dating back many years. And she wasn't claiming to be innocent all of the sudden. She was right to leave his office and to talk about it. Maybe she had fun doing Playboy but that doesn't mean it's the only side of her. If you're being cast as a nude model, you can expect to take your clothes off. Not if you are being cast in a conventional movie. Other actresses have done nudity in films; does that mean they are expected to take their top off during every casting? Of course not.
Dayze: You sound a little bitter. Talk about getting off-topic. Phew. I can't believe you are a counsellor. Were your sons ever able to have a normal relationship? You probably gave them an anxiety attack every time they tried to have sex. Tell us... what is the "real reason" woman are trying to have sex? Did you give your children ANY HOPE that there are loving, caring women in the world who want to be with them because they love them, or did you just tell them that all women are irresponsible gold diggers who have crazy families and are trying to rope them in by having a baby, which they will neglect or abort? Obviously you DIDN'T raise your sons right if all they are attracting are sex crazed girls coming to their room at midnight. There are lots of respectable, independent women who aren't desperate to rope a man. I've always said the best way to teach is by example. Instead, YOU chose to relate to your sons the horror stories told to you by your emotionally disturbed patients, and tales of Russian mind-control. Smart.
• Javalation says:
Seagal should seek out "Big" Ben Roethlisberger to provide dating tips. Poor Ben is young, dumb and usually too drunk to remember any lines, so must resort to exposing his shortcomings to the drunkest girl in the house. Steven has developed the ploy of I'm so evolved I've mastered Tantra, so sex with me is a spiritual experience. Perhaps this line has lost some of its charm as he's aged and gotten fat, but who knows, it just might be the ticket for Ben.
• raw says:
Steven, you are being extremely disrespectful and immature. You should know better then to let everyone here push your buttons to the point where you feel you must threaten them with physical violence. You know, there is always someone tougher then you - why do you seem so anxious to "crack their arms" etc... Stay calm and ride this thing out. Like everything else It too will pass!
• micky says:
to RAW my comment steven seagal is not disrespectful or immature I think to be honest the only person who's immature points right at you there is martial artists out there who maybe better.... that's not what it's all about he doesn't feel threatened by nobody or uses physical violence towards women more of a protector he's not violent never has been you may see him using violence in his movies that's completely different that's steven seagal's acting side..... it's what makes him lots of money in the movie world it's just a JOB a place of work but take away this and he's got music love respect for everyone he comes into contact with..... jean claude van damme hit his wife why because hes on drugs that's why cocaine you don't really know anything you do you ???????????
• Bogey says:
Steven Seagal has always been a very untalented actor. Kids and developmentally arrested adults go to see his movies for the violence and the martial arts bull!
Common, a fat overweight middle aged man in a ponytail who dyes his hair jet black to look more oriental? He is a joke, and yes he can wipe the floor with me but he'd still be a joke-LOL What a loser-ask his ex wife Kelly LeBrock!
• Thomas says:
I think Steven Seagal was a good actor,but now he's a middle aged man trying to do things that he can't do as before.His age is starting to show.He should retire and live his life in Japan where he would probably be happier.I do think he has sexual issues,and treats women as objects.
• Harley Pero says:
Hi, I have found pretty helpful information and tips on your site, but can’t find an answer for my question, what are some finger/hand exercises to prevent carpal tunnel? I know of foot exercises for when one wears stilettos or high heels. What about fingers?
• [...] (yes, all women) got $50k just to keep their blowholes shut about Lord Steven’s piggery. Jenny McCarthy said he orded her to strip for an audition (for a flick with no nude scenes). Jaime Pressley [...]
• micky says:
theres' far too many lies have been spread about steven seagal he has done a lot of things to help kids in Thailand against sexual assults and raping why would he make sexual advances to jenny McCarty ex playboy well say no more after has money..... then more like to rune his good nature because hes not a drugged up actor like rest of them out there who are spending there money on crack heroine under siege 2 it was another actress that did that... she was ex playboy / Baywatch star ...... if he had made these against children women how come he hasn't been sent to prison hes only human stop reading internet crap which is printed on the papers also
• micky says:
continued if steven seagal had done this F.B.I would be on steven seagal like a rat up a drain pipe giving him interrogation over it.... they wouldn't bother if he is an actor martial arts superstar all these rumours and lies whats been spread about him it's totally disgusting I could understand if he took drugs and drink or spending his money on heroine but he doesn't then you could write print comments about him.... why would he want to make sexual advances towards women when hes married a lovely wife children of his own.... infact speaking of children YES they would also interview his children if hes made sexual advances towards them ...... same as this with gene le bell its on the internet videos well its crap anyway. it goes on saying how judo gene le bell choked out steven seagal on one of his movie sets lol what a joke another plank wanting to make a name for himself...... same as ex wife Kelly la brock she's another village idiot saying steven seagal used to beat her up / control her wow is that all you can do slate him slag him off steven seagal is the most greatest man on this planet...... he's done a lot for this world... helped out kids in Thailand find better homes by getting them away from street crime off the streets in Bangkok and into real protective homes..... and not raped or used for sexual favours.....so how can you say all these bad hurtful things towards steven seagal you must have complete sad lifes to be honest and believe rumours and lies..... STOP believing everything you read in newspapers / internet same jean claude van dam another druggie movie star who claimed he offered to fight steven seagal at a party.... jean claude van damme threw a kick towards steven seagal he just laughed and walked away.. jean claude van damme said to steven seagal.... do you fancy a fight ?? steven seagal walked away not because he's scared it's because he has respect for himself 6th dan black belt in the Japanese art of aikido yeah ok you fight him then..... if steven seagal would have hit jean claude van damme. he would have filed a law suit against steven seagal and took him to crown count for assult to make some money out off him.... to fund his drug habbit ?
• micky says:
including not just women but men slating him also because they wont get a great background .like he's got there's other martial artists out there chuck Norris / Michael dudicoff / late bruce lee / jeff wincott / jean claude van damme / Jackie chan but have these actors martial artists gone all the way in there life no they haven't steven seagal has ... it's all down to 100% jealously with people today.... this is why you wont leave him alone..... you always have to read newspaper shit about him. internet bullshit he has martial arts skills aikido / karate / kendo / he's put these great skills to 100% useage into his movies that's why but steven seagal has not made any sexual advances towards women its all ballocks anybody who knows steven seagal personally will say also ??????
• micky says:
get out in the real world I can see most of you here haven't got any social lifes and most of your time is spent reading newspapers / magazines / internet get out in the real world ?
• micky says:
there's nothing wrong steven seagal at all what so ever it's just jealously lies and rumours you all like to spread about him ....... what's wrong with you all are you jealous because you can't have a good background like him buddist aikido lived in japan for many years speaks Japanese practiced karate / kendo followed a japanese way of life honour respect married a beautiful Japanese lady put his money to good use need I say more answer NO I don't ?????????????
• micky says:
this is all a load crap it's just another newspaper reporter getting its useless information for more useless people just to make a name for him / she more money KYLE BUCHANAN who's wrote this article ??????????????????????
• […] “EXCLUSIVE: The Full Steven Seagal Story Jenny McCarthy Told Movieline in 1998″ by Kyle Buchanan, a re-print of an excerpt from a profile by Stephen […]
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Patriots Report Card: Aaron Hernandez Breaks Out, Special Teams Deliver Against BroncosThe Patriots overcame a slow start Sunday to roll through the Broncos, clinch the AFC East title and close in on a first-round bye. That's not a bad day's work.
There were also some coaching moves that paid off, timely plays by the special teams and a reminder that the Patriots' other tight end is pretty good, too. New England is now 11-3 and holds the top seed in the AFC playoff picture.
Let's break out the grades.
Tom Brady threw for 320 yards and two touchdowns, and he added another score on the ground.
What grade would you give the Patriots offense?
The tackling and gap control in run defense was atrociously bad for the first three series, but the Patriots stepped up in a big way when they made the switch to a 3-4 in Andre Carter's absence. New England's defense was much, much better throughout the rest of the game as its offense went to work.
What grade would you give the Patriots defense?
Special Teams
Stephen Gostkowski kicked a pair of field goals, including one after the punting unit recovered a fumble at the end of the second quarter. Plus, the coverage units did a solid job, and Julian Edelman kept the Patriots from getting pinned deep by Broncos punter Britton Colquitt.
What grade would you give the Patriots special teams?
The defensive adjustment was impressive, particularly on the heels of Carter's injury. It's hard to fault the coaching staff for the defense's poor start out of the gate because that was mostly about tackling and execution. Lastly, the decision to fly the team to Denver on Friday appeared to pay dividends.
What grade would you give the Patriots coaching?
Mark Anderson
He's shifted to outside linebacker in recent weeks, and that's where he played Sunday in the 3-4. Anderson constantly brought pressure and had two sacks and a fumble recovery. His motor changed the pace of New England's defensive performance.
Unsung Hero
Aaron Hernandez
It's a tough week to dole out this honor because a lot of guys played at a high level and made some big plays. Brady was even considered for the way he ran the offense in the face of that pressure, but to call him unsung would be a reach. Hernandez had a career day and needed to be very good in the absence of wide receiver Deion Branch. Plus, the Broncos swarmed tight end Rob Gronkowski, so Hernandez stepped up and showed opposing defenses why the Patriots are so tough to stop.
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BBC News
watch One-Minute World News
Last Updated: Tuesday, 27 December 2005, 00:20 GMT
Gnashers may be secret of success
Image of white teeth
People rate whitened teeth as more attractive
A person's teeth may influence whether they will be successful in life, say a team of social psychologists.
Researchers from King's College London found volunteers rated the same individuals less favourably when their mug shots showed visible tooth decay.
Those with rotten teeth were deemed less clever, less popular and less well adjusted - as were crowded teeth.
In comparison those with whitened teeth were rated as more attractive and successful than normal.
Hollywood smiles
Professor Tim Newton who carried out the research said: "I would have thought that people would prefer natural looking teeth, but actually they don't."
Image of Ken Dodd
Comedian Ken Dodd
Lead singer of Queen Freddie Mercury
Lead singer of the Pogues Shane McGowan
Writer and broadcaster Janet Street-Porter
DJ turned actor Goldie
The difference was even greater when the pictures were of women, suggesting people judge women more than men based on looks alone.
Yet, there are many famous people who have achieved success with less than perfect smiles, he said.
For some, such as Ken Dodd, their gnashers are their trademarks.
Indeed DJ turned actor Clifford Prince or "Goldie" got his nickname after living in Miami earning a living making and selling gold tooth caps.
But other celebrities strive for the perfect smile and have cosmetic dental procedures such as bleaching or caps.
If you are attractive and you have a bit of decay you can probably get away with it
Professor Newton
Actors Tom Cruise and Cary Grant both had one of their front teeth missing. Tom has since had his corrected.
Professor Newton said his studies suggested that people who were already above average in attractiveness stakes stood a better chance of carrying off a less than perfect smile than people who were not so naturally attractive.
"If you are attractive and you have a bit of decay you can probably get away with it."
Tooth obsessed
But people who are not classically beautiful may have other attributes that make up for it, such as an outstanding wit, he said.
It also appears that people's expectations about what makes a beautiful smile have changed.
I see people every week who want something done to improve the appearance of their teeth
Professor Jimmy Steele, a consultant dentist at Newcastle University
Professor Newton said people today associate perfectly straight, white teeth with beauty because of the Hollywood images they see in magazines and on TV.
In the 100 or so volunteers he tested, he found when people had been looking at pictures of others with these so-called "perfect smiles" they were likely to be less satisfied with their own facial appearance as a result.
In the future, he said it would be interesting to investigate how the attitude differences he found in his studies might impact on peoples' lives.
"For example, if you had two identical people going for the same job, but one had worse teeth than the other, would he be less likely to get the job?" he asked.
Professor Jimmy Steele, a consultant dentist at Newcastle University, said: "If you went back even 10 years ago, footballers often had bad or even no teeth. Now footballers have dental makeovers.
"It's changed the general public's expectations substantially and what we perceive as normal."
Indeed, manufacturers of porcelains and other dental materials used to make artificial teeth have had to produce new whiter shades to match these trends and expectations.
Professor Steel added: "In some ways it is quite positive because it encourages people to look after their teeth."
But he said expectations could be unrealistic and might detract away from the fundamental aspects of healthy dentition - people focusing on what looks good rather than what makes for a healthy smile.
He said it was also putting pressure on dental services.
"It has major implications for the health service. It's generating a demand that can only be partially met.
"I see people every week in my clinic who want something done to improve the appearance of their teeth, and it's not just young people.
"I recently had an 82-year-old lady who wanted orthodontic treatment to straighten her teeth, which is something that we would normally do on 13-year-olds."
Celebrities spark dental trips
18 May 04 | Health
Gold teeth are a gold mine
03 Aug 01 | Business
'Breastfeed for straight teeth'
18 Nov 04 | Health
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Page last updated at 11:51 GMT, Saturday, 23 August 2008 12:51 UK
What next for President Musharraf?
The resignation of President Pervez Musharraf in Pakistan marks something of a watershed in the country's troubled recent history as Chris Morris reports.
Former President Pervez Musharraf
Mr Musharraf resigned after being threatened with impeachment
"Where's Musharraf's farm?" we asked a man on the road.
"First left, on the left," he said.
"You can't miss it."
We passed another man, sitting under a hedge, next to a cart loaded with apples.
And just around the corner, we came to a gate covered in muddy, plastic sheeting.
A bit of a come down from the pomp and circumstance of the presidency, but beggars can't be choosers.
If he stays in Pakistan, and if his political opponents don't try to throw him in jail, this is where the former President, General (retired) Pervez Musharraf will soon make his home.
Dangerous places
The surrounding fence was beginning to rust a little, but it had been topped off with gleaming coils of what looked like brand new razor wire.
And like the emperor who had no clothes, no-one in his immediate circle seemed willing to tell him that his time was up
Inside, piles of bricks lay next to a half-built drive and a cement mixer stood idle.
In the background a large house was well on the way to completion. But it certainly did not look like the owner had been expecting to move in any time soon.
The labourers were under strict instructions not to let us through the gates, but as we turned to leave, a few slightly better-dressed gentlemen appeared.
"You shouldn't come here again," one of them said gravely, "it's dangerous for you."
Now there are undoubtedly quite a few dangerous places in Pakistan, but the hedgerows of suburban Islamabad do not quite fit into that category.
Confronting death
If it is dangerous for anyone, it is probably dangerous for Pervez Musharraf. This is a man whom Islamist militants have tried to kill more than once.
Pakistan"s ruling coalition leaders: Asif Ali Zardari (left), Nawaz Sharif (centre left), Maulana Fazal-ur-Rehman (centre right) and Asfand Yarwali (right)
Pakistan's ruling coalition must now choose a new president
Given the chance, they will try again. Protecting him will be a security nightmare. But he has always seemed serenely confident that he can survive almost anything.
"I have confronted death and defied it several times in the past," he writes in his autobiography, "because destiny and fate have always smiled on me."
So will he really stay?
Well, according to reports from friends who went to see him after Monday's resignation, that is exactly his plan.
They paint a picture of a changed man with a weight off his shoulders, but still living for now in grand military accommodation.
"He's playing tennis and relaxing with his family," said one supporter.
"He was in a good mood, very relaxed. With no official duties, he was completely different."
But then again, his friends and his official spokesman had been rubbishing reports of his impending resignation until about 10 minutes before he went on TV to speak to the nation.
So who knows?
Civilian politicians have often failed to live up to expectations in Pakistan
If all the rumours that had been doing the rounds had been correct, the soon-to-be former president would have resigned three times and left the country twice, well before his lengthy televised address.
There was a Saudi plane waiting at the airport... A British diplomat pulling the strings... He was going to fight on, he was going to flee... The military were with him. No they weren't... and so on and so forth.
Stopping a rumour, they say, is like trying to un-ring a bell. But the bells had been tolling loud and clear for Pervez Musharraf for quite some time.
Right to the very end, it was clear that he still thought he was the best man for the job, perhaps the only man who could save Pakistan.
"I always put Pakistan first," he said, "always Pakistan first."
Unlike other elements, he suggested darkly, who think they are more important than the country and are trying to betray it.
Insurgency and inflation
The last image of Pervez Musharraf as president was of a man staring rather wistfully from an open car window, his hand raised in military salute.
An appropriate farewell for a leader who was never elected by the people, in a country which for all its current troubles, values the idea of democracy.
But civilian politicians have often failed to live up to expectations in Pakistan.
And at a time when insurgency and inflation are both rising fast, there is an enormous responsibility on their shoulders.
One striking thing about this week's transfer of power was that the Pakistani army was prepared to step aside and watch, as its former chief was backed into a corner and forced to resign.
That is a rare event in Pakistan. And now those who claim a democratic mandate will have to prove they are worthy of that trust.
Wherever he ends up former President Musharraf will probably be watching them closely, perhaps playing one of his favourite games of bridge, and wondering with the rest of us, who has got the ace up their sleeve.
From Our Own Correspondent was broadcast on Saturday, 23rd August, 2008 at 1100 BST on BBC Radio 4. Please check the programme schedules for World Service transmission times.
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April 22nd, 2010
09:46 AM ET
'South Park' Mohammed issue sparks debate among Muslims
A message on the "South Park" website explaining why the second part of an episode involving Mohammed can't be streamed online yet.
It took seven minutes of a "South Park" episode to change a devout Muslim’s features from an entertained smile to complete disapproval. He told his colleague, Lebanese blogger Bilal el-Houri, as he walked away from the screening, “This is disgusting.”
What the young man (he prefers to remain anonymous) found disgusting was the depiction of Islam’s revered Prophet Mohammed as a bear mascot in "South Park’s" 200th episode. The depiction was the show authors’ sarcastic attempt to highlight media’s uneasy dealing with the father of Islam as not to offend Muslims who consider any depiction of their prophet as blasphemous.
Since his followers insist on him not being shown in any form, producers have always struggled with ways to include Mohammed in story lines without showing him. The most famous of those depictions is the classic Hollywood movie ‘The Message’ by Mustafa al-Akkad about the life of Prophet Mohammed. Being Muslim himself, al-Akkad directed his entire film with extreme sensitivity building the character of the prophet around the wind or the light so it’s a presence that is felt or experienced but not seen.
The "South Park" episode showing Mohammed disguised in a bear suit earned the show creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker a jihadist campaign and a serious warning from a radical Islamic group based in New York City. The group posted on its website Revolutionmuslim.com a video filled with reminders of what fundamentalist Muslims did to those who in their eyes “insulted” their prophet.
On Wednesday night the episode continued the storyline of Mohammed in part II of the episode– but it aired with additional audio bleeps and image blocks reading “CENSORED." They also didn't have the episode streaming on their Web site. There was however, this message from the creators:
Comedy Central confirmed they added additional bleeps to the show than what was in the original cut. Whether the decision was an attempt to appeal to Muslims or to keep angry sentiment at bay, nobody knows, but tackling the issue of Mohammed in any way, beeps and censor marks included, still sparks concern among Muslims.
Blogger Bilal el-Houri is agnostic but he grew up in a Muslim family in the mostly Muslim region of the Middle East. He said, “My first thoughts on the episode were "haha!", but then I realized how deep and complicated this issue is.”
El-Houri observed that the "South Park" episode highlighted the fear from “barbaric Muslim retaliation” when a Muslim symbol is featured in the media. He said Muslims should focus on convincing others not to show iconic figure out of “respect to Islam” instead.
Having been brought up as a Muslim, she said she grew up with the notion that one “shouldn’t criticize Allah, Islam or the Prophet” but she herself became a prominent critic of Islam. Her screenplay for Theo Van Gogh's movie ‘Submission’ brought her death threats. She had been living under protection since Van Gogh’s assassination of fear for her life. She describes the reaction to the depiction of Mohammed as “ridiculous” and thinks the solution lies in “scrutinizing Islam and criticizing it in the same way that we criticize Christianity, Judaism and other ideologies and other religions.”
"Equal opportunity scrutiny, equal opportunity offense," she told CNN's Anderson Cooper.
On "South Park’"s Facebook discussion boards, Muslims vented their frustration trying to explain why depicting their prophet is offensive and blamed South Park for fanning the tensions that already exist in the world around this subject. Under the title “Respect my Religion,” posts were mainly defensive. Most tried to expand on their belief that Islam is a religion of peace that respects other religions and prophets. Others blamed the extremists for “hijacking” their religion and using it to justify murdering and threatening people who don’t agree with them.
Muslim fans of "South Park" focused more on the episode which one of them thought was a “let down” in its redundancy of the old “controversial Prophet Mohammed depiction.”
Zainab Sher said, “2 b honest 200 episode wasnt funny at all to me!” She then added, “Bringing Mohammad back! when you know it is a sensitive issue […] seems to me southpark is running out of ideas!!! that angle just brought everything down.”
Omar Latif kept his comments simple, “DISAPPOINTED with showing our prophet.”
Ahmed Ata Saada said he had seen all "South Park" episodes and he found them “very fun.” But he found it “ridiculous” to make fun of other people’s beliefs and sacred religion. Many other Muslims joined in agreement while non-Muslims comments focused on the right to freedom of speech.
Part II of the 200th episode brought more of the same and the reaction does not seem to have picked up anywhere around the Muslim world yet. But the episode did seem to have a clear self-censorship which could have resulted from the warning. The reason for this could be a simple one. In every instance where violence ensued from published or broadcast material that offended Islam, the strong reaction was not immediate or spontaneous. It took time to build steam through video distribution in mosques and on the Internet, supported by clerics and religious leaders’ incitement during sermons and speeches.
It is true that hundreds and thousands took to the streets especially following the Danish cartoons controversy. Many of them protested violently burning buildings, cars and calling for the death of the cartoonist. But it is equally true that the majority of Muslims did not take to the streets and expressed their dismay rather peacefully or did not comment at all.
While millions around the world watched the violence in the streets of Islamabad, Cairo, and Beirut, there were many other Muslims who appeared on shows to condemn the violence committed in their name and under what they considered it to be the guise of defending Islam. They called for calm and talked about the peaceful nature of Islam instead.
Many mainstream Muslim clerics and devout Muslims have said repeatedly that the problem with the Muslim scripture, the Quran, is that it is vast, complex and appears at times to be contradictory. They attribute that to the belief that the verses are based on unique situations that occurred during the life of Prophet Mohammed but don’t apply to modern-day life.
It is a known fact that the Quran is open to interpretation; unlike other religions, Muslims don’t have a single entity to make a final call on certain issues. This leaves the door open to local clerics to issue Fatwas or religious edicts, based on their personal belief which could be ultra orthodox, moderate and many shades in between.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Bilal el-Houri, like many experts and scholars who speak up about this subject, put the responsibility in the hands of the majority moderate Muslims. Hirsi Ali points out that the Quran contains verses calling for the killing of non-believers. She said, “There are some people who want to act on it, and there are some people who don’t. The majority of Muslims do not want to act on the scripture, but they are silent when fellow Muslims do.”
Blogger Bilal el-Houri has seen both sides first hand in the Middle East. He says no matter how "cruel" the South Park episode is, “it should be a wake up call to Muslims around the world about how they are being portrayed, and instead of grunting and calling for boycotts and other actions, “they should begin by respecting free speech” and they should ask themselves, "why?"
Beside the intended humor in "South Park’s" 200th episodes I and II, there seems to be a message about the role of the world’s leading religions with a special emphasis on Islam’s state of affairs. Judging by the many bleeps censoring every time the word Mohammed was uttered and covering the entire “moral” of the episodes if one may call it that. It seems that the creators of South Park are sending the same message as Hirsi Ali and el-Houri; that open dialogue is the way to go.
In the midst of "South Park’s" many jokes and jabs, one can conclude that moderate Muslims can take away a message already articulated by many. By enforcing strict rules on depiction of their prophet, they allow the extremists to get all the attention. By doing so, they draw negative attention to their religion, alienate themselves and allow their message to be lost in censorship.
soundoff (222 Responses)
1. Andrew B. Bosma
If not now... when?
When will we seriously address the threat of capitulating to fundamentalist thinking?
I mean, look, I can certainly see the sound reasoning behind why MUSLIMS would be forbidden from depicting Mohammed in any way, shape or form: because Mohammed (or whoever it was who issued the decree), understood man's tendency to idolize people. You see, he wanted the focus to be on the Qua'ran instead of the man. Okay, I got it. And that's fine. (I mean, makes sense given what happened during Moses' absence from his people when he ascended Mt. Sainai to bring God's [written] commandments down from the mountaintop for them).
But, as such, it must be emphasized that this decree against depicting Mohammed is and always has been strictly imposed upon Muslims... AND MUSLIMS ONLY.
Muslim FUNDAMENTALISTS seek to twist and distort the teachings of Islam to their own selfish ambitions by trying to force the non-Muslim rest of the world to adopt Muslim standards.
It's time for the Muslim NON-extremists to start confronting the crazies operating in the name of Islam and Allah.
It troubles me greatly that you don't see a movement among modern, socially-progressive Muslims to denounce fundamentalism in all its guises but especially those that operate under their own religious label 'Muslim'.
April 22, 2010 at 11:30 am | Report abuse | Reply
2. Josiah
This is getting old.. move on already.. Muslim's should just shrug their shoulders, and move on.. I mean in Christianity when you are struck you are supposed to turn the other cheek right?.. well that can even be the same when they portray Jesus..Shrug thier Shoulders (turn their cheeks) and move on!! Thats why you don't hear controversy with Christians.. this is plain and simple.. Its not like you will get struck down if you (muslims) shrug your shoulders and ignore it or even laugh... c'mon.. where is the humor.. Guess the making of that movie "Looking for Comedy in a Muslim World" never got flack whe it came out.. so whats the big deal.. South Park portrayed a Muslim prophet inside of a Bear Costume...ok why are Muslims so ashamed to Show off or even display their beloved prophet?? Buddah is shown, Many of the Hindu gods are shown, Jesus is shown, Moses is shown, what gives?? Did he even exist?? Stop complaining and shrug your shoulders and MOVE ON!!!!!!
April 22, 2010 at 11:34 am | Report abuse | Reply
3. Abdul Aziz
What amuses me about this article is that the two "Muslim Scholars" aren't muslim at all and have obviously left the religion based on their own negative experiences (which I would never invalidate.) However If you are going to provide a balanced voice for the muslim community as it relates to how we view the depiction of the Prophet Muhammed (peace and blessings be upon him) Please reach out to people who do not consider themselves atheists. I do not understand why we as muslims get so upset when unbelievers depict our prophet (pbuh) in negative ways or talk against Islam. It is the duty of the shaitan to do such. We don't have to do anything but believe in what we believe in and allow others to believe what they believe Like Surah Al-Kafirun tells us. The Quran explicitly tells us that this is the way:
Say (O Prophet): O ye who reject faith! (1)
لَآ أَعۡبُدُ مَا تَعۡبُدُونَ
I worship not that which ye worship; (2)
وَلَآ أَنتُمۡ عَـٰبِدُونَ مَآ أَعۡبُدُ
Nor worship ye that which I worship. (3)
وَلَآ أَنَا۟ عَابِدٌ۬ مَّا عَبَدتُّمۡ
وَلَآ أَنتُمۡ عَـٰبِدُونَ مَآ أَعۡبُدُ
Nor will ye worship that which I worship. (5)
لَكُمۡ دِينُكُمۡ وَلِىَ دِينِ
The key part being Unto you your religion, and unto me my religion.
Let the unbelievers do what they will because there is nothing we can do about it.
April 22, 2010 at 11:40 am | Report abuse | Reply
4. Ellie M
What's wrong with people these days? Did you completely miss the fact that they made fun of almost every other religous leader, too? It's not like South park is singling out a religion and bashing it. I thought that the 200th episode was hilarious. People need to stop being so sensitive and get over it. It's just a cartoon tv show(and an awesome one at that). There are worse things to freak out about. We keep bending over backwards because of fear of violence. Well we can always fight violence with violence. We need to stop allowing radical groups to make our decisions for us.
April 22, 2010 at 11:45 am | Report abuse | Reply
5. John
You know, the following string of 8 ascii characters .. mohammed .. isn't a picture of the man, but it does represent him in text, and muslims are not offended. But if I choose a different set of 5 ascii characters .. Ç:-]= .. to represent him in text, should muslims now be offended? After all, some people might chose to tilt their heads and imagine seeing a turbin, eyes, nose, mouth, and beard - and suddently to them its now a picture. Should CNN print this comment? Or censor it for fear of it generating death threats. What has this world of ours become?
April 22, 2010 at 11:49 am | Report abuse | Reply
6. Vinnie
Deluded. Absolute delusion. Delusions of grandeur found in a book. In a book called the Koran/Quran.
South Park is less so. Where is the South Park religion?
April 22, 2010 at 11:50 am | Report abuse | Reply
7. SMW
South Park shows no mercy to any religion. Wouldn't not showing this episode be like giving into the threats and fear that terrorist try to push upon us. Not that I believe all Islams are terrorists. I don't believe that at all, but for the ones that are, they try to bully the world into fearing them. I think this shows that we wont be bullied or fear stricken into silence.
April 22, 2010 at 11:55 am | Report abuse | Reply
8. Trey
The fact that these people burned down buildings because of a Danish cartoon in the 1st place shows you how crazy they are...they need to get their heads right...
USA USA USA!!!
April 22, 2010 at 12:03 pm | Report abuse | Reply
9. mordrud
I wish someone in hollywood would make a real movie about Mohamed and the rise of the Islamic empire. I know it would be controversial to show someone playing Mohamed but tough puckies. People are so afraid of other peoples crazy eccentric behavior that they tip toe around. I think a history based – well researched movie or miniseries about Mohamed and Omar would be very enlightening and educational to the world.
April 22, 2010 at 12:07 pm | Report abuse | Reply
10. mark Montgomery
Muslims are too sensitive and it's time we stopped kissing their butts. If a muslim draws a caricature of Jesus we Christains are not going to hunt him down and kill him. I keep copies of the "Muhammed" cartoons on my computer and share them with folks all over the world. Try to stop me. Mark Montgomery NYC, NY
April 22, 2010 at 12:17 pm | Report abuse | Reply
11. lord of the isles
The white male Christian is the evil satan. Everything bad in this world comes from the evil white man. Specifically those whites north of Italy and Spain, Those evil doomed northern Europeans and our Christianity. Islam is such a disenfranchised helpless little religion, only stuggling to bring peace happiness and joy to those who believe in MOE-HAM-ADD...hey I said HAM is'nt that pig flesh?!?!? Hey do the Moslems/Islamic Sunny sheeeeeite know this? Their prophet has a little porcine in his name..oooohhhhhh. Let me guess now some is-lam-ic fundementalist is screaming "DEATH TO THE INFIDEL". Grow up, not everyone likes you or your silly cult of moons and stars. Go back to your sand box, make your 5 year old daughter marry some 50 year old camel rapist, and when she tries to free herself from this insanity, stone her to death like you normally do, or like the latest one, cut off her nose. Yeah a real great religion..belong to us or we KILL YOU.
12. Divune
I hope they would get their 72 virgins right now, but instead stop crying like little babies about mohammad related stuff.
April 22, 2010 at 12:26 pm | Report abuse | Reply
13. me
Listen ppl .. Mohammed was NOT GOD.. so get over it .. you seem to accept it and laugh when Christ was on.. Southpark doesnt pick and choose, so lets just move on .. he was a human, so lets not make more of it than it is.. This is why the rest of the world thinks middle easterns are a bunch of angry ppl .. HYPOCRTICeS
April 22, 2010 at 12:32 pm | Report abuse | Reply
14. simplicity
why cant we simply refrain from "intentionally" doing things that obviously upset other fellow human beings. this seems to be upsetting not one or two, but an awful lot of people is it not? wouldn't the world be so much more peaceful if we make the feeblest attempt to not "knowingly" do things that hurt or offend others? is it really that difficult? or are we just ignorant to the fact, because we just don't give a damn...
April 22, 2010 at 12:34 pm | Report abuse | Reply
15. me
oh and BTW, welcome to USA.. Freedom of Speech .. something Islam doe not allow nor tolerates
April 22, 2010 at 12:36 pm | Report abuse | Reply
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Windows 8 to offer easier file management
But studies done by Microsoft confirmed that parts of the Windows 7 copy experience can be "cluttered and confusing." This is especially true if you're are copying or moving files and folders with the same names or copying or moving multiple files one after the other.
Related stories:
Windows 8 prerelease launching in coming months
Microsoft lists 'App Store' as a Windows 8 feature
Windows 8 to fully support USB 3.0
To offer a more user-friendly file management experience in Windows 8, Microsoft came up with three goals: 1) create a single place to manage and monitor all files being copied; 2) remove distractions and give people just the information they need; and 3) put people in more control of their copy operations.
As as result, Windows 8 users will see four new features in the upcoming operating system designed to simplify the chore of copying and moving files.
First, in past versions of Windows, a separate progress dialog box would pop up for each new file that you were copying or moving. This could sometimes result in dozens of different file copy boxes floating around the screen. Windows 8 consolidates the process into one dialog box for all files being copied or moved where you can more easily view and control each individual file.
Windows 8 will display a single dialog box even when copying multiple files.
(Credit: Microsoft)
Second, users will be able to stop, pause, and resume each file being copied or moved and view the source or destination folder while the process is running.
Third, Microsoft's estimates on how long a file will take to copy or move have always been something of a joke, which Simons even admitted in his blog. We've all seen file copy messages that keep changing the estimate dramatically, jumping from something like 5 minutes to 1 hour and then to 15 minutes and then back to an hour.
Instead of guessing how long a file will take to copy, Windows 8 will offer a new graph detailing the data transfer speed, the transfer rate trend, and how much data is left to transfer. Though that sounds more complicated than a simple estimate, it promises to be more accurate.
Fourth, people can sometimes be confused by filename conflicts or collisions, which occur when the same filename exists in both the source and destination folders during a copy or move. For Windows 8, Microsoft has redesigned the box that pops up during a file collision, which Simons feels will be more efficient and easier to understand.
Windows 8 will present a clearer dialog box in the event of duplicate filenames.
(Credit: Microsoft)
As one final tweak that should please a lot of people, Microsoft is doing away with some of the redundant and often annoying dialog boxes that appear when managing files, such as, "Are you sure you want to delete this file?" or "Are you sure you want to merge these folders?"
All of the new file management improvements add up to "building a significantly improved copy experience, one that is unified, concise, and clear, and which puts you in control of your experience," Simons added.
Gift Guide: Digital stocking stuffers under $50
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Getting cash for crashed gadgets
Why pay to recycle? Web-based services will pay you for mailing in old electronics.
The new BuyMyTronics, (via EcoGeek) from the same people behind BuyMyBrokeniPod, will accept game consoles from a GameBoy to an Xbox, as well as iPods and iPhones. According to the site's online estimate, a dead Wii in the original box would fetch $62.25, sent via PayPal or check. If you like the deal, just sign up and ship out the goods.
SecondRotation also pays for gaming consoles, PDAs, phones, camcorders, GPS devices, and digital cameras. But its estimate rated the value of the same broken Wii as a gaping zero.
Too bad I can't find a site that wants my TI 99/4-A, circa 1981. I guess that's better fit for a vintage computer sale, Craigslist, FreeCycle, or eBay.
At least someone will give me a kickback for mailing in an old Motorola RAZR V3. CellforCash would pay $13, SimplySellular would fork over $23, and SellYourCell would offer $20. SecondRotation beat them all with its $30 trade-in estimate. BuyMyTronics is working to add trade-in options for cell phones, laptops, digital cameras, and camcorders.
Of course, you can also recycle a wireless phone without getting paid, or pay a small fee to GreenCitizen if you find walking into their San Francisco or Silicon Valley trade-in shop convenient. Trade-in services, including curbside pickup, from HP and Dell have good reputations.
Services such as these either refurbish and resell used gear, donate the old tech to schools or needy nonprofit groups, or send the stuff straight into something like a meat grinder for hardware, later reclaiming valuable metals to sell. SecondRotation resells the items on eBay, as does BuyMyTronics, which also donates castoff parts to artists. The staff of BuyMyTronics also aims to be "green" by reusing packaging materials and walking most of the hundreds of goods it deals with each month over to the post office.
However, many other recycling services make it a practice to ship used electronics overseas, where it's likely to poison the health of people and ecosystems. The Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition lists recyclers services that recycle responsibly.
Gift Guide: Digital stocking stuffers under $50
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Posters for Ang Lee movies are typically unimaginative, so I was pretty shocked when I saw the new one-sheet for Lee's latest, Lust, Caution. It isn't exactly an innovative design, but it is a lot more interesting than his usual head-shot type of poster. I like it even better than the Brokeback Mountain look-away-in-shame artwork. And if we can base the quality of Lee's movies on their posters (just look at the awful designs for Hulk and Ride with the Devil to see how it works), then Lust, Caution could be his best film to date. This poster, with its browning tones and its shadows, make the film look like it's directed by Wong Kar Wai (whose films also didn't have good posters until recently). It could just be because Tony Leung stars, or because of that dress, but for me the poster evokes Wong's In the Mood for Love. I am surprised that Joan Chen isn't featured anywhere, but I guess they preferred to spotlight newcomer Tang Wei, who gets even better exposure here than Leung (though it must be said that Leung's profile is more recognizable than many other stars').
Lust, Caution is Lee's return to Chinese-language filmmaking again following Hulk and Brokeback, and it marks his first film after winning the Oscar for the latter film. He is again working with executive producer James Schamus of Focus Features and he has brought back Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon producer William Kong and screenwriter Wang Hui-Ling. Lee's longtime editor Tim Squyres also returns after not working on Brokeback. It seems the only collaborator that Lee is keeping from his Oscar darling is cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto. Lust, Caution is set in WWII Shanghai and involves a plot to assassinate an intelligence chief in the Japanese-backed Chinese government. Leung plays the intelligence chief, Chen plays his wife and Tang is a student who seduces Leung's the character in order to set up the assassination. Focus will open the film in limited release September 28.
Check out the trailer after the jump.
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A Natural History of Menopause
Menopause is defined as an ending, a lack: you can't know you're in it till it's over. That's the dance, said a doctor I asked. To medicine, it's the one-year anniversary of a woman's last period. Just that day, that 24-hour spot of time.
To most women, the word carries much more weight. Hot flashes. Mood swings. A feeling of falling apart. Aches in the teeth, the joints, the eyes. Osteoporosis. The end of fertility—and of desire, too? The transformation from "babe" into "crone." The door to old age.
I fear beginning to look like my mother, with a very large stomach, said a woman in one survey. Others noted:
Wrinkling, pot-belly, old-looking skin.
It's a negative image of a body "drying up."
Weight gain is a constant struggle.
I dislike feeling old.
"Notable was the absence of any sense of achievement, or gained status, associated with becoming menopausal," noted the researchers who conducted the survey. "Rather, the anticipated benefits had more to do with the termination of currently annoying or troubling conditions."
Recently an anthropologist did find a biological reason for "the change": as a way to secure the health of the youngsters in a family while their mother is nursing a newborn. Post-menopausal females are prodigious food-gatherers, she found, and keep their grandchildren well fed. The news was uplifting: menopause may be a good thing for the species. But the anthropologist's work carried a downside as well. She named her idea "The Grandmother Hypothesis." (At menopause, I wonder, will I become white haired and apple-cheeked? Will I learn patience and pie-baking?)
Doctors talk about the perimenopause, those years (and we're talking five, more or less) of fluctuating fertility, when a woman's once punctual periods start wandering over the days and weeks. When it comes, the blood may gush—a sign frighteningly like that of some cancers. Just the irregularity of it all takes some getting used to. Especially when no one can tell you why.
"Why do women continue to feel they don't know anything about menopause when there are so many books on the bookshelves now?," asked Phyllis Mansfield, who had conducted the survey cited above. "Because every woman's menopause is unique," she answered herself, "and no study has validated that uniqueness."
Mathematics, oddly, may give women that validation: mathematics and almost a quarter of a million urine samples. These are the telling points of a $2 million study, funded by the National Institutes of Health last July, joining Mansfield and anthropologists Jim Wood, Darryl Holman, and Kathleen O'Connor at Penn State, with demographer Maxine Weinstein at Georgetown University and nurse-physiologist Ann Voda of The Tremin Trust at the University of Utah.
Mansfield is a psychologist, a health educator, and a scholar of women's studies. She has a reassuring manner and a soothing voice, yet she's effusive and energetic when talking about what drives her; for an activist she's unusually optimistic. She offered me chocolate when I came to her office: someone baked brownies for a birthday treat. When she spoke of her new project she sat very still. "All my research is done with the aim of giving women the information that will empower them. I want to help women. I want to help women manage a very scary transition—and it's scary because they don't know what to expect."
"It's a hot topic," said anthropologist Jim Wood of the menopause. "Because of the aging of the Baby Boom and also the development of new interventions for infertility that aren't just "treatments.' It's now possible for a woman to become pregnant after menopause, with donor eggs, a simulated hormonal milieu. There's no overwhelming technical reason why she shouldn't be able to do this." Wood has the kind of enthusiasm that is barely contained in his frame. His gestures are large, his vocabulary lively. He does professorial stuff: writes flow charts on the blackboard, knits his fingers behind his head, yet he can discuss without blushing such things as breastfeeding and menstrual blood. His research landed him in New Guinea, just out of graduate school, collecting urine and trying to unravel, by reading hormonal signs, why women are sometimes fertile, sometimes not, why their cycles suddenly end. "To discover the dearth of information on these questions was absolutely mindboggling," he exclaimed.
Darryl Holman was one of Wood's graduate students and is now a postdoctoral fellow in the lab. He rivals Wood's enthusiasm (and though a younger man, beats him hands down on length of beard), but his is a more gentle, inquiring manner. He's quick to blame his own bad assumptions for the trick his data from Bangladesh played on him. With a team of Bangladeshi field workers, he collected 20,000 urine samples one year. He was assessing rates of fetal loss—how often women became pregnant but lost the fetus before they knew it—and menopause factored into his tests. "If I'd only known," he mused. "If I'd not read the literature, I would have done a better study." He laughed and explained: "I went to Bangladesh believing women over 43 had a good chance of being post-menopausal. There'd been a study in the early "80s in this same area, and it found the mean age at menopause was 43.6. That's on the low end, but it's consistent with studies of menopause in developing countries," the theory being that menopause has something to do with poor nutrition or stress. "So I only collected women up to age 48," Holman said. "By chance I got a few older than that because the field worker messed up." A statistical analysis including these strays showed the mean age at menopause to be between 49 and 51. "My conclusion now is that this belief that menopause occurs earlier in developing countries is not true. It's hooey. I went back and reviewed the literature very carefully, and in all the studies that showed a really early age at menopause, the statistical analyses were flawed."
Statistical analyses are Holman's cup of tea. He talked of being "the statistical interpreter" of the menopause group, of being interested in "building etiologic models, mechanistic models, of how we think the biology is working," of being "quite proud of the follicular depletion model" that he and Wood have developed to explain menopause. "But I want to apply it as well," he added. "We're trying to understand what menopause is."
"There's another reason why women want to do this, to be a part of this study," said Kathleen O'Connor. O'Connor, also a postdoc, actually runs the lab. She's the one who has to go down to Walmart to collect the 200 clipboards, 200 Tupperware freezer containers, and 1200 styrofoam boxes. She's the one who'll be in charge of packing and sending the stuff out to the women volunteers and organizing hormonal assays on the quarter of a million urine samples they return. She's assayed her own urine as well. "It's fun experimenting on yourself," she kidded. There's a quickness, a cut-to-the-chase efficiency about O'Connor that's lacking in the other three Penn Staters on the team. She sorted through a stack of files looking for something, grabbed a napkin when she couldn't come up with a blank scrap to draw a diagram on. She showed me the chart: two hormones fluctuating like out-of-sync waves across a span of 30 days. "It's so cool to see that," she said, "when you get a profile of your hormones across your cycle, it's so cool. You learn what your body is doing. It's a reward in itself."
"I'm taking urine samples myself, too," noted Mansfield. "Kathy and I can sit around and say, You know what it's like when you can't open the freezer box because your hands are too stiff first thing in the morning?" She smiled. "It's very important to know what you're asking other people to do."
The "other people," in this case, are a group of 150 to 200 35- to 55-year-old women selected from the Tremin Trust Menstruation and Reproductive History Program. Beginning in 1934, when Alan Treloar of the University of Minnesota enrolled the 2350 women of cohort 1, and continuing with the 1600 women of cohort 2, who were recruited in the 1960s and "70s, the Tremin Trust women have kept menstrual calendars, recording the beginning and ending dates of each of their periods on a standardized card and, on its reverse, any "unusual events" that might have affected their cycles, such as pregnancies, births, abortions, surgeries, illnesses, use of medication, or lapses in their record-keeping. A year-end health report recorded their living arrangements and household composition, education, medical and smoking histories, exercise routines, and sources of stress or support. "Since 1967," Wood and his colleagues wrote in their grant proposal, "analyses drawing upon the Tremin Trust database have made significant contributions to our understanding of the human menstrual cycle. . . . Most of what we know about age patterns of menstruation, including during the menopausal transition, is based upon the Tremin Trust sample."
Mansfield met Ann Voda, current director of the Tremin Trust, at a conference the year after the Trust moved to the University of Utah in 1984. Both were asking questions about the menstrual cycle: "Not medicalizing," Mansfield said, "but asking different questions, saying, What do women experience? We were not making assumptions that menstrual events were signs of illness. They may be different from what women experience at other times, but not illness."
In 1990, the two started a study using a subset of the Tremin Trust women, those aged 35 to 55 who were still menstruating. They focused on heavy bleeding. "We asked the women to report not just when their periods started and stopped, but we devised a scale to measure how much bleeding was occuring. Women do notice if their period is longer or shorter, but what they most notice is this heavy bleeding." The women's yearly health report was expanded to include questions about changes in their bodies, their cycles, moods, sexual response, hot flashes, and other conditions related to menopause. "We asked them how they negotiated decision-making with their physicians on hormone treatments, and where they got their information on menopause." Voda and Mansfield also asked, Why do you stay in this project? "Mostly to help other women, the subjects said. They felt they had been so much better informed by being in the project," Mansfield noted. Some had listed Edith Bunker of TV's "All in the Family" as one of their chief sources of information before joining the study. I can't talk to my physician about this, one said. Another: Two doctors told me when I asked about when to expect menopause, "Ask your mother.' Thanks anyway. A third: My mother told me nothing about the menstrual cycle or menopause. It was hush-hush.
Independently of Mansfield, Wood and Maxine Weinstein had contacted Voda about using the Tremin Trust to look at the hormonal profile over menopause. It was Voda who linked Wood and Mansfield, both at Penn State. "It was natural for us to put together a grant proposal," said Mansfield. But it took several rewrites before a federal agency agreed to fund it. ("Our fear was that the government would take so long that the women would be past menopause," Mansfield said. "This was going to be the last try, they're getting old.") Funding came through in July "97, and Mansfield admitted that the protocol was improved by the review process. "We did a quick pilot study," she explained, "with women in this area collecting their urine in a device Darryl devised. We were able to show the government that we did have a method women would easily comply with."
It's not a method easy on the lab. "We're getting daily samples from a large number of women over a long range of time," said O'Connor, "it's unprecedented. It'll open a window into the biology." It'll be a lot of work. Each woman will get a 15-pound "urine collection kit" each year: 185 "urine collection devices" (one a day for six months, then she can take a six-month break), a plastic freezer storage case, sheets of labels, sealing tape, seven 8-ounce refrigerant gel packs (one extra for travel), six postpaid polyfoam mailing boxes, and an instruction sheet on a clipboard. The easy-to-use urine collection device, which Holman hopes to patent, obviates the need for the subject to process urine in any way, e.g. to pour it from one container to another, according to the grant proposal. Each morning, the woman collects her own urine, seals the vial, attaches that day's sample identification number to the vial, and then places it into the plastic container provided for storing the specimens in her freezer. On the label she does "a little bit of record-keeping," noting if she's menstruating, taking birth control pills, eating large amounts of soy protein ("Some studies find an effect on the hormones we're looking at," said O'Connor. "It's controversial."), any medicines she might be using.
"Altogether," said O'Connor, "it should take her three to five minutes, max."
At the end of each month, she'll ship her 30-odd vials toUniversity Park via overnight express.
"We'll probably need 12 freezers here in the lab," said O'Connor. "We're hoping to get 40,000 urine samples a year." From each daily sample O'Connor and her assistants will take a one-milliliter aliquot, freezing the rest of the 10-to-15 milliliter sample. The urine in each aliquot will be used in four hormone assays, testing for forms of estradiol, progesterone, follicle-stimulating hormone (FSH), and luteinizing hormone (LH). "Each of the assays," said O'Connor, "takes about a week to run. At 36 samples per plate, 30 plates at a time, we'll be doing about 1,000 samples a week. A robotic pipetter will do a lot of the work for us," she added. "That'll help prevent carpal tunnel syndrome from repeat pipetting. But it will still be an enormous amount of work. That's why other people haven't done this before."
Over the last year, processing Holman's 20,000 Bangladeshi urine samples, O'Connor has streamlined the assaying. "Every day of the week we take out the plates, line them up, and do something to them. It's like working in your kitchen. The samples have a wide range of colors. They're quite pretty. There is a distinctive odor—" She laughed. "I get a lot of comments from the genetics people down the hall, especially when we're boiling it. But it's better than working with blood or feces."
Mansfield, meanwhile, is in charge of keeping the samples coming in. "My job," she explained, "is to make calls to every woman on the project and find out how she's doing. To make sure she doesn't have questions, that her morale is good." Mansfield will also be the one integrating the women's label jottings and yearly surveys with the hormonal assays—"that is, placing what we're finding in the lab in the context of women's lives: the stressful events, new jobs, divorces, deaths; what the women are taking, in terms of medical products or herbs; and how they're feeling: What is going on when their LH and FSH are sky high?
"We've learned that all changes are alarming to women," Mansfield said, citing her earlier work with Voda. "A woman who has a 32-day cycle will become totally alarmed if she has a 35-day period, when for another woman that's totally normal. No one has documented what all the changes are over the menopause. Treloar did some of it, the man who started the Tremin Trust."
Nearly three million office visits are made by women between ages 25 and 54 each year for complaints related to menstrual disorders; the annual visit rate for abnormal bleeding is 7.2 per 100 women, Mansfield and her colleagues note in their grant proposal. Changes in menstrual patterns have been linked to osteoporosis, cardiovascular risk, cancers of the breast and endometrium, thyroid and pituitary disorders, and other health problems. Yet no one knows the full range of "normal." Despite recent work on the biology of menopause, little is known at the population level about variation among women in the perimenopausal transition or how that variation relates to their earlier experiences.
"Here's the Reader's Digest Condensed Version," Wood began. He was giving me the lab's working model, their theory of what menopause is. When Holman had explained it to me, he used equations; O'Connor scrapped the math and pulled out illustrations and graphs. Wood began with the basics.
"Up in your head you have the hypothalmus." He drew a box on the blackboard. "A little lower down in the head you have the pituitary gland. The hypothalmus releases gonadotropic releasing hormone, GnRH. That stimulates a couple of hormones known as FSH and LH, the gonadotropins, which in turn stimulate the ovary and are critical in maintaining regular cycles. These hormones select which follicle in the ovary is going to develop into an egg. What we think is happening with this selection process is that a lot of follicles begin developing, then randomly die by a process called atresia. Atresia is the default value. But the idea is that if a follicle has started to develop at such a time that it presents the right hormone receptor during a previous month's cycle, it will be selected—it will be rescued from atresia and go on to become an egg.
"The developing follicles in the ovary feed back to the pituitary gland by releasing steroids—estradiol, which is a form of estrogen, and progesterone are the most important." At the blackboard, Wood finished drawing boxes for the pituitary and ovary and linked them with a pattern of arrows. "Except for a brief period mid-cycle, these feedbacks are mostly negative, that is, they suppress the production of hormones. The exception is estradiol. Just before ovulation, it switches over in a way that's still mysterious to a positive feedback. But it's the negative feedback from the follicles at the beginning of the cycle that's critical for getting a normal cycle underway.
"We now know with fair confidence," Wood said, speaking for science in general, "that menopause is driven by this process of follicular depletion." Or, as O'Connor had put it, "Aging comes from the ovaries." It works like this: A girl is born with upwards of a million follicles in her ovaries. Like the cells in the brain and the eye, these follicles are never replaced when they die. Unlike brain cells, dying off is what follicles do naturally: by the time a girl reaches puberty and her hormones kick in, she will have lost all but some 100,000 of them. Every month after that, a dozen or more follicles will begin to grow, only one of which is usually selected to mature and be released at ovulation. By the time she is 45 (at least according to the handful of studies that have been done using autopsy cases or ovaries that had to be surgically removed), a woman's follicles will number only about a thousand. "What happens in menopause," said Wood, "is that once you've run out of follicles, all the hormonal feedback is removed. FSH and LH go up to very high levels and randomly fluctuate, which is what we believe is responsible for hot flashes.
"The big mysteries in this research have to do with the mechanisms of follicular depletion," Wood added. "But from the statistical information, it looks like a process that begins prenatally and randomly continues. There's a random exhaustion of follicles ending with menopause." That statistical pattern lends itself to "some fairly simple mathematical models," said Wood. (As Holman had noted. "It looks like an exponential process, like a radioactive half-life.") Wood continued, "As modelers, we thought, If the process is as straightforward as that, then we should be able to develop a mathematical model of follicular depletion that could tell us what the age distribution of menopause should look like, and it should tell us something about the variation in ages of when women reach menopause.
"So we developed a model. But as we started playing around with the model more, and the implications of the model, we thought, There really shouldn't be such a thing as menopause. It's an arbitrary definition: If you haven't experienced vaginal bleeding in 12 months, you're post-menopausal. But the model told us there should be a very long upper tail"—that is, that a graph of bleeding episodes over a woman's lifetime wouldn't show just monthly clusters of dots that suddenly stop; the dots would instead at some point start spacing out and looking erratic, tailing off little by little until they eventually gave out.
"But then, we asked, Why do we see these long lags between bleeding at higher ages? It turns out that it has to do with interarrival times in superimposed pure-death processes."
Huh? Wood saw the blank look on my face and laughed, a great guffaw. "This loss of follicles can be modelled in a way that statistical modellers call a "pure-death process.' That's a subclass of what statisticians call "birth-death processes,' but here you have a stock of something and the only thing that can happen to them is that you can lose them.
"It's a very strange biological reality.
"What our model predicted was that at any age you had a possibility of having a period of time where there was no follicular development. In a young woman, that period of time might be milli-seconds long, but it's there. In an older woman, it can be very long indeed. Menopause, in a way, is just a very long phase before follicular development. Which means that a woman well past "menopause' could still get some vaginal bleeding. This is what our model predicts."
He smiled. "It's a lot nicer than thinking that something very wrong is going on if you get bleeding after menopause," he added.
Back to the science: "So then we got to wondering if these interarrival times left any hormonal signature? We searched the literature and we found it.
"We used to think that if you saw a combination of low steroids and high gonadotropins that it was the signature of menopause. But if our model was right, there should be a period in any woman's cycle when no steroids were released and we would see high gonadotropins. And we found a handful of cases. There was no explanation given. These were just weird times when the women were not producing steroids and their gonadotropins went real high. One endocrinologist went so far as to label this the "hypoestrogenic-hypergonadotrophic period.' He only saw it in one woman.
"At the same time, we were doing a pilot study for our NIH grant proposal. Kathy was collecting urine in women of a wide age range, and as data came in, hey presto! There was our own hypoestrogenic-hypergonadotrophic phase. It looked like what you'd expect during one of our interarrival times.
"Then we said—and this idea took a long time coming—we said, occasionally you'd expect to see one of these in a younger woman. We looked at our data on younger women and, by God, there it was. No steroids, and the gonadotropins would start to go up. They didn't get very far. As soon as you got hormonal evidence that another follicle was developing, the gonadotropins went right back down. When we looked at the full set of younger women, some showed no sign of this phase, some showed one day, some three or four days. But never very long phases.
"And we started to think the following brave thoughts. Let's call them hypotheses. We think these inactive phases will turn out to be a normal part of the perimenopausal transition. They will get longer—the age progression turned out to be quite regular. It makes sense to think of menopause as a very long inactive phase that could be followed by another round of follicular development if there are follicles left. And the fact that the inactive phase is getting longer, but that there's a lot of variability, explains why women's cycles are so different. It also explains a lot of what have been hitherto mysterious connections between hormone levels and menopause."
Just like women throughout the ages, I've long compared my cycles to the moon's. I wax and I wane. I come to a glowing fullness at ovulation, I get sharper and more prickly as I approach the dark respite and the cycle begins anew. The metaphor, woman as moon, doesn't bear up under too much analysis. Yet imagine this: If the moon were mortal, if she aged as I do, those dark nights that we call the new moon would increase. The month would linger. One night of darkness now, maybe two. Five nights when I'm 45. By the time I'm 55, years and years might go by without moonlight, and then, suddenly, a sliver of moon.
"We can predict, mathematically, how long it will take since the last cycle before an ovary begins putting out estradiol," Holman said, "and it depends on a woman's age. At 30 years of age, it's really short. At 45, it's really noticeable.
"We call this period the inactive phase of the cycle. We're proposing that there are three phases of the menstrual cycle, not two.
"The other two are the follicular phase and the luteal phase. During the follicular phase, the follicles are growing. The luteal phase is after ovulation, which means that the selected follicle has turned into a corpus luteum. That's when progesterone starts going up, to finish preparing the lining of the uterus for implantation." Sometimes in post-menopausal women, Holman noted, when their ovaries are removed for one reason or another, a corpus luteum is found inside. In other cases, a woman believed to be post-menopausal will get pregnant. A hysterectomy is often prescribed if a woman two or three years past menopause suddenly begins again to have vaginal bleeding, yet such a lag, in her case, could be normal: merely an extra-long phase before a last follicle develops.
To counteract some side effects of menopause, such as mood swings and hot flashes, as well as to protect against osteoporosis, physicians often suggest estrogen replacement therapy: According to the New York Times, Premarin, an estrogen replacement, is the most widely used prescription drug in the United States. "One of the things physicians typically do before a woman goes on estrogen replacement therapy," Holman explained, "is to take a blood test for hormones. If our model is right, a woman who has a single blood sample taken and looks menopausal may still have another bleeding episode. You need to know what part of her cycle the woman is in. It's not recognized that a woman can go six months in an inactive stage and yet suddenly have one of her follicles grow."
Plus, added O'Connor, "When is she going to go to the doctor? When she's unhappy. When she's in this inactive phase. Why does she feel lousy? Because her gonadotropins are high and her steroids are low. It's been a routine part of her cycle, but now it's become longer and more frequent because she's older. Those gonadotropin peaks used to be very narrow, only a day or less, before the steroids would also get high. Now it's a longer period of time."
"We're hopeful," said Wood, "that by gaining a clearer picture of the processes involved we can come up with much more reasonable guidelines for estrogen replacement therapy. For instance, how long might it be before a woman is likely to be making these hormones herself again? That's something we could predict."
Plus, added Mansfield, "There might be patterns in the way a woman's menstrual cycle changes during menopause. That's not interesting in itself, but what if we could predict patterns? For instance, what if every woman who had one child had a certain pattern, and it differed from that of a woman who had no children? Wouldn't that help women to know?"
"There might be other things that affect the rate of follicular depletion," said Holman. "We haven't identified specific ones, because the data are still being entered, but besides pregnancies, these might be the age at menarche, the use of birth control, the length of the cycle, even things like smoking. There's an epidemiological finding that women who smoke have earlier menopause. That might be purely a coincidence, nobody knows the mechanism, but smoking might kill follicles or it might affect a woman endocrinologically somehow. Right now there's not a lot of evidence that anything affects follicular depletion very much, but this study will let us look for factors that might somehow affect the underlying rate."
Said Wood, "Adding this inactive phase to our model of follicular depletion is really a powerful concept in understanding the aging of the reproductive system. It's an elegant way to explain some phenomena that haven't been tied together before. And it can make some pretty strong predictions. It can give a woman a better understanding of her own pattern, and some idea of what she is going to go through as she ages, based on her previous reproductive history. And it can tell us something about hormone patterns and the underlying biology of what is normal."
A compelling reason for studying changes in the pattern of menstrual bleeding during the perimenopause is related to the frequency of hysterectomies in the U.S., Wood and his colleagues write. Hysterectomy, still the most common surgical procedure performed on women, is often precipitated by self-diagnosed changes in bleeding pattern or menstrual disorders.
Knowledge of what sort of menstrual changes to expect is therefore essential to women's well-being.
"At what point do we say a bleeding pattern or a hormonal pattern is 'abnormal'?" Wood asked. "My own thought is that we've been too quick to label it that."
James W. Wood, Ph.D., is professor of anthropology in the College of the Liberal Arts, 517 Carpenter Bldg., University Park, PA 16802; 814-865-1936; jww3@psu.edu. Phyllis Kernoff Mansfield, Ph.D., is professor of women's studies and health education in the College of the Liberal Arts, 14 Sparks Bldg.; 863-0356; pkm@psu.edu. Darryl Holman, Ph.D., is a postdoctoral fellow in the Population Research Institute, Intercollege Research Programs, 714 Oswald Bldg.; 863-1823; holman@pop.psu.edu. Kathleen O'Connor, Ph.D., is also a postdoctoral fellow in the Population Research Institute, 510 Carpenter Bldg.; 863-7740; oconnor@pop.psu.edu. Their current research is funded by the National Institutes of Health.
Helen Redman's illustrations for this article appear on her Web site, "Birthing the Crone: Menopause and Aging Through the Artist's Eyes." The site combines powerful images and text to explore menopause and the physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual changes women experience as they age. She encourages women "to learn how to remain healthy and vital and to appreciate their bodies as they transform into the crone,' the pinnacle of femail life experience and wiseon," Redman says.
Last Updated May 01, 1998
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Massive computing effort to evaluate national hydrological models
University Park, Pa. — A team of Penn State civil engineers has received one of the largest single-year allocations of supercomputing hours made for 2010.
The engineers, led by Patrick Reed, associate professor of civil engineering, recently received 6 million hours on a large-scale supercomputing system for their project titled "Massively Parallel Simulation and Evaluation of Hydrologic Monitoring, Prediction and Management Systems Under Uncertainty."
According to Reed, researchers can routinely use thousands of hours of computational time on supercomputers to solve complex problems. "Once you go up and towards a million hours, you need special access," he said.
Reed's team will utilize the Texas Advanced Computing Center's Ranger system at the University of Texas at Austin. "The six million service units represent one of the largest allocation blocks they will give," he explained. "For us to get this, we had to compete nationally."
Reed has been modeling local watersheds for a number of years and researching related aspects such as drought management, the effect of large river basins and climate change. The 6 million computing hours will allow the research team, which includes Thorsten Wagener, associate professor of civil engineering, and Reed Maxwell, an associate professor at the Colorado School of Mines, to scale their models up to the regional and national level.
"We'll be looking at the Susquehanna River basin, but in addition to that, we have collaborations with Princeton University and the National Weather Service where we will have models of watersheds throughout the United States," he said.
Reed stated that the effort to evaluate and advance his simulation of a national water resource model will demand a massive amount of computing power.
"Right now, there's a lot of different kinds of hydrologic models and prediction frameworks out there. The goal of our project is to go from simple models that are very local, modeling stream flow at a single point in the river, all the way up to a national water resources model of the United States."
Much of the work will involve evaluating existing models. "How good are our data sets right now, and where can we fall in that predictive continuum to get good flood forecasts or to make long-term predictions?" he asked. "You have to account for uncertainty, which means running thousands or even more simulations to statistically really understand what a model is doing or is capable of doing. That's where the supercomputing comes in."
Reed said the National Weather Service became involved because the agency was seeking more accurate tools for flood forecasting.
"The National Weather Service wants more complex models in generating a flood forecast," he explained. Current flood forecasting models base their predictions on what's termed a "lumped model" ? essentially gathering all of the information involving a river, such as rainfall and evaporation, and using the average to create a flood prediction.
What the National Weather Service hopes to do is more accurately forecast flooding in different parts of a given river basin. "The move is away from a single-point time series to grids of time series where you start to distribute across space. Then that way, you're not just forecasting at a single point in a river basin, but at all the major outlets, all the major points of interest within a river basin simultaneously."
He said, "They want to do a broader sweep of analysis. Every six hours they do flood forecasts and it's a tremendously challenging job. But not only do they want to do more flood forecasting, but drought as well. They want to use the model's prediction not only in stream flow, but also soil moisture."
Being able to accurately model regional and national water basins will also allow scientists to better understand the impact of climate change, Reed added.
"As climate comes into focus and as land use changes, problems are moving from the large, urbanized streams up into the watershed. Now we're becoming concerned with the ecological ramifications of change in these small headwaters," he said. "Trout in Pennsylvania would be a huge example. These are streams that are extremely temperature sensitive and species that are extremely temperature sensitive, so making some predictions or having an understanding of our predictive skills up into these smaller streams that are ungauged is difficult."
Reed said, "As land use, population growth, climate — all these variables — are changing, the classic engineering approach to water resources management of 'the past will reflect the future' is not so true anymore. We have to fundamentally understand how we make these predictions, what observations we need to improve them, then improve our science and then use that science to advance our engineered solutions. These tools will create a whole new spectrum of possibilities for design engineers and scientists."
Last Updated November 02, 2010
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Updated: 10/08/2013 02:44 | By Agence France-Presse
China grabs limelight from wounded US at Asia-Pac summit
China took centre-stage at an Asia-Pacific summit on Monday, adopting a leadership role on the strength of its new-found economic might as the United States struggles to overcome its budget paralysis.
China grabs limelight from wounded US at Asia-Pac summit
Russia's President Vladimir Putin (left) talks to China's President Xi Jinping (right) as they arrive for a retreat session at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Nusa Dua on the Indonesian resort island of Bali on October 7, 2013
The US federal shutdown has stopped US President Barack Obama from attending the two-day Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit on the Indonesian island of Bali, and another meeting this week of East Asian leaders in Brunei.
US Secretary of State John Kerry stressed Obama's determination to remain engaged with the Pacific Rim region. But his absence left the arena clear for the leader of one-party China to trumpet the mounting heft of the world's second largest economy.
"China will firmly uphold regional peace and stability and help cement a foundation for a win-win situation in the Asia-Pacific," President Xi Jinping told an APEC business forum, as he emphasised his country was the biggest trading partner and export market for many nations in the region.
Prior to a gala dinner, at which Indonesia resurrected an APEC tradition of dressing up the leaders in artisan designs, Xi also sought in his speech to adopt a healing and united tone.
"China cannot develop in isolation of the Asia-Pacific and the Asia-Pacific cannot prosper without China," he said, stressing that his country's recent economic slowdown was the intended result of policies designed to put growth on a more sustainable path.
"We the Chinese often say a family in harmony prospers. As a member of the Asia-Pacific family, China is ready to live in amity with other family members and help each other."
The communist leader has been touring Southeast Asia, where there is much disquiet about China's territorial ambitions, and also touted the benefits of free trade pacts after securing commercial deals worth tens of billions of dollars in Indonesia and Malaysia.
China is involved in talks on a trade agreement grouping 16 East Asian nations just as Washington's rival "Trans-Pacific Partnership" (TPP) of 12 countries appears to be running into trouble.
While sympathetic to Obama's political plight, the leaders of US allies in APEC such as Singapore expressed disappointment that he had been unable to throw his presidential weight personally behind the TPP and Washington's stop-start "pivot" towards Asia.
An unprecedented default by the holder of the world's reserve currency would affect "the entire planet, and not just those countries with a strong geographical and economic linkage to the US", Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto said in Bali.
But Kerry, taking Obama's place at APEC, said the president's epic tussle with the Republicans was merely "a moment in politics" that did not deflect the United States from its strategic goals.
"I want to emphasise that there is nothing that will shake the commitment of the rebalance to Asia that President Obama is leading," Kerry told the business forum.
Previewing Tuesday's final summit declaration in Bali, the ministers said that "global growth is too weak, risks remain tilted to the downside, and the economic outlook suggests growth is likely to be slower and less balanced than desired".
Before he called off his foreign travel, Obama had intended to preside over a top-level round of talks among the TPP countries in Bali on Tuesday.
But doubts about the pact are gathering pace, and also about Obama's vaunted "pivot".
Attending APEC "would have been a golden opportunity for America and President Obama himself to show leadership in that context of the new emphasis towards Asia", Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak said.
Najib sees the end-of-year deadline for the TPP as "very tight" given mounting discord over issues such as market access and protection of intellectual property.
But Kerry said a deal was still achievable in the timeframe, as he sought to sell the merits of the pact.
"At a time when all of us seek strong and sustainable growth, TPP is creating a race to the top, not to the bottom. It is reaching for the highest standards of all," he said in his speech.
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Lon Kruger's good idea had a bad ending
By Michael Baldwin Published: July 14, 2011
Lon Kruger went to Atlanta Hawks management before the 2002-03 NBA season with a radical proposal.
Kruger's idea was to build a marketing plan around the Hawks making the playoffs. If the Hawks reached postseason, all season ticket holders would be given free first-round tickets.
"Crowd interest was very low," Kruger said. "The enthusiasm for the Hawks was low. We were just trying to do something to pique interest."
The final marketing plan was different from the plan pitched by Kruger. Team officials decided it wasn't sexy enough.
Before that season, team officials did make a guarantee, though. If the Hawks didn't make the playoffs, every season ticket holder would be refunded $125.
“The team thought it would play better, read better, if they did it the other way, which I was fine with,” Kruger said. “We just wanted to create a little interest.”
Kruger said he believed making the playoffs that season was a realistic goal.
After missing the playoffs three consecutive years, including two seasons under Kruger, the Hawks acquired veteran Glenn Robinson from Milwaukee. Robinson would complement veterans Shareef Abdur-Rahim and Theo Ratliff.
Atlanta also had a talented second-year guard, Jason Terry, who would eventually become the league's Sixth Man of the Year with the Dallas Mavericks.
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Thursday, November 13, 2008
Beauty is truth, truth beauty
Good ol' Keats.
The truth is: M has been out of town, so my meals have been sandwichy or fruit from the fruit platter-y.
The truth is: M does most of the dishes in our house.
The truth is: this is a very full sink of the girls' dishes.
But isn't it such a pretty sink of dirty dishes?
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problem icon
Links and Knots
problem icon
The interval 0 - 1 is marked into halves, quarters, eighths ... etc. Vertical lines are drawn at these points, heights depending on positions. What happens as this process goes on indefinitely?
problem icon
Voting Paradox
Binary Sequences
Bill from Reading School sent in this solution and other good solutions came in from Jax from Pate's School and Curt from Reigate College.
This problem can easily be solved through use of Georg Cantor's method for proving that the set of irrational numbers is uncountable. Suppose we tabulate the results of the coin-flipping so that one set of infinite tosses is one row. We might have something like this:
1) 0 1 0 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 1...
2) 10 0 1 1 0 1 0 1 0 1...
3) 1 1 1 0 0 1 0 1 0 0 0...
and so on down and across the infinite list.
Now, we take a diagonal line, starting from the top left and going right and down. The first three digits in this sequence would be 0 0 1. Suppose that this diagonal line gives us a sequence A:
0 0 1 0 1 1 0 0 0 1 1...
Take the complements (remember that we are working in binary). The sequence becomes:
1 1 0 1 0 0 1 1 1 0 0...
This sequence B cannot appear anywhere in the table of coin tosses. Why is this true?
Try matching it up against the first row. Since the first digit of B is the first digit of line 1, but swapped, the sequence B clearly does not match the first row.
Try line 2: the second digit of B is again, taken from line 2 but swapped. Thus the sequence B does not correspond to line 2.
To generalise, the sequence B could almost correspond to some line n, but it would be incorrect at the nth place.
Thus the sequence B we have constructed cannot appear in the table.
This shows that the infinite set of all infinite sequences cannot be written in an ordered list because if we try to make an ordered list as above another sequence can be found which has not been included.
In contrast the infinite set of finite or terminating binary sequences can form an ordered list by defining an order in the following way. Take each binary sequence and treat it as the binary expansion of some integer. Thus the sequence 0 1 1 0 1 0 1 corresponds to 53 (since the initial 0 does not contribute). This mapping associates a non-negative integer with each member of the (infinite) set and therefore arranging the integers in order defines an ordered list.
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BaSTA – More fun than a Swedish sauna
One day, a few years ago, I was drinking with some fellow biologists in “Seminar Room A” opposite the Natural History Museum in Helsinki. The Sibelius Academy is next door to the museum, so we shared the bar with musicians. Once of the musicians came up to us with a plastic bag, and gave it to us saying that they thought we’d know what to do with it. In the bag was a dead gull.
Well, the other biologists knew what to do with it: it had a band on it so they took that off its leg, and dumped the body. The band was sent to the local banding centre, so they would know that the bird had died. And another datum was added to the store of human knowledge.
But what’s the point of banding birds and collected the bands after the bird’s dead? Because it helps us learn about how their populations are faring. We can learn a lot about survival from this sort of data, particularly if it’s combined with observations of birds when they’re alive. But this data is quite messy, so it needs some seriously fun statistics to get anything out of it.
The basic problem is that we don’t see every bird ever year. So, if we didn’t see a bird in one year, how do we know it was still alive? We can’t be sure, but we might be able to put a probability on it. It could be that it was dead, or it was alive but not seen. We can estimate the probability of not seeing the bird from observations of other birds. For example, if we look at all of the birds seen in the previous and subsequent years (i.e. ones we know exist and survived), then the proportion of those that we see is an estimate of the probability of seeing the bird if it was alive.
Once we know the probability of not seeing a bird, we can estimate the probability of it surviving (because we can write down the probabilities of death and of not being seen each year and sum these up to get the probability of never seeing the bird again. Seriously, it does work). Hence, we can estimate the probability of survival. This is helped if we know when some of the birds have died, because that tells us a lot more about the probability of dying and being recovered.
Now, in practice it gets more complicated, because we want to estimate survival that varies, e.g. because of the poor weather we’ve been having or because survival changes with age. Statistics has some standard approaches to do this, but they make it more complicated to estimate anything. So, either one needs to write your own computer code to do the analysis (which takes time, most biologist would also have to start of by learning to programme). Or someone has to write a programme that can take some straightforward inputs and do the complicated stuff itself.
All of which brings us to this video, expounding on the virtues of a computer package to do just that:
The package is based on an amazing piece of statistical software called R, which has taking over as the tool to use. This means biologists only have to learn to use R and they have a lot of tools at their fingertips for them to abuse.
The applications of these methods go beyond ecology. In the video they mention estimating historical survival of humans, but the methods have also been used to estimate HIV infection, and the numbers of political killings in Kosovo. If we have several incomplete lists of individuals in a population, these methods can help us estimate how incomplete they are, and if they are ordered in time we can estimate when individuals drop out, either through death or just moving away.
So, if you see a dead banded bird, pop over to the nearest ornithologist-filled pub and give them the band, or the whole bird if you really want to make their day.
This entry was posted in Ecology, Research Blogging, Statistics. Bookmark the permalink.
2 Responses to BaSTA – More fun than a Swedish sauna
1. Tom Webb says:
Fascinating stuff Bob. Particularly like the Airplane-inspired outtakes at the end!
Serious question though: do you know of anyone applying these kinds of methods to the fossil record? Seems like birth & death of species, under (very) incomplete sampling (what’s got preserved) would be an obvious application.
2. Bob O'Hara says:
I’ve started doing something similar, but I hadn’t been thinking of it in a MRR context. Lee Hsiang Liow seems to have been doing something too, or at least thinking about it. My impression is that the paleao people are behind in this regard.
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The Metropolitan Transportation Authority will reopen the old station at South Ferry in the first week of April, state officials said Thursday. The move would restore subway service to the southern terminus of the No. 1 line for the first time since superstorm Sandy.
The closed South Ferry Subway Station is pictured in January. Peter Foley for the Wall Street Journal
Reopening the outer loop of the old South Ferry station will revive some anachronistic features the MTA thought it had relegated to the past: Its short length forced riders to walk to the front five cars of a train to exit; and metal extenders were needed to bridge gaps between the platform and the train.
But Sandy—and more than four months in which riders had to walk north from the Staten Island Ferry landing to board the No. 1 train at Rector Street—have left the MTA no choice but to reopen the old station while the effort is under way to rebuild the new South Ferry station downstairs.
The restoration of service to the old South Ferry was a step MTA officials had once ruled out, even as the modern station beneath it lay in ruins after filling with brackish, corrosive floodwater during the Oct. 29 storm.
"It became clear that the time necessary to repair it would be too long a period to deny our customers a direct link to lower Manhattan," Mr. Prendergast said.
Restoration of No. 1 trains to South Ferry would leave just a single section of the subway system out of service because of storm damage, the A train between Howard Beach and Rockaway Park. Storm surge there knocked out the train tracks that cross Broad Channel.
Commuters welcomed the news that the old station would be restored to use.
"My commute time has doubled," said Sharon Johnson, 35 years old, of Staten Island, as she waited at the Staten Island ferry terminal. "If it were summer, the walk [from Rector St. Station] wouldn't be that bad, but it's not."
Other commuters said the closed station had given them an excuse to fit more exercise into their day. "It's just a little walk," said Carlos Diaz, 49, also of Staten Island. "It's a good walk. It's brisk, it's been kind of nice," Mr. Diaz said. "To be honest, it only adds about 10 minutes to the commute."
Work at South Ferry was under way earlier this week. A peek through a security gate revealed crews had already cut an opening in the wall that separates the modern South Ferry station from the platform of the outside loop track of the old station.
The MTA was also installing new lighting, repainting walls, and adding security cameras, radio connections and customer intercoms, the agency said, at a projected cost of $2 million.
How much the restoration of the new South Ferry station will cost remains an open question. In the immediate aftermath of the storm, MTA officials said it could cost as much as $600 million. Much of the cost was driven by the need to replace sensitive signal and communications equipment that was wrecked by salt corrosion from the flood. Mr. Prendergast said last month that the agency would evaluate whether it was possible to raise some sensitive equipment to new locations aboveground to protect against future floods.
The cost of repairs to South Ferry was especially frustrating to the agency because the station was so recently overhauled. It was expanded and modernized in a $545 million project concluded in 2009.
—Mara Gay contributed to this article.
Write to Ted Mann at
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Ram Singh was found dead at Tihar Jail, Delhi's main prison, at around 5:15 a.m., said his lawyer, V.K. Anand.
Police stand guard as an ambulance leaves Tihar Jail on Monday where one of the five men accused in the gang rape of a 23-year-old Indian woman hanged himself. Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
Delhi Outrage Over Gang Rape
A large number of protesters gathered outside Rashtrapati Bhawan, the President's Palace, in New Delhi on Dec. 22. Getty Images
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"He hanged himself [from] the ceiling with his own clothes," said Sunil Gupta, spokesman for Tihar Jail.
Mr. Gupta said Mr. Singh had three cellmates. He said the cellmates "were clueless about his intention to commit suicide. They were sleeping when the incident happened."
Rajinder Singh, Delhi's assistant commissioner of police, who is part of a special task force investigating the Delhi rape case, said Mr. Singh used his "own clothes" to hang himself.
"He used the sleeping mat to make a noose, string from his trousers as a rope to hang himself."
Mr. Singh's lawyer, who originally said that his client had killed himself in jail, hours later contested the police version.
"It is not possible he committed suicide. And the theory that he used his own clothes can't be true as there is high security inside the prison," Mr. Anand said.
Mr. Gupta denied allegations of negligence by the jail authorities. "I am aware media channels are accusing jail authorities for negligence but I deny this allegation. There are guards outside every ward here in Tihar. Ram Singh's ward, too, had sufficient guards. It is not possible to have guards outside every single jail," he said.
Mr. Gupta said the four other accused men at Tihar, who are in neighboring cells, are being closely watched by jail authorities following the suicide.
Addressing reporters in New Delhi, Indian Home Minister Sushil Kumar Shinde said, "It's a major lapse. It's not a small incident. It's a suicide."
"A magisterial inquiry has been ordered. Things will be clear once the report comes," he added.
V.K. Anand, in the center, lawyer for Ram Singh, speaks with the media at the hospital where Mr. Singh's body is scheduled to arrive for autopsy in New Delhi on Monday. Reuters
The five men, along with a juvenile who faces juvenile-court proceedings, are accused of luring the young woman and a male friend onto a bus, then beating the friend and beating and sexually assaulting the woman with a metal rod before throwing both of them naked onto the side of a highway on the evening of Dec. 16.
The young woman, a physiotherapy student, later died of her injuries. Mr. Singh was the regular driver of the bus, one of thousands of private buses that ply the capital's streets.
The case drew widespread attention in India and world-wide for its brutality and for the spotlight it shone on India's failure to protect women. The bus traveled around south Delhi, near an enclave popular with diplomats, for about 45 minutes as the assault took place. Protesters marched in New Delhi and other Indian cities and the government has since moved to strengthen laws to deter crimes against women.
Assistant commissioner of police Rajinder Singh said Mr. Singh's body had been moved to a nearby hospital for a post mortem. "Only after the inquiry is done by special district magistrate, we can say what exactly happened," he said.
Reached by telephone, the father of the rape victim said: "We are feeling a bit relieved with this development. But we really don't know what more to say right now."
Mr. Anand said that during the last court hearing on Friday, Mr. Singh "looked cheerful since he met his 5-year-old son in the court." He said he didn't know what had driven Mr. Singh to this extreme step. "He was happy with the way the trial was proceeding."
A.P. Singh, a lawyer for Akshay Kumar and Vinay Sharma, two others facing trial, said he was skeptical about authorities' explanation that Mr. Singh hanged himself. "How is it possible for a prisoner to hang himself inside a jail cell? Is Tihar's security so weak?"
He added: "My clients are terrified, scared, they fear for their safety."
Mr. Singh's father said in an interview that the family, too, doubted the official version of events. "I had met him six days back," said Mange Lal. "He said the authorities are not treating him well." He also noted that Mr. Singh couldn't use one of his hands efficiently since an accident several years ago.
Tihar's spokesman has said the prisoners in the rape case have been treated properly and confirmed that authorities believe it was a suicide.
Following Mr. Singh's death, the trial being held at a special fast-track court at the Saket district court complex in south Delhi, was adjourned Monday.
The next date of hearing has been set for Tuesday.
--This article has been amended to include lawyer V.K. Anand's initial statement that he believed the death of his client Ram Singh to have been a suicide.
—Saurabh Chaturvedi, Rajesh Roy, R. Jai Krishna, and Aditi Malhotra contributed to this article.
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How has Jazz Influenced Modern Music
Jazz is as American as apple pie. It is original music, created in America. Jazz is the most influential of all music styles in the 20th century. No other music can make that claim. What jazz is, is a mainly improvisational style of playing with syncopated rhythms laid down under the melody. It was created in the Mississippi River Delta country, growing out of ragtime and the blues, in the early 1900′s.
And because it is an improvisational style of playing, there are many different periods of jazz and many different styles of playing jazz. In other words, there is always somebody, somewhere, doing something a little differently than the next guy around the corner. Looking at it historically, jazz followed the Black migration out of the south to the north,by way of Kansas City, Chicago and New York. Each city developed its own sound, from say the jazz that came to be in the French Quarter and lowlands of New Orleans.
Jazz can rightly be called the people’s music because it is heavily influenced by the surrounding social situation where it is played. It takes the day’s social issues and weaves a tune around them. Rock, R&B, Rap, hiphop and country take this cue from Jazz. The best of the other genres are the ones that do this with ease and remain the songs remembered by the people. The 20′s and 30′s are commonly referred to as the Jazz Age in America, and was style was at the height of its popularity. Not that it has ever gone out of style or favor. All things ebb and flow, but Jazz is eternal. The big names live on. Names like Armstrong, Ellington, Basie, Bird Brubeck and Miles are carved in history. Singers like Billie, Ella and Sarah need no last names and remain almost without peer.
The names of the artists who were influenced by jazz are equally memorable, starting with Jimi Hendrix, Chicago, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Cream. Tower of Power, Earth Wind and Fire, James Brown with his magnificent brass horn section. This list goes on ad infinitum and continues to present day.
Rap and hiphop naturally evolved from jazz. Many songs sample jazz greats and the beats created by the older music. The hiphop delivery reflects that created by jazz greats like Joe Williams. Many musicians have combined rap hiphop with jazz including the late great Miles Davis whose final album contained hiphop elements while he wove his magic around them. Quincy Jones, the master musician and band leader regularly weaves the three form together. Nowhere is this more apparent then his album Secret Garden, or The Dude, or Killer Joe.
The changing nature of jazz makes it immediately identifiable and easily adaptable to whatever is going on around it. Jazz is one of the greatest imports ever out of the United States and into Europe and beyond. Those who hear it take and make it their own and then send it back again to the America the country of its birth. Upon its return, the creators of the master plan take the new form, rework it into something else new and original and then send it back out in the world to begin the cycle again for whomever wants to pick it up, be it rock, alternative soul, or Japanese hiphop. It’s still all jazz.
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Friday, October 4, 2013
The longest route
I found myself in need today to share my local installation with a co-worker so that he can test a massive memory optimization I made.
Unfortunately me working from office and a ton of infrastructure with firewalls and what not between us I was forced to come up with a kind of non-standard solution to make it work. Here's what I've done:
1. The application runs locally on Tomcat (using Maven's tomcat6 plugin so mvn tomcat6:run)
2. Local Apache installation forwards requests from port 81 to 8080
3. An ssh tunnel is made that forwards my local port 81 to a remote port 8080 on a machine in Amazon
4. That remote machine has haproxy installed with a certificate that forwards local ports 80 and 443 to 8080 effectively allowing the user to login to my local installation
To test this I've used another Linux machine at home to login to with X forwarding enabled to locally view a remote Google Chrome running and accessing my local installation.
How can you not love Linux for that?
Sunday, September 29, 2013
Removing executable bit from files
I don't want to bore you with the details but I've been looking for a nice solution for this problem for a very long time. Today I came across this post:
chmod -R -x+X *
And life's simple again :)
Thanks to Pabouk (whoever you are)! You made my day!
Friday, August 23, 2013
Why documentation doesn't matter?
Well, it's not really true, it does matter - just not post mortem. It does tell the developer what to do - sometimes even how to do it. It tells the tester how to test it. After the release it's no longer valid nor accurate for anyone to use. Wanna know why?
A simple case
Imagine for a second there's a new position you just stepped into. It's this glorious application that everyone keeps talking about on the 'net. You took a position in one of the teams because you were certain that this can't be wrong - people have been doing that for years so good established processes and a proper technical documentation will be accompanied by a proper introduction training - something to take the edge off from new hires.
Introductory shock
I mean, woooow!!! You just came to the office, suddenly you realize nobody knows who you are, nobody seems to care. People seem to be rushing for no apparent reason through the floors - it's nothing like the place you've envisioned. But that's ok, right? You came here to do the job so let's get that notebook and let's get this show on the road!
Still positive, still passionate, still a foreigner - but you feel this is your chance! In this company, in this corporation there are endless possibilities! Here you will shine!
The second disaster
Ok, so you finally know where you sit, you've got your shiny new notebook on your desk trying to figure out what you've been given, trying to get your familiar tools installed so that you can finally kick start that 'being a developer at ' dream come true.
First of all you don't get to install whatever you want on company's property. No no.. There are rules in place preventing you to utilize whatever power Today's software market has to offer (commercial or OpenSource) so you're kinda stuck with what your new employer has carefully selected for you. You keep telling yourself that it's just a matter of time, that chemistry doesn't happen over night and that you'll get used to it. Why wouldn't you?
Anyways,... There comes the big moment: you're getting the sources! Obviously it's all going to be professional, high quality, top-to-bottom properly designed and brilliantly described in a few pages of perfect documentation. Well.. Our heroes rarely live up to our expectations and my friend this ain't no different. Suddenly it looks like some soft-skill course is more important than getting things done (the famous 'complete this course by today midnight or you'll be terminated' email floating around). Product training is something nobody heard within this walls since the company grew from 7 enthusiast to 1300 employees most of which have better things to do than to sit here, with you and explain obvious things - that seems like a giant waste of time, right?
So you're a professional, right?
And so you've got the code, you've got all the tools you shall need, you have access to the password-protected Maven repository and by all means - let's get to hacking! Obviously we need to start that thing first on that shiny new piece of equipment to compensate the lack of documentation with a debugger session. But wait! What's that error during compilation? Does that look like a broken test? NO!!! It's the code in one of the core modules that a colleague from abroad committed a few moments ago - just forgot to add that new class to version control before and it just so happened it landed this way on your machine. No worries! This is a good version control system so people's email addresses are there to chase that person and to give 'em hell! And so you do:
Dear John,
I've tried compiling our solution a moment ago but it seems like the code you committed Today lacks one of the new classes. Can you please check what's missing? Thanks!
Best regards,
One should thing that such an error like "code does not compile" would be spotted by some continuous integration environment where it's constantly tested to meed the high quality standards everyone talked about on the interview. It just so happens that the server CI is on went down 3 weeks ago and nobody noticed. Since everyone sat so far in the same room with nice flowers and A/C if John would commit the code with errors Sally would come over for a coffee and tell him to fix it. This time John is some 6000 miles away on another continent and just called it a day.
No worries - I'm a professional!
And so I'm capable of at least learning the inner workings of the system by going through that clear-cut set of unit and integration tests the project is obviously equipped with. So where are they?
The real life
As with any corporation there are rules: you don't moan, you be creative, think outside of the box, be proactive - and all that politely and politically correct. Following this path 2 weeks later you've got the application running, the database it talks to is across several VPN connections so it's ridiculously slow, most of the external systems don't respond since their security just isn't setup for your location (you being the new developer in the team abroad) and quite frankly you start to miss on the boss that told you you can go to hell because he's not going to be giving you anything you didn't earn with blood and sweat and tears.
So why doesn't documentation matter?
Plain and simple: if you think you have any form of documentation other than the application code itself you're mistaken. Anything talking about the code, telling you how things are is bullshit and does not mean a thing. Wanna know why? Because your compiler doesn't read wiki, it doesn't have access to your email account nor does he care at all about Word documents and Excel spreadsheets. All it's interested in is the funky looking wall of text in source files - that's the only specification, the only documentation, the only rule book that will tell you everything.
So for the love of God: KEEP IT CLEAN! You're gonna need it 'cause you're gonna read it over and over and over and over again. If your co-workers (co-located and those miles, miles away) don't understand the need for keeping things clean tell them it's important to you, that you don't want to work in manure.
And if they will not listen - to hell with them! Tell the world how things are so that the next person drown by the lucrative perspective of working in young and highly motivated team will stay away. Let other learn from your experience.
Post scriptum
If any of you felt this matches any of your previous experience I rush to say it's fiction (well at least some of it). The situation as a whole didn't happen at all (would have been a disaster and a case for a shrink afterwards :] ). It's just to underline the importance of clean code and the fact that the code is the ultimate documentation out there. Don't undermine it.
Thursday, June 27, 2013
It's been a while...
.. but I have not forgotten :) There was just not much going on in my life. A nice and quiet 6 months.
Recently I've been working on some health issues but nothing really serious. My doctor asked me to collect some statistics for heart parameters (pressure, pulse) for review. Since I hate dead-tree versions of pretty much everything I decided that it's the best time to renew my friendship with Ruby and Sinatra.
The challenge
The challenge for me was to write the app in about an hour, with possible extensions at a later time, but to start collecting evidence as soon as possible. Although I'm a huge Grails fan (like you didn't know that) I think it is just too damn heavy for simple data collection applications like the one I have had in mind - thus the obvious dilemma between PHP and Ruby/Sinatra. I really like the embedded nature of PHP but to write anything in a sane way one needs to employ frameworks like CakePHP and the like. I hate that. I wanted to have as minimalistic as possible, with everything just working in a matter of minutes.
My sweet Ruby, Dear Sinatra,
You all know what Sinatra in the Ruby space is, right? If you don't - just go to and find out. Here's what I did with it:
1. All in one construct with everything in one place (configuration, controller, views, css, javascript)
2. All of it takes 210 lines of code (63 Ruby, 143 Erubis and a few while lines for convinience)
3. Deployed to Heroku in a matter of minutes
4. Using MySQL backend because it was just convenient.
Heroku provided the infrastructure for free (the one web worker that's always for free), a free database and Git repository. With all that in place I was ready with the first usable version in about 30 minutes (that's how quick Ruby and Sinatra and Heroku are).
Iterate iterate iterate
As with everything in software development there are going to be bugs, there are going to be new requirements and there are going to be "things that could be done better". One of them was for me to be able to input new measurements using my phone's web browser (the simplest thing that could possibly work). And it worked right out of the box but the default font size is just so small on my S3 that I've had to go through a number of zoom-ins to make out what's in there. Every navigation to another page returned me to that ugly small fonts. Changing the font size to like 40 did the trick :)
Then there was the matter of inputting numbers into the edit boxes. See, the default keyboard is an alpha-numeric-on-request type of keyboard which means that to enter numbers you have to either long-tap on the screen every number you'd like to enter or to switch to the numeric-special-characters-page on every input box which was just plain ugly. Changing the input types to "number" did the trick. Fortunately I'm not using Firefox on my Mobile where this type of inputs are just plain text inputs (as per some sophisticated page that knows all about browser compatibility).
And there was light! I have had enough measurements to actually display them on a chart. I wanted it to be an interactive graph, obviously, so my first choice was Google Charts. Even though beautiful and easy to use almost out of the box I felt kind of cheated because it used Flash underneath the skin. That obviously didn't work on S3 so I needed some alternative. Dygraph to the rescure (with GViz interface) and in a matter of 10 minutes (including research) I've had my charts up for display.
A small snag
As it turns out MySQL by default doesn't understand time the way it's supposed to. It just knows that 13:21:43 is almost half past one but with no particular interest for time zone. An obvious way to overcome this issue was to set all times to UTC and convert them when interacting with the user. Piece of cake. I'd like to point out that the author of mysql2 gem could finally extend the thing to allow something else than 'utc' or 'local' for the automated conversion and life whould be a lot simpler.
I always believe that software should be written according to high standards, with proper code coverage, proper planning, agile mindset and clean code in the end. Even though I tend to not do TDD in the case of such simple project such as this I still think it makes sense in other cases. I know I shouldn't talk like this since I'm the "Mr TDD" among friends but guys let's face it: throw-away software happens all the time and there's no reason to follow the routine blindly even in the case of spikes. Production code you write for someone else - TDD all the way; spikes no.
I'll probably use the app for another week or two, maybe even for a couple of months, who knows. I just hope it'll give my doctor enough information to get me back on track.
Wednesday, December 26, 2012
Did you noticed Spring Loaded is here?
Here's how you use it:
Well - it isn't JRebel - but it is good enough!
Have fun!
Monday, December 10, 2012
Named inner classes in methods
public String getName(String user) {
JdbcTemplate template = new JdbcTemplate(this.datasource);
class NameExtractor implements ResultSetExtractor {
public String extractData(ResultSet rs)
throws SQLException, DataAccessException {
Have fun!
Thursday, November 22, 2012
Who cares?!
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Tuesday, April 17, 2012
Tuesday Tie-Up
We've got Blackhawks full of armed men flying over Chicago.
The Secret Service is running whores in Columbia.
Rivrdog said...
For the helos, this looks like ordinary MOUT to me.
Can't figure out why that Secret Service type balked at a $170 all-nighter cuenta por la puta. Try getting an all-nighter in Vegas and it will probably be 6-8 times that much.
To me, though, the curious thing is that all eleven of these agents were sucked into the fiesta de las putas. In that size of a group, there should have been at least one who stuck to his vows. This suggests that the agents were provided a "sweet deal", and perhaps that deal was arranged before they ever left the USA. If there was pre-arrangement, that definitely needs looking into, to see who the ultimate facilitator to that deal might have been. FARC? Hugo? Fidel?
Old NFO said...
Yep, bad week, and he'll blame it ALL on Bush... sigh
MSgt B said...
The DoD has regulations against that now.
Hell, they probably always have.
DiamondD said...
I don't understand why they need the Blackhawks and all of that security if the conference is in Chicago? It is illegal to own a gun in Chicago so no security needed.
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DepotFileDiff Class
[This is preliminary documentation and is subject to change.]
A diff between depot files in a Perforce repository.
Namespace: Perforce.P4
Assembly: p4api.net (in p4api.net.dll) Version: 2011.1.34.7706 (2011.1.34.7706.BETA)
public class DepotFileDiff
Visual Basic
Public Class DepotFileDiff
Visual C++
public ref class DepotFileDiff
p4 help diff2
diff2 -- Compare one set of depot files to another
p4 diff2 [options] fromFile[rev] toFile[rev]
p4 diff2 [options] -b branch [[fromFile[rev]] toFile[rev]]
p4 diff2 [options] -S stream [-P parent] [[fromFile[rev]] toFile[rev]]
options: -d<flags> -q -t -u
'p4 diff2' runs on the server to compare one set of depot files (the
'source') to another (the 'target'). Source and target file sets
can be specified on the 'p4 diff2' command line or through a branch
With a branch view, fromFile and toFile are optional; fromFile limits
the scope of the source file set, and toFile limits the scope of the
target. If only one file argument is given, it is assumed to be
fromFile and toFile can include revision specifiers; by default, the
head revisions are diffed. See 'p4 help revisions' for details
about specifying file revisions.
'p4 diff2' precedes each diffed file pair with a header line of the
following form:
==== source#rev (type) - target#rev (type) ==== summary
A source or target file shown as '<none>' means there is no file
at the specified name or revision to pair with its counterpart.
The summary status is one of the following: 'identical' means file
contents and types are identical, 'types' means file contents are
identical but the types are different, and 'content' means file
contents are different.
The -b flag makes 'p4 diff2' use a user-defined branch view. (See
'p4 help branch'.) The left side of the branch view is the source
and the right side is the target.
The -S flag makes 'p4 diff2' use a stream's branch view. (See 'p4
help stream'.) The stream is the source, and its parent is the
target. -P can be used to specify a parent stream other than the
stream's actual parent.
The -d<flags> modify the output of diffs as follows:
-dn (RCS)
-dc[n] (context)
-ds (summary)
-du[n] (unified)
-db (ignore whitespace changes)
-dw (ignore whitespace)
-dl (ignore line endings).
The optional argument to -dc specifies number of context lines.
The -q omits files that have identical content and types and
suppresses the actual diff for all files.
The -t flag forces 'p4 diff2' to diff binary files.
The -u flag uses the GNU diff -u format and displays only files
that differ. The file names and dates are in Perforce syntax, but
but the output can be used by the patch program.
Inheritance Hierarchy
See Also
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Pet of the Day
April 16, 2000
Today's Pet
Nominate Your Pet
Previous Pets
Pet Talk
About Us
Ugg, the Pet of the Day
Name: Ugg
Age: Eight years old
Gender: Male
Breed: Sicilian Donkey
Home: Ozarks, Missouri, USA
Ugg is eight years old and he is a miniature or Sicilian Donkey. Ugg is 34 inches tall at the shoulders but he thinks he is much, much taller. Ugg thinks he is a house donk and enjoys a little tv or a nap in front of the fireplace. We don't have the heart to tell him he's supposed to be outside in the pasture. His favorite snack is peppermint mints. Ugg lost his tail when he was just a baby, the bigger donks he was playing with bit it off. In fly season we have to attach a piece of garden hose to his tail so he can swish the flies away.
Find out how your pet
could be Pet of the Day.
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