Morgan found the practice does violate free-speech rights, but is a "reasonable limit on the right of expression".
Despite the ruling, it's time to end the requirement. It could be replaced by an oath to defend Canada and uphold the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
Someday Canada will grow up and ditch the monarchy, but it looks like it's not going to be soon.
As a high-school student, I used to go to the mathematics library at the University of Pennsylvania to look up and try to read articles articles in number theory. Usually I couldn't understand them at a first reading, so I'd photocopy them and take them home to puzzle over. I remember being completely flummoxed by a paper on Bell numbers that used the "umbral calculus"; I just didn't understand that you were supposed to move the exponents down as indices. That is, in an equation like
B4 = (B + 1)3
you were supposed to expand the right hand side, getting
B3 + 3B2 + 3B1 + 1
and then magically change this to
B3 + 3B2 + 3B1 + 1 .
I had nobody to ask about stuff like that. Although my high-school teachers were great, they didn't know about the umbral calculus.
Things like this permeate the mathematical literature. Take compactness, for example. Compactness is a marvelous tool that lets you deduce -- usually in a non-constructive fashion -- the existence of objects (particularly infinite ones) from the existence of finite "approximations". Formally, compactness is the property that a collection of closed sets has a nonempty intersection if every finite subcollection has a nonempty intersection; alternatively, if every open cover has a finite subcover.
Now compactness is a topological property, so to use it, you really should say explicitly what the topological space is, and what the open and closed sets are. But mathematicians rarely, if ever, do that. In fact, they usually don't specify anything at all about the setting; they just say "by the usual compactness argument" and move on. That's great for experts, but not so great for beginners.
I really wonder who was the very first to take this particular lazy approach to mathematical exposition. So far, the earliest reference I found was in a 1953 article by John W. Green in the Pacific Journal of Mathematics 3 (2), 393-402. On page 400 he writes
By the usual compactness argument ([2, p.62]), there does exist a minimizing curve K.
Can anybody find an earlier occurrence of this exact phrase?
This month's is the International Journal of Advance Innovations, Thoughts & Ideas.
It doesn't get much sillier than that. Then again, some of the titles of the articles they publish are silly in the same way:
We all know why, of course. If people accept evolution, they'll be less likely to follow Jeebus.
Dear Author,
ICOCSA 2014 aims to provide a comprehensive global forum for experts and participants from academia to exchange ideas and present results of ongoing research in the most state-of-the-art areas of computer science and application. Click here to know more about ICOCSA 2014: http://www.icocsa.org/
All accepted papers in English will be published by International Journal of Computer Science and Application (IJCSA) which has been indexed by ULRICHSWEB, ckan, WorldCat, Rice St, Yandex, AcademicKeys, dogpile, WIPO, Google Scholar, getCITED, JournalTOCs, etc.
Topics include but not limited to:
Computer science
Computational mathematics
Software and hardware manufacturers
Machine Intelligence
Diagnostic and Decision Supporting Systems
Data and Web Mining
Fuzzy Systems
Chaos Theory and Evolutionary Algorithms
Knowledge Extraction and Knowledge Management
Applications of Computer Science in Modeling
Visualization and Multimedia
Data and Information Systems
Internet and Distributed Computer Systems
Graphics and Imaging
Natural Language Processing
Computational Mathematics
Robotics and Micro-Robotics
Theoretical Informatics
Quantum Computing
Software Testing
Computer Vision
Digital Systems
Pervasive Computing
Computational Topology
Human-Computer Interaction
Signal Processing
Digital Forensics
Important Dates
Submission Deadline: October 24, 2013
Acceptance Notification Date: November 7, 2013
Conference Date: January 10 to 11, 2014
Submission
Online Submission System: http://www.icocsa.org/paperSubmission.aspx
Call for Attendees
If you want to present your research result at conference, but do not wish to publish a paper, you can simply submit an abstract to our submission system.
Call for TPC Members
This conference is calling for TPC Members. If you wish to serve the conference as a TPC Member, please send an email to us with your CV attached.
Best regards,
ICOCSA 2014 Organizing Committee
Email: icocsa2014@hotmail.com
Website: http://www.icocsa.org/
Why would anyone submit to this conference?
Swanson also thinks Mark Twain was possessed by demons.
People like Swanson offer nothing but lies, because their whole world view is based on lies.
In Canada we teach our moose at Arthur Murray dance studios.
We feel sorry if any boring arising from this message, you can click to Unsubscribe
2013 International Conference on Intelligent Materials and Mechatronics (IMM2013)
November 1-2, 2013, Hong Kong, China
2013 International Conference on Intelligent Materials and Mechatronics (IMM 2013) will be held in Hong Kong, November 1-2, 2013. The forum aims to bring together researchers, developers, and users from around the world in both industry and academia for sharing state-of-art results, for exploring new areas of research and development, and to discuss emerging issues facing Intelligent Materials and Mechatronics.
And they thought this was appropriate to send to me?
Dear Dr.Jeffrey Shallit,
OMICS Publishing Group successfully publishing quality open access journals with the support from scientists like you.
We are aware of your reputation for quality of research and trustworthiness in the field of "Journal of Advance Robotics and Automation "
and that is why you have been chosen as an Editorial Board Member of our Journal of Advance Robotics and Automation
... We may again assure you of international quality and standards of our articles published in our journals, Using state-of-the-art prominent reviewers and editorial board. We also assure you of our best co-operation always...
Well, you could start by having a grammatical title for your journal.
There are apparently two different floors numbered 4 -- on different levels -- and no floor 3. And why do the restrooms need their own floor?
The integral is attached as a pdf file ...please have a look at it.
Thank you so much and sorry for the inconvenience.
Hint to students: don't do this! This kind of message is appropriate only if you are addressing a question that is directly in the specialty of the person you are writing to. I am not a specialist in integrals.
It is with pleasure to invite your Excellency to take part in an academic opportunity through submitting your research paper for possible publication in a strictly intellectual journal named "International Journal of Advanced Science and Engineering Technology" (IJASET),(ISSN: 2225-9686). Our journal here is a peer reviewed scholarly kind of bulletin which in its natural existence devoted for publishing high-quality papers with an internationally recognized Editorial Board Members. The well-built editorial board welcomes all kind of papers regardless of their academic tendency in a way that transcends all the scientific and theoretical concepts into a new era of enlightenment and insight; the journal is issued on bi-monthly bases and supports all kind of topics and streams including:
- Research and Reviews Articles, Scientific Commentaries in the Fields of Applied and Theoretical Sciences, Biology, Chemistry, Physics, Zoology, Medical Studies, Environmental Sciences, Geology, Engineering, Short Communications, Computer Science, Technological Sciences, Medicine, Industrial, Mathematics, Statistics in addition to all other Applied and Theoretical Sciences
For author Instructions http://www.ijaset.com Indexed/ Abstracted in
EBSCO
Ulrich's
DOAJ
J-Gate
Index Copernicus
Awaiting your papers.
Yours sincerely,
Editor-In-Chief
======================
International Journal of Advanced Science and Engineering Technology
Website: http://www.ijaset.com
Article submitted through E-mail: editor@ijaset.com ; info@ijaset.com;
or online submission visit www.ijaset.com
Schuklenk, by the way, is an respected ethicist whose clear thinking contrasts sharply with the muddled views of people like Margaret Somerville.
I hate to be the bearer of bad news, Barry, but there's no such thing as "design theory". Yes, there's the pseudoscience of intelligent design, but there's no coherent body of knowledge (much less science) about intelligent design that remotely approaches a "theory". That's why intelligent design advocates like yourself are unable to respond to even the most basic challenges concerning your pretend "theory" and why even your own vanity "journal" can hardly find anything to publish, even though it almost exclusively publishes the droolings of its creationist editorial board.
As for understanding, Barry, let me just note that I have published an article (with Elsberry) in a philosophy journal on intelligent design in which we spell out, in detail, what's wrong with it, and why the math is bogus. You could try reading it. I know it's a bit of intellectual effort, but heck, knock yourself out.
While you're at it, you may want to admonish your friend Sal Cordova (who for some strange reason is sometimes referred to as "Slimy Sal") for lying on the same blog entry. Dembski did not "dedicate" his first book to me. Yes, it's true that he tried to gain some intellectual respectability by dropping a whole bunch of names and thanking them, but that's not the same as a dedication; it's an acknowledgment.
A hundred years ago today, she arrived, at a dock at the foot of Washington Avenue on the Delaware River in Philadelphia. The newspapers of the day were not concerned with her arrival, but they were full of another story: the 50th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg. Veterans from both sides of the battle converged on the small Pennsylvania town 100 miles west of Philadelphia, for remembrance and reconciliation. My grandmother never told me about her arrival, so I have to reconstruct it from short accounts from others.
Here is what my uncle Si had to say about it: I cannot remember my own arrival at the Pier. I was just a tot being carried in my mother's arms. My father had come here about a year ahead to get things ready for the rest of the family. I'm told that Mom couldn't recognize the Old Man. For horror of horrors...the yeshivah bocher who left Vitebsk with a luxuriant, black beard had shaved it off. When this "stranger" took us in his arms and murmured "meine kinder", we cried. We'd never seen this beardless character before!
And, if all goes well, on the hundredth anniversary of my grandmother's arrival in Philadelphia, I will be walking the streets of Velizh, the little town where she was born. (I have written this post ahead of time, as I anticipate no internet access for a few days.)
I am not expecting much in the way of historical finds related to my family, since Velizh was directly in the path of the brutal German invasion of Russia in 1941. I once asked my father if he still was in contact with relatives in Russia. He replied that there were some letters up to 1941, but nothing after that. And according to a 1942 dispatch from the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, any relatives left behind in Velizh were probably murdered by the Germans:
Only Seventeen Jews Escape Massacre by Nazis in Russian Town of Velizh
September 9, 1942
A harrowing account of how the German occupation forces in the town of Velizh, in the Vitebsk district, used machine guns, the noose and fire to murder all but seventeen of the 1,440 Jewish residents of the village is related in a letter from one of the seventeen – a young half-Jewish girl – shown to this correspondent today.
The letter, written by Lida Grigorieva to her father, a Red Army man at the front, tells how the Germans drove all the Jews of the town into a ghetto as soon as they occupied Velizh. Nine hundred of them were confined in a pigsty. Every day groups of Jews were led to the outskirts of the town and shot, while others were hanged in the town itself, Miss Grigorieva writes.
When the Nazis were forced to abandon Velizh, they locked all the Jews in the pigsty, sprayed kerosene over it and set it afire, the letter discloses. Those who tried to escape were mowed down by machine guns. Only seventeen Jews remained alive.
My grandmother probably found her new life baffling and difficult. She had to adjust to new customs, a new language, and a new name. (Upon his arrival, my grandfather had his name arbitrarily changed to "Shaltz" by a confused immigration agent. With an anglicized first name, my grandmother then became "Celia Shaltz".)
My grandmother and my uncles and aunts were fortunate to leave when they did. I am very grateful to their determination to find a better life in America; I only wish they had told their stories in more detail. I have only been able to reconstruct a pale shadow of their experiences and journeys.
The example is given of flipping a presumably fair coin 500 times and observing it come up heads each time. The ID advocates say this is clear evidence of "design", and those arguing against them (including the usually clear-headed Neil Rickert) say no, the sequence HH...H is, probabilistically speaking, just as likely as any other.
This is an old paradox; it goes back as far as Samuel Johnson and Pierre-Simon Laplace. But neither the ID advocates nor their detractors seem to understand that this old paradox has a solution which dates back more than 15 years now.
The solution is by my UW colleague Ming Li and his co-authors. The basic idea is that Kolmogorov complexity offers a solution to the paradox: it provides a universal probability distribution on strings that allows you to express your degree of surprise on enountering a string of symbols that is said to represent the flips of a fair coin. If the string is compressible (as 500 consecutive H's would be) then one can reject the chance hypothesis with high confidence; if the string is, as far as we can see, incompressible, we cannot. It works because the proportion of compressible strings to noncompressible goes to 0 quickly as the length of the string increases.
So Rickert and his defenders are simply wrong. But the ID advocates are also wrong, because they jump from "reject the fair coin hypothesis" to "design". This is completely unsubstantiated. For example, maybe the so-called "fair coin" is actually weighted so that heads come up 999 out of 1000 times. Then "chance" still figures, but getting 500 consecutive 1's would not be so surprising; in fact it would happen about 61% of the time. Or maybe the flipping mechanism is not completely fair -- perhaps the coin is made of two kinds of metal, one magnetic, and it passes past a magnet before you examine it.
In other words, if you flip what is said to be a fair coin 500 times and it comes up heads every time, then you have extremely good evidence that your prior belief about the probability distribution of flips is simply wrong. But ID advocates don't understand this and don't apply it to biology. When they view some biological structure, calculate the probability based on a uniform distribution, claim it is "specified", and then conclude "design", they never bother to consider that using the uniform distribution for probabilities is unfounded, because the causal history of the events has not been taken into account. Any kind of algorithmic bias (such as happens when random mutation is followed by selection) can create results that differ greatly from the uniform distribution.
Elsberry and I discussed this in great detail in our paper years ago, but it seems neither side has read or understood it.
But for me, this is the hundredth anniversary of the day -- June 18 1913 -- that my grandmother, Zipporah Levinton, boarded the ship in Liverpool, England that would take her to her new life in America.
As I imagine it, it must have been an interesting sight. Hundreds of steerage passengers lined up, clutching their belongings from little towns in Russia, Poland, Romania, and elsewhere, and holding kosher provisions for the voyage that were kindly supplied to them by relief agencies... my grandmother trying to keep her young children happy and occupied, while the first-class passengers boarded in luxury. The first-class passengers would have even received a little guidebook, detailing the many services of the ship and the names of the other first-class passengers, like the one shown here. First-class passengers would have eat breakfast at 8 AM, lunch at 12:30, dinner at 6 PM and 7:15 PM, and supper at 9 PM. But passengers like my grandmother probably had a menu something like this one.
The name of the ship was the S. S. Merion, built in 1902 in Scotland. It was 162 meters long and 18 meters wide, and had her maiden voyage on March 8 1902. For most of her career, she sailed for the American Line from Liverpool. Although most people have a picture in their minds of all immigrants arriving at Ellis Island in New York, in fact many arrived elsewhere, including Baltimore and (in my grandmother's case) Philadelphia.
My family did not save any records of that trip, or if they did, they are long gone now. But I managed to find a postcard of the Merion, and here it is:
If you look closely at the postcard, you can see what appears to be a rabbi in the front left section of the card.
And here is my grandmother and her children (and one from my grandfather's first marriage) listed in the Outwards Passenger Lists from the Records of the Board of Trade and of successor and related bodies, The National Archives, Kew, Richmond, Surrey, England:
Transatlantic ship travel was not completely safe. Of course, it was just the year before that the Titanic hit an iceberg in the north Atlantic and went down. (My grandfather emigrated on the Pisa in February-March 1912; just a month later, the Pisa encountered ice and was in the general vicinity of the Titanic when it sank.) And the Merion herself had several accidents, including a collision with a tanker on December 24 1912, off the coast of Delaware.
In August of 1913, the ship's commander would have been J. Beattie Hill, and the outgoing passenger records indicate he was the commander for my grandmother's trip, too. The ship records show that the Merion stopped on August 19 in Queenstown (now Cobh), Ireland to pick up more passengers. All together there were (from the records I have access to) 1,036 passengers on the Merion headed to Philadelphia.
In 1914, the Merion was sold to the British navy, where it was used as a "decoy", and outfitted to look like the British battleship Tiger. On May 29 1915 this decoy ship was sunk by a German submarine.
For now, I'll leave my grandmother on the Merion, as the whistle sounds and the ship slowly leaves the port in Liverpool...
