41% of Americans identify as "pro-choice," a record-low in Gallup polling

es-335 · 2012-05-24T03:14:39.849366+00:00

I spent about 20 minutes searching google for something either confirming or contradicting and couldn't find anything. Clearly you have the superior google-fu. Looks like you're quoting this politifact article. Thanks. It makes the whole debate seem rather silly. Looks like politifact links directly to several studies all showing between 80 to 95 percent as you previously said.

es-335 · 2012-05-24T01:15:01.033941+00:00

I think you said it first. There isn't any great sources (or apparently mediocre sources) on it. That doesn't mean you just accept it as truth. It comes down to how you define severe prenatal diagnosis as well. If you can't find a single organization that claims to do a study on it, the answer is "We just don't know because nobody has studied it" not "Well here is a number from some backwater webpage that apparently is found nowhere else on the internet". You are citing it as fact when you don't have the evidence to show that.

es-335 · 2012-05-24T00:06:46.089457+00:00

Don't worry, it was already stolen.

es-335 · 2012-05-24T00:05:48.660264+00:00

Yes, Foolie, we need to know which way you'd prefer the number to be so we know which way to vote your post.

es-335 · 2012-05-24T00:04:40.152758+00:00

I not saying it is necessarily false, but that is a really bad source. Apart from the red flags all over the site, it doesn't mention where the data comes from. I found a dozen other sites using the same vague "it is estimated" citing the same statistic none of which named a source either. This is how misinformation is spread.

es-335 · 2012-05-23T21:41:09.300798+00:00

I love how you think you're so much smarter than the folks at gallup who do these polls for a living and yet know apparently nothing about statistical sampling methods.

The weightings are based on the demographics of the people sampled scaled to the demographics of the US. For example, if they find that 55% of those survey'd are female verses the true 51% of the US that is female they will scale female survey results by 51/55 and scale male survey results by 49/45. They will ask you if you own a cell phone when calling you on a land line or if you own a land line when calling you on a cell phone. Cell phone only users are likely less represented in the survey results so they are then scaled up to be as large a proportion of the weighted results as there are cell phone only users in the US. This requires having up to date data on number of cell phone only users and other demographic factors.

It is potentially more complicated than single factor weighting of each individual demographic, but this was an example of rudimentary sample weighting.

I'm not saying this is a perfect method. They ask fewer cell phone users than perhaps they should (This is potentially because cell phones are more expensive to call due to laws saying you can't robo-call cell phones like you can landlines). This leads to it potentially being easier for a few dozen respondents to influence the results especially if they are in high weight categories like cell phone users, but there methods ensure that their results will not be pushed in a systematic direction. It does lead to less reliability but this is reflected in the standard deviation and in their choice of how many people to poll in the first place to get their desired reliability.

es-335 · 2012-05-23T21:20:37.548632+00:00

Internet studies don't use any sort of proper sampling method like calling random numbers. Not only that but internet surveys are prone to survey rushes where some site like reddit sends everyone to a fox news survey to try and influence it. The results end up being not even a fair representation of what fox news visitors think, let alone a fair representation of what internet users or the general public think.

There are good reasons why people don't pay attention to them and you should ignore them too.

es-335 · 2012-05-23T20:32:05.227424+00:00

Samples are weighted by gender, age, race, Hispanic ethnicity, education, region, adults in the household, and phone status (cell phone only/landline only/both, cell phone mostly, and having an unlisted landline number).

You are wrong. They took this into account.

nxlyd · 2012-05-23T20:06:00.755646+00:00

First of all you are completely ignoring time dilation. If you were traveling the speed of light it would take you 10 million light years to get there from the perspective of an outside observer. From your perspective you would arrive there instantly. No time would have passed and you would not have aged.

Secondly, it doesn't matter how far away you are when you die. There is nothing special about arriving at the given galaxy except that you'll have caught up with "current time" and can't fast forward anymore by getting closer (though you could still fast forward by generally traveling fast). You could watch the entire lifetime of the galaxy from 100's of millions of lightyears away and even be moving away from it (just not moving directly away from it at the speed of light in which case you wouldn't be able to observe it at all).

fnord0 · 2012-05-23T19:04:09.993535+00:00

For truecrypt volumes? I would assume most people. When you set up a truecrypt volume it specifically tells you that you should use a 20+ character password. I set up a truecrypt volume just for fun and used a 20+ character password. I can't imagine someone setting up a truecrypt volume for actual security purposes using a simple password. Ultimately it doesn't matter what many people do, it only matters what the person that you are trying to attack did and generally if it is worth attacking it is worth protecting.

nxlyd · 2012-05-23T18:46:57.180053+00:00

I'm not sure if I would call a 44 fold speed up you would experience traveling 99.9% the speed of light "ever slightly". Even if you were traveling at 90% the speed of light it would age 4.3 fold faster. Then again with either of these speed ups you won't see much happen in your lifetime, so I guess that might be what you mean by "slight".

233C · 2012-05-23T18:36:26.353797+00:00

Do you have any evidence to support this?

metl_lord · 2012-05-23T18:34:45.564975+00:00

Its hard to top the maturity of Vim which was released 20 years ago, still has a large user base and is actively maintained. The original vi, which vim was based on (vim=Vi IMproved) was released 35 years ago.

diggro · 2012-05-23T15:16:14.710330+00:00

The amount of uninformed circlejerk in this thread is amazing. Those saying they would never buy facebook at any price would make terrible investors.

diggro · 2012-05-23T15:09:10.506547+00:00

That is a bad assumption to make that you know better than to invest. The only problem was the IPO price or the current price. The market feels the current fair price is $32, which may still be overvalued, but the company is still worth something. If the IPO price had been 28 instead of 38 it would've gone nothing but up to get to its current price of $32 and you wouldn't've felt so high and mighty.

Just because something is a "good" company or a "bad" company doesn't make it a good or bad investment as it all depends on the price. Ikea furniture is "bad" but if it is cheap enough it becomes entirely worth it. I would totally buy Facebook stock at $0.25/share even if I knew it was going to collapse in a year, because it is worth it just based on current revenues. So the question for all stock is NEVER "Is it a good company?" but "Is it a good buy at the given price?".

damontoo · 1 day

This is my guess because because .01mm = 10 micrometers (also known as a micron), so whatever "my" is it is the equivalent of a micrometer. Some hunting has found a potential source for this error. The greek letter mu apparently has a pronouncation of mŷ in ancient greek. It may be more likely it is just a typo though.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mu_(letter)#Ancient_Greek

damontoo · 1 day

That was my first thought since it may be an imperial unit, but a yard ~= a meter, so .01 mm would be about .01 milliyards.

damontoo · 1 day

That wouldn't work because it would show up as a dog bone (or whatever you used) on the register and they can plainly see it isn't a dog bone.

This happens all the time, stores just don't publicize it. A friend that works in retail tells me that they have people taking sale stickers from other products or barcodes from other products and putting them on more expensive types of the same kind. An example they gave is taking the price sticker from a small frame and putting it on a larger frame.

Its pretty dumb though because with cameras everywhere. If they can see you slipping a product into your coat they'll probably see you moving bar codes around. It isn't really any safer then normal shoplifting.

damontoo · 1 day

Actually "tolerance as small as .01 millimeters" (100,000 Angstrom) according to this 2010 pdf on the lego website.

EDIT: Woops, I missed that you had already corrected your statement that it is not 1 angstrom. I think you made that edit before I posted. If you add ~~ to both sides of your mistake it'll ~~cross~~ it out drawing more attention to it.

lazyFer · 1 day

This title is editorialized and doesn't meet the requirements of this subreddit. The Supreme Court hears 75-80 cases a year verses the 10,000 cases that request to be heard by the supreme court. They literally don't have time to hear over 99% of cases. They are not saying it is dandy or that they are even okay with it, just that it isn't in the most important 1% of cases that are requested to be heard.

EthicalReasoning · 1 day

Disposible income is defined in this situation as income after tax and social security obligations.

I normally think of disposible income as what is left over after rent, food, and most bills are paid, but that isn't the definition they are using. Which I suppose is good because otherwise people could just seek out very high rent bills to get out of garishment which they may do out of spite in many cases.

Using those numbers they can garish you down to a yearly salary of $11,310 which is ~~far below the poverty line~~ almost exactly the 2012 poverty line for a household of one, which is $11,170.

Though you could only be garnished down to that low if you were making $15,080 or less in the first place. If you are making more than that then 25% of your after-tax income would be the rule for you.

Suppose he makes the median income of $44,000. His take home pay would be about $35,000. The 25% of that would be $8,750/year. It would take him 77 years to pay off his $675,000 debt. Though he has a doctorate in statistical physics so I doubt he will only be making median income.

A physicist on average makes $112,000, which would make his take home pay $80,000/year so he would pay $20,000/year towards this garishment, so it'd get paid off in 34 years which if he started paying today would take him until he was 62 years old, just in time to retire.

EthicalReasoning · 1 day

The Supreme Court hears 75-80 cases a year verses the 10,000 cases that request to be heard by the supreme court. They literally don't have time to hear over 99% of cases.

Making a fuse over them not choosing your case is absurd.

lazyFer · 1 day

The Supreme Court hears 75-80 cases a year verses the 10,000 cases that request to be heard by the supreme court. They literally don't have time to hear over 99% of cases.

Making a fuse over them not choosing your case is absurd.

Secret4gentMan · 2 days

No, not really. Sciencenews.org surprisingly doesn't do a very good job at reporting scientific results. Generally the conclusions they try to draw are on par with the silly and sensational conclusions that traditional media sources cover.

For example, seems like there is a pure correlation study done on coffee every year and the media tries to pass this off as useful information. http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/340733/title/Coffee_gives_jolt_to_life_span

While science news does make the comforting statement:

Since the study volunteers weren’t randomly assigned to drink coffee or not, the research has the limitations of being observational in nature.

In the very next sentence they say:

But with data from 402,260 participants, the results are “very powerful” and unlikely to be superseded by another coffee study anytime soon, says Roy Ziegelstein, a cardiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center.

They make it sound like sample size can make up for fundamentally flawed methods. The article even starts with the almost humorous that we chastise most media sources for using:

Drinking several cups of coffee every day may help you live longer.

The OP is aware of the Bayer study and he wants the perspective of someone that understands the full body of work around bees, not just a single study. The article you linked isn't even based on a study, it is based on a 19 page study synopsis.

The impression I've had from talking to bee experts is that, while they were looking for a single source for the decline of bees, they actually don't believe that it is a single source and believe that it is multiple problems working together, but I'm curious to get a bee expert in here to comment on the current state of affairs.

Negro_Napoleon · 3 days

There are a number of ways for thieves to steal your credit card information and the only way you have to protect yourself is monitoring your account for fraudulent activity and notifying your credit card company in a timely fashion.

Even if you don't have RFID, a waitress you give your card to could swipe it in her own machine to record information. A conman could set up a fake til at a store. A shady vendor could just directly sell the information you provided to them.

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