When Even Mathematicians Don't Understand the Math

Grok Headline matches for When Even Mathematicians Don't Understand the Math

"How two mathematicians came to the aid
of the Met."

"How two mathematicians came to the aid
of the Met." 04/07/2005 10:37 PM

Mathematicians sceptical over claimed
breakthrough

Mathematicians sceptical over claimed
breakthrough 06/13/2004 04:51 PM

Something you would need a TV to
understand

Something you would need a TV to
understand 05/04/2004 02:27 AM
If you get all your news from watching Weekend Update or The Daily Show, you might find FootnoteTV helpful. The site comments and expounds on the newsworthy topics that often crop up in television shows. The parent site, newsaic, has subsites that examine comics and popular culture, among other things, as well.

I wish I didn't understand

I wish I didn't understand 04/09/2004 04:09 PM
Just a quick note to my few friends in Spain... I had my first chance to visit your beautiful country...

What Happens When You Don't Understand
The Problem

What Happens When You Don't Understand
The Problem 12/16/2003 06:28 PM
The real source of the vulnerability is not Apple's code, or really even their implementation. But the DHCP standard itself. (John C. Welch via MyAppleMenu)

Why I'd like to understand bl0gging

Why I'd like to understand bl0gging 09/18/2004 05:35 AM
People ask me often what is a "blog". It annoys me to no end that I cannot give a simple answer, because it tells me how little I understand of the phenomenon.

A big discussion point in Finland at the moment is that "blogs" have been translated as "internet diaries". There is an danger of confusion here: If I tell you that I play go, and that it is an "old chinese boardgame", you will immediately understand its nature. But if I say that "I blog, and it's like writing a diary on the web", your next question will be "do you really write about your sex life in public?" And that is because the word "diary" has a private connotation. Reading someone else's diary is peeping and wrong. Reading things that someone else published in the hopes that someone would read them and give feedback, is not. Diary = private, blog = public.

Most of the significant weblogs in the world are not diaries. But that's another subject for a later day.

Perhaps I am an elitist, purist and academic. But I would still really, really like to be explain to my grandmother what it is that I care so much about.

Companies Understand Themselves By
Powerpoint

Companies Understand Themselves By
Powerpoint 04/09/2004 05:29 PM
While there are some who still believe Powerpo int is evil, it's become a standard necessity in every day business life. In fact, David Weinberger suggests that Powerpoint is how companies understand themselves. It's replaced the company story and has become "the company myth," so that employees themselves can understand the organization they belong to. Even in creating a sales pitch, companies focus on creating the Powerpoint slides - mostly because it reinforces their own understanding of the company they work for. While there are both good and bad results that come out of this, I think it's also a statement on corporate culture. Who gets to write the official version? While you can make changes on your own, you tend to leave the corporate story alone. While I'm not sure it's for everyone, I'd think that more "bottom up" style corporations would be better off using something like a wiki to define the corporate story. If you're building a story around the corporate culture, shouldn't those participating be a part of writing the story as well?

I really don't understand how the iTunes
store...

I really don't understand how the iTunes
store... 12/02/2003 01:06 AM

I really don't understand how the iTunes store has sold so much music. Every single time I've tried to use it in the past few weeks, I've gotten this. (I wondered if this was just happening via Windows, but I just tried it on my Mac and got the same thing.)

Read this and understand the P2P wars

Read this and understand the P2P wars 05/15/2004 05:48 AM
Timothy Wu is a law prof at the University of Virginia, and a very clever copyright reformer to boot. When Timothy and I last met, he was called Timmy, and we were both students at ALP, the hippie alternative school in Toronto that we both attended until grade eight. One of the weirdest coincidences in my life to date is that two alumni of a tiny school in Toronto would both end up moving to the US to pursue something as obscure as copyright reform.

Back to Tim(my)! His latest paper, "Copyright's Communications Policy," has me absolutely floored. Tim traces the history of copyright law, the way that we've spent a century undergoing a once-a-decade copyfight, in which representatives of inventors faced down representatives of artists and duked it out in the courts and Congress.

The parallels to today's fights are downright spooky. For example, the first music pirates (the recording industry, who ripped off sheet music) got this proper dressing-down from John Phillip Sousa, who told Congress:

These talking machines are going to ruin the artistic development of music in this country. When I was a boy...in front of every house in the summer evenings, you would find young people together singing the songs of the day or old songs. Today you hear these infernal machines going night and day. We will not have a vocal chord left. The vocal chord will be eliminated by a process of evolution, as was the tail of man when he came from the ape.

I mean, I though Jack Valenti's Boston Strangler testimony was over the top, but clearly, Jack took his cues from Sousa et al.

Thirty-odd years later, the another group of pirates -- radio broadcasters, who refused to pay royalties for the music they file-shared over the airwaves -- violated Godwin's Law decades before it was formulated, comparing the entrenched rights societies that served the recording industry (the pirates of their boyhoods) to Adolph Hitler.

Tim runs down the history of cable versus broadcasters, and other copyfights down through the ages. He does so clearly and engagingly, in ways that non-lawyers and non-historians can readily grasp. And when it's done, the most amazing thing is the certainty that copryight-disrupting technologies every bit as wooly as file-sharing have been invented over and over again, and that the P2P fight is not a new one -- that piracy is the norm, not the exception.

If you want to understand the P2P fight, read this -- it is the most concise, thorough and engaging text on the subject to date. 560k PDF Link

MegaTokyo - relax, we understand j00

MegaTokyo - relax, we understand j00 01/11/2004 09:25 PM
http://www.megatokyo.com/ Wow, I just wasted 3 hours on one site.... Just kept reading... The blog is below the Comic, but the Comic is friggin funny.... Well worth the 3 hours...

Just How Much Do The Music Labels Not
Understand?

Just How Much Do The Music Labels Not
Understand? 05/04/2004 02:29 AM
Last month we wrote about how the music industry was, inexplicably, looking to (a) raise prices on digital downloads and (b) force people to buy a bad song to get a good song. They clearly have no clue that they're basically killing the one, very minor, success they've had in the world of digital downloads. Now, even folks in mainstream magazines like Newsweek are screaming about how the labels just don't get it. Steven Levy takes a look at a number of downloadable albums that cost more than their CDs, while giving the user less (one of the CDs comes with a DVD as well). He also can't believe that the industry hasn't pushed to make downloadable songs play on a variety of devices, as that would encourage more people to buy. However, the folks who run the labels don't get it. They only look at digital downloads and see piracy. They are blind to the idea that it might be an opportunity, and thus they have no real reason to come up with reasons to encourage it. Of course, all this really does is push end-users to seek less than legal alternatives.

Who says Americans don't understand
Irony?

Who says Americans don't understand
Irony? 03/13/2003 10:14 AM
Though maybe one of his speechwriters is British. Last week, Bush made a speech chiding the world community for not...

2 Small Caps You Can Understand

2 Small Caps You Can Understand 07/07/2004 11:33 AM
A look at two small caps with clear business models, market-beating growth prospects, and moderate risk.

2 More Small Caps You Can Understand

2 More Small Caps You Can Understand 07/14/2004 11:27 AM
Here are two companies with clear business models, market-beating growth prospects, and moderate risk.

What the media don't understand about
bl0gging

What the media don't understand about
bl0gging 07/24/2004 11:27 AM
I want to try to answer better a question I got asked by Larry Magid who's putting together a 30 second piece for CBS Radio: What don't the media understand about blogging? To the print and broadcast media, bloggers usually look like little, vanity-press versions of the mass media. That's because the media focus on the A-List. After all, the A-Listers are the ones who have succeeded in the mass media's terms... ...continued at Boston.com...

What part of "Baroque" didn't you
understand?

What part of "Baroque" didn't you
understand? 10/29/2003 12:12 AM
I got a copy of Quicksilver while we were in London. I had to snag it off the stocking...

State Politicians Don't Understand P2P
Either

State Politicians Don't Understand P2P
Either 08/05/2004 03:50 AM
What is it with the difficulty politicians seem to have understanding what a P2P file sharing network is, and why none of the networks have control over the content being shared? The latest is that a group of 40 states have teamed up to write a threatening letter to file sharing companies accusing them of all sorts of bad things. In whose name are they doing this? Even though the courts have recognized file sharing networks for what they are, it appears that the state attorneys general seem to believe that they can ignore what the law says when the entertainment industry starts telling them how evil file sharing networks are. Update: Ernest Miller asks, "why shouldn't the state attorneys general condemn email and FTP as well? An awful lot of child porn is shared via email. Shouldn't email providers be doing more to stop it?"

Help business drivers understand the
reports that they will need

Help business drivers understand the
reports that they will need 01/11/2003 02:05 AM
CNET Jan 11 2003 1:27AM ET

Online Marketers Try To Understand Women

Online Marketers Try To Understand Women 05/05/2004 12:04 AM
Amazing. Last week we joked about Yahoo realizi ng that women use the internet too, and now Salon has an article on the same conference looking at exactly how to market to women online. In both cases the conference comes off as this sort of stunning world where it turns out to be a surprise that women actually use the internet. Why is this so shocking? Even more to the point, why is it so surprising that you can't classify all women into a single group? Did marketers really assume that all women only went online to research cleaning products? It's pretty sad that a conference was needed to explain all this, and it will be even sadder watching these same marketers try to take these "lessons" and turn them into new advertisements for women. At the end of the Salon article there's quite a telling quote. A young woman is asked: "How do you feel about Yahoo trying to get into your life?" She responds: "They pay you enough, and you don't care." Welcome to the internet. Advertising isn't about intrusiveness and annoying people, it's about giving people something of value - whether monetarily or otherwise.

Computers learn to understand Sefrican

Computers learn to understand Sefrican 04/10/2004 09:41 PM
Sunday Times South Africa Apr 11 2004 0:17AM GMT

NBOR: The Coolest Thing I Can't
Understand

NBOR: The Coolest Thing I Can't
Understand 01/09/2004 09:58 PM

New 'NBOR' Software to Debut Next Month: This looks interesting, but I got confused halfway through. This guy has spent 15 years of his life building it. Here's to hoping it works out for him.

The software, called "No Boundaries Or Rules," or NBOR, includes an intuitive user interface for writing, drawing, compiling multimedia presentations and other PC tasks. It allows real-time collaboration and sends large files over the Internet at lightning speed.

The cornerstone of NBOR is "Blackspace," software for word processing, desktop publishing, slideshow presentation, graphics, drawing, animations, audio, photo cropping, instant messaging and real-time conferencing.

This knocks Britney Spears off her perch, making her the second coolest thing I don't understand.

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Stuff That I Don't Really Understand But
Sounds Cool Anyway

Stuff That I Don't Really Understand But
Sounds Cool Anyway 04/18/2005 02:02 AM

RAC on Mac: In the 64-bit technology space, no company can match the Apple OS X / Darwin technology and price.

Building Robots to Understand Brains

Building Robots to Understand Brains 03/22/2005 04:20 PM
An article in The Online Engineer describes the work of Tony Prescott and other researchers at the Sheffield University Department of Psychology. In an attempt to better understand vertebrate brains, they are designing and building control systems for multitasking robots. The work involves computational modellers, neuroscientists, and neurobiologists in the Department's Adaptive Behaviour Research Group. Their initial goal is to build robots based on reverse-engineered rat brains. They hope that an understanding of rat brains will eventually lead to an understanding of the human brain.

Dogs Understand Human Language

Dogs Understand Human Language 06/10/2004 02:50 PM
Wired News Jun 10 2004 7:22PM GMT

EU Commissioner says we need to better
understand benefits of e-Government

EU Commissioner says we need to better
understand benefits of e-Government 06/22/2004 02:46 AM
PublicTechnology.net Jun 22 2004 7:04AM GMT

BLACKFIVE: Media Still Doesn't
Understand the Military

BLACKFIVE: Media Still Doesn't
Understand the Military 07/01/2004 05:38 AM
journalists are making fools of themselves via their ignorance of things military: .. this Blackfive article .. Blackfive

blackfive.net/main/2004/06/media_still_doe.html
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Americans do understand irony
(part 2)

Americans do understand irony
(part 2) 03/19/2003 10:24 PM
The US, as part of our "blow the heck out of Iraq" policy, is pumping billions of dollars into the...

Kids Understand The Difference Between
Texting And Writing

Kids Understand The Difference Between
Texting And Writing 12/24/2004 12:18 PM
For years, now, we've been hearing horror stories about how kids who are growing up learning "txt spk" on instant messenger programs and via phone SMS messages are hurting their ability to write proper English. There was never actually any evidence of this -- other than some anecdotal horror stories. Also, as we pointed out, there's nothing wrong with understanding txt abbreviations as long as the person knows what is appropriate at the right time. It's like knowing two different languages -- which most parents and teachers consider to be a good thing. Thus, the focus shouldn't be on freaking out about kids learning to tap away in abbreviated format, but in making sure they know what's appropriate for what venues. Supporting this theory is a new study suggesting that kids who text have comparable writing skills to those who don't. The study was quite small, and the methodology could clearly be questioned -- but it is some initial evidence that kids are smart enough to understand when text talk is appropriate and when it's not. Much more interesting, though, was the finding that those who used messaging regularly also wrote more concisely. While the article suggests this is a downside, being able to write concisely is a useful talent. If text messaging helps people better organize their thoughts this way, perhaps it's a benefit.

Oracle Tip: Understand the difference
between IN and EXISTS in subqueries

Oracle Tip: Understand the difference
between IN and EXISTS in subqueries 08/23/2004 02:48 AM
CNET Aug 23 2004 7:15AM GMT

Wireless Broadband Companies Need To
Understand The Competition

Wireless Broadband Companies Need To
Understand The Competition 04/15/2004 02:23 PM
When you hear something like this, it seems quite obvious - but many wireless broadband players still haven't quite figured it out. When offering wireless broadband services, they are competing against wired broadband services in the minds of customers. Too many wireless broadband providers only seem to focus on the other wireless players - and therefore price things too high for service levels that don't match wired broadband at all. This was exactly the problem that Metricom ran into years ago with their Ricochet service - and which many wireless broadband players are now repeating. The article points out that hopefully this is changing with Nextel' s wireless broadband announcement yesterday as they seem to be moving as quickly as possible towards true DSL/cable broadband speeds at prices not that far off from their wired competitors.

'I hope Fox News viewers will understand
the computer has to be on.'

'I hope Fox News viewers will understand
the computer has to be on.' 05/12/2004 08:06 PM
Blah Blah Blogging :: "The following is a meticulously detailed recap of a news segment that appeared on the Chicago FOX news affiliate on Wednesday, May 5th, 2004." -- Intelligent blogger agrees to appear in puff piece about blogging for FOX news. These are the results.

Research shows dogs understand language

Research shows dogs understand language 06/10/2004 09:37 AM

Research Shows Dogs Understand Language
(AP)

Research Shows Dogs Understand Language
(AP) 06/10/2004 08:22 AM
AP - As many a dog owner will attest, our furry friends are listening. Now, for the doubters, there is scientific proof they understand much of what they hear.

Telstra took days to understand BigPond
virus

Telstra took days to understand BigPond
virus 11/03/2003 01:03 AM
ZDNet Australia Nov 3 2003 0:25AM ET

Boston.com / News / Blogs / DNC: What
the media don't understand about
bl0gging

Boston.com / News / Blogs / DNC: What
the media don't understand about
bl0gging 07/25/2004 09:11 AM
What don't the media understand about blogging? .. continued at Boston.com .. Dave Weinberg says

boston.com/news/blogs/dnc/2004/07/what_the_media.html
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Some Understand Covert Journey; Others
Fear Bad Precedent (washingtonpost.com)

Some Understand Covert Journey; Others
Fear Bad Precedent (washingtonpost.com) 12/02/2003 12:28 AM

Trying to Understand WiMax? The Wall
Street Journal Explains

Trying to Understand WiMax? The Wall
Street Journal Explains 05/24/2004 02:21 PM
The Journal's Nick Wingfield lays out the WiMax field, including the basis of its technology, its potential for rollout, and the current state of wireless broadband: Wingfield's article is a solid portrayal of the state of the industry, including the likely date for real equipment being available in the U.S. (2006, he notes, which jibes with fellow editor Nancy Gohring's research among WiMax-backin gcompanies), the market size, and the potential competition with cellular data and existing wireline services. WiMax and its early relatives has the best potential in areas in which service is difficult to obtain (the prairie or Manhattan), wireline services offer limits to uploads and downloads far below a wireless broadband offering (at the edges of DSL coverage, for instance), or where wireless broadband is just plain cheaper. In some cases, early wireless broadband offers high speeds at cost that are the same or as little as half of competing wireline offerings. I'm not bullish on WiMax's mobile options, which are even further out in the future for deployment because by the time that standard is set, the cell companies will have had three or four years dealing with the first and probably second iterations of 3G cellular data. Meanwhile, Wi-Fi might blanket whole cities, an increasing trend. [link via Brian Chin]...

Musicians don't understand copyright,
but they don't like the RIAA suing their
fans

Musicians don't understand copyright,
but they don't like the RIAA suing their
fans 05/03/2004 11:00 AM
The Pew Internet and American Life project has just concluded a survey of 2,700+ musicians, measuring their attitude to the lawsuits the record labels have brought against their fans in their name:

When asked what impact free downloading on the Internet has had on their careers as musicians, 37% say free downloading has not really made a difference, 35% say it has helped and 8% say it has both helped and hurt their career. Only 5% say free downloading has exclusively hurt their career and 15% of the respondents say they don't know...

67% say artists should have complete control over material they copyright and they say copyright laws do a good job of protecting artists...

Some 60% of those in the sample say they do not think the Recording Industry Association of America's suits against online music swappers will benefit musicians and songwriters. Those who earn the majority of their income from music are more inclined than "starving musicians" to back the RIAA, but even those very committed musicians do not believe the RIAA campaign will help them. Some 42% of those who earn most of their income from their music do not think the RIAA legal efforts will help them, while 35% think those legal challenges will ultimately benefit them.

220K PDF Link (Thanks, Wendy!)

Recording Industry Thinks The UK Doesn't
Understand Exchange Rates

Recording Industry Thinks The UK Doesn't
Understand Exchange Rates 05/20/2004 01:05 PM
We've already had stories about how the recording industry is looking for any possible way to raise prices on digital downloads (showing just how little they understand the concept of an emerging market), and now we find out that the standard $1 price is really more for marketing reasons. Now that Napster has launched in the UK, they seem to think that it's a good idea to use the "1 standard unit of currency" as the main price - probably because it looks better in advertisements. So, in the US, a track is $1. In the UK it's £1. Now, while the recording industry couldn't be bothered, most users understand exchange rates, and realize that £1 = ~ $1.77 (with some fluctuations). In other words, for the sake of being able to use the "1 standard unit of currency" pricing, the recording industry gets to nearly double the price in the UK. This doesn't seem likely to encourage much adoption - but may encourage plenty of resentment. Of course, by this point, it appears the recording industry thrives on resentment.
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When Even Mathematicians Don't Understand the Math

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