We went to Old Chicago last night. Had a pretty rockin time. Here is the low down.

The food is about the same price as Applebees, like always you have to look at what you are ordering, you cant just pick anything and expect to get a cheap dinner. The place inside is pretty good, they have a fair amount of TVs, but no trivia (What?), so that is minus some points. The wait wasn�t too bad, for basically opening night (it opened Monday, but the paper ran their article about them opening on Tuesday) we waited about an hour, the worst part is that there isn�t much room to wait, so we had to sit outside in the very hot sun.
The food is just like any other OCs, good. An although they serve Pepsi products I can overlook that because they bring out fresh a glass for each tea refill, which means that I get a new lemon for every glass of tea (yay!). One interesting thing that they did was split the appetizer between all three checks, which is handy, and good to know for future reference.
All in all, it is everything you can hope that OCs would be in Manhappinin. It adds one more good place to put on the restraint rotation.

AMV - I Love You / Vision of Escaflowne

A M V - Video Information (site)

Way back in '98 (some of the non-stop happiest days of my life) Matt, Newgen and I went to Non Desu Kan. At the con we watched a very, very good anime music video of Escaflowne done to Donna Lewis' "I Love You". It is still the best music video that I have seen. And I have been looking for it online ever since... well not ever since... ever since in a recent way. Anyways this is now the closest I have got. It is actually about the video, unfortunately you can't d/l it. :(, ah well. Maybe some things are better left for memory.

WONDERPIZZAUSA - The Company (site)

Wonder Pizza of Italy will place America 's most popular food source in places never before available.
The innovative machine holds, cooks and serves 9� whole pizza pies in just 2 minutes. There are 3 different pizzas available in each machine at one time. Delicious Connie�s Pizza of Chicago is featured in all WonderPizza Kiosks. 5 years and 6 million dollars of R&D went into this design and subsequent manufacture of WONDERPIZZA of Italy and the product is now beginning worldwide distribution.

I approve.

Most scientific papers are probably wrong

New Scientist Breaking News (article)

Most published scientific research papers are wrong, according to a new analysis. Assuming that the new paper is itself correct, problems with experimental and statistical methods mean that there is less than a 50% chance that the results of any randomly chosen scientific paper are true.
John Ioannidis, an epidemiologist at the University of Ioannina School of Medicine in Greece, says that small sample sizes, poor study design, researcher bias, and selective reporting and other problems combine to make most research findings false. But even large, well-designed studies are not always right, meaning that scientists and the public have to be wary of reported findings.

So very, very true. (Although I would argue with "less than 50%", because if that were the case then we would be fine, just take what the report didn't find to be true. No, I think he means is there are errors in more than 50% of the papers, which could, *or could not* lead to a wrong decision.)

Traditionally a study is said to be "statistically significant" if the odds are only 1 in 20 that the result could be pure chance. But in a complicated field where there are many potential hypotheses to sift through - such as whether a particular gene influences a particular disease - it is easy to reach false conclusions using this standard. If you test 20 false hypotheses, one of them is likely to show up as true, on average.
Odds get even worse for studies that are too small, studies that find small effects (for example, a drug that works for only 10% of patients).

ummm...no... properly conducted small experiments have the same error rate as properly conducted large experiments... Now, the power for a large test is better, but that is a different issue...

So what this article is saying is that sometimes people report the wrong conclusion based on a poor understanding of statistics, when this article itself has no clue. So was this article just an example of that problem?

Hockey and whatnot

Hockey practice went pretty good last night. Most of the people from last year returned, with the most notable exception being Trav. But we picked up a fair amount of new people as well, including the Wood brothers (they are very good).
Practice wasn't too hard, and I’m not all that sore this morning, although I did sleep past the alarm. (When I woke up this morning I remembered the feeling of sleeping through the alarm, although I didn't remember hearing the alarm...strange.)
Today is a big pile of classes, help sessions, and work, so not that fun of a day is foreseen. But the one bright spot is trivia, possibly at Old Chicago.
Ah, off to class.

Well that weekend came and went fast. On Friday we went to the Stat club picnic. On Saturday Newgen came down and we had a massive Warhammer battle (more here). And Sunday we did some stuff with Newgen and then putzed around the house for the rest of the day. And now it is Monday.
The main event for today is hockey practice (the first of the year). Hopefully I will remember how to skate...

Animal right activists steal diseased dogs

National News (article)

Animal rights activists have stolen six huntaway dogs from a Massey University farm, some of which are carrying a fatal genetic disease also found in humans.
Massey veterinarians had hoped that because of the genetic similarities, if they found a cure for the dogs they would also be able to save children. In this respect, they were working with the Adelaide Women's and Children's Hospital.
Without expert treatment, the infected dogs will waste away and die fairly quickly.

but wait there's more...

"(The activists) thought they were liberating animals facing vivisection," said the head of the Massey University Veterinary School, Grant Guilford said. "Instead they have got things horribly wrong and condemned at least some of the dogs to certain death."
The activists, claiming to be from the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) posted an anonymous message on an animal liberation website yesterday boasting of breaking into Jennersmead Farm near Bunnythorpe in Manawatu on Tuesday night.
They say they stole records of the dogs' medical treatment which they destroyed in the belief that they were "breeding records".
The buildings with sprayed with graffiti and animal rights slogans.

Ace!

Biggity-freaking-booyeah!!!!!

Fair Use Guidelines for Educational Multimedia (site)

(Section 2)
Students may incorporate portions of lawfully acquired copyrighted works when producing their own educational multimedia projects for a specific course.

and

Students may perform and display their own educational multimedia projects created under Section 2 of these guidelines for educational uses in the course for which they were created and may use them in their own portfolios as examples of their academic work for later personal uses such as job and graduate school interviews.

That would be a green light for Mad.

I say, my faith in the world is restored.

Game Knighted!

The first Game Night of the school year went pretty good. We had baked ziti, a pretty good salad, and peanut butter bars. The game we played was Would You Rather? Good times were had by all.

Quiz Answer.

If you said socks you are correct!

I also would have accepted mp3 player or camera as well.
p.s. it rained this morning.

Pop Quiz

What did I bring to school today in a Ziploc plastic bag?

I'll post the answer later today.

Oh, that Wednesday...

Today has been pretty good so far. Just working on some notes and going to a consulting meeting. Later today I need to get on down to Dillion’s to get some food for our refrigerator, it is getting quite bare inside.
Mental note: Ramen for breakfast is not a good idea.

Classes: Sitting and Standing

School went pretty good today, besides missing the first class (it's not like i even overslept, i just didn't leave home at the right time, oh well). The class that I am taking this semester is Nonparametrics, which is doing statistics with basically no parameters (mainly rank based stuff and well as some boot-strapping). It went pretty good, and since Dr.Higgins is teaching it I think I will learn a good amount. The other news of the day was that today was the first day for the class that I teach. It went relatively smoothly. The classroom is packed (had about 50some people in the room), hopefully a couple of people will drop and that will make enough room for everyone to have a chair.
Well I'm gonna go eat stuff because the union doesn't have anything good in it (although Panda Express opened up there) so I haven’t ate lunch yet.
And I'm hungry.

Mission: Attend Class - Failed

Who would have thought that actually looking at when a class started mattered. I thought it was suppose to start at 8.30, but it really started at 8, ah well, it made it pretty easy to decide to drop the class. :)

8AM?!? They make time in AM as well? Crazy.

Ok, now it feels like the school year has started. I'm up before 8 :P and I have to teach today. I think that I am gonna drop my early class though since I don't need to take it, but I'll go check it out today to see what it is like anyways.
Welp I've gotta get going so that I have enough time to go figure out when the class is (probably somewhere in Bluemont).
Have a good Tuesday.


Hey, here is a question. what does AM stand for?