Age of the earth debates from the old-age side are based on linear regressions which are parameter estimates and arguing about whether that’s a fact or not is like arguing about whether the expected value of a portfolio is a fact or not. It’s an absurd thing to claim as truth and argue about since it is a mathematical outcome from a chosen formula.

Genetic ancestor tests DON’T ACTUALLY REVEAL ANCESTRY [1]. This one is a myth that new atheists push about.

…It’s also quite possible for someone who is African American to get ancestry test results that say they’re 75 percent European… [1]

One cannot analyze a bunch of DNA and determine where someone came from a million years ago, and applying DNA results to modern geopolitical borders is snake-oil selling. At best they are correlations only and correlation doesn’t imply causation.

The second one is a favorite of anti-Israel proponents who secretly think the Judeans in the Bible were replaced en-masse at some point in the past with people who looked differently than the modern Isrealis who got that state as a result of Judaism-following ancestors, thus proving that Jesus was ‘browner’ and did not have ‘blue eyes’ [2] because of hithertoo unknown genetic predictive power proving that he would thus side with the PLA in morality questions. King David being said to have had Red hair really puts the lie to that whole browner thing… Hence why genealogies are a waste except as box-checking messiah status.

1. https://now.tufts.edu/articles/pulling-back-curtain-dna-ancestry-tests [archive | wayback]

2. https://www.timesofisrael.com/anomalous-blue-eyed-people-came-to-israel-6500-years-ago-from-iran-dna-shows/

The number of science, technology, engineering, and math, STEM, jobs in the United States, shrank for the past three decades,1982-2012. The draw-down accelerated from 2000-2012.

The highest occupational growth occurred among occupations with soft skills, with K-12 teaching and non-doctor health care support staff, such as nurses, technicians, and therapists. From 2000-2012, those in the physical sciences, such as chemistry, physics, and others, biological scientists, and engineers saw decreases in the availability of work in their field. The percentage of the workforce that fell into the category of “engineer” declined by over 15% (David Deming, 2017). In “The Economics of Noncognitive Skills”, data from the Brookings Institution’s Hamilton project shows that the number of service jobs increased the most over the last three decades (Timothy Taylor, 14 October 2016). These are tasks such as customer service.

Very good article on decision theory by James Jones, Professor of Mathematics Richland Community College.  The modes discussed are expect value (realist), also called the Bayesian principle, Maximax (optimist), Maximin (Pessimist), and Minimax (Opportunist).  They use the example of a bicycle shop choosing how many bicycles to purchase and sell.  The example is very good and the explanation is well-constructed.

Forestry Economics: A Managerial Approach by John E. Wagner has a great explanation of the decision modes.  The Wikipedia article on Minimax includes pseudocode for using Minimax in games, such as Chess.  Of particular interest was the mention of this technique’s use by Deep Blue, the computer which beat Gary Kasparov in chess.

Management and the Technology Professional – B302 Risk analysis using maximin criterion, minimax regret criterion, expected value criterion, and decision trees is a good example of decision theory writing as well, and it includes a Dilbert cartoon.  Ultimately the regret table at Wikipedia was one of the most useful.

Real-World Decision Making: An Encyclopedia of Behavioral Economics edited by Morris Altman captured my interest when search related to Laplace decision criteria.  It’s more of an economics book on behavior.  I am mentioning here not because of decision theory content, but because it’s page on Google Books led me to IndieBound.org, which seems to be a federation of independent bookstores.

Upward Pull was a term used in marketing to describe the effects of people seeing advertisements that made them aspire. Examples including seeing a nice watch or a luxury vehicle in a magazine. Someone who may have to work for years for those items may see them and aspire to obtain them, despite them normally appearing outside their socioeconomic demographic. With the internet and advertisers, upward pull has all but vanished. When one views websites they see almost nothing aspirational. They instead see what is immediately obtainable.

Parmy Olsen describes the filter bubble that exists on the internet.

“…as algorithms make predictions about people based on their web behavior, they can inadvertently deepen existing disparities on aspects like culture, race or gender. In a few years you could, for instance, be looking at a richer or poorer version of the Internet depending on how things work out with your credit score or where you live, and not even know it.” (1)

She further says “The Princeton researchers will compare search results, prices, ads, offers and emails that their fake profiles receive over the coming months, and look for patterns to measure what kind of discrimination is happening across different sites.” (1)

1. Olson, Parmy. “This Landmark Study Could Reveal How The Web Discriminates Against You – Forbes.” News. This Landmark Study Could Reveal How The Web Discriminates Against You, 2 Dec. 2013, http://www.forbes.com/sites/parmyolson/2013/12/02/this-landmark-study-could-reveal-how-the-web-discriminates-against-you/.

2. Englehardt, Steven, et al. Web Privacy Measurement: Scientific Principles, Engineering Platform, and New Results., Draft, June 1, 2014 https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~arvindn/publications/WebPrivacyMeasurement.pdf

3. Englehardt, Steven, et al. OpenWPM: An Automated Platform for Web Privacy Measurement. Zotero, https://senglehardt.com/papers/openwpm_03-2015.pdf.

Addendum: The study was published. They focused on news site personalization at the time, which was before Google entered the foray as a primary driver of news content via Google News. Steven Englehardt maintains a webpage at https://senglehardt.com/pages/publications.html. The published material is very interesting and reveals how tracking mechanisms work over time. I have been unable to find detailed analysis of the different filter bubbles encountered by their bots. They published a second paper on their privacy analysis tool, but it does not delve into the different potential experiences of the web user. The material relates to the technical aspects of what occurs. Those studies have been added with notes 2 and 3.

Last modified on March 7th, 2026 at 10:44 pm

This will start the time service and synchronize the clocks on CentOS 6.

yum install ntp 
chkconfig ntpd on 
ntpdate pool.ntp.org 
/etc/init.d/ntpd start