I think what happened was that the reference was passed to a function that (1) under most conditions (I think there was a fast-path added after the function had been around a while) accessed it directly, and (2) under all conditions turned it back into a pointer for another call. The way that function was called in this particular case was outside of those "most conditions", so the only thing that was done with the invalid reference was to turn it back into a pointer and then null-check it. And so while making the reference probably counts as "dereferencing" the pointer as far as language rules go, the memory that it pointed to was never actually accessed.
(Why yes, that does sound like something badly in need of refactoring. And illegal reliance on implementation details.)
Because it is lip service only. This plan will be muddled by congress as to benefit primarily the large institutions that are their donors, rather than the intended swath of USians. When that happens, don't expect Obama to be outraged. The exact same thing happened with health care, tax rates, debt cap, etc.
I agree. That said, using actual gender rather than assigned sex only serves to identify people more uniquely. I wonder if that would have an appreciable effect on the stats or if it would fall within error bars.
You'd have to have a pretty long dropdown menu in the data-mining centers for all the genders people self-identify these days. Some people might be uniquely identifiable on that value alone.
Considering that it is designed to measure intelligence in a way that can be objectively defined, I'd say it correlates pretty good. Can you think of many intelligent people with a low IQ or unintelligent people with a high IQ?
Intelligence is not defined precisely enough to speak of correlation here. Maybe a better question to consider is: is it fair that salary is correlated with IQ?
I would love to take a second shot at a convex optimization course. I took one from a former PhD student of Boyd's during my junior year of college and I was not at the right point in my education for a class like that.
It touched on some really great real world optimization problems, including an interesting couple of lectures on the Netflix prize.
I took those via HCP (which is like SEE but for 3x the usual grad student rate) and he's a great teacher. He's not one to let his smarts get in the way of teaching, which is not true of all the professors at Stanford.
Economics is a value-free science, in that it analyses real-life processes and policy implications _without_ prescribing what specific goals are to be pursued by the policy makers.
Politics (unlike _political science_, arguably) is all about promoting specific values and fulfilling special interests. It's not necessarily "bad", it is just not what economics is about. Economics provides the tools for analyzing what _means_ are appropriate (or not) for attaining some or other ends, but the latter lie outside of the scope of economics as a science.
I wish this distinction was so hard and true. It has unfortunately been my experience that to address the assumptions of most economic thinkers, political engagement is required. Bringing up heterodox or marxist _economic_ arguments tends to be met with political resistance. I will redouble my efforts to keep the distinction alive.
Capital Vol. 1 by Marx is classic and still more applicable than anyone wants to admit. Ease into the terminology over the first few chapters, things are defined carefully.
