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For the past 50 years,
The British have made some of
the funniest Comedy TV Shows. Come inside for A Video Chronology of The History of British TV Comedy.
posted to MetaFilter by Foci for Analysis
at 1:38 AM on January 24, 2008
(96 comments)
The
Marquis de Condorcet and Admiral
Jean-Charles de Borda were two men of the French Enlightenment who struggled with how to design voting systems that accurately reflected voters' preferences. Condorcet favored a
method that required the winner in a multiparty election to win a series of head-to-head contests, but he also discovered that his method easily led to a
paradoxes that produced no clear winners. The
Borda method avoids the Condorcet paradox by requiring voters to rank choices numerically in order of preference, but this method is flawed because the withdrawal of a last-place candidate can reverse the
election results. Mathematicians in the 19th century attempted to design better voting systems, including
Lewis Carroll, who favored an early form of
proportional representation. Economist Kenneth Arrow argued that designing a perfect voting system was futile, because his
"impossibility theorem" proved that it's impossible to design a non-dictatorial voting system that fulfills
five basic criteria of fairness. (more inside)
posted to MetaFilter by jonp72
at 12:11 PM on August 27, 2007
(43 comments)
Gather 'round, friends, and tell me how to learn Bayesian statistical analysis.
posted to Ask Metafilter by docgonzo
at 1:13 PM on May 8, 2007
(8 comments)
The World Lecture Hall
is a compedium of links to open university materials. Some include lecture notes, text books and even video. The
OCW at MIT is probably the most well known but there are many universities that provide online access to course materials. Want to learn about
medicine? John Hopkin's kindly provides some popular courses (Cadaver not included).
Notre Dame provides a number of courses focused on the liberal arts. The University of Washington provides
Computer Science and Engineering courses. Tufts provides a potpourri of
courses, including dentistry.
posted to MetaFilter by substrate
at 4:39 PM on February 24, 2007
(13 comments)
From the U.S. National Academies Press: 3,000 Science, Technology, Medical, and Social Science Books Available Free, Online.
The interface is clunky - you can only see one page at a time, can't download PDFs (except paid) and image view is via TIFF -
but! the content is all there, and free. Some is quite technical, but much is readily accessible. Some idea of the breadth:
A Doctor's Memoirs of Treating AIDS in Haiti,
The "Drama of the Commons",
The 1872 Research Voyage of HMS Challenger,
Biography of Stephen Hawking,
Biotechnology Research in the Age of Terrorism,
Risk Reduction Strategies for Human Exploration of Space,
Forensic Lead Bullet Analysis,
50 Short Essays on How Mathematicians Think,
Recent Research on Non-Lethal Weapons, and
Introduction to Tough Topics in Contemporary Science.
Also, see their
rather spiffy site on the cosmos.
posted to MetaFilter by Rumple
at 10:57 AM on June 12, 2006
(13 comments)
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