Slashdot Mirror

Last September 21, as the Northern Hemisphere tilted away from the sun, scientists reported with unprecedented distress that the North Polar ice cap is “falling off a cliff.” One study estimated that it could be completely gone during summer in less than 22 years. Another new study, to be presented by U.S. Navy researchers later this week, warns it could happen in as little as 7 years.

I'm don't know where he got that study from, but it's certainly possible for some study to reach that conclusion by extrapolating from known data if trends had held up. What studies Al Gore cherry-picks does not have to represent the state of scientific consensus, but he's right in that the Arctic ice is shrinking at a considerable rate.

from my understanding a game "dev" does very little programming in the traditional sense

I work on a VR project at my day job (basically a video game). Your statement that we use a "pre-made" game engine is basically like saying that nobody does any "real" programming if they use a library or some code that someone else wrote. In other words: yours is a no-true-scotsman statement.

These guys are mostly doing scripting

We used both C++ and Unreal Script when we were using UDK (Unreal Engine 3). But everything we do now with Unreal 4 is C++ (and some Blueprint stuff to hook the GUI together).

world building, animation, modeling, progress triggers, hit boxes, etc.

Yes, that's the problem domain. And how do you think these things get implemented? With code.

So assuming I'm correct on that, Lint would be useless for this.

You're not really correct on all that. Also Lint and other static analysis tools are useful. John Carmack has some great insight into all this and how static analysis tools can help and fit into game development. As evidence: the Doom 3 source code is pretty generally very good.

Much of this criticism was actually covered in the paper. The complaints therefore seem overblown.

For example, here's footnote 14: "The Seattle Minimum Wage Study surveyed over 500 Seattle business owners immediately before and a year after the Ordinance went into effect. In April 2015, multi-site employers were more likely to report intentions to reduce hours of their minimum wage employees (34% versus 24%) and more likely to report intentions to reduce employment (33% versus 26%). A one-year follow-up survey revealed that multi location employers were more likely to report an actual reduction in full-time and part-time employees, with over half of multi-site respondents reporting a reduction in full-time employment (52%, against 45% for single-site firms)."

The paper excluded chain locations for a few reasons, including the issues of an employer with one foot in and one foot out of the affected region, but generally concludes that with reasons to suspect both effects on the exclusion of chains, "Our employment results may therefore be biased towards zero."

The paper itself: https://evans.uw.edu/sites/def...

The report has issues. For a look at some of them, look here https://sccinsight.com/2017/06....

Also the report focused on small local businesses – the cafe on the corner, rather than the big restaurant chain. Two problems here: big restaurant chains are profitable minimum wage employers and leaving them out is likely to skew the results of the study. But a second one is that the corner cafe is very sensitive to any shift in the economic winds, and Seattle rents have been rising dramatically in a boom.

So it's really hard to evaluate this work. The objections above, as well as contradicting many prior results may indicate problems. On the other hand, it might be that it is valid. I make the researchers (thought I am not a professional these days) usual plea for peer review and more study.

The Evans School web page which covers the report is here: https://evans.uw.edu/policy-im...

Also the Windows File Explorer is limited in the length of filenames and paths that it can handle.

How ridiculous is it to browse to a folder and be unable to delete a file/folder?

The typical workaround is to use robocopy to /MIR an empty folder to the problem folder location.

The evidence suggests that marijuana does not lower the level of driving execution,

False. To verify this, go make a movie of yourself driving while high, and when you watch yourself afterwards. Here's a summary of some studies, and stop getting your information from "High Times"

Marijuana impairs attention. That seems to be the linkage that most people cite. But I find no hard statistics on this either.

Since there is no legally recognized impairment level for Marijuana, and no legally recognized tests, (other than blood draws) either device based tests, or field sobriety tests, its hard to prove the extent to which it is present in accident situations. So if there was a car crash, the police have no real way to prove it was even a factor.

University of Washington cited an Australian study showing that the research is a total mess in this area. So a local TV station then went out and did their own tests.

Second, weed does not cause aggression

Oh, but it does:

Studies show that violence can occur more often among people who use marijuana regularly, rather than those who use it occasionally or not at all. It is unclear why this is the case, but it may be because people with violent tendencies can also have a range of other psychosocial problems and are therefore more likely to use marijuana. marijuana is also part of the illegal drug market, which may increase the chances of violence occurring in some social interactions.

Oopsie...

Here's a program that actually looks appealing, and I'd consider paying for it (I think about $2k for the year-long program):
http://www.pce.uw.edu/certificates/data-science.html

It's a graduate certificate in data science. It's my understanding the guy behind it (J. Nathan Kutz) is the same one who teaches a couple of the data science courses on Coursera for free. So for some money and a bit more rigor in your work and assignments, you get an actual certificate you can put on your resume.

Here are the Coursera courses:
https://www.coursera.org/course/compmethods
https://www.coursera.org/course/scientificcomp

If Andrew Ng and Stanford offered some kind of real credit and certificates, I'd be all over that.

Reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), the peer-reviewed study found that providing housing to chronically homeless people with severe alcohol problems who use the most community resources can dramatically cut public costs.

http://www.tacoma.uw.edu/features/research/housing-homeless-alcoholics-saves-millions-dollars

Keep telling yourself that government intervention is useless. It might not be perfect but a well organized charity can actually affect change.