What you seem to be critiquing them for is not covering the entire experimental possibility space but I think this is usually done over the course of multiple, focused experiments rather than in one super-large multi-year answer-all-possibilities experiment. (Think of it as the scientific version of doing Agile development - do many, focused experiments than one large one so that if there is a flaw in your methodology others will point it out early in the process).
I do think all of the specific questions you raise are excellent questions that certainly need to be experimentally tested. However, I think that they all can (and will) be answered in future experiments that build on the results of this one. Even if the result of these experiments show this paper is wrong, it still advances our collective understanding by showing evidence for an idea that can now be confirmed, refined or refuted by subsequent experimentation.
I agree that for most people, 3 drinks a day is moderate.
I think most everyone would agree that getting drunk would constitute heavy drinking. Given that benchmark, I have known people for whom heavy drinking is 2 drinks, and others for whom it is 12. So to label any number of drinks as being light or heavy drinking for everybody is inherently arbitrary.
Your chemistry is sound, but your biology needs work. Our bodies are very complex, so the effects of things on whole body often cannot be summed up by simple chemistry.
For example, the concentration of uric acid in the urine is higher than the concentration in the blood, despite the fact that the two solutions "want" to have the same concentration.
So to say that distilled water has such an impact untrue, and is a result of an overgeneralization of simple chemical processes.
That doesn't make any sense: there is a big difference between when a chemical dissolved in another, and a chemical binding to another.
Blood, for example, is a complex solutions containing various vitamins, minerals, hormones and cells.
The water you drink is absorbed into the rest of your body and is added to the different fluids bodily (blood, lymph, cytoplasm, etc.).
Then, as your kidneys filter the blood, they pull out wastes like uric acid, and the water they are dissolved in.
So you drink water, this new water is added to other water that already contains minerals in it, resulting in more water with stuff dissolved in it. At this point the new water and old water are indistinguishable, and act the same way.
Nothing is expelled from the body's fluids until the kidneys do their job of filtering the blood.
Also, water isn't absorbed until it gets to your colon. So if you drink water with your food or within a few hours of eating, some of the minerals in the food that is in the process of being digested (from your mouth to your stomach to your small intestine) will get dissolved in the water as it makes its way to your colon aka large intestine.
The only way distilled water could be bad for you is if you are replacing water containing minerals that, unless you drank them in your water, you would be deficient in, which is the case for almost nobody.
They did do it right... except for the whole still-not-profitable part. So they can either make a good hardware product that looses money, or they could go back to focusing on ridiculously profitable software.
When I was in middle school and high school, the teachers periodically let me know what my percentage in the class was. In addition, they usually made it easy to compute the current grade assignment-by-assignment, and some students would keep track of it in "real time" if they wanted to. (College was a different story entirely) The letter grade was more for parents and the transcript.
Also, in Middle School/Junior High & High School, most of the classes are required. Trying something else often isn't really an option.
I have the same pet peeve! The scoring of Tennis bothers me for a similar reason.
However, in this case, the rest of the world has a pretty clear expectation of what an F means. Giving out failing D's would require much more explanation to change the expectations of students, parents, and other school systems that they interact with. There is also the risk of a PR disaster if in getting rid of F's, people mis-interpret that as the school passing everyone no matter how poorly they do.
I agree. Ballmer keeps trying to beat others at their own game, and loosing.
Microsoft makes most of its money selling to businesses (Windows to OEMs, and Server software, Exchange & Office directly to companies). But they keep trying consumer projects like the Xbox (decent product but no profits after 9 years), PlaysForSure, Zune, Kin, Hotmail/MSN/Bing, etc. and are being beaten by Sony, Nintendo, Apple, Google and others.
You would think somebody within Microsoft would realize that their strength isn't being a "cool" company, but rather one that businesses trust.
Why does the market share matter if there are no profits? From what I have read Microsoft is still billions of dollars away from breaking even on their Xbox.
In contrast, when Apple broke into the smartphone market, they almost certainly made up all of their R&D costs within the first year, and is now very profitable in that market.
The markets are different, and traditionally consoles are loss-leaders in order to sell videogames but it has been 9 years since Microsoft entered the market.
It isn't like Apple decided that The Beatles aren't "good enough" music to sell, its the people who own their catalog that refuse to sell it in any online music store, not just the iTunes music store.
Plenty of developers have both an iPhone app in the app store & versions for other smartphones.
There were no issues approving the Kindle app, as well as other ebook and music purchasing apps. Apple even featured Pandora's app in the WWDC keynote.
I assume that it is nearly impossible to do an exemplary job teaching one course for one semester. It takes time to refine one's personal teaching style and to figure out what parts of the subject students grasp easily and which parts are more difficult. Nobody's teaching is perfect, so I assume that most of the criticism is legitimate.
Contradictory feedback is to be expected. Rather than ignoring it though, the proper response is to think critically to see if there were times where you did too much of X and other times you did too little of X. Sure, in the end you will probably have to ignore some of the feedback - but that doesn't mean it doesn't merit careful consideration before deciding in the end that you couldn't or shouldn't have done anything about it.
For example, if the A+ students had complained you were going to slowly and explaining things too much, but the B & C students were very happy with the explanations and needed them to keep from getting a much lower grade, then the explanations should be kept - though thought should be given as to how to keep the first group of students from getting bored when they are given.
Doing an excellent job at teaching a group of people a variety of related but not always similar things is something that is inherently challenging to do.
I personally find the purely-socratic style of teaching extremely frustrating.
I've never been graded in such a class by how well I took part in the discussion. Usually the "interesting out of textbook material" never makes it on the exam and the "confusing stuff in the textbook that I wish the instructor would discuss in class but doesn't" is the majority of the exam (and therefore, my grade).
Maybe instead of blaming students (many of whom are going into many thousands of dollars in debt to hear you speak) for wanting to be "spoon fed", maybe you should think about how good of a job you actually did.
By actually *listening* to your students' seemingly reasonable feedback you would be able to refine your technique, so your students would get more out of your class and you would become a better teacher.
While it has done with regard to market share, (beating Nintendo in its first generation, tying Sony's PS3 in the second), they have managed to loose tons of money. So much so that from what I have read, they still have not recouped the money spent developing these systems.
Re:Oh good! The trolls are out in full force!
on
iOS 4 Releases Today
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Yes, but then the developer has to set up their own store, pay for bandwidth, pay credit card processing fees, and spend significantly more on advertising since they are not in a centralized store and are less likely to be randomly stumbled across.
So the developer would not be able to sell their $10 app on their own for $7 and make the same amount of money.
Re:You signed away this "right" by picking Apple.
on
Flash Is Not a Right
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· Score: 1
iPhone, Android, Windows Mobile, Symbian & WebOS all support development in C.
Going from C to Java is a bigger deal, but again, some parts of you application, such as your data store (such as XML) and your controller logic, are going to be largely the same.
Re:You signed away this "right" by picking Apple.
on
Flash Is Not a Right
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· Score: 1
If you have to "completely rewrite an app from the ground up" for different platforms, isn't that an indication that you are doing object oriented software design wrong?
For most programs using an MVC pattern, only the View layer needs to be rewritten across platforms.
Every time you ask a famous developer what programming language a beginner should learn, they always say it doesn't really matter because if you are good, you can pick up new languages as needed.
So if the programming language doesn't matter that much, why is having to use Objective-C (or just using regular C) such a big deal? How does it "hurt developers"? Or are there really that many bad developers who can only develop for the Flash platform?
If it isn't about using a gold standard, why does the article keep giving examples of people using competing currencies that are *backed by gold*?
How likely is it that the gold supply will not be stable in the future for any reason? Speculators have been able to corner the silver market - its possible for this to happen gold too.
The liberty dollar is one example of a currency pegged to the US Dollar. E-gold.com, in-game virtual currency, Vedic City, Iowa's Raam, and the Birkshire's BirkShares are all legal and have been around for years.
What is 5% huge relative to? My house is huge compared to an ant, and tiny when compared to a skyscraper. The question is, what are interest rates relative to other countries? According to this, the US is doing rather well: http://www.billshrink.com/blog/7050/the-highest-global-inflation-rates/
Currency inflation is the problem. It is what makes the USD and indeed the US economy a bit of a prisoners dilemma. If you attempt to store your wealth in US dollars, you will find that over time, the value of that wealth approaches zero. This is due entirely to the inflation of the monetary base. This inflation is something which you do not control, and which legally you cannot opt-out of.
You can certainly opt out of it: nobody is forcing you to hold US dollars. Storing my wealth in iPads would also result in the value of my wealth decreasing over time. Hold your money in Euros, or gold or houses or stocks, or cows (which multiply over time, and pay dividends in the form of fertilizer). There are also plenty of financial instruments that allow you to increase your value faster than inflation.
So the US economy requires that everyone who wants to merely keep their head "above water" finds places to put their USD denominated wealth such that it pays interest at at least the natural rate of inflation. But of course, putting your money into a fractional reserve bank may pay interest, but it also inflates the money supply. So you don't really win there.
What? Putting your money in a fractional reserve bank doesn't inflate the money supply significantly. Its not like if you decide to put your money in a bank that pays 1.5%, the inflation rate jumps from 1% will jump to 2%. You do win there, if the rate is higher, as it often is. Just as you would win if you put your money in a CD. Or an annuity. Or another financial instrument.
Refusing to "play the game" means you lose, and "playing the game" from a weakened position [i.e. without the collusion of th government in maintaining a monopoly, or avoiding fraud prosecution, etc] means that you will also usually lose.
Play what game? This is how money works in developed countries - we have had wild fluctuations between inflation and deflation in the past, and it was a very bad thing.
So due to the tremendous ease with which new dollars are created, and the legal tender laws which make it illegal for you to REFUSE to participate in this game, you and most people will continue to lose, as they are continually worked literally _to death_ to just keep their head above water, wealth-wise.
Illegal to refuse? There are plenty of places in border towns that accept Pesos, in Vedic City, Iowa they have their own currency that is accepted, e-gold.com allows you to pay with gold, in-game virtual currencies are fast on the rise, etc.
Continually worked to death? Thats a lot of flowery language without much evidence given to support it. Most people's incomes rise with inflation, so the net cost of inflation in terms of income for most people is zero. In addition, if you invest your money, rather than stuffing it in a mattress, there are safe investments that will certainly keep you ahead of inflation. Or you could buy your house outright, grow your own food, produce your own power, and barter with people for any necessities you can't provide for yourself.
Of course, rows in some database are even easier to inflate than paper bills. And infact, much of the actual growth of the supply of dollars is just that: "electronic" dollars.
Having a specie based money and a strong discouragement towards paper instruments lets you avoid the insiduous destruction of inflation. And private actors _could_ do that now, but they'd be outside of the protections of government and society. Indeed, if they did it "too much", they'd become the prey of government agencies who don't fancy having their power and authority challenged.
Private actors *do* do that now. Its just not very popular (aside from in-game currencies).
There's nothing special about Gold. It's just that, for a number of very practical reasons, precious metals are a very good choice for a curency. Ass
Gold's price has gone from over $600 in the 80's, to less than $300 in the 90's back up to over $600 now. How again would this remove inflation & deflation? (The US dollar inflated between those two periods, so if gold is a counterweigh, then gold prices should have increased to match.)
What happens if a huge amount of gold reserves are found? Everyone's money deflates.
You do also know that we have fewer recessions than we did while in the gold standard, right?
And that there is nothing preventing you from accepting gold as payment? See e-gold.com & their payments system.
If you are going to claim that a government agency is defrauding you, then there needs to be evidence: the inflation rate in the US has been less than 5% for almost all of the last decade, and much of that time it has been less than 2%. And you do know that inflationary bubbles aren't the only cause of asset bubbles or the only cause of recession?
A random metal is no more/less intrinsically valuable than random pieces of specially printed paper or of little black pixels in the shape of numbers on my bank's website.
Slashdot Mirror
What you seem to be critiquing them for is not covering the entire experimental possibility space but I think this is usually done over the course of multiple, focused experiments rather than in one super-large multi-year answer-all-possibilities experiment. (Think of it as the scientific version of doing Agile development - do many, focused experiments than one large one so that if there is a flaw in your methodology others will point it out early in the process).
I do think all of the specific questions you raise are excellent questions that certainly need to be experimentally tested. However, I think that they all can (and will) be answered in future experiments that build on the results of this one. Even if the result of these experiments show this paper is wrong, it still advances our collective understanding by showing evidence for an idea that can now be confirmed, refined or refuted by subsequent experimentation.
Right idea, wrong target.
There is one social network that is still holding on by its fingernails by focusing on music, which has always been a strength: MySpace.
I agree that for most people, 3 drinks a day is moderate.
I think most everyone would agree that getting drunk would constitute heavy drinking. Given that benchmark, I have known people for whom heavy drinking is 2 drinks, and others for whom it is 12. So to label any number of drinks as being light or heavy drinking for everybody is inherently arbitrary.
Your chemistry is sound, but your biology needs work. Our bodies are very complex, so the effects of things on whole body often cannot be summed up by simple chemistry.
For example, the concentration of uric acid in the urine is higher than the concentration in the blood, despite the fact that the two solutions "want" to have the same concentration.
So to say that distilled water has such an impact untrue, and is a result of an overgeneralization of simple chemical processes.
That doesn't make any sense: there is a big difference between when a chemical dissolved in another, and a chemical binding to another.
Blood, for example, is a complex solutions containing various vitamins, minerals, hormones and cells.
The water you drink is absorbed into the rest of your body and is added to the different fluids bodily (blood, lymph, cytoplasm, etc.).
Then, as your kidneys filter the blood, they pull out wastes like uric acid, and the water they are dissolved in.
So you drink water, this new water is added to other water that already contains minerals in it, resulting in more water with stuff dissolved in it. At this point the new water and old water are indistinguishable, and act the same way.
Nothing is expelled from the body's fluids until the kidneys do their job of filtering the blood.
Also, water isn't absorbed until it gets to your colon. So if you drink water with your food or within a few hours of eating, some of the minerals in the food that is in the process of being digested (from your mouth to your stomach to your small intestine) will get dissolved in the water as it makes its way to your colon aka large intestine.
The only way distilled water could be bad for you is if you are replacing water containing minerals that, unless you drank them in your water, you would be deficient in, which is the case for almost nobody.
They did do it right... except for the whole still-not-profitable part. So they can either make a good hardware product that looses money, or they could go back to focusing on ridiculously profitable software.
Thank you!
When I was in middle school and high school, the teachers periodically let me know what my percentage in the class was. In addition, they usually made it easy to compute the current grade assignment-by-assignment, and some students would keep track of it in "real time" if they wanted to. (College was a different story entirely) The letter grade was more for parents and the transcript.
Also, in Middle School/Junior High & High School, most of the classes are required. Trying something else often isn't really an option.
I have the same pet peeve! The scoring of Tennis bothers me for a similar reason.
However, in this case, the rest of the world has a pretty clear expectation of what an F means. Giving out failing D's would require much more explanation to change the expectations of students, parents, and other school systems that they interact with. There is also the risk of a PR disaster if in getting rid of F's, people mis-interpret that as the school passing everyone no matter how poorly they do.
I agree. Ballmer keeps trying to beat others at their own game, and loosing.
Microsoft makes most of its money selling to businesses (Windows to OEMs, and Server software, Exchange & Office directly to companies). But they keep trying consumer projects like the Xbox (decent product but no profits after 9 years), PlaysForSure, Zune, Kin, Hotmail/MSN/Bing, etc. and are being beaten by Sony, Nintendo, Apple, Google and others.
You would think somebody within Microsoft would realize that their strength isn't being a "cool" company, but rather one that businesses trust.
Why does the market share matter if there are no profits? From what I have read Microsoft is still billions of dollars away from breaking even on their Xbox.
In contrast, when Apple broke into the smartphone market, they almost certainly made up all of their R&D costs within the first year, and is now very profitable in that market.
The markets are different, and traditionally consoles are loss-leaders in order to sell videogames but it has been 9 years since Microsoft entered the market.
And how!
It isn't like Apple decided that The Beatles aren't "good enough" music to sell, its the people who own their catalog that refuse to sell it in any online music store, not just the iTunes music store.
Plenty of developers have both an iPhone app in the app store & versions for other smartphones.
There were no issues approving the Kindle app, as well as other ebook and music purchasing apps. Apple even featured Pandora's app in the WWDC keynote.
So to answer your question: No.
I assume that it is nearly impossible to do an exemplary job teaching one course for one semester. It takes time to refine one's personal teaching style and to figure out what parts of the subject students grasp easily and which parts are more difficult. Nobody's teaching is perfect, so I assume that most of the criticism is legitimate.
Contradictory feedback is to be expected. Rather than ignoring it though, the proper response is to think critically to see if there were times where you did too much of X and other times you did too little of X. Sure, in the end you will probably have to ignore some of the feedback - but that doesn't mean it doesn't merit careful consideration before deciding in the end that you couldn't or shouldn't have done anything about it.
For example, if the A+ students had complained you were going to slowly and explaining things too much, but the B & C students were very happy with the explanations and needed them to keep from getting a much lower grade, then the explanations should be kept - though thought should be given as to how to keep the first group of students from getting bored when they are given.
Doing an excellent job at teaching a group of people a variety of related but not always similar things is something that is inherently challenging to do.
I personally find the purely-socratic style of teaching extremely frustrating.
I've never been graded in such a class by how well I took part in the discussion. Usually the "interesting out of textbook material" never makes it on the exam and the "confusing stuff in the textbook that I wish the instructor would discuss in class but doesn't" is the majority of the exam (and therefore, my grade).
Maybe instead of blaming students (many of whom are going into many thousands of dollars in debt to hear you speak) for wanting to be "spoon fed", maybe you should think about how good of a job you actually did.
By actually *listening* to your students' seemingly reasonable feedback you would be able to refine your technique, so your students would get more out of your class and you would become a better teacher.
4. Xbox
While it has done with regard to market share, (beating Nintendo in its first generation, tying Sony's PS3 in the second), they have managed to loose tons of money. So much so that from what I have read, they still have not recouped the money spent developing these systems.
Yes, but then the developer has to set up their own store, pay for bandwidth, pay credit card processing fees, and spend significantly more on advertising since they are not in a centralized store and are less likely to be randomly stumbled across.
So the developer would not be able to sell their $10 app on their own for $7 and make the same amount of money.
iPhone, Android, Windows Mobile, Symbian & WebOS all support development in C.
Going from C to Java is a bigger deal, but again, some parts of you application, such as your data store (such as XML) and your controller logic, are going to be largely the same.
If you have to "completely rewrite an app from the ground up" for different platforms, isn't that an indication that you are doing object oriented software design wrong?
For most programs using an MVC pattern, only the View layer needs to be rewritten across platforms.
Every time you ask a famous developer what programming language a beginner should learn, they always say it doesn't really matter because if you are good, you can pick up new languages as needed.
So if the programming language doesn't matter that much, why is having to use Objective-C (or just using regular C) such a big deal? How does it "hurt developers"? Or are there really that many bad developers who can only develop for the Flash platform?
IIRC, you can download a patch from Blizzard's website to allow you to play it on OS X.
If it isn't about using a gold standard, why does the article keep giving examples of people using competing currencies that are *backed by gold*?
How likely is it that the gold supply will not be stable in the future for any reason? Speculators have been able to corner the silver market - its possible for this to happen gold too.
The liberty dollar is one example of a currency pegged to the US Dollar. E-gold.com, in-game virtual currency, Vedic City, Iowa's Raam, and the Birkshire's BirkShares are all legal and have been around for years.
What is 5% huge relative to? My house is huge compared to an ant, and tiny when compared to a skyscraper. The question is, what are interest rates relative to other countries? According to this, the US is doing rather well: http://www.billshrink.com/blog/7050/the-highest-global-inflation-rates/
Currency inflation is the problem. It is what makes the USD and indeed the US economy a bit of a prisoners dilemma. If you attempt to store your wealth in US dollars, you will find that over time, the value of that wealth approaches zero. This is due entirely to the inflation of the monetary base. This inflation is something which you do not control, and which legally you cannot opt-out of.
You can certainly opt out of it: nobody is forcing you to hold US dollars. Storing my wealth in iPads would also result in the value of my wealth decreasing over time. Hold your money in Euros, or gold or houses or stocks, or cows (which multiply over time, and pay dividends in the form of fertilizer). There are also plenty of financial instruments that allow you to increase your value faster than inflation.
So the US economy requires that everyone who wants to merely keep their head "above water" finds places to put their USD denominated wealth such that it pays interest at at least the natural rate of inflation. But of course, putting your money into a fractional reserve bank may pay interest, but it also inflates the money supply. So you don't really win there.
What? Putting your money in a fractional reserve bank doesn't inflate the money supply significantly. Its not like if you decide to put your money in a bank that pays 1.5%, the inflation rate jumps from 1% will jump to 2%. You do win there, if the rate is higher, as it often is. Just as you would win if you put your money in a CD. Or an annuity. Or another financial instrument.
Refusing to "play the game" means you lose, and "playing the game" from a weakened position [i.e. without the collusion of th government in maintaining a monopoly, or avoiding fraud prosecution, etc] means that you will also usually lose.
Play what game? This is how money works in developed countries - we have had wild fluctuations between inflation and deflation in the past, and it was a very bad thing.
So due to the tremendous ease with which new dollars are created, and the legal tender laws which make it illegal for you to REFUSE to participate in this game, you and most people will continue to lose, as they are continually worked literally _to death_ to just keep their head above water, wealth-wise.
Illegal to refuse? There are plenty of places in border towns that accept Pesos, in Vedic City, Iowa they have their own currency that is accepted, e-gold.com allows you to pay with gold, in-game virtual currencies are fast on the rise, etc.
Continually worked to death? Thats a lot of flowery language without much evidence given to support it. Most people's incomes rise with inflation, so the net cost of inflation in terms of income for most people is zero. In addition, if you invest your money, rather than stuffing it in a mattress, there are safe investments that will certainly keep you ahead of inflation. Or you could buy your house outright, grow your own food, produce your own power, and barter with people for any necessities you can't provide for yourself.
Of course, rows in some database are even easier to inflate than paper bills. And infact, much of the actual growth of the supply of dollars is just that: "electronic" dollars.
Having a specie based money and a strong discouragement towards paper instruments lets you avoid the insiduous destruction of inflation. And private actors _could_ do that now, but they'd be outside of the protections of government and society. Indeed, if they did it "too much", they'd become the prey of government agencies who don't fancy having their power and authority challenged.
Private actors *do* do that now. Its just not very popular (aside from in-game currencies).
There's nothing special about Gold. It's just that, for a number of very practical reasons, precious metals are a very good choice for a curency. Ass
Gold's price has gone from over $600 in the 80's, to less than $300 in the 90's back up to over $600 now. How again would this remove inflation & deflation? (The US dollar inflated between those two periods, so if gold is a counterweigh, then gold prices should have increased to match.)
What happens if a huge amount of gold reserves are found? Everyone's money deflates.
You do also know that we have fewer recessions than we did while in the gold standard, right?
And that there is nothing preventing you from accepting gold as payment? See e-gold.com & their payments system.
If you are going to claim that a government agency is defrauding you, then there needs to be evidence: the inflation rate in the US has been less than 5% for almost all of the last decade, and much of that time it has been less than 2%. And you do know that inflationary bubbles aren't the only cause of asset bubbles or the only cause of recession?
A random metal is no more/less intrinsically valuable than random pieces of specially printed paper or of little black pixels in the shape of numbers on my bank's website.
Why?
Your car, DVD player, HDTV, TiVo, gaming console, Mp3 player, oven, & microwave all require hacking to get root.