Yeah, except that the rods and cones are NOT packed evenly. Your assumption that they lay in a nice uniform grid does not reflect reality.
In reality, the number of photosensitive cells are between 100 and 1000 times higher in the centralmost part of vision, the fovea, than in the periphery.
Our eyes and brains do an exceptional job of integrating information across different visual glances to give us a deep, persistent illusion of uniformly high-resolution vision. And while the resolution at the center of our vision is really quite good (about 60 cycles per degree of visual angle), it gets rather poor rather quickly.
There's a nice parlor trick to convince yourself of the existence of this illusion: take a paragraph of printed material. Printed material works well, but the exact text does not matter so much. Place your finger under a word in the middle of a paragraph. Using your finger as a guide to hold your gaze fixed, look at that word and try to read left and right WITHOUT moving your eyes. Use your finger as a guide. You should find that for most text you can read at most one or two words to the left or right, and perhaps the word immediately above. Beyond that, vision is too low resolution.
So, back to the original point, counting the number of photosensitive cells underestimates the effective resolution of human vision by at least a factor of 10 once you take into account that we move our eyes.
The P30 Pro also has a new "RYYB" pixel layout, which swaps out the two green pixels in most CMOS "RGGB" sensors for yellow pixels. "Huawei claims it can capture 40 percent more light, as the yellow filter captures green and red light," Ars Technica reports. "Of course, this will make the color wonky, but Huawei claims it can correct for that in software."
That's essentially what your retina does. The red and green photosensors (more accurately called L for "long-wave" and M for "medium-wave") have spectral sensitivity that largely overlap; it is the relative difference that gets resolved into red and green percepts (after a lot of additional processing).
So, yep, use high sensitivity sensors that mostly overlap in sensitivity, and then correct it in software. That's what your visual system does!
The issue I find with nearly every single biological application of p-value testing is that either the wrong test is used, or, far more frequently, the necessary validations of the assumptions of the test have not been made. I assume that among those many articles from The American Statistician (a journal that I do not read) that point will have been made because although it is a subtle one, it isn't that subtle, and it is important.
The most commonly used statistical tests assume that unaccounted experimental variability will be Gaussian in nature. That assumption is patently false for the general case. Noise sources for some things are Gaussian -- thermal noise in an electrical signal for example -- but many, many biological sources are not.
When Nature is non-Gaussian, you have to be extra super careful with your tests of significance. And nearly every paper that I've read skips doing noise analysis to validate their tests. Even the lowly mean and standard deviation functions assume Gaussian variability for correct interpretation. The alternative is to have p-values that are so small that results are obvious by inspection --- and then you don't need statistics.
When i've seen people heavily using alt+tab it's usually on systems where a very small number of applications are in use (maybe 3-4), they are running maximized and the user is switching between them.
Sounds like exactly the right way to use a system when you want to take full advantage of screen space. Even with the two 1600x1200 monitors on my desk, that is still definitely the case for me. And yes, I use virtual desktops as well. On laptops with typically paltry screens, why WOULDN'T you want to run each application fully maximized?
If you have a huge number of windows open at the same time and aren't organizing them in such a way that Alt-Tab works to quickly switch between them, then I argue you aren't working as efficiently as you could be.
THESE sorts of articles are what I want to see on Slashdot. Not the latest reason we need to cater to the perceived slights against one group or another.
I read the article. The photos are indeed magnificent. Makes me want to understand more about how they plan on mitigating sonic boom.
At least with a subscription, you get a chance to review prices and see if you want to go through with it.
Seriously, press a button and get it sent to you at some random current price?
Not just that, but suppose I see we're low on toilet paper. I push the button. Later in the day, my wife also sees we're low. Push the button. Then the next morning, my oldest child sees we're low. Push the button. Then my youngest child, watching everyone push the button wants to do the same. So now we have four orders for the same thing before the first delivery arrives?
I've not acquired a Dash button, so I have to think that the engineers at Amazon figured out how to prevent this scenario that would clearly lead to elimination (or destruction) of the button and substantial dissatisfaction from multiple customers.
I work in a highly related field. All the time I get asked about extending the sensitivity of our visual system in cool, biotech-y ways.
My standard response is: buy the appropriate glasses / goggles / binoculars / telescope / microscope / filter and leave your biology intact. We're much, much better at designing desk-sized microscopes than we are at making ones that fit inside your eye somehow. We are much, much better at designing low-vision assistance devices that can read signs out loud (like your cell phone) than we are at making implants to restore sight (at least for now). And, for this case, we're much, much better at making night-vision scopes that make you look cool when you wear them than we are at injecting nanoparticles into your eyes in a procedure that has a non-trivial chance of rendering you blind.
Pure electro-mechanical technology in the form of a wearable or external device of some sort is far, far more advanced than biotechnology right now. And it, generally speaking, is reversible, something none of the current generation of biological approaches have.
Should we continue research on this sort of thing? Oh, yes, definitely! But don't think about using it, yet. Not for a long while.
It all boils down to the observation: just because you CAN do something (create IR-sensitive vision by injecting nanoparticles in your eyes) does not mean you SHOULD do it, and that there are not any vastly better alternatives.
I suspect that Prof. Kelly is not familiar with his colleague Prof. Livingstone and her work studying the neuroscientific basis for art. It would not be so surprising, given their disparate departments and that Prof. Livingstone is across the river in Boston, somewhat removed from main campus.
The crux of artistic creation is, as I hope philosophers will slowly understand, that each new wave of modality of expression, each new genre, tickles a specific pathway in the brain. Given time, both to study the art and to study the neuroscience of visual perception, the greatness of many of the great works of art can be reduced to a simple explanation. That does not reduce their impact on us, nor should it. But it does reveal the fundamental requirement of human perception to denote a particular work as great.
The Mona Lisa is perhaps Prof. Livingstone's best result: the reason we find the image of a partially smiling woman compelling is that there are two images in conflict: one at low spatial frequencies (larger features) that is smiling, and one at high spatial frequencies (smaller features) that is not. Somehow, Da Vinci was able to exploit these two separate perceptual channels. Because we sense that the figure is smiling, we find it appealing, but we cannot see the smile, so we find it enigmatic and compelling.
Another telling result: much of impressionism is compelling because the colors are what are known as equiluminant: in black-and-white, they would appear to be uniformly gray, this the luminance channel in our visual system is silent, and in conflict with the color channel.
The very fact that we find black-and-white photographs compelling is even understood by showing that the color channel has been suppressed, something that does not normally happen.
Art, at least visual art, is all about masterful manipulation of different perceptual channels that have direct physiological embodiments in our brains.
And, and AI can most certainly be trained to do that. The results eventually will be undoubtedly just as compelling (given good models on which to train the AI) as that done by human hand.
I mean, he's my BROTHER. Like, we have the same parents. We look alike. A lot alike. Our DNA is highly similar. As in more highly similar than essentially anyone else on the planet, except for our sister, whom I call SIS... oh shit, is THAT sexist too?
Crap, this is getting too confusing. Call me when this insanity is over, I'm going on permanent vacation in the Brohama... no, wait, BAHamas. Sorry about that.
The summary takes a swipe at mature technology (the stethoscope) just because it is mature. Mature does not mean bad, nor ineffective. On the contrary, mature means "we have figured out all the ways to make this better." Stethoscopes are awesome instruments: they take no power, last indefinitely, and can be used to diagnose a wide range of diseases in skilled hands.
Now the last part is the important one: in skilled hands. The proposed instrument is for unskilled hands to help diagnose disease where doctors are scarce. It will need batteries. It will need protection from theft. It will cost a bundle. It may have annual licensing fees. It will surely need an internet connection. Now, is that really something that a sub-Saharan nation will be able to afford in its remote clinics?
Or would that same money be better put into training its workers as health care technicians specifically skilled to diagnose pneumonia through traditional stethoscopes? No licensing. Stethoscopes are dirt cheap. Once learned and continually exercised, the training doesn't go away, doesn't stop working, doesn't need batteries. Some of those trained workers would be inspired to become physicians. Those new physicians would help ameliorate the local shortage. Long term, that appears to be the far better choice.
If I were in charge of a remote village and given the option of (a) getting a shiny new device with all of the strings mentioned above, or (b) having the brightest one of my residents trained on hearing the difference between healthy and diseased lungs, you can bet which option I'd take.
Cool stuff, as the parent poster states, yes. Appropriate use of technology when a simpler, better solution exists? Perhaps not.
Here's where this kind of technology is actually useful: in comparatively rich places (not sub-Saharan Africa) where there's an under-served population at the physician level, but there are still skilled health care workers. Like Western inner city clinics staffed by physician assistants. PAs can use these tools to augment their existing skills to help triage patients more efficiently and accurately, sending those who are in need of more advanced services to regional hospitals.
But even then, such clinics are cost-sensitive, so pricing becomes an issue, and any company manufacturing a product that can affect the outcome of human health needs to carry substantial liability insurance. Those costs are reflected in the purchase price of such devices. I'm having a hard time thinking automated diagnostic machines are going to be inexpensive.
If the proposal were to, instead, create a small, ultra-fast antibody-based device that would take the results of a throat swab or cough to look for evidence of standard bacterial or viral lung pathogens, now you're talking. That kind of solution has the potential for being inexpensive and globally applicable.
The telecommuting fad seems to be fading, which is good. People are finally starting to understand that there are, indeed, benefits to being in the same physical proximity with coworkers. So that's a "no" answer to the original question, since government will presumably work better -- the machinations of government, the behind-the-scenes interactions and negotiations -- when people can bump into each other at lunch, or meet for drinks, etc.
Then, there's the very deeply steeped idea that the US Federal and State governments should be accessible to all. There should be no barriers. If someone wanted to witness a public debate, then they should be able to do so with an absolute minimum of requirements. Needing any kind of equipment, including internet access, a computer, a screen, a mobile phone, ANYTHING, is a barrier, as there are people who do not have them. So "no" on that count as well, since public debate needs to be witnessed by people with first-hand direct experience, and that's not possible if the debate -- or even only part of the debate -- is available only electronically.
Finally, when someone has a job to perform, making that job difficult in some way, especially time, means that they are less likely to squander the privilege of holding office. If a representative has to travel 6 hours each way to get to Washington, then I'll bet they will minimize their travel time and make sure they use their time in DC and in their home office, more wisely than if it took no effort to be in DC at all. Think of how important an individual long-distance phone call was, and how well-chosen the words were, when every second carried a cost, as compared to the blather we get now with free long distance. So, "no" for the third time, because when a resource is precious, it gets used more wisely.
Call me a luddite (you wouldn't be the first), but there are distinct benefits to face-to-face interaction.
Scientists aren't surprised. That's just the language that is used to describe findings that don't match up with existing dogma.
As another poster suggested, the natural world is exceedingly complex. Physics aside, our models of it tend to be simple. Simple models perforce do not capture complexity, and thus, are often wrong when you test them beyond their domain.
If you, as a scientist, aren't constantly stumbling across unexpected results (which are written as surprises, that term has a different meaning in scientific papers than in the general public), then you aren't exploring new areas. As a scientist, you work by taking an existing model or hypothesis, and pushing it to its limits, finding where it breaks down, and creating a new, better model that accommodates a wider area. There are precious few cases where such models are sufficiently complete that we have run out of things to test... low-energy fundamental particle physics seems to be the best-known one. In biology, which is the field I work in, we aren't even remotely close.
Take paleontology, for instance. One a seemingly monthly basis, new dinosaur species are being discovered, or old bones are realized to have been put together wrong, or new details about extinctions have been discovered. For that field, much of the surprise comes from additional data sources -- our older, simpler models were based on less data, and with additional information, better models can be built. Dinosaurs, when I was a kid, were thought to all be lizard-like in appearance. Recent discoveries of exceedingly well-preserved specimens suggest many of them had feathers, and were colored.
Take planetary sciences / cosmology. We have discovered a vast trove of objects in our solar system, thanks to new streams of data. We have discovered large numbers of planets beyond our solar system, also thanks to new streams of data. The better we build our telescopes and sensors, the better a picture of the cosmos we get. Each increase in available resolution continues to bring surprises because we do not have fully-developed models of the universe.
Take geology. Plate tectonics was validated only about 50 years ago. We don't know for sure that the same thing happens on other planets.
And biology. The combination of Darwin, and Watson and Crick seemed to explain all of evolution. Except that, as we look more and more closely, there *are* acquired traits that are inherited... they're just not the dominant means of evolution. Our tools are getting better and measuring with finer molecular detail, revealing secrets of the scaffolding around DNA and the immense role it plays in determining externally observable characteristics.
Or sleep. We actually understand much of the metabolic mechanism for sleep, now. There is a real rejuvenation process. But we wouldn't have understood that without new tools that allow us to probe at high temporal and spatial resolution, and with fine molecular resolution using genetic tools.
In short, scientists are surprised because we discover new things all the time. We remain on the cusp of wide troves of knowledge, all of which is new. Each new revolution in data collection brings with it a new, unexplored realm and, as is written in many papers, surprises.
Which is what? 10 minutes on a bicycle? Or I assume 15 minutes on these darned new fangled scooter electric kick bikes?
Given the traffic described, I would not expect a bicycle to be safe, eliminating that possibility.
And the parent poster stated that the electric scooters had been declared illegal in his location, thus that isn't an option, either.
What's left? Car, by implication that the poster uses public transportation, that isn't an option. Then? Walking, which, from the poster's description of the commute by tram, takes potentially just as much time, and is better for you in many ways.
A 2.5 mile trip (which is 4.0 km) should take 40 minutes to walk at a brisk pace.
The exercise would do you a world of good physically, and not being crammed in the tin-cans of public transportation would do the same psychologically. I bet you could even combine it with stopping at shops that you would otherwise need to take a separate trip for, like a bagful of groceries, the bank, the bottle shop, whathaveyou. Add in an improving audiobook at the same time, rather than using your phone to play the game du jour, and you're getting a leg up, so to speak, on everyone else.
And, according to your claim of a 45 minute commute, it should take the same amount of time! Win all around.
Of course, on days where the weather is not conducive to walking, you can hop back on the tram.
My feeling is many of the people that own and drive personal pickup trucks all the time...
I drive my pickup all the time because it is the only car I own. I suspect that is true for the majority of pickup owners, because it is true for the majority of vehicle owners.
... even when they're not actually hauling anything
I also suspect that people driving their cars are similarly not using their vehicles to their fullest capacity and potential the vast majority of the time. Most of the time cars are carrying one or two passengers, a far cry from their full capacity of four or five.
But why let a few bits of common sense get in the way of a good screed?
Agreed. Comparing WF before and after Amazon, the prices are the same on the special items ONLY if you include the 10% additional discount given to Prime members. We had all hoped that Amazon would bring some of its immense efficiencies to WF and lower prices, but the opposite seems to have happened.
And, anecdotally, despite buying fish at WF for probably two decades now, last weekend was the first time I found a parasite.
Most people complaining about this season say it's bad because of the SJW themes. That's not why it's bad. It's bad because the writing, directing, and acting are terrible.
God, yes. The political pandering is annoying, but the scripts are just crap. The companions' acting is roundly sub-standard. And why did Chibnal select such a terrible accent for the Doctor and *all* the companions? I had always thought one of the wonderful, enjoyable parts of the UK was the broad range of accents. That richness certainly was part of the previous seasons of the reboot. Now, we get ones that are not only difficult to understand, but identical, bland and uninteresting.
But the big problem, the really big problem, is that the writing is poor. Inexcusably so. I don't write TV scripts for a living, but I have a couple of friends who do, and given the skeleton of a story line, I have absolutely no doubt they could do better. At least the shows they worked on didn't have massive, gaping plot holes.
I have counter-examples where Amazon Warehouse items were items that had been previously returned because they had a subtle, or not-so-subtle malfunction. Back they went again.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, except that the rods and cones are NOT packed evenly. Your assumption that they lay in a nice uniform grid does not reflect reality.
In reality, the number of photosensitive cells are between 100 and 1000 times higher in the centralmost part of vision, the fovea, than in the periphery.
Our eyes and brains do an exceptional job of integrating information across different visual glances to give us a deep, persistent illusion of uniformly high-resolution vision. And while the resolution at the center of our vision is really quite good (about 60 cycles per degree of visual angle), it gets rather poor rather quickly.
There's a nice parlor trick to convince yourself of the existence of this illusion: take a paragraph of printed material. Printed material works well, but the exact text does not matter so much. Place your finger under a word in the middle of a paragraph. Using your finger as a guide to hold your gaze fixed, look at that word and try to read left and right WITHOUT moving your eyes. Use your finger as a guide. You should find that for most text you can read at most one or two words to the left or right, and perhaps the word immediately above. Beyond that, vision is too low resolution.
So, back to the original point, counting the number of photosensitive cells underestimates the effective resolution of human vision by at least a factor of 10 once you take into account that we move our eyes.
The P30 Pro also has a new "RYYB" pixel layout, which swaps out the two green pixels in most CMOS "RGGB" sensors for yellow pixels. "Huawei claims it can capture 40 percent more light, as the yellow filter captures green and red light," Ars Technica reports. "Of course, this will make the color wonky, but Huawei claims it can correct for that in software."
That's essentially what your retina does. The red and green photosensors (more accurately called L for "long-wave" and M for "medium-wave") have spectral sensitivity that largely overlap; it is the relative difference that gets resolved into red and green percepts (after a lot of additional processing).
So, yep, use high sensitivity sensors that mostly overlap in sensitivity, and then correct it in software. That's what your visual system does!
The issue I find with nearly every single biological application of p-value testing is that either the wrong test is used, or, far more frequently, the necessary validations of the assumptions of the test have not been made. I assume that among those many articles from The American Statistician (a journal that I do not read) that point will have been made because although it is a subtle one, it isn't that subtle, and it is important.
The most commonly used statistical tests assume that unaccounted experimental variability will be Gaussian in nature. That assumption is patently false for the general case. Noise sources for some things are Gaussian -- thermal noise in an electrical signal for example -- but many, many biological sources are not.
When Nature is non-Gaussian, you have to be extra super careful with your tests of significance. And nearly every paper that I've read skips doing noise analysis to validate their tests. Even the lowly mean and standard deviation functions assume Gaussian variability for correct interpretation. The alternative is to have p-values that are so small that results are obvious by inspection --- and then you don't need statistics.
That's the sort of science I strive to perform.
When i've seen people heavily using alt+tab it's usually on systems where a very small number of applications are in use (maybe 3-4), they are running maximized and the user is switching between them.
Sounds like exactly the right way to use a system when you want to take full advantage of screen space. Even with the two 1600x1200 monitors on my desk, that is still definitely the case for me. And yes, I use virtual desktops as well. On laptops with typically paltry screens, why WOULDN'T you want to run each application fully maximized?
If you have a huge number of windows open at the same time and aren't organizing them in such a way that Alt-Tab works to quickly switch between them, then I argue you aren't working as efficiently as you could be.
THESE sorts of articles are what I want to see on Slashdot. Not the latest reason we need to cater to the perceived slights against one group or another.
I read the article. The photos are indeed magnificent. Makes me want to understand more about how they plan on mitigating sonic boom.
... and could be used to show the current price of the thing you're going to order to correct its biggest shortcoming.
At least with a subscription, you get a chance to review prices and see if you want to go through with it.
Seriously, press a button and get it sent to you at some random current price?
Not just that, but suppose I see we're low on toilet paper. I push the button. Later in the day, my wife also sees we're low. Push the button. Then the next morning, my oldest child sees we're low. Push the button. Then my youngest child, watching everyone push the button wants to do the same. So now we have four orders for the same thing before the first delivery arrives?
I've not acquired a Dash button, so I have to think that the engineers at Amazon figured out how to prevent this scenario that would clearly lead to elimination (or destruction) of the button and substantial dissatisfaction from multiple customers.
I work in a highly related field. All the time I get asked about extending the sensitivity of our visual system in cool, biotech-y ways.
My standard response is: buy the appropriate glasses / goggles / binoculars / telescope / microscope / filter and leave your biology intact. We're much, much better at designing desk-sized microscopes than we are at making ones that fit inside your eye somehow. We are much, much better at designing low-vision assistance devices that can read signs out loud (like your cell phone) than we are at making implants to restore sight (at least for now). And, for this case, we're much, much better at making night-vision scopes that make you look cool when you wear them than we are at injecting nanoparticles into your eyes in a procedure that has a non-trivial chance of rendering you blind.
Pure electro-mechanical technology in the form of a wearable or external device of some sort is far, far more advanced than biotechnology right now. And it, generally speaking, is reversible, something none of the current generation of biological approaches have.
Should we continue research on this sort of thing? Oh, yes, definitely! But don't think about using it, yet. Not for a long while.
It all boils down to the observation: just because you CAN do something (create IR-sensitive vision by injecting nanoparticles in your eyes) does not mean you SHOULD do it, and that there are not any vastly better alternatives.
Can gab.com be use to comment on gab.com? And can that process continue to recurse?
I suspect that Prof. Kelly is not familiar with his colleague Prof. Livingstone and her work studying the neuroscientific basis for art. It would not be so surprising, given their disparate departments and that Prof. Livingstone is across the river in Boston, somewhat removed from main campus.
The crux of artistic creation is, as I hope philosophers will slowly understand, that each new wave of modality of expression, each new genre, tickles a specific pathway in the brain. Given time, both to study the art and to study the neuroscience of visual perception, the greatness of many of the great works of art can be reduced to a simple explanation. That does not reduce their impact on us, nor should it. But it does reveal the fundamental requirement of human perception to denote a particular work as great.
The Mona Lisa is perhaps Prof. Livingstone's best result: the reason we find the image of a partially smiling woman compelling is that there are two images in conflict: one at low spatial frequencies (larger features) that is smiling, and one at high spatial frequencies (smaller features) that is not. Somehow, Da Vinci was able to exploit these two separate perceptual channels. Because we sense that the figure is smiling, we find it appealing, but we cannot see the smile, so we find it enigmatic and compelling.
Another telling result: much of impressionism is compelling because the colors are what are known as equiluminant: in black-and-white, they would appear to be uniformly gray, this the luminance channel in our visual system is silent, and in conflict with the color channel.
The very fact that we find black-and-white photographs compelling is even understood by showing that the color channel has been suppressed, something that does not normally happen.
Art, at least visual art, is all about masterful manipulation of different perceptual channels that have direct physiological embodiments in our brains.
And, and AI can most certainly be trained to do that. The results eventually will be undoubtedly just as compelling (given good models on which to train the AI) as that done by human hand.
How is this News for Nerds?
Is it because dollar stores sell electronic parts?
Or they have a wide selection of computer games?
They sell the latest laptops?
Or they have really advanced IT?
They compute bitcoin hashes with your body heat when you walk through the door?
Maybe it's me, but there doesn't seem to be any relevance whatsoever.
Same reasoning applies to important information,
The same reasoning applies to any enterprise or engineering design that has robustness as a requirement: vigorously avoid single points of failure.
Hell, I call my brother "bro".
That's sexist?
I mean, he's my BROTHER. Like, we have the same parents. We look alike. A lot alike. Our DNA is highly similar. As in more highly similar than essentially anyone else on the planet, except for our sister, whom I call SIS ... oh shit, is THAT sexist too?
Crap, this is getting too confusing. Call me when this insanity is over, I'm going on permanent vacation in the Brohama ... no, wait, BAHamas. Sorry about that.
Metallic foam is already well understood.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
https://www.tms.org/pubs/journ...
(see especially Figure 4 on that page which REALLY looks like metallic wood; the stuff in the article doesn't so much)
What makes the the linked article interesting is the novel manufacturing method.
The summary takes a swipe at mature technology (the stethoscope) just because it is mature. Mature does not mean bad, nor ineffective. On the contrary, mature means "we have figured out all the ways to make this better." Stethoscopes are awesome instruments: they take no power, last indefinitely, and can be used to diagnose a wide range of diseases in skilled hands.
Now the last part is the important one: in skilled hands. The proposed instrument is for unskilled hands to help diagnose disease where doctors are scarce. It will need batteries. It will need protection from theft. It will cost a bundle. It may have annual licensing fees. It will surely need an internet connection. Now, is that really something that a sub-Saharan nation will be able to afford in its remote clinics?
Or would that same money be better put into training its workers as health care technicians specifically skilled to diagnose pneumonia through traditional stethoscopes? No licensing. Stethoscopes are dirt cheap. Once learned and continually exercised, the training doesn't go away, doesn't stop working, doesn't need batteries. Some of those trained workers would be inspired to become physicians. Those new physicians would help ameliorate the local shortage. Long term, that appears to be the far better choice.
If I were in charge of a remote village and given the option of (a) getting a shiny new device with all of the strings mentioned above, or (b) having the brightest one of my residents trained on hearing the difference between healthy and diseased lungs, you can bet which option I'd take.
Cool stuff, as the parent poster states, yes. Appropriate use of technology when a simpler, better solution exists? Perhaps not.
Here's where this kind of technology is actually useful: in comparatively rich places (not sub-Saharan Africa) where there's an under-served population at the physician level, but there are still skilled health care workers. Like Western inner city clinics staffed by physician assistants. PAs can use these tools to augment their existing skills to help triage patients more efficiently and accurately, sending those who are in need of more advanced services to regional hospitals.
But even then, such clinics are cost-sensitive, so pricing becomes an issue, and any company manufacturing a product that can affect the outcome of human health needs to carry substantial liability insurance. Those costs are reflected in the purchase price of such devices. I'm having a hard time thinking automated diagnostic machines are going to be inexpensive.
If the proposal were to, instead, create a small, ultra-fast antibody-based device that would take the results of a throat swab or cough to look for evidence of standard bacterial or viral lung pathogens, now you're talking. That kind of solution has the potential for being inexpensive and globally applicable.
The telecommuting fad seems to be fading, which is good. People are finally starting to understand that there are, indeed, benefits to being in the same physical proximity with coworkers. So that's a "no" answer to the original question, since government will presumably work better -- the machinations of government, the behind-the-scenes interactions and negotiations -- when people can bump into each other at lunch, or meet for drinks, etc.
Then, there's the very deeply steeped idea that the US Federal and State governments should be accessible to all. There should be no barriers. If someone wanted to witness a public debate, then they should be able to do so with an absolute minimum of requirements. Needing any kind of equipment, including internet access, a computer, a screen, a mobile phone, ANYTHING, is a barrier, as there are people who do not have them. So "no" on that count as well, since public debate needs to be witnessed by people with first-hand direct experience, and that's not possible if the debate -- or even only part of the debate -- is available only electronically.
Finally, when someone has a job to perform, making that job difficult in some way, especially time, means that they are less likely to squander the privilege of holding office. If a representative has to travel 6 hours each way to get to Washington, then I'll bet they will minimize their travel time and make sure they use their time in DC and in their home office, more wisely than if it took no effort to be in DC at all. Think of how important an individual long-distance phone call was, and how well-chosen the words were, when every second carried a cost, as compared to the blather we get now with free long distance. So, "no" for the third time, because when a resource is precious, it gets used more wisely.
Call me a luddite (you wouldn't be the first), but there are distinct benefits to face-to-face interaction.
Scientists aren't surprised. That's just the language that is used to describe findings that don't match up with existing dogma.
As another poster suggested, the natural world is exceedingly complex. Physics aside, our models of it tend to be simple. Simple models perforce do not capture complexity, and thus, are often wrong when you test them beyond their domain.
If you, as a scientist, aren't constantly stumbling across unexpected results (which are written as surprises, that term has a different meaning in scientific papers than in the general public), then you aren't exploring new areas. As a scientist, you work by taking an existing model or hypothesis, and pushing it to its limits, finding where it breaks down, and creating a new, better model that accommodates a wider area. There are precious few cases where such models are sufficiently complete that we have run out of things to test ... low-energy fundamental particle physics seems to be the best-known one. In biology, which is the field I work in, we aren't even remotely close.
Take paleontology, for instance. One a seemingly monthly basis, new dinosaur species are being discovered, or old bones are realized to have been put together wrong, or new details about extinctions have been discovered. For that field, much of the surprise comes from additional data sources -- our older, simpler models were based on less data, and with additional information, better models can be built. Dinosaurs, when I was a kid, were thought to all be lizard-like in appearance. Recent discoveries of exceedingly well-preserved specimens suggest many of them had feathers, and were colored.
Take planetary sciences / cosmology. We have discovered a vast trove of objects in our solar system, thanks to new streams of data. We have discovered large numbers of planets beyond our solar system, also thanks to new streams of data. The better we build our telescopes and sensors, the better a picture of the cosmos we get. Each increase in available resolution continues to bring surprises because we do not have fully-developed models of the universe.
Take geology. Plate tectonics was validated only about 50 years ago. We don't know for sure that the same thing happens on other planets.
And biology. The combination of Darwin, and Watson and Crick seemed to explain all of evolution. Except that, as we look more and more closely, there *are* acquired traits that are inherited ... they're just not the dominant means of evolution. Our tools are getting better and measuring with finer molecular detail, revealing secrets of the scaffolding around DNA and the immense role it plays in determining externally observable characteristics.
Or sleep. We actually understand much of the metabolic mechanism for sleep, now. There is a real rejuvenation process. But we wouldn't have understood that without new tools that allow us to probe at high temporal and spatial resolution, and with fine molecular resolution using genetic tools.
In short, scientists are surprised because we discover new things all the time. We remain on the cusp of wide troves of knowledge, all of which is new. Each new revolution in data collection brings with it a new, unexplored realm and, as is written in many papers, surprises.
Which is what? 10 minutes on a bicycle?
Or I assume 15 minutes on these darned new fangled scooter electric kick bikes?
Given the traffic described, I would not expect a bicycle to be safe, eliminating that possibility.
And the parent poster stated that the electric scooters had been declared illegal in his location, thus that isn't an option, either.
What's left? Car, by implication that the poster uses public transportation, that isn't an option. Then? Walking, which, from the poster's description of the commute by tram, takes potentially just as much time, and is better for you in many ways.
A 2.5 mile trip (which is 4.0 km) should take 40 minutes to walk at a brisk pace.
The exercise would do you a world of good physically, and not being crammed in the tin-cans of public transportation would do the same psychologically. I bet you could even combine it with stopping at shops that you would otherwise need to take a separate trip for, like a bagful of groceries, the bank, the bottle shop, whathaveyou. Add in an improving audiobook at the same time, rather than using your phone to play the game du jour, and you're getting a leg up, so to speak, on everyone else.
And, according to your claim of a 45 minute commute, it should take the same amount of time! Win all around.
Of course, on days where the weather is not conducive to walking, you can hop back on the tram.
Wow, just wow. Not only did you get a whoosh over just one person, but at least four moderators. Well done, sir!
MODS: the post, which is now at +5 insightful, should be +5 FUNNY.
Why? Because he is satirising the parent!
My feeling is many of the people that own and drive personal pickup trucks all the time ...
I drive my pickup all the time because it is the only car I own. I suspect that is true for the majority of pickup owners, because it is true for the majority of vehicle owners.
I also suspect that people driving their cars are similarly not using their vehicles to their fullest capacity and potential the vast majority of the time. Most of the time cars are carrying one or two passengers, a far cry from their full capacity of four or five.
But why let a few bits of common sense get in the way of a good screed?
We are constantly reinventing the wheel.
https://xkcd.com/2044/
Each generation of programmers seems to think they have more insight than the previous, but ends up repeating the same mistakes.
Agreed. Comparing WF before and after Amazon, the prices are the same on the special items ONLY if you include the 10% additional discount given to Prime members. We had all hoped that Amazon would bring some of its immense efficiencies to WF and lower prices, but the opposite seems to have happened.
And, anecdotally, despite buying fish at WF for probably two decades now, last weekend was the first time I found a parasite.
Most people complaining about this season say it's bad because of the SJW themes. That's not why it's bad. It's bad because the writing, directing, and acting are terrible.
God, yes. The political pandering is annoying, but the scripts are just crap. The companions' acting is roundly sub-standard. And why did Chibnal select such a terrible accent for the Doctor and *all* the companions? I had always thought one of the wonderful, enjoyable parts of the UK was the broad range of accents. That richness certainly was part of the previous seasons of the reboot. Now, we get ones that are not only difficult to understand, but identical, bland and uninteresting.
But the big problem, the really big problem, is that the writing is poor. Inexcusably so. I don't write TV scripts for a living, but I have a couple of friends who do, and given the skeleton of a story line, I have absolutely no doubt they could do better. At least the shows they worked on didn't have massive, gaping plot holes.
I have counter-examples where Amazon Warehouse items were items that had been previously returned because they had a subtle, or not-so-subtle malfunction. Back they went again.