So yes... More regulation would have stopped this.
I always find it interesting when the knee-jerk reaction to regulators dropping the ball is to increase their authority. "The regulators screwed up, let's give them more power!" It just feels a little bit like leaning into a punch to me...
Tenure is intended for university professors mainly; it intentionally makes it harder to fire a tenured person, so they can "push the boundaries" a bit in their classes.. without the fear of being fired for petty political reasons.
Tenure is for research, not for teaching*. Elementary school teachers are not there to push the boundaries of cutting edge research. If a grade 8 teacher is doing something politically unpopular, well, I'm not really sure what is wrong with that situation (even odds on overprotective parents and teachers like that guy who told the kid he wasn't even capable of killing himself), but I suspect it's not inflammatory conclusions in published research.
* This is not to say that I think that university professors shouldn't be good teachers, only that the academic world prescribes the "publish or perish" model, not the "teach undergrads well or perish" model.
I think what we were actually seeing was virtual money. The uncertainty principle says that we can either know how much money we have or how fast we're spending it, but not both, and since we choose to measure GDP...
Maybe we'll get lucky and one of those rogue black holes will sweep through Wall St.
Oh, yeah, my parents adopted a line of code in Beliz or Botswanna or something and they kept getting printfs from him ever month and then one day they decided to go visit him in his village and when they got there it turned out he'd been commented out years ago and his parents had been keeping the $4 and writing fake output. True story.
...the majority of people in my department used Adderall to help them study longer. Those people all ended up with better GPA's for it.
Okay, so, studying longer probably gets you better grades. How sure are you that those people studied longer because of taking Adderall as opposed to, say, the placebo effect? Or is it possible that the kinds of competitive people who are likely to study longer are likely to take drugs that they think will help them study longer?
His business model is to bleed money very slowly during normal market operations, but whenever anything hickups, he makes it all back and thensome. And I think he is well aware that there is always the chance that he will bleed to death between hickups. But, those hickups are so frequent that it's pretty unlikely, and so far, he seems to be doing okay.
This is in stark contrast to most hedge funds and investors who gamble everything to show visible gains in the short term but then lose it (and thensome) whenever things hickup.
The other thing that Taleb knows is that there's a chance that an investor will cash out with all this winnings between hickups, but that these hickups are so frequent and most "investors" are such compulsive gamblers that that too is very unlikely.
It has been obvious since the release of GMail that google's intention has been to create the dumb terminal model for the 21st century. Everything will run in the browser. You won't need any storage or serious processing power. Just an assload of ram and a graphics card and away you go.
"But processing power is cheap!" you cry. But not as cheap as free, which is what google will offer. Email, office apps, video games as hot as you've ever seen before, all from the comfort of your own browser and all Google Adsense paid for.
So now we're going to go from incidental anthropogenic climate change to on purpose anthropogenic climate change? The whole problem is that there is more energy coming into earth/atmosphere system than is going out and now we want to take energy, which would have otherwise passed this system by, and deflect it inside? It's nice to know that highschool physics has completely left the building.
There are a number of academic papers about in RAM databases; 384GB would get you a lot of database, and it would be hellafast. And, you could even reboot the system from time to time, provided you force the system not to clear the memory on startup, all without ever needing to touch non-volatile storage.
Then and now, I don't see why they have fences in the first place. Without fences, a kid will die... and then everyone will know the story about the kid who died, and the idiocy will be stopped cold for at least five years (i.e. one high school rotation).
Well, that's easy to say when you or someone you love is not the Darwin award winner in question. I think moving the fences back shows remarkable foresight on the part of a government body. I understand your argument about people getting a false sense of safety (just look at China and the baby formula thing), but I think overall, the fence will result in less danger. And while teaching people lessons is a good thing, I think keeping people out of danger in sane and reasonable ways is a better thing.
If it would reduce my monthly cellphone bill, I'd be ok with it.
Nope, they'd come up with a system non-access fee which you pay so they can make sure you're being saved from yourself. Your new bill would include that and changes for the time you would used your phone and the text messages you would have sent. At which point, if you're a 15 year old boy, the cops will come and arrest you for nude photos of 15 year old girls you would have received, had you been able to carry a cell phone.
See? Everybody wins!
Ask anyone who has lived in New York about pizza, or public transportation, or pretty much anything else for that matter and the conversation will eventually turn to how much better New York is than wherever it is they currently happen to be. One wonders why they don't just go back and stay there.
Except the street meat. Man, have you ever had a hot dog from a street vendor in NYC? It's like eating boiled spam on wonderbread.
Now Toronto? That's some good street meat. And let me tell you about how public transit and pizza and anything else you want to talk about is better in Toronto, too...
This is what the Socratic Method is for. Instead of just giving them the answer, you ask them a lot of questions that they can answer until they've reached the desired solution. If people aren't willing to try to learn what it is you're helping them with, then they won't bother coming to you.
The added bonus to this method is that people can't tell when you're spinning a line of bull because you don't know the answer yourself...;*)
This is why you have something called a Life Cycle Analysis. I suspect for CFLs it's pretty straightforward - the amount of electricity saved plus the longer lifetime (given proper usage) outweights things like more materials going into CFLs and higher shipping costs and retooling factories and so forth. I agree with the mention of shipping as I beleive people need to look more carefully before assuming that something is Enviromentally Friendly becuase some whackjob who wouldn't know the first thing about thermodynamics said so. Mentioning transportation cost is not ludicrous, it's something that needs to be looked at.
The efficiency numbers you see on these things are by and large the product of someone's imagination.
The testing procedure involves the solar company building a very small sliver of a PV cell under lab conditions (not mass manufacture conditions) and then sending it to a test facility. The smaller that sliver is the more likely the efficiency numbers are inflated. The more experimental a technology is the harder it is to manufacture anything big enough for meaningful results. This means that all these reports of 37% efficient PV technology being 5 years away are probably incorrect.
My friend works in an office that does energy retrofits of government buildings and one of the lists they have is the factor for each PV manufacturer between what the manufacturer claims their panels will do and what kind of energy the panels actually generate in the wild, based on monitoring previous installs they've done themselves.
These efficiency numbers are all academic until you've tried the cells out in the environment from which you need to generate energy.
So, my question is, if the kitchen is hotter than before, but the area where you are is cooler, does it matter? We spend all this time making sure vast volumes of air with lots of surface area are nice and cool in the summer and hot in the winter, and then, for most people, I suspect, use only a tiny fraction of that air.
This is sort of a neat solution in that it allows you to, potentially, turn the temperature of the whole house up a little bit but still keep the local area you are using at a lower, more comfortable temperature. I'm not sure if I would call that "engineering genius", but I think it could be useful.
The trick is that you really do have a choice. You choose to pay $4 a gallon for gas and to pay $50 a month for a violated service agreement and next to no bandwidth, whether you like to admit it or not.
Nobody is holding a gun to anybody's head and saying "burn oil and use DSL and cable."
At least not anyone I know. Which, I will admit, is a reasonably small sample size, given the population of the Earth. It just seems a little far-fetched when it's obvious that people will pay it without the gun.
...truncated the title at "Suc..." and I was all raring to go with a rant about why programming languages suck. Looks like I got my knuckles all lined up for nothing. Oh well.
Color was a gimmick once, but now we don't expect every movie to be as colorful as The Wizard of Oz. Oh, man, I totally want to go watch a few episodes of The Prisoner now. I can't think of a more masterful abuse of colour tecnology.
I think its safe to say I wouldn't read much into this yet. How many times has medicine been burned by animal studies and other type of non-randomized lower quality studies in the past, only to have well done follow-up studies disprove the originals.
Ah, but it doesn't MATTER if there are follow up studies that completely disprove this one. The idea that coffee prevents Alzheimers is now ingrained in Common Knowledge. Most people are not scientifically minded, they're media spoon-fed mush-brains.
Frankly, if people have been doing it for hundreds of years (drinking coffee, drinking wine, eating beef, as a few examples) then a new study where they swabbed something on a rabbit isn't going to make me change my behaviour.
Slashdot Mirror
When Google get their hands on this, it will be Wolfram Beta Forever.
But things with "Forever" in their name never ship!
And that is why this will really be the google killer.
and behold: the iPhone tethers. "It's amazing. I'm really proud of this capability, which is the first in a capacitive-touchscreen smartphone." etc.
I think you meant "and boom: the iPhone tethers."
So yes... More regulation would have stopped this.
I always find it interesting when the knee-jerk reaction to regulators dropping the ball is to increase their authority. "The regulators screwed up, let's give them more power!" It just feels a little bit like leaning into a punch to me...
> the financial crises was caused by just about anyone
Except for folks who bought within their means and paid their mortgages on time. Sadly, they will now end up paying for everything else.
Yep, all 4 of them.
Tenure is intended for university professors mainly; it intentionally makes it harder to fire a tenured person, so they can "push the boundaries" a bit in their classes.. without the fear of being fired for petty political reasons.
Tenure is for research, not for teaching*. Elementary school teachers are not there to push the boundaries of cutting edge research. If a grade 8 teacher is doing something politically unpopular, well, I'm not really sure what is wrong with that situation (even odds on overprotective parents and teachers like that guy who told the kid he wasn't even capable of killing himself), but I suspect it's not inflammatory conclusions in published research.
* This is not to say that I think that university professors shouldn't be good teachers, only that the academic world prescribes the "publish or perish" model, not the "teach undergrads well or perish" model.
is that no product is going to want to be placed next to a monkey urinating in his own mouth.
Wait, you mean that video wasn't an ad for Mountain Dew?
I think what we were actually seeing was virtual money. The uncertainty principle says that we can either know how much money we have or how fast we're spending it, but not both, and since we choose to measure GDP...
Maybe we'll get lucky and one of those rogue black holes will sweep through Wall St.
Oh, yeah, my parents adopted a line of code in Beliz or Botswanna or something and they kept getting printfs from him ever month and then one day they decided to go visit him in his village and when they got there it turned out he'd been commented out years ago and his parents had been keeping the $4 and writing fake output. True story.
...the majority of people in my department used Adderall to help them study longer. Those people all ended up with better GPA's for it.
Okay, so, studying longer probably gets you better grades. How sure are you that those people studied longer because of taking Adderall as opposed to, say, the placebo effect? Or is it possible that the kinds of competitive people who are likely to study longer are likely to take drugs that they think will help them study longer?
His business model is to bleed money very slowly during normal market operations, but whenever anything hickups, he makes it all back and thensome. And I think he is well aware that there is always the chance that he will bleed to death between hickups. But, those hickups are so frequent that it's pretty unlikely, and so far, he seems to be doing okay.
This is in stark contrast to most hedge funds and investors who gamble everything to show visible gains in the short term but then lose it (and thensome) whenever things hickup.
The other thing that Taleb knows is that there's a chance that an investor will cash out with all this winnings between hickups, but that these hickups are so frequent and most "investors" are such compulsive gamblers that that too is very unlikely.
It has been obvious since the release of GMail that google's intention has been to create the dumb terminal model for the 21st century. Everything will run in the browser. You won't need any storage or serious processing power. Just an assload of ram and a graphics card and away you go.
"But processing power is cheap!" you cry. But not as cheap as free, which is what google will offer. Email, office apps, video games as hot as you've ever seen before, all from the comfort of your own browser and all Google Adsense paid for.
So now we're going to go from incidental anthropogenic climate change to on purpose anthropogenic climate change? The whole problem is that there is more energy coming into earth/atmosphere system than is going out and now we want to take energy, which would have otherwise passed this system by, and deflect it inside? It's nice to know that highschool physics has completely left the building.
There are a number of academic papers about in RAM databases; 384GB would get you a lot of database, and it would be hellafast. And, you could even reboot the system from time to time, provided you force the system not to clear the memory on startup, all without ever needing to touch non-volatile storage.
Then and now, I don't see why they have fences in the first place. Without fences, a kid will die... and then everyone will know the story about the kid who died, and the idiocy will be stopped cold for at least five years (i.e. one high school rotation).
Well, that's easy to say when you or someone you love is not the Darwin award winner in question. I think moving the fences back shows remarkable foresight on the part of a government body. I understand your argument about people getting a false sense of safety (just look at China and the baby formula thing), but I think overall, the fence will result in less danger. And while teaching people lessons is a good thing, I think keeping people out of danger in sane and reasonable ways is a better thing.
If it would reduce my monthly cellphone bill, I'd be ok with it.
Nope, they'd come up with a system non-access fee which you pay so they can make sure you're being saved from yourself. Your new bill would include that and changes for the time you would used your phone and the text messages you would have sent. At which point, if you're a 15 year old boy, the cops will come and arrest you for nude photos of 15 year old girls you would have received, had you been able to carry a cell phone. See? Everybody wins!
Ask anyone who has lived in New York about pizza, or public transportation, or pretty much anything else for that matter and the conversation will eventually turn to how much better New York is than wherever it is they currently happen to be. One wonders why they don't just go back and stay there.
Except the street meat. Man, have you ever had a hot dog from a street vendor in NYC? It's like eating boiled spam on wonderbread.
Now Toronto? That's some good street meat. And let me tell you about how public transit and pizza and anything else you want to talk about is better in Toronto, too...
This is what the Socratic Method is for. Instead of just giving them the answer, you ask them a lot of questions that they can answer until they've reached the desired solution. If people aren't willing to try to learn what it is you're helping them with, then they won't bother coming to you.
The added bonus to this method is that people can't tell when you're spinning a line of bull because you don't know the answer yourself... ;*)
This is why you have something called a Life Cycle Analysis. I suspect for CFLs it's pretty straightforward - the amount of electricity saved plus the longer lifetime (given proper usage) outweights things like more materials going into CFLs and higher shipping costs and retooling factories and so forth. I agree with the mention of shipping as I beleive people need to look more carefully before assuming that something is Enviromentally Friendly becuase some whackjob who wouldn't know the first thing about thermodynamics said so. Mentioning transportation cost is not ludicrous, it's something that needs to be looked at.
Prof Frink: Of course the real humans... won't... won't burn so fast...
The efficiency numbers you see on these things are by and large the product of someone's imagination.
The testing procedure involves the solar company building a very small sliver of a PV cell under lab conditions (not mass manufacture conditions) and then sending it to a test facility. The smaller that sliver is the more likely the efficiency numbers are inflated. The more experimental a technology is the harder it is to manufacture anything big enough for meaningful results. This means that all these reports of 37% efficient PV technology being 5 years away are probably incorrect.
My friend works in an office that does energy retrofits of government buildings and one of the lists they have is the factor for each PV manufacturer between what the manufacturer claims their panels will do and what kind of energy the panels actually generate in the wild, based on monitoring previous installs they've done themselves.
These efficiency numbers are all academic until you've tried the cells out in the environment from which you need to generate energy.
So, my question is, if the kitchen is hotter than before, but the area where you are is cooler, does it matter? We spend all this time making sure vast volumes of air with lots of surface area are nice and cool in the summer and hot in the winter, and then, for most people, I suspect, use only a tiny fraction of that air.
This is sort of a neat solution in that it allows you to, potentially, turn the temperature of the whole house up a little bit but still keep the local area you are using at a lower, more comfortable temperature. I'm not sure if I would call that "engineering genius", but I think it could be useful.
The trick is that you really do have a choice. You choose to pay $4 a gallon for gas and to pay $50 a month for a violated service agreement and next to no bandwidth, whether you like to admit it or not.
Nobody is holding a gun to anybody's head and saying "burn oil and use DSL and cable."
At least not anyone I know. Which, I will admit, is a reasonably small sample size, given the population of the Earth. It just seems a little far-fetched when it's obvious that people will pay it without the gun.
...truncated the title at "Suc..." and I was all raring to go with a rant about why programming languages suck. Looks like I got my knuckles all lined up for nothing. Oh well.
Ah, but it doesn't MATTER if there are follow up studies that completely disprove this one. The idea that coffee prevents Alzheimers is now ingrained in Common Knowledge. Most people are not scientifically minded, they're media spoon-fed mush-brains.
Frankly, if people have been doing it for hundreds of years (drinking coffee, drinking wine, eating beef, as a few examples) then a new study where they swabbed something on a rabbit isn't going to make me change my behaviour.