Better sensors will be useful for providing an actual idea of what sort of forces are being encountered; but it'll be interesting to see what happens to the monitoring system if team neurology keeps coming back with observable negative results at lower and lower thresholds.
Part of what helped the problem fly under the radar so long (despite the fact that descriptions of boxers being 'punch drunk' are available even from classical sources) was the almost complete lack of measurements. Unless it cracked the helmet or something, the only severity measure was the (probably unrecorded) subjective assessment by the victim and any bystanders, and there wasn't anyone standing around delivering cognitive function tests before and after, or anyone doing long term followup of various populations with different levels of impact exposure.
It would simplify some of the coding and billing; but it wouldn't solve the problem that we currently have basically nothing on the table for treating this class of brain injury. At the level of gross anatomy the damage is quite modest, not necessarily even visible until you slice 'n stain postmortem; but it's usually reported as a grab-bag of psychological issues(depression, lack of focus, loss of energy, emotional disregulation, etc.) that can be quite hard on the patient and which have no terribly reliable treatments. If an SSRI and maybe a psychostimulant work for you, then great, your insurance coverage does matter. If not, though, it doesn't matter if you can afford neural repair nanites or not because they simply cannot be had.
Even if people are inclined to let bygones be bygones, and not poke the touchy question of whether certain authority figures chose to stick with the 'eh, just rub some dirt on it, wimp' theory of sports medicine for sake of convenience even after medical evidence demanded otherwise; this seems like one that isn't going to go well.
Mitigating shocks with helmets that don't make you look like you've been engulfed by a marshmallow python just isn't an easy problem; and there isn't an obvious 'floor' value below which shocks(especially when repeated, often, and often in relatively quick succession) are entirely harmless. Even if you can push the 'eh, they knew the risks and chose to play' at the pro level, that isn't going to go so well with children, who are typically treated as unsuitable for contract-grade decision making.
It's a fairly classic collective action problem. We would all be better off if it were to be done; but maybe if I drag my feet you'll flinch and do it first, so I get all the benefits at zero cost. It is fairly unimpressive, though, because it isn't even some charitable exercise, it's totally pragmatic self interest. Augment the wages of some people in an area with fairly low wages and cost of living in order to reduce the odds of a nasty hemorrhagic fever making it to somewhere where I might get it, or have to pay for its containment at first world wages? That's a hell of a bargain.
I'm not inclined to optimism; but it is worth noting that all previous outbreaks were successfully contained without either a vaccine or a cure, in no small part because of how little infrastructure their was. Just a village or two in the sticks dropping off the map and not reporting back.
The trouble this time is that the outbreak has landed squarely in the worst-of-both-worlds intermediate position, where the victims and potential victims are far too thickly settled to be more or less automatically isolated; but it's not the sort of dense settlement that has managed to develop the sort of relatively strong structures you'd need to do something unpopular and technocratic to halt the disease progression. (That said, given how popular quarantines aren't, and wishful thinking is, the list of places where people would actually line up and do whatever the socially optimal solution required might be pretty damn short.)
Apparently getting it to scale without unacceptably high defect levels has proven to be extremely hairy. What I do find somewhat curious, though, is that there appears to be very little, if any, use of the small bits that they can make in some sort of composite application. I'm not sure if that's down to price or if it simply isn't that much better than generic carbon fiber unless you can produce relatively large, relatively high quality, sheets of the stuff.
Being able to perform division without the aid of a machine is a critical life skill.
Why? I can imagine survival situations where you may not have a calculator/cellphone/computer available. But I am having a hard time thinking of any such desperate situation that involves long division. Can you explain a plausible scenario where manual long would be critical to survival?
I wouldn't say that being able to perform long division on paper is, itself, terribly useful; but I'd be a trifle nervous about whether or not learning how to perform calculations manually is related to developing a decent sense for estimation(I don't know if it is or not; but the idea seems just plausible enough that I'd want to have somebody check).
Playing FPU is relatively rarely all that important; but developing a good, reasonably intuitive, sense for approximate answers is immensely helpful. You can always let a computer handle the details; but it's a lot harder to get a computer to tell you that you screwed up somewhere and the result you've arrived at is clearly outside the realm of plausibility.
It is really, really depressing to observe a student dutifully punching numbers into a calculator and then freezing and giving a long look of bovine incomprehension when asked whether their answer makes sense or not. Now, I'm not saying that these skills are, in fact, necessarily linked. People can use a calculator as well as estimate and people can do blind paper-and-pencil right off a cliff. However, I'd want to be suitably careful about anything that might retard the development of a decent sense of what is going on while doing math. If research suggests that there is no problem here, then I'm fine with it. If it suggests that learning manual operations is helpful, even though the manual operations are relatively useless, I'd say that they are well worth it.
I've heard that an abacus can actually cope pretty well within certain bounds; but there's just nothing to recommend Roman numerals(except perhaps that they aren't quite as fucked as Egyptian or Babylonian representations, which are really awful).
No more STEM or business ideas scribbled on the backs of napkins and other foolscap.
I'm fairly sure that not being taught 'handwriting' is no obstacle to producing a crude scrawl when the situation calls for it.
At least in my area, I caught the last few dying gasps of cursive (it was theoretically required until 3rd or 4th grade; but more or less immediately ignored thereafter), loathed every second of it, and haven't written a word in cursive since the last time an elementary school teacher forced me to. I still took all my notes, in all my subjects, through the end of college by hand and on paper. Failure to do a zillion hours of drilling fancy swirls made for ugly results; but perfectly usable ones.
That's the real killer for cursive: not that nobody ever writes; but that you need a lot less training to produce an adequate scrawl when the occasion demands it and most written things that do have to look presentable will be typed up anyway for ease of editing, revision, and storage.
I haven't had the pleasure personally; but I suspect that the difference(aside from whatever call-center-like workplace hell policies they have) is that productive testing means focusing most intensely on the parts that are broken or suck, while ignoring or skimming through as fast as possible the good and working stuff; while repetitive gaming (while often inscrutable to those less interested) focuses on the most pleasurable parts of the game, while speeding through or skipping the boring ones(in games with mod support this is especially evident if you look at the various mods that skip certain sections of the game or speed up crafting or leveling or the like, the distribution and popularity of these tell you a lot about what parts of the game people want to avoid on replay).
AMD theoretically has parts that target reasonably similar power envelopes (lower-powered 'Kabini' APUs, 'Temash' APUs, and 'Mullins' APUs, go here and play with the wattage filter if you want the actual model-number-soup); but design wins appear to be..sparse...at best.
Zotac put an A6-1450 into a little fanless desktop/HTPC thing; but AMD parts seem to be damn rare outside cheap desktops and the churn of big-n'-awful 15ish inch Best Buy shelfwarmer laptops.
I'm not familiar enough with the benchmarks, and definitely not familiar enough with what OEMs actually pay, to say how much of this is due to objective inferiority, and how much is due to Intel's rather 'generous' pricing of their low-end, low-TDP parts to break into the tablet game.
Compared with something like the J1900 ('Bay Trail' celeron ~10w) the A6-1450 can hold its own, and likely has a punchier GPU; but reports are that Intel is practically giving Bay Trails away, while AMD just doesn't have anything that matches Haswell parts.
The one nice thing about the crap that Lenovo sells is that it (only sometimes, not always, alas) provides them with space to express their bad ideas without fucking up the Thinkpad line.
They can make all the freakjobs and plastic toys they want; but if the day comes when I can't get a decent thinkpad it's going to be very, very, bad.
It doesn't help now that 'brands' aren't just a sticker on the box. They increasingly (getting to the 'alarmingly frequently' and likely heading toward the dystopian future of 'forever, across every platform!') also tell you what (terrible) online 'service' you'll have to create an account for and what god-awful launcher/store/spyware/'social' clusterfuck you'll be forced to install.
If it were just about the label on the box, I'd be cautious about EA, and really cautious about Ubisoft; but hey, if the reviews end up actually being good, or a friend recommends it, or even if it initially sucked but was patched back to health, I'd be willing to agree that they've done better than usual and give it a try.
Now that everyone wants to have their own distribution platform and monetize the social friendscape and so on, though, that's less of an option. Ubisoft game that looks interesting? Well, "U-Play" sure as hell doesn't. No sale.
I'd certainly only want the ones who appear to have grown out of illicitly releasing games into the underground(or, at very least, agreeing only to release other people's games, not the one that they are working on); but aside from that little issue, "Voluntarily grovelled through game binaries and assets stripping out DRM and poking various things in exchange for nothing more than amusement and possible recognition" sounds like a pretty promising set of qualifications.
Going by the reviews, it looks like they shot the initial release to hell; but apparently fixed it by the time I noticed and purchased it. Still looks pretty retro on my giant modern pretty-screen; but no less stable now than it was back in the day(which, admittedly, wasn't perfect).
The QA peons can make all the sad mouth-noises they want, to no effect; but "We released the latest iteration of one of our hot franchises and our stock dipped 12%" probably made it up to HQ...
The ghastly plague of pre-orders certainly feeds the cynical pump 'n dump of lousy, unfinished, games; but I'd be interested to know how the incentives for fixing work out:
Can you reverse the plunge of a really buggy launch by fixing it? If so, how quickly and how completely do you have to have a fix in place?
Is a bad launch effectively irreversible; but a solid patching effort can make a substantial difference in 'second-run' sales in the $20-$30 versions and 'Gold' re-release-with-DLC versions?
Is the game effectively tainted permanently; but 'they fucked up; but then they eventually fixed it' a memory more likely to get you to pre-order the sequel than 'they fucked up, then did nothing'?
Ideally, of course, they'd fix it because it's the right thing to do (and some of the humans involved in the game's production might even feel that way); but I doubt that the publisher, as a corporate colony organism, gives a damn about that, so it'd be interesting to know where the money is when it comes to fixing or not fixing a game.
I'd still be annoyed at having to re-buy it because the CD and all the patches didn't work correctly; but (as someone who lost their CD fair and square, by good old fashioned incompetence and disorganization on my part rather than theirs) I think it's fair to note that GoG thankfully has this one, and it was worth my $6.
Let's put it this way: When a game doesn't suck publishers generally don't embargo reviews until 12 hours after release...
Even games that end up releasing in pretty dubious shape often manage to score fairly positive pre-launch press through some combination of assurances that 'those little issues won't be in the final version, just see the promise!' and the degree to which the reviewer depends on the goodwill of the publisher for future access, so if reviewers aren't allowed to talk about it even after it is on the shelves, you might want to run away. Maybe pick it up for $20 a year from now, if they actually do fix it.
The difference is obviously academic if nobody actually does it; but do the various auto-updaters of today attempt to resist, by some DRMish means, archiving of updates as they are received, such that you could either do an offline 'replay' of each update against a retail copy, or preserve a final working version(depending on whether updates are delivered as replacements or as deltas)?
I assume that consoles do, if only because consoles are extremely touchy by nature about anything going in or out(aside from maybe DLNA streaming and such) without being explicitly blessed; but I don't know about the PC side. Have updaters been sucked in to the wonderful world of DRM, or are they still mostly an honest-if-sometimes-incompetent download and patch utility?
I suspect that this was not the cause of the failure to find the raging pile of bugs in the PS4 and XBox One versions, since there isn't much hardware variation among released models.
Much more plausible (if still an example of terrible testing practice) with any bugs in the PC version that can be linked to a specific GPU driver version or the like. Even there, though, PC gamers(of the type interested in new-release action games) may not have the newest hardware; but tend to be fairly good about updating GPU drivers and DirectX runtimes.
It might not work in young children (see also 'congenital insensitivity to pain' and the unpleasant self-inflicted/accidental injuries that children with it wrack up); but as a now more or less mentally competent adult I'd really be in favor of replacing pain with something more informative and less painful. Maybe SNMP.
Slashdot Mirror
Better sensors will be useful for providing an actual idea of what sort of forces are being encountered; but it'll be interesting to see what happens to the monitoring system if team neurology keeps coming back with observable negative results at lower and lower thresholds.
Part of what helped the problem fly under the radar so long (despite the fact that descriptions of boxers being 'punch drunk' are available even from classical sources) was the almost complete lack of measurements. Unless it cracked the helmet or something, the only severity measure was the (probably unrecorded) subjective assessment by the victim and any bystanders, and there wasn't anyone standing around delivering cognitive function tests before and after, or anyone doing long term followup of various populations with different levels of impact exposure.
It would simplify some of the coding and billing; but it wouldn't solve the problem that we currently have basically nothing on the table for treating this class of brain injury. At the level of gross anatomy the damage is quite modest, not necessarily even visible until you slice 'n stain postmortem; but it's usually reported as a grab-bag of psychological issues(depression, lack of focus, loss of energy, emotional disregulation, etc.) that can be quite hard on the patient and which have no terribly reliable treatments. If an SSRI and maybe a psychostimulant work for you, then great, your insurance coverage does matter. If not, though, it doesn't matter if you can afford neural repair nanites or not because they simply cannot be had.
Even if people are inclined to let bygones be bygones, and not poke the touchy question of whether certain authority figures chose to stick with the 'eh, just rub some dirt on it, wimp' theory of sports medicine for sake of convenience even after medical evidence demanded otherwise; this seems like one that isn't going to go well.
Mitigating shocks with helmets that don't make you look like you've been engulfed by a marshmallow python just isn't an easy problem; and there isn't an obvious 'floor' value below which shocks(especially when repeated, often, and often in relatively quick succession) are entirely harmless. Even if you can push the 'eh, they knew the risks and chose to play' at the pro level, that isn't going to go so well with children, who are typically treated as unsuitable for contract-grade decision making.
It's a fairly classic collective action problem. We would all be better off if it were to be done; but maybe if I drag my feet you'll flinch and do it first, so I get all the benefits at zero cost. It is fairly unimpressive, though, because it isn't even some charitable exercise, it's totally pragmatic self interest. Augment the wages of some people in an area with fairly low wages and cost of living in order to reduce the odds of a nasty hemorrhagic fever making it to somewhere where I might get it, or have to pay for its containment at first world wages? That's a hell of a bargain.
I'm not inclined to optimism; but it is worth noting that all previous outbreaks were successfully contained without either a vaccine or a cure, in no small part because of how little infrastructure their was. Just a village or two in the sticks dropping off the map and not reporting back.
The trouble this time is that the outbreak has landed squarely in the worst-of-both-worlds intermediate position, where the victims and potential victims are far too thickly settled to be more or less automatically isolated; but it's not the sort of dense settlement that has managed to develop the sort of relatively strong structures you'd need to do something unpopular and technocratic to halt the disease progression. (That said, given how popular quarantines aren't, and wishful thinking is, the list of places where people would actually line up and do whatever the socially optimal solution required might be pretty damn short.)
Apparently getting it to scale without unacceptably high defect levels has proven to be extremely hairy. What I do find somewhat curious, though, is that there appears to be very little, if any, use of the small bits that they can make in some sort of composite application. I'm not sure if that's down to price or if it simply isn't that much better than generic carbon fiber unless you can produce relatively large, relatively high quality, sheets of the stuff.
Being able to perform division without the aid of a machine is a critical life skill.
Why? I can imagine survival situations where you may not have a calculator/cellphone/computer available. But I am having a hard time thinking of any such desperate situation that involves long division. Can you explain a plausible scenario where manual long would be critical to survival?
I wouldn't say that being able to perform long division on paper is, itself, terribly useful; but I'd be a trifle nervous about whether or not learning how to perform calculations manually is related to developing a decent sense for estimation(I don't know if it is or not; but the idea seems just plausible enough that I'd want to have somebody check).
Playing FPU is relatively rarely all that important; but developing a good, reasonably intuitive, sense for approximate answers is immensely helpful. You can always let a computer handle the details; but it's a lot harder to get a computer to tell you that you screwed up somewhere and the result you've arrived at is clearly outside the realm of plausibility.
It is really, really depressing to observe a student dutifully punching numbers into a calculator and then freezing and giving a long look of bovine incomprehension when asked whether their answer makes sense or not. Now, I'm not saying that these skills are, in fact, necessarily linked. People can use a calculator as well as estimate and people can do blind paper-and-pencil right off a cliff. However, I'd want to be suitably careful about anything that might retard the development of a decent sense of what is going on while doing math. If research suggests that there is no problem here, then I'm fine with it. If it suggests that learning manual operations is helpful, even though the manual operations are relatively useless, I'd say that they are well worth it.
I've heard that an abacus can actually cope pretty well within certain bounds; but there's just nothing to recommend Roman numerals(except perhaps that they aren't quite as fucked as Egyptian or Babylonian representations, which are really awful).
No more STEM or business ideas scribbled on the backs of napkins and other foolscap.
I'm fairly sure that not being taught 'handwriting' is no obstacle to producing a crude scrawl when the situation calls for it.
At least in my area, I caught the last few dying gasps of cursive (it was theoretically required until 3rd or 4th grade; but more or less immediately ignored thereafter), loathed every second of it, and haven't written a word in cursive since the last time an elementary school teacher forced me to. I still took all my notes, in all my subjects, through the end of college by hand and on paper. Failure to do a zillion hours of drilling fancy swirls made for ugly results; but perfectly usable ones.
That's the real killer for cursive: not that nobody ever writes; but that you need a lot less training to produce an adequate scrawl when the occasion demands it and most written things that do have to look presentable will be typed up anyway for ease of editing, revision, and storage.
Oh, you mean 'Winter Break'? That's um, totally secular, and patriotic, and helps keep kids off drugs that aren't booze!
I haven't had the pleasure personally; but I suspect that the difference(aside from whatever call-center-like workplace hell policies they have) is that productive testing means focusing most intensely on the parts that are broken or suck, while ignoring or skimming through as fast as possible the good and working stuff; while repetitive gaming (while often inscrutable to those less interested) focuses on the most pleasurable parts of the game, while speeding through or skipping the boring ones(in games with mod support this is especially evident if you look at the various mods that skip certain sections of the game or speed up crafting or leveling or the like, the distribution and popularity of these tell you a lot about what parts of the game people want to avoid on replay).
AMD theoretically has parts that target reasonably similar power envelopes (lower-powered 'Kabini' APUs, 'Temash' APUs, and 'Mullins' APUs, go here and play with the wattage filter if you want the actual model-number-soup); but design wins appear to be..sparse...at best.
Zotac put an A6-1450 into a little fanless desktop/HTPC thing; but AMD parts seem to be damn rare outside cheap desktops and the churn of big-n'-awful 15ish inch Best Buy shelfwarmer laptops.
I'm not familiar enough with the benchmarks, and definitely not familiar enough with what OEMs actually pay, to say how much of this is due to objective inferiority, and how much is due to Intel's rather 'generous' pricing of their low-end, low-TDP parts to break into the tablet game.
Compared with something like the J1900 ('Bay Trail' celeron ~10w) the A6-1450 can hold its own, and likely has a punchier GPU; but reports are that Intel is practically giving Bay Trails away, while AMD just doesn't have anything that matches Haswell parts.
Pretty expensive: $1,299. Not a good investment.
Do any laptops count as 'investments'? I'm pretty sure I've had some toner cartridges last longer than some laptops.
The one nice thing about the crap that Lenovo sells is that it (only sometimes, not always, alas) provides them with space to express their bad ideas without fucking up the Thinkpad line.
They can make all the freakjobs and plastic toys they want; but if the day comes when I can't get a decent thinkpad it's going to be very, very, bad.
It doesn't help now that 'brands' aren't just a sticker on the box. They increasingly (getting to the 'alarmingly frequently' and likely heading toward the dystopian future of 'forever, across every platform!') also tell you what (terrible) online 'service' you'll have to create an account for and what god-awful launcher/store/spyware/'social' clusterfuck you'll be forced to install.
If it were just about the label on the box, I'd be cautious about EA, and really cautious about Ubisoft; but hey, if the reviews end up actually being good, or a friend recommends it, or even if it initially sucked but was patched back to health, I'd be willing to agree that they've done better than usual and give it a try.
Now that everyone wants to have their own distribution platform and monetize the social friendscape and so on, though, that's less of an option. Ubisoft game that looks interesting? Well, "U-Play" sure as hell doesn't. No sale.
I'd certainly only want the ones who appear to have grown out of illicitly releasing games into the underground(or, at very least, agreeing only to release other people's games, not the one that they are working on); but aside from that little issue, "Voluntarily grovelled through game binaries and assets stripping out DRM and poking various things in exchange for nothing more than amusement and possible recognition" sounds like a pretty promising set of qualifications.
Going by the reviews, it looks like they shot the initial release to hell; but apparently fixed it by the time I noticed and purchased it. Still looks pretty retro on my giant modern pretty-screen; but no less stable now than it was back in the day(which, admittedly, wasn't perfect).
But, but, what about the Exclusive Pre Order Bonus Content!?
The QA peons can make all the sad mouth-noises they want, to no effect; but "We released the latest iteration of one of our hot franchises and our stock dipped 12%" probably made it up to HQ...
The ghastly plague of pre-orders certainly feeds the cynical pump 'n dump of lousy, unfinished, games; but I'd be interested to know how the incentives for fixing work out:
Can you reverse the plunge of a really buggy launch by fixing it? If so, how quickly and how completely do you have to have a fix in place?
Is a bad launch effectively irreversible; but a solid patching effort can make a substantial difference in 'second-run' sales in the $20-$30 versions and 'Gold' re-release-with-DLC versions?
Is the game effectively tainted permanently; but 'they fucked up; but then they eventually fixed it' a memory more likely to get you to pre-order the sequel than 'they fucked up, then did nothing'?
Ideally, of course, they'd fix it because it's the right thing to do (and some of the humans involved in the game's production might even feel that way); but I doubt that the publisher, as a corporate colony organism, gives a damn about that, so it'd be interesting to know where the money is when it comes to fixing or not fixing a game.
I'd still be annoyed at having to re-buy it because the CD and all the patches didn't work correctly; but (as someone who lost their CD fair and square, by good old fashioned incompetence and disorganization on my part rather than theirs) I think it's fair to note that GoG thankfully has this one, and it was worth my $6.
Let's put it this way: When a game doesn't suck publishers generally don't embargo reviews until 12 hours after release...
Even games that end up releasing in pretty dubious shape often manage to score fairly positive pre-launch press through some combination of assurances that 'those little issues won't be in the final version, just see the promise!' and the degree to which the reviewer depends on the goodwill of the publisher for future access, so if reviewers aren't allowed to talk about it even after it is on the shelves, you might want to run away. Maybe pick it up for $20 a year from now, if they actually do fix it.
The difference is obviously academic if nobody actually does it; but do the various auto-updaters of today attempt to resist, by some DRMish means, archiving of updates as they are received, such that you could either do an offline 'replay' of each update against a retail copy, or preserve a final working version(depending on whether updates are delivered as replacements or as deltas)?
I assume that consoles do, if only because consoles are extremely touchy by nature about anything going in or out(aside from maybe DLNA streaming and such) without being explicitly blessed; but I don't know about the PC side. Have updaters been sucked in to the wonderful world of DRM, or are they still mostly an honest-if-sometimes-incompetent download and patch utility?
I suspect that this was not the cause of the failure to find the raging pile of bugs in the PS4 and XBox One versions, since there isn't much hardware variation among released models.
Much more plausible (if still an example of terrible testing practice) with any bugs in the PC version that can be linked to a specific GPU driver version or the like. Even there, though, PC gamers(of the type interested in new-release action games) may not have the newest hardware; but tend to be fairly good about updating GPU drivers and DirectX runtimes.
It might not work in young children (see also 'congenital insensitivity to pain' and the unpleasant self-inflicted/accidental injuries that children with it wrack up); but as a now more or less mentally competent adult I'd really be in favor of replacing pain with something more informative and less painful. Maybe SNMP.