Re:Despite this "Terminal Chaos"
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Terminal Chaos
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· Score: 1
Mod parent up - it's well documented that flying was an activity limited to those of high society back in the day.
Like most all technologies, what is cost-prohibitive at one era generally becomes affordable the next. Cars were once a privilege, rather than a right that most Americans look at them today. Once they became cheap however, that's when congestion started and road rage emerged.
This isn't a post to defend the airlines industry or the regulators, far from it, but it weakens the author's legitimate arguments when he uses an invalid comparison.
Though ESPN may seem like a junket of jocks crazy on sports, the cable network has a solid past of coverage on topics outside of conventional sports. Case in point, they have successfully covered the World Series of Poker, National Paintball Championships and soon to be MLG (Major League Gaming). Each of these areas had little to no coverage in the past, while the production quality was quite poor. The World Series of Poker after being made popular on ESPN grew into one of their most popular shows, while those familiar with paintball were very impressed with how ESPN covered the NPCC.
Of course, BattleBots and the MLG are on the peripheral of mainstream media even compared with poker or paintball. It would be surprising for either of the shows to be a run-away success, but I believe that ESPN understands how to market each show to highlight its strengths and appeal. Comedy Central approached the show more as an amusing gag and never quite found the right rules to make for an interesting fight.
While there is no guarantee for a successful show, ESPN is also the network that brought the NFL from public television to cable. If the most watched sports franchise can agree to jump ship, it has to say something about their trust in ESPN. Let's keep our fingers crossed.
I think an important argument that can be made to support the 'cash prize theory' can be directly seen with the Netflix Prize project. For those unfamiliar, they are offering a $1,000,000 cash reward for the best third-party team/individual that can develop the best algorithm for predicting movie preferences for their users.
Of course, to a company like Netflix, this may be more of a cost/benefit issue as hiring a team of bright researchers still won't guarantee that even a million in R&D will lead to their objectives. But, what it does illustrate here is that there is quite a heavy incentive for other researchers to pool their resources and attack a problem together. If you've read the specs for the project (100 million ratings, 480,000 users, 18,000 movies), you'll see that this isn't just some standard run-of-the-mill data set. This is academic level huge and is obviously attracting some top talent.
The term 'revolutionary science' from the article is going to be one up for debate in terms of actual definition, but one can assume that it entails research on the edge of existing science. Anyone in the research field knows that the NSF provides a huge bulk of the research funds for universities and institutions, but much of that money is ear-marked to science buzz or politically intertwined subjects. Case in point, global warming is the big issue right now so solar cells are getting the funding. Nothing of course against solar cells, but if we are talking about funding for studying a high-risk or not-so-popular field like cold-fusion, then suddenly things dry up.
In short, smart people will often do things for free because they enjoy it. But perhaps, the really smart people are waiting to get paid.
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Mod parent up - it's well documented that flying was an activity limited to those of high society back in the day. Like most all technologies, what is cost-prohibitive at one era generally becomes affordable the next. Cars were once a privilege, rather than a right that most Americans look at them today. Once they became cheap however, that's when congestion started and road rage emerged. This isn't a post to defend the airlines industry or the regulators, far from it, but it weakens the author's legitimate arguments when he uses an invalid comparison.
Though ESPN may seem like a junket of jocks crazy on sports, the cable network has a solid past of coverage on topics outside of conventional sports. Case in point, they have successfully covered the World Series of Poker, National Paintball Championships and soon to be MLG (Major League Gaming). Each of these areas had little to no coverage in the past, while the production quality was quite poor. The World Series of Poker after being made popular on ESPN grew into one of their most popular shows, while those familiar with paintball were very impressed with how ESPN covered the NPCC.
Of course, BattleBots and the MLG are on the peripheral of mainstream media even compared with poker or paintball. It would be surprising for either of the shows to be a run-away success, but I believe that ESPN understands how to market each show to highlight its strengths and appeal. Comedy Central approached the show more as an amusing gag and never quite found the right rules to make for an interesting fight.
While there is no guarantee for a successful show, ESPN is also the network that brought the NFL from public television to cable. If the most watched sports franchise can agree to jump ship, it has to say something about their trust in ESPN. Let's keep our fingers crossed.
I think an important argument that can be made to support the 'cash prize theory' can be directly seen with the Netflix Prize project. For those unfamiliar, they are offering a $1,000,000 cash reward for the best third-party team/individual that can develop the best algorithm for predicting movie preferences for their users.
Of course, to a company like Netflix, this may be more of a cost/benefit issue as hiring a team of bright researchers still won't guarantee that even a million in R&D will lead to their objectives. But, what it does illustrate here is that there is quite a heavy incentive for other researchers to pool their resources and attack a problem together. If you've read the specs for the project (100 million ratings, 480,000 users, 18,000 movies), you'll see that this isn't just some standard run-of-the-mill data set. This is academic level huge and is obviously attracting some top talent.
The term 'revolutionary science' from the article is going to be one up for debate in terms of actual definition, but one can assume that it entails research on the edge of existing science. Anyone in the research field knows that the NSF provides a huge bulk of the research funds for universities and institutions, but much of that money is ear-marked to science buzz or politically intertwined subjects. Case in point, global warming is the big issue right now so solar cells are getting the funding. Nothing of course against solar cells, but if we are talking about funding for studying a high-risk or not-so-popular field like cold-fusion, then suddenly things dry up.
In short, smart people will often do things for free because they enjoy it. But perhaps, the really smart people are waiting to get paid.