I participated in user testing of some of our internal systems. And I remember they give us tasks to do and observe what we are doing. I remember telling them afterwards things like "I have no idea what this button is going to get me to", or "I understand you have a color scheme for the institution, but shades of greens and oranges are color blind un-friendly".
And they fixed some of them.
Anyway, it is fun participating in user testing as well!
Well, it depends a lot what they are using these technologies to do. One of the problem we have in classes today are relating to engagement. Being able to do something you want to show your mom or your roommate is valuable in term of education. If these platforms are used to engage the student with more people and get more feedback, more power to them. If these platforms are here to sell-out the students for the benefit of the instructor, then that's not right.
Yes, whether P is equal to NP or not does matter a lot.
First of all, if P is equal to NP. Then lots of computations are going to get much faster. This is likely to rock many industries, for instance logistics companies that need to schedule and order the way they work.
If P is not equal to NP, then the proof will still be interesting because it is a problem we have not been able to solve in a long time. This means that there is an aspect of complexity theory we do not understand. In the past, understanding complexity theory better gave us approximation algorithms, randomized algorithms, sat solvers,... Also a proof of P!=NP could give us a better understanding of which types of instances are hard which could lead to better algorithm for the types of instances that are not hard.
So, while a proof will give us nothing immediately, it could be big in the long run.
I guess it is hard to get to anything useful on such a short test track. It means you need to accelerate like crazy at first and immediately slow down.
Though to be fair. their previous test was a 60mph. So going from 60mph to 200mph one test later, promise to go higher. Hyperloop is supposed to deliver 500mph. So I reserve my judgment for the next test. Hopefully on a longer track.
I wonder how much that problem is linked to overchoice ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... ), the paralysis some feel when exposed to too many options. Mostly stemming from the fear of not picking the best option we could have.
We have so many ways to get so much news today, that it becomes impossible to follow all of it. So from all these choices, we have to pick the ones we read, taking the chance of missing out the important news for us.
Well, it depends how you see the movie theater. There is a similar offer in france with the UGC cinema chain. They have showings of both "big studio movies" but also "indie movies", showing of old movies, etc.. My brother use to see the theater as his tv. Since it is free (after subscription), you can just casually walk in to the movie every night and skip watching tv. And if it is boring, just walk out and do something else.
We have an employee who was fired for exercising his first amendment rights.
I am no lawyer. And actually not even a US citizen. But doesn't the 1st amendment protect against the government bending free speech? Google is not part of the government. So I do not think that the first amendment applies here. Does it?
Absolutely. In the US, there are many metrics that are reported and that help understanding the state of the labor force. Called U-1, U-2,... U-6 which represent different aspect of the questions. Saying that the unemployment should be the fraction of the 16-64 year old that do not work is ridiculous. I did not start working until I was 25. I was a student before. Counting me as unemployed at that time would have been ridiculous. If I chose to stop working at 60 because I have enough money to retire, why should I count as unemployed?
There are different category of people that do not work which surely needs to be reported. The definition of unemployement used in the US (U-3) is the one quoted, because it is the one that matches better the definition that other country used. But you need to account differently people not working because they are studying, people that are working but would like a different job, people that are working but not full time, people that stopped looking because they do not believe they can find a job.
There are all important numbers that should all be reported. But in a short piece, you can not give that much context, so you quote a single number "unemployment" which will always be kind of misleading. But calling it a lie is ridiculous. Life is complicated, a single number can not summarize everything accurately.
This is certainly not true everywhere. I sit on conference program committees fairly often. And first tier conference are paying a lot of attention to their reviewing process. We often prefer reject a paper we are unsure about rather than accepting it. Lots of papers get rejected because of incorrect proofs, or results that are not deemed convincing enough, or the novelty of the method being judged too low.
Now I agree with you that the main part of the peer review will happen after publication. But the peer reviewing filter at top tier journal and conference ensure some standard of quality.
Conferences have started their reproducibility initiative a couple of years back where they will organize event to reproduce the results of some papers and will add a particular note on the document that this particular paper has been reproduced.
If you are looking at TGV tracks, they typically go 200mph. On a New York-Seattle trip, you are still talking about a 14 hours trip. And the amount of infrastructure you need is overwhelming if you need to connect most of the major city of the west to the major cities on the east.
Hyperloop might be faster, but I doubt you'll be able to maintain a 600mph on that kind of length and for the kind of traffic we are talking about. And the infrastructure cost would be even higher.
Frankly for a trip of that length, flying may be as good as it gets.
When you see people driving into stores, they are almost always automatic cars.
That observation does not make sense. Almost all cars in the US have automatic transmissions. A quick googling show over 95% of cars have automatic transmissions. So you would expect that almost all cars that do something stupid have automatic transmissions. It is true for passing a red light, for being double parked, or whatever.
I've never been to Bangalore. But I have been to other places in India. And I don't think I have seen a car reach 55 mph. The average speed seems closer to 15 with peaks at 40 due to a massive number of cars on a complete under-scaled under-maintained road infrastructures.
Congestion problems in India and in the US are probably very different problems. I heard stories in Bangalore of a congested one way street progressively change way during the day when there is an opposite flow of cars pushing their way through in opposite directions.
I've never heard of someone planning to have drinks with someone Thursday on a Monday. Who makes casual plans like that?
People that have complex daily lives? If you are a single parent with kids, grabbing drinks mean you need a sitter. That means you need to schedule work for someone else. Some people that work with strange schedules and the likelihood you will catch them on a particular day is low.. If you really want to grad a drink with a particular someone (as opposed to anyone), you better make a precise plan, otherwise he/she might have a plan that does require more preparation. Maybe Thursday is your next free evening after a long and crazy project crunch, and you really want to go out once you are done.
The original case for patents was to publicize how things are done to foster innovation. If three different independent company are coming up with the exact same innovation within most of each other, (I am ssuming, I haven't RTFA) then maybe there is not much innovation we care for in there.
It takes nearly as much effort as developing a handful of episodes to teach what they are trying to teach, although I grant the idea they have is novel... A documentary would in fact be harder to make, and involve a lot more on-location shooting which is more expensive and involves a lot of travel expense.
No, a documentary is way cheaper. They were filming trips and interviews. There is little planning, there is little design in this. You identify people to interview, you send the interviewers there followed by a camera crew. Later you mount and you are about done. You are probably done shooting within two/three weeks, with probably an other two/three weeks of editing. This require little no post hoc analysis. Essentially, in 2 month you are done.
Compare that to educational material. You need professional actor, make-up artist, animators. You need to design the material. You need to produce it. Run it on a few test groups. You need to ensure the test groups are diverse geographically, ethnically, socio economically, and big enough to have statistical significance. Once you run the entire process, you need to analyze data, extract trends. That's a 3/4 month job for a team of educator, probably a 3/4 month job for your production group. And you need a lead that synchronize everything. From that knowledge, you are certainly able to see what works and what doesn't. So on year 2, you start over. Also you need to track the impact of the production on your groups in the long term, that's 3 years down the road. This is not a small job that you can do half drunk in your garage.
You say they need that but where is is said they are doing that? They have a "team", yes, but it's probably more creative than scientific. The article does not really say.
In the public abstract of the grants. Here is the relevant sentence from the second one. The first one has similar language in there.
The project includes five new PBS SciGirls episodes featuring girls and female coding professionals using coding to solve real problems; a new interactive PBSKids.org game that allows children to develop coding skills; nationwide outreach programming, including professional development for informal educators and female coding professionals to facilitate activities for girls and families in diverse STEM learning environments; a research study that will advance understanding of how the transmedia components build girls' motivation to pursue additional coding experiences; and a third-party summative evaluation.
Well a nice investigation by a real journalist would clear that right up then. After reading the article I am not so much inclined to believe this is fraud, but that is a LOT of money. The bigger question is, who is even watching to be sure? Or any NSF grant for that matter? No-one. That's what makes me think some third party should really be investigating how wisely and fraud-free the NSF grants are working.
Well, I am glad you asked. A lot of people are looped in on these things. For a project like this to be funded it has to go through a panel. That means that you ask the opinion of a dozen experts (that means university professors most of the times ) on a group of about 40 proposals. There are a lot of rules to prevent conflicts of interest. When there are too many huge proposals, it can actually be a problem to find people that are not in conflict and sometimes foreign experts are brought in the process to make sure there are no conflicts Not all 12 experts will read all the proposals. But funded proposals will be extensively discussed. And proposals to be funded at a million dollars level will be read by the 12 experts. I have seen a single unconvinced expert in the room kill a proposal. The panel of expert does not have to recommend a single proposal in the group. If the panel chose not to recommend a proposal for funding, it will not be funded. Where is the acco
Which grant are you talking about. There are two grants presented here. One is targeted at early childhood development, the other is targeted at pre-teen girls. Both will develop some kind of video content. But that is not the only thing that they will do, there are other components that need to be developed. The prior $200k grant you talk about is essentially to make a documentary, this is quite cheap to do. The two grants here develop new material from scratch, which is harder than follow people around with a camera crew.
Also, you don't just develop something, you need to evaluate effectiveness and develop theory of why things work or don't work. So you need a behavioral scientist, a psychologist, and experts in the subject matter.
It was shown that just distributing hardware does not work. (See the cases of Californian cities pulling their ipad programs.) What you need is to better engage, to have age appropriate material, and to educate the educators.
As someone who has both competed for NSF funding (on both CS technical and education programs) and reviewed NSF proposals in the past, I am glad they are funding this. NSF does not just hand out $3M awards, you can bet there is solid evidence that this could work.
If you can only change the life of 10 people from being a low skilled worker to be a trained computer scientist, the economic impact will be WAY more than $3M. Think of how many people say things like "I watched XYZ show when I was a kid, and that inspired me to become an XYZ". You'll get 10 people inspired probably.
Or not. At least in the USA, the phrases "left the work force" and "unemployment rate" are completely disconnected. If you're unemployed for a signficant period, you have "left the workfirce", and are no longer counted as unemployed.
hum... no... The unemployement rate is the U-3 measure which only means: "people are without jobs and they have actively looked for work within the past four weeks". (source wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... and reference therein )
Note that the USA quote the u-3 metric as the unemployement rate to allow direct comparison with other countries but other metrics are also reported.
There are reasons not to like u-3, but "you are not counted if you have not worked XYZ weeks" is not one of them.
It is not because you are standing that you are not strapped to something. If you are thinking like in a bus, then yes it is not going to work. But you could stand in front of a padding with straps to hold you in place.
I think it is hard to stay standing up without moving for a long time. But that could work for some people.
When I was wearing a fitbit (I don't anymore, the battery died) I used to charge it when I was taking a shower. That pretty much cover the charging time that you need and disrupt very little the step count.
To be fair, that guy is not well paid. We graduate bachelors with a specialty in security and they average at twice the number that was give here. I think $45k is the low 10 percentile of our CS graduate. And we are a state school.
Well, it could eventually get cheaper to grow meat rather than raise the animals. It could also have implication for places were it is inconvenient to raise animals. Think in the polar region or the desert. Also, raising animal is not environmentally friendly and my not scale to a 10 billion human population at US consumption rate.
Some people object to eating animal products (7+ million in the us, 350+ million in the world) but may not object to grown meat which could be a trillion dollar industry in itself.
Slashdot Mirror
I participated in user testing of some of our internal systems. And I remember they give us tasks to do and observe what we are doing. I remember telling them afterwards things like "I have no idea what this button is going to get me to", or "I understand you have a color scheme for the institution, but shades of greens and oranges are color blind un-friendly".
And they fixed some of them.
Anyway, it is fun participating in user testing as well!
(Obviously, I haven't RTFA.)
Well, it depends a lot what they are using these technologies to do. One of the problem we have in classes today are relating to engagement. Being able to do something you want to show your mom or your roommate is valuable in term of education.
If these platforms are used to engage the student with more people and get more feedback, more power to them.
If these platforms are here to sell-out the students for the benefit of the instructor, then that's not right.
Yes, whether P is equal to NP or not does matter a lot.
First of all, if P is equal to NP. Then lots of computations are going to get much faster. This is likely to rock many industries, for instance logistics companies that need to schedule and order the way they work.
If P is not equal to NP, then the proof will still be interesting because it is a problem we have not been able to solve in a long time. This means that there is an aspect of complexity theory we do not understand. ...
In the past, understanding complexity theory better gave us approximation algorithms, randomized algorithms, sat solvers,
Also a proof of P!=NP could give us a better understanding of which types of instances are hard which could lead to better algorithm for the types of instances that are not hard.
So, while a proof will give us nothing immediately, it could be big in the long run.
Well, I think the test is weird.
Their test is a tunnel of 1 mile.
I guess it is hard to get to anything useful on such a short test track.
It means you need to accelerate like crazy at first and immediately slow down.
Though to be fair. their previous test was a 60mph. So going from 60mph to 200mph one test later, promise to go higher. Hyperloop is supposed to deliver 500mph. So I reserve my judgment for the next test. Hopefully on a longer track.
I wonder how much that problem is linked to overchoice ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... ), the paralysis some feel when exposed to too many options. Mostly stemming from the fear of not picking the best option we could have.
We have so many ways to get so much news today, that it becomes impossible to follow all of it. So from all these choices, we have to pick the ones we read, taking the chance of missing out the important news for us.
Do anyone know if that link was studied?
I am sorry to hear of your experiences.
As a cis white male in his 30s teaching CS at a university, would you have an opinion of what I can do to help the situation?
Well, it depends how you see the movie theater. There is a similar offer in france with the UGC cinema chain. They have showings of both "big studio movies" but also "indie movies", showing of old movies, etc.. My brother use to see the theater as his tv. Since it is free (after subscription), you can just casually walk in to the movie every night and skip watching tv. And if it is boring, just walk out and do something else.
We have an employee who was fired for exercising his first amendment rights.
I am no lawyer. And actually not even a US citizen. But doesn't the 1st amendment protect against the government bending free speech? Google is not part of the government. So I do not think that the first amendment applies here. Does it?
Karl Marx also said: "Where is my Cowboy Neal option on the poll!?"
I am not sure about me. Cut my flight time in two, and now a 2nd class seat seems easier to tolerate.
Absolutely. In the US, there are many metrics that are reported and that help understanding the state of the labor force. Called U-1, U-2, ... U-6 which represent different aspect of the questions.
Saying that the unemployment should be the fraction of the 16-64 year old that do not work is ridiculous.
I did not start working until I was 25. I was a student before. Counting me as unemployed at that time would have been ridiculous.
If I chose to stop working at 60 because I have enough money to retire, why should I count as unemployed?
There are different category of people that do not work which surely needs to be reported. The definition of unemployement used in the US (U-3) is the one quoted, because it is the one that matches better the definition that other country used.
But you need to account differently people not working because they are studying, people that are working but would like a different job, people that are working but not full time, people that stopped looking because they do not believe they can find a job.
There are all important numbers that should all be reported. But in a short piece, you can not give that much context, so you quote a single number "unemployment" which will always be kind of misleading. But calling it a lie is ridiculous.
Life is complicated, a single number can not summarize everything accurately.
This is certainly not true everywhere. I sit on conference program committees fairly often. And first tier conference are paying a lot of attention to their reviewing process. We often prefer reject a paper we are unsure about rather than accepting it. Lots of papers get rejected because of incorrect proofs, or results that are not deemed convincing enough, or the novelty of the method being judged too low.
Now I agree with you that the main part of the peer review will happen after publication. But the peer reviewing filter at top tier journal and conference ensure some standard of quality.
Conferences have started their reproducibility initiative a couple of years back where they will organize event to reproduce the results of some papers and will add a particular note on the document that this particular paper has been reproduced.
If you are looking at TGV tracks, they typically go 200mph. On a New York-Seattle trip, you are still talking about a 14 hours trip. And the amount of infrastructure you need is overwhelming if you need to connect most of the major city of the west to the major cities on the east.
Hyperloop might be faster, but I doubt you'll be able to maintain a 600mph on that kind of length and for the kind of traffic we are talking about. And the infrastructure cost would be even higher.
Frankly for a trip of that length, flying may be as good as it gets.
When you see people driving into stores, they are almost always automatic cars.
That observation does not make sense. Almost all cars in the US have automatic transmissions. A quick googling show over 95% of cars have automatic transmissions. So you would expect that almost all cars that do something stupid have automatic transmissions. It is true for passing a red light, for being double parked, or whatever.
I've never been to Bangalore. But I have been to other places in India. And I don't think I have seen a car reach 55 mph. The average speed seems closer to 15 with peaks at 40 due to a massive number of cars on a complete under-scaled under-maintained road infrastructures.
Congestion problems in India and in the US are probably very different problems. I heard stories in Bangalore of a congested one way street progressively change way during the day when there is an opposite flow of cars pushing their way through in opposite directions.
I've never heard of someone planning to have drinks with someone Thursday on a Monday. Who makes casual plans like that?
People that have complex daily lives?
If you are a single parent with kids, grabbing drinks mean you need a sitter. That means you need to schedule work for someone else.
Some people that work with strange schedules and the likelihood you will catch them on a particular day is low..
If you really want to grad a drink with a particular someone (as opposed to anyone), you better make a precise plan, otherwise he/she might have a plan that does require more preparation.
Maybe Thursday is your next free evening after a long and crazy project crunch, and you really want to go out once you are done.
The original case for patents was to publicize how things are done to foster innovation. If three different independent company are coming up with the exact same innovation within most of each other, (I am ssuming, I haven't RTFA) then maybe there is not much innovation we care for in there.
The patent and IP law are due for an overall...
It takes nearly as much effort as developing a handful of episodes to teach what they are trying to teach, although I grant the idea they have is novel... A documentary would in fact be harder to make, and involve a lot more on-location shooting which is more expensive and involves a lot of travel expense.
No, a documentary is way cheaper.
They were filming trips and interviews. There is little planning, there is little design in this. You identify people to interview, you send the interviewers there followed by a camera crew. Later you mount and you are about done. You are probably done shooting within two/three weeks, with probably an other two/three weeks of editing.
This require little no post hoc analysis. Essentially, in 2 month you are done.
Compare that to educational material. You need professional actor, make-up artist, animators. You need to design the material. You need to produce it.
Run it on a few test groups. You need to ensure the test groups are diverse geographically, ethnically, socio economically, and big enough to have statistical significance. Once you run the entire process, you need to analyze data, extract trends. That's a 3/4 month job for a team of educator, probably a 3/4 month job for your production group. And you need a lead that synchronize everything.
From that knowledge, you are certainly able to see what works and what doesn't. So on year 2, you start over.
Also you need to track the impact of the production on your groups in the long term, that's 3 years down the road.
This is not a small job that you can do half drunk in your garage.
You say they need that but where is is said they are doing that? They have a "team", yes, but it's probably more creative than scientific. The article does not really say.
In the public abstract of the grants. Here is the relevant sentence from the second one. The first one has similar language in there.
The project includes five new PBS SciGirls episodes featuring girls and female coding professionals using coding to solve real problems; a new interactive PBSKids.org game that allows children to develop coding skills; nationwide outreach programming, including professional development for informal educators and female coding professionals to facilitate activities for girls and families in diverse STEM learning environments; a research study that will advance understanding of how the transmedia components build girls' motivation to pursue additional coding experiences; and a third-party summative evaluation.
Well a nice investigation by a real journalist would clear that right up then. After reading the article I am not so much inclined to believe this is fraud, but that is a LOT of money.
The bigger question is, who is even watching to be sure? Or any NSF grant for that matter? No-one. That's what makes me think some third party should really be investigating how wisely and fraud-free the NSF grants are working.
Well, I am glad you asked. A lot of people are looped in on these things.
For a project like this to be funded it has to go through a panel. That means that you ask the opinion of a dozen experts (that means university professors most of the times ) on a group of about 40 proposals. There are a lot of rules to prevent conflicts of interest. When there are too many huge proposals, it can actually be a problem to find people that are not in conflict and sometimes foreign experts are brought in the process to make sure there are no conflicts
Not all 12 experts will read all the proposals. But funded proposals will be extensively discussed. And proposals to be funded at a million dollars level will be read by the 12 experts. I have seen a single unconvinced expert in the room kill a proposal. The panel of expert does not have to recommend a single proposal in the group. If the panel chose not to recommend a proposal for funding, it will not be funded. Where is the acco
Which grant are you talking about. There are two grants presented here. One is targeted at early childhood development, the other is targeted at pre-teen girls.
Both will develop some kind of video content. But that is not the only thing that they will do, there are other components that need to be developed. The prior $200k grant you talk about is essentially to make a documentary, this is quite cheap to do. The two grants here develop new material from scratch, which is harder than follow people around with a camera crew.
Also, you don't just develop something, you need to evaluate effectiveness and develop theory of why things work or don't work. So you need a behavioral scientist, a psychologist, and experts in the subject matter.
It was shown that just distributing hardware does not work. (See the cases of Californian cities pulling their ipad programs.) What you need is to better engage, to have age appropriate material, and to educate the educators.
As someone who has both competed for NSF funding (on both CS technical and education programs) and reviewed NSF proposals in the past, I am glad they are funding this. NSF does not just hand out $3M awards, you can bet there is solid evidence that this could work.
If you can only change the life of 10 people from being a low skilled worker to be a trained computer scientist, the economic impact will be WAY more than $3M. Think of how many people say things like "I watched XYZ show when I was a kid, and that inspired me to become an XYZ". You'll get 10 people inspired probably.
Or not. At least in the USA, the phrases "left the work force" and "unemployment rate" are completely disconnected. If you're unemployed for a signficant period, you have "left the workfirce", and are no longer counted as unemployed.
hum... no...
The unemployement rate is the U-3 measure which only means: "people are without jobs and they have actively looked for work within the past four weeks". (source wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... and reference therein )
Note that the USA quote the u-3 metric as the unemployement rate to allow direct comparison with other countries but other metrics are also reported.
There are reasons not to like u-3, but "you are not counted if you have not worked XYZ weeks" is not one of them.
It is not because you are standing that you are not strapped to something. If you are thinking like in a bus, then yes it is not going to work. But you could stand in front of a padding with straps to hold you in place.
I think it is hard to stay standing up without moving for a long time. But that could work for some people.
tar and feathers?
$ man feathers
No manual entry for feathers
mmm...
When I was wearing a fitbit (I don't anymore, the battery died) I used to charge it when I was taking a shower. That pretty much cover the charging time that you need and disrupt very little the step count.
To be fair, that guy is not well paid. We graduate bachelors with a specialty in security and they average at twice the number that was give here. I think $45k is the low 10 percentile of our CS graduate. And we are a state school.
Well, it could eventually get cheaper to grow meat rather than raise the animals. It could also have implication for places were it is inconvenient to raise animals. Think in the polar region or the desert. Also, raising animal is not environmentally friendly and my not scale to a 10 billion human population at US consumption rate.
Some people object to eating animal products (7+ million in the us, 350+ million in the world) but may not object to grown meat which could be a trillion dollar industry in itself.