As someone who also owns over 1000 books, I'd say the vast majority of my collection is "still relevant," at least to me.
You probably have classics worth re-reading, but I bet you also have things like "Writing Java Applets in 24h With Jbuilder 3.0".
I don't tend to buy such books in the first place, if I can help it. I mostly buy physical books that I expect to last as reference works or whatever. If it's a short-term guidebook or something that will be obsolete in a couple years, I'll borrow it from a library or friend or buy a beat-up used copy and then get rid of it.
A physical library that has obsolete books is basically hoarding.
Agreed. But some people actually like reading beyond ephemeral manuals and the latest trade fiction title, and a personal library is useful for consulting standard sources on many topics. The basic knowledge in many fields doesn't change over a few years or even decades as much as programming. Admittedly, maybe 10-20% of my collection consists of books I probably will rarely if ever consult, and they aren't even obscure reference works, so I could prune them. But I will pull hundreds of my books off the shelf at some point every year.
Meanwhile the illegals can't complain about working conditions - and will work for less than minimum wage in (those occupations where it applies.)
Well, pickers are often paid by the amount they pick, rather than simply an hourly wage. The reason your average young American can't make decent money is because these are SKILLED LABOR positions. It often takes a few years of picking a particular item of produce before you get enough experience to do it most efficiently. Many pickers specialize in certain fruits or vegetables; hence why many of them are "migrant," since they follow the harvest of what they're good at.
The problem isn't that one can't earn more than minimum wage doing picking -- it's that most Americans view picking as a temporary job or summer thing that they'll do until they find something better. But you have to do it for quite some time before it becomes profitable.
You might read up on what happened in some southern states that passed laws to make it more difficult to hire illegals. They still had migrant legal workers who were pros and could make money, but most of the Americans they'd try to train would quit in a week... It's hard work, and unskilled workers can't keep up enough to make decent money.
People tend to forget that Social Security wasn't originally a retirement plan. It was an insurance plan... "Insurance" was in the name. Insurance against what? Living past the average life expectancy for the time, which was ~65. It was never designed to be for "retirement" which didn't exist for most people back then; if you lived longer than was reasonable for people to plan for at the time, the government would help you out. It's no wonder the math no longer works today when people are expecting 20+ years of retirement from it.
Yeah, you obviously haven't tried this a lot for obscure searches. For an easy way to see this, try searching for an obscure phrase enclosed in quotes in Google Books using sources from, say 1950 to 2000. Then try the search again for years 1950 to 1975. You'll likely end up with a different list of results from the years 1950-75 in the two searches. You can try this with all sorts of verbatim searches; for example, word order (outside quotes) will cause hits to appear or get dropped... Not merely differently ranked, but to disappear from the complete list of hits. I could go on with dozens of ways I've seen results added or subtracted in supposedly verbatim searches with the exact same search terms. I'll grant you the vast majority of Google users don't use it this way, but there are clearly a lot of cases where some nontrivial percentage of people would like this capability (and for it to function reliably).
Huh? My definition? I was following YOUR exceptionally narrow definition of search engine and actually trying to expand it to cover an additional decade of history. And if you re-read my post, you'll realize that at no point did I say the approach Google has taken is invalid or bad or not useful. What I said is that I don't understand why their new approach NECESSITATED breaking the old search for people who want/need it. Google is now a great tool for answering broad questions with relevant links; I never said otherwise. I find it unfortunate that it can no longer function reliably for serious research though. Not only the ranking but the actual complete list of links that show up in a search are not consistent, even with verbatim or allintext turned on.
Oh and BTW, the way you use a literal search engine with thousands or millions of results is to introduce more specific search terms to narrow your search to a reasonable number. Back then people COULD use search engines to find specific content very well that way. I used to be able to use Google to find specific pages again years later if I remembered a few specific unique words or phrases that could get me back to that specific page... I haven't been able to reliably do that in years. As you point out, that type of searching is less useful when you're doing a broader search for a vague topic and just want the "best" hits (by some metric). Early on, Google tried to combine the two, but the former approach requires search strategy and understanding how to use operators and such to get useful results in narrowing down a topic. Most internet users today never learned how to use a search engine -- they just want to type in a few vague things and expect good stuff to come up, even if it's not what they literally asked for. Google has thus decided to serve the latter crowd, though I still don't quite understand why that required them to screw up literal search for those who request it. (BTW, for those who don't know and want more literal search, verbatim on Google is really poor these days. Try the allintext: operator instead, though even that is a crapshoot was to whether the specific results you want will actually show up.)
While I guess you have a point that Pagerank was designed to deliver better results, so were all other "search engines" of the time. Pagerank was just a better algorithm than others. But by your definition all search engines back then were "answer engines," since they all were trying to rank results somehow.
The thing is: back then Google's algorithms were still based on terms actually found in the searched pages. Hence, it was still a search engine. The ranking may have been tweaked, but you were still searching for actual text and actual search terms.
Somewhere around 2005 or so, it became possible for Google to serve up top hits that no longer contained the literal search terms. At that point it ceased to be a "pure" search engine and became about trying to guess what you wanted rather than just retrieving pages with your text. As the years went by, Google deprecated and screwed up the plus operator, increasingly screwed up verbatim search until it became nonfunctional for people who just want a literal search, and incorporated "personalization" to serve up pages more like other pages you've viewed, rather than what you literally asked for.
Google hasn't been a functional search engine in about a decade.
If I'm CC'ing him, we're well past the point where I don't trust things to be going as smoothly as they should.
Exactly. If you're to the point where you need to CC an authority that doesn't need to be there, you are deliberately conveying a MESSAGE that the recipient is untrusted to complete a task or whatever.
There are other situations where it's just routine to CC a supervisor. If you get worried about those, you're just paranoid.
Very true. But each paragraph of an article also has to be verifiable.
Yes, but your previous post was about the NOTABILITY guideline. Obviously if you declare X source is not "reliable," then a paragraph with only that source can be removed.
But that has nothing to do with the notability guidelines. The entire point of your previous post was about how to pre-emptively ban an entire article through notability guidelines. As the summary notes, whether or not a particular source is "reliable" is often a judgment call. Even a "scholarly" souce can be unreliable if it's discussing information outside of its main purview. (E.g., if you're writing a paragraph on baking different types of bread, citing an academic book on Beethoven's music may not actually be a reasonable "reliable" source on bread-baking technique.)
I'm not at all making a judgment call on the Daily Mail here, just noting that judging a "reliable source" on a single sentence or something is quite a bit different from pre-emptively declaring an entire article to be non-notable for lack of ANY verifiable sources.
If your only point was "text with unreliable sources can be deleted," there was no point in even writing your previous post on notability... because basically the entire summary was about the unreliable source policy.
Wikilawyering at its best -- one policy fails, so quote another, even if it's irrelevant to the point you originally claimed to be making. I don't give a crap about Wikipedia policy guidelines, but your projection of making a pre-emptive strike at any subject matter ("ACK! This may not be notable! DELETE, DELETE, DELETE!!") is actually indicative of many editors at Wikipedia, and I think a major failing of the project. That was the MAIN point of my reply to you -- but your Wikilawyering instincts clearly took over and you chose to try to change the subject to assert your superior knowledge of the guidelines, rather than actually addressing the fact that deletionism is contributing to the ruin of Wikipedia.
Why do you assume the "subject" mentioned in TFS was the subject of an entire article? It could also be the only source for a "subject" of a paragraph or even a sentence within an article that has multiple sources. There are other guidelines dealing with material within an article, but notability only applies if the "subject" is an entire article. (BTW -- what you just did there? Wikilawyering. That is one of the primary reasons people hate contributing to Wikipedia. And if you're one of the deletionists -- who tend to quote notability guides most often -- you're one of the main problems with Wikipedia.)
Well, I'm not exactly in favor of such models either, but I would note in the U.S. at least that it's been quite common to bundle "workbooks" or other such course materials with textbooks for decades. Some instructors make heavy use of them, and by themselves they've often cost ~$40 in the past. In this case, apparently students can forego the $100 textbook and just pay for the "online workbook" equivalent for $40, instead of what students would do 15 years ago and have to buy the $140 textbook/workbook combo.
Also, it should be noted that many college instructors have traditionally used textbooks mostly for the standard set of exercises they can assign from them. (Which is part of the reason publishers can often so easily force the adoption of new editions, since their most common strategy is to scramble the exercises, making it difficult to use more than one edition.)
Obviously in an ideal world, I suppose every college professor would write his/her own exercises, but if you're an adjunct getting paid $1500 to teach the entire course (more common than you might think), that's a lot more work.
Thanks for the text, though your summary doesn't quite say the same thing as the text. You said it prohibits sharing of intimate images "that were taken without consent," but what this text actually bans is sharing of intimate images where "the depicted person did not consent to the disclosure." The word "disclosure" isn't defined, but presumably it would also cover instances where the TAKING of the image was consensual but the DISTRIBUTION was NOT consensual.
People don't want to choke down 2 raw carrots and a cup of kale every day when they can slam it with some apple juice in one gulp.
Yeah, that "with some apple juice" part bugs me. It drives me a little nuts when you see those expensive "juice blends" sold at the store claiming to be full of veggies and labeled "green goodness" or "green goddess" or whatever.
Except a lot of times there's mostly high sugar apple or pear juice or whatever.
I get that most people like sweet stuff compared to savory stuff. But I think a lot of that is cultural conditioning. Stop eating a lot of products with added sugar for a while, and suddenly even a lot of vegetables start tasting "sweet" when they're ripe and fresh. It's frustrating that even the high-priced "vegetable" juice blends are mostly packaged sugar products, with a minor amount of stuff with more nutrients.
I never really got into the "juicing fad," but I did use a juicer occasionally for a while. But I rarely juiced sweet fruits -- the sweetest stuff I'd do would often be stuff like carrots. Carrot juice is actually quite sweet, sweet enough to pair with a lot of more savory or even bitter juices once you actually get used to it.
Sounds like you have a relatively unusual issue. For most of the human race, a reasonable amount of fiber (with enough liquid consumption) helps to promote digestive transit time and softens stool. If what you say is true, though, you have my sympathies for the problems it sounds like it causes you.
I have a 2-3 week travel time. Bowel movements about 1 pound (fist-sized) occur every 18-26 days.
Are you serious? Do you eat food daily? Are you on some sort of strange liquid-only diet?
Sounds like "dietary fiber sensitivity" is a thing but nobody wants to claim you can overdose on fiber.
I don't think any reasonable dietician or doctor would say you can't "overdose on fiber." But it's so incredibly rare that most people don't talk about it. But yes, if you consume massive amounts of fiber every day it can screw up nutrient absorption and other even more serious things than messing with your bowel movement. Again, given how few people even consume the "recommended" amount of fiber -- let alone excess -- it's something rarely talked about though.
And no need to go crazy on the fruit either, since most fruit is very high on sugar, and low on nutrients.
I wouldn't exactly say it's "low on nutrients," and the amount of sugar depends on the fruit. And part of the issue is how we tend to define "fruit" which is not a botanical definition but one seemingly mostly based on sweetness. If you include the varieties of botanical fruits (from cucumbers to peapods), "fruits" in general have a great variety of nutrients and aren't necessarily very sweet. And a lot of how your body processes the sugar has to do with what else you consume with it. A whole fruit at least has the fiber that regulates the digestive process a bit more.
But yeah -- if you define "fruit" as "sugary stuff" -- better to load up on more vegetables than lots of fruit in general. Still, eating whole fruit is often a lot better than eating a bunch of other junk food.
Plus, and I'm going to be called nasty things for saying this, but traffic accidents do not appear to be "way up", like they would be if smart phones were causing a ton of new accidents.
I'm not going to call you "nasty things," because you're basically right that stats don't appear to be "way up." BUT it also depends on what stats you use. You're right that "distracted driving" stats are always hard to estimate.
What we do know: overall number of crashes (including fatalities, non-fatal injuries, and property-damage-only crashes) basically had been in steady decline since the mid-1990s, when we had nearly 7 million crashes/year in the U.S. This trend lasted until ~2010, when it got down to ~5.5 million/year.
For some reason total crashes have been steadily rising again, from a low of 5.3 million in 2011 up to 6.3 million in 2015.
Granted, total number of injuries and fatalities have thankfully not been rising at the same rate (though they are rising again too), but for some reason total CRASHES have been going up quickly. (That is, particularly crashes with no significant injuries.)
The official reports say that cell phone distractions have been steadily rising, though they only claim to account for around 2% of distraction-caused accidents in 2005 rising up to 8% of distraction-caused accidents in 2015. That is obviously a significant rise in that category, but I don't know how those numbers are estimated -- and still only accounts for (according to the report) 69,000 crashes in 2015, which is only about 1% of total crashes.
But I think we need to ask -- if total crashes have risen by ~20% in the past 5 years, after >15 years of steady declines (despite increased total miles driven), why? Drunk driving numbers have generally been continuing to decline. Are drivers really just that much more reckless in general than they were a few years ago? Are the reports estimating things that poorly? Are people suddenly reporting more accidents for some reason? Or could there be some more specific reasons why we're now seeing ~1 million more crashes per year than 5 years ago?
Smart phones weren't designed for use while driving but neither were maps, kids, sleepiness, or being drunk.
Let's take those in turn, shall we?
Maps -- traditionally, most people only used these occasionally, relying on street signs, visual cues, and other general direction sense. For long trips, a lot of people would have a travel companion to use the map. And in any case, map use was usually NECESSARY to actually find your destination (which was your entire point of being in the car).
Kids -- can be horrible distractions. But again, like maps, you can't really avoid dealing with them.
Oh and most people don't really WANT to be distracted by kids and maps -- they're just forced to deal with them while driving. People WANT to look at their phones and thus seem drawn to them.
Sleepiness and being drunk -- the hallmark of bad drivers. The latter is explicitly illegal. The former is generally avoidable too, and if a cop catches you weaving and pulls you over to find you literally asleep at the wheel, you might end up with problems too.
Contrast this with phones -- which the present study says a lot of drivers use FREQUENTLY and which don't have the necessity element in most scenarios. Unlike maps (which actually get your where you're going) or kids (which can't be ignored), most of the non-mapping features of your phone use CAN be delayed. People just choose not to.
I'll finish up with " something something forest for trees."
Smartphone screens as distractions are a serious new threat. Like drunk driving and fatigue, they are not a necessary element to the driving experience and are easily avoidable... and yet people seem unable to stop using them even when doing what's pretty much the most dangerous activity most people do on a regular basis.
It's an addiction, more serious than drunk driving, because at least most people seem to recognize the dangers of drunkenness -- whereas lots of people seem to want to downplay the seriousness of the new smartphone distraction threat or, like you, just pretend "it's always been this way!" No, it hasn't. This is a new one which -- at a minimum -- ADDS to the previous potential distractions and compounds the danger.
Do the books change subtly enough from edition to edition that it would be possible to prepare a plan that would work for both the current and previous editions at the same time?
Textbook producers have long found ways around this. I mentioned exercise numbers, because that's one way they make this practice next-to-impossible.
One edition you assign problems #1-10, but in the next edition those same problems are #1, 3-4, 6, 9, 11-12, 19. Oh, except for #4 and #7 in the original edition, which have been dropped for no apparent reason and replaced with new problems. (Admittedly, in the first few editions the exercises are often edited for legitimate improvements -- clarifying them, dropping bad exercises, etc. But by the time you get to the 7th ed. or whatever, it's mostly about making it really annoying to keep using the 6th ed.)
That's just one thing they do. There are also generally various other minor differences incorporated to make it just annoying enough that it's hard to use multiple editions in the same class.
The solution is for professors to just generate their own sets of problems, rather than relying on textbook exercises. But that takes more work and is frequently one of the main reason professors choose textbooks (more for the exercises than the readings). And if it's a big lecture class that has graduate teaching assistants or whatever, it's generally easier to just point them to some answer guide that is provided by the textbook publisher or whatever, rather than having to write up detailed solutions to explain to the TAs.
There are various ways around this stuff for professors who want to do the work. But a lot of those ways end up defeating some of the main points of using a standard textbook in the first place.
They were trying to monetize access to basic data and got under cut by a competitor who did it cheaper and more customer friendly. If your webtraffic can be decimated by customers receiving a one sentence answer to their question the problem may have been your business model, not Google.
There's a very flawed assumption here, which is that "basic data" and "one sentence answers" are always inherently easy to gather, and there's no significant time or monetary investment needed to do so.
That's obviously false. There's loads of non-trivial data out there which isn't available in something like a free government database or Wikipedia or whatever. It may take significant effort or resources to gather that data. I have no idea how much effort this particular site put into its data gathering, but clearly if Google is using it as a primary source for its "snippets," it must either not be available easily elsewhere for free or other sources are less reliable.
Thus, the site is apparently providing some value by gathering information that others don't.
Whether this can be turned into a viable business model is of course a separate question, but acting like Google is blameless by just TAKING that data and reusing it without permission is -- well, Google is certainly morally suspect at a minimum here. If businesses like this can't make money gathering such data, who will gather the data?
(Note that I really don't care about celebrity net worth, so I really couldn't care less if this data went ungathered. But the model applies to lots of other potentially useful information.)
If tipping is done like in the Lyft app, then you're tipping after you've already left the car so there is actually less pressure to tip.
This is one of the things I tend to hate about cab tipping, as opposed to other services. (Tipping in general is of course annoying too; I wish people were actually just paid reasonably for their services.)
Anyhow, in most services, you tip as you are leaving the transaction (or the service person is leaving). In a cab, particularly if you are paying by card, you're often forced to tip before you even get out of the car -- frequently handing back the credit card thing to the driver, where he prints out your receipt with tip listed and hands it to you. If you have bags in the trunk or whatever, will the driver treat you the same if you don't tip well? And even if you wanted to tip in cash, it's awkward, because you generally do the transaction in the car for payment before those final parts of service are rendered (opening your door, taking out bags, etc.) -- and if you don't tip until after all of that is complete, the driver may be thinking you're a cheapskate because you haven't tipped already.
If they pick a percentage/sum by default I think they should be forced to advertise prices with that service fee though.
I'm not sure I've ever encountered a situation where that wasn't the case that a service fee was posted or discussed in advance. If you have a party of over X number of a people at a restaurant (usually 6-8 or more), menus or signs will often say there's a service charge included. If you order room service at a hotel, the menu will generally say X% service charge will be added to the cost.
However, in an ideal world, posted prices should simply include those fees, rather than designating them separately on top of the price. The only reason I assume they do so is actually to signal that an additional tip isn't necessary, which I actually appreciate given the U.S. tendency toward tipping everywhere.
If this is the reason students are spending $1200 pa, why don't community colleges design their courses around last year's textbooks (which are presumably available for much less)? Very few fields of study change significantly from year to year.
As someone who has taught at the college level, I can tell you that most professors would be thrilled to do this. Unfortunately, it only really works for a year or two. The first year after a new edition comes out, there may be sufficient stock left to source a decent amount of textbooks (though they'll still be nearly full price).
The second year, you're down to mostly used copies. But the used textbook market is unreliable. You can probably get away with using the old edition for that second year, because used textbook stocks may be reliable enough. But after that, it gets harder -- the bookstore may not be able to reliably source a lot of copies. If you go on Amazon or whatever, you'll end up buying from 3rd-party sellers who often don't pay detailed attention to textbooks... resulting in inaccuracies for listings. You'll get the student who comes in and says, "I know the current edition is 7th, and you want to use 6th -- I ordered a 6th from a used seller, but they sent me the 5th edition! Can I use it?"
A large number of students don't sell textbooks back, particularly if they already bought them used and it's an old edition that they won't make much money off of. So the used market dries up after a couple years.
And most textbooks (except in very active fields) aren't actually releasing new editions EVERY year. Instead, it's often every 3 or 4 or 5 years, which is long enough to "dry up" any used market and force everyone to upgrade.
Believe me -- I know there are always plenty of stories of professors who teach from their own books and want to make loads of money. But the majority of professors don't write textbooks, and they're often happy to stay on a consistent edition (and save students money). Who wants to update course materials to take into account all the exercise numbers changing from edition to edition, the minor rearrangements of text, etc., etc.?
They are attributing a 30-year trend to a company founded 10 years ago? Get this drivel off the front page please.
I don't see anything in the summary or TFA that says there is a steady 30-year trend. It's just comparing conventions now to what they were a few decades ago. I'd assume the guy has some data showing a more marked shift or acceleration in recent years that corresponds to his trend.
Also, note that technology hasn't only been shifting for the past 10 years. I knew people 20+ years ago who were accessing massive archives of mp3s on communal servers and choosing what to access, what to download for themselves, etc. You don't think they were making decisions on the basis of a few seconds of listening? Only a few years later, mp3 players started to become mainstream, people were managing large archives of tracks, etc. Or, go back to the 80s and the gradual spread of digital tuning on radios. I can recall the first time I saw a car radio with a "scan" function that would play a few seconds on each station before skipping to the next. Sure, older analog tuners might have those programmable buttons that would physically shift the tuner, but digital tuning made it a lot easier to shift the station quickly (or just browse random stations) when a song that didn't sound interesting came on.
So just because Spotify is the one service mentioned in the summary doesn't mean there aren't other technological shifts over the past 30 years that might be driving changes.
Anyhow, it's not only intro to vocals that's changed. I've seen a study looking at trends in the form of songs in the past couple decades, and a much higher percentage of songs foreground a chorus or some other high-intensity section as an early "hook" in the initial part of the track. That goes against the older practice of pop songs which generally had an intro, then a verse which set the tone (and gave some exposition), then perhaps a pre-chorus to build some energy, and finally a much more dramatic chorus. A higher percentage of songs today seem to be front-loading a "hook" of more dramatic music to get listeners to stop changing tracks.
So this trend is a real thing. The structure of music IS changing in response to listening habits. (Which obviously shouldn't be surprising....)
What the heck does any of this have to do with my point?
You proposed that cell phones on planes could be used to trigger bombs. I certainly realize the limitations on this, though I thought it was obvious you would too since you brought up the scenario in the first place.
My point is that YOU brought up the "security issue" of cell phone triggering bombs, and I pointed out that criminals can ALREADY do whatever they'd theoretically do, whether there's a "ban" on in-flight use or not.
I'm even more confused by what you're talking about now. Basically, my understanding of the conversation was --
YOU: "We have security implications with terrorists who could trigger bombs with cell phones."
ME: "Well, if they figured a way to do that, couldn't they do that anyway now? Terrorists don't exactly have to follow regulations."
YOU: "Cell phones don't work well on planes anyway."
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How many of those 900 books are still relevant?
As someone who also owns over 1000 books, I'd say the vast majority of my collection is "still relevant," at least to me.
You probably have classics worth re-reading, but I bet you also have things like "Writing Java Applets in 24h With Jbuilder 3.0".
I don't tend to buy such books in the first place, if I can help it. I mostly buy physical books that I expect to last as reference works or whatever. If it's a short-term guidebook or something that will be obsolete in a couple years, I'll borrow it from a library or friend or buy a beat-up used copy and then get rid of it.
A physical library that has obsolete books is basically hoarding.
Agreed. But some people actually like reading beyond ephemeral manuals and the latest trade fiction title, and a personal library is useful for consulting standard sources on many topics. The basic knowledge in many fields doesn't change over a few years or even decades as much as programming. Admittedly, maybe 10-20% of my collection consists of books I probably will rarely if ever consult, and they aren't even obscure reference works, so I could prune them. But I will pull hundreds of my books off the shelf at some point every year.
Meanwhile the illegals can't complain about working conditions - and will work for less than minimum wage in (those occupations where it applies.)
Well, pickers are often paid by the amount they pick, rather than simply an hourly wage. The reason your average young American can't make decent money is because these are SKILLED LABOR positions. It often takes a few years of picking a particular item of produce before you get enough experience to do it most efficiently. Many pickers specialize in certain fruits or vegetables; hence why many of them are "migrant," since they follow the harvest of what they're good at.
The problem isn't that one can't earn more than minimum wage doing picking -- it's that most Americans view picking as a temporary job or summer thing that they'll do until they find something better. But you have to do it for quite some time before it becomes profitable.
You might read up on what happened in some southern states that passed laws to make it more difficult to hire illegals. They still had migrant legal workers who were pros and could make money, but most of the Americans they'd try to train would quit in a week... It's hard work, and unskilled workers can't keep up enough to make decent money.
People tend to forget that Social Security wasn't originally a retirement plan. It was an insurance plan... "Insurance" was in the name. Insurance against what? Living past the average life expectancy for the time, which was ~65. It was never designed to be for "retirement" which didn't exist for most people back then; if you lived longer than was reasonable for people to plan for at the time, the government would help you out. It's no wonder the math no longer works today when people are expecting 20+ years of retirement from it.
Yeah, you obviously haven't tried this a lot for obscure searches. For an easy way to see this, try searching for an obscure phrase enclosed in quotes in Google Books using sources from, say 1950 to 2000. Then try the search again for years 1950 to 1975. You'll likely end up with a different list of results from the years 1950-75 in the two searches. You can try this with all sorts of verbatim searches; for example, word order (outside quotes) will cause hits to appear or get dropped... Not merely differently ranked, but to disappear from the complete list of hits. I could go on with dozens of ways I've seen results added or subtracted in supposedly verbatim searches with the exact same search terms. I'll grant you the vast majority of Google users don't use it this way, but there are clearly a lot of cases where some nontrivial percentage of people would like this capability (and for it to function reliably).
Huh? My definition? I was following YOUR exceptionally narrow definition of search engine and actually trying to expand it to cover an additional decade of history. And if you re-read my post, you'll realize that at no point did I say the approach Google has taken is invalid or bad or not useful. What I said is that I don't understand why their new approach NECESSITATED breaking the old search for people who want/need it. Google is now a great tool for answering broad questions with relevant links; I never said otherwise. I find it unfortunate that it can no longer function reliably for serious research though. Not only the ranking but the actual complete list of links that show up in a search are not consistent, even with verbatim or allintext turned on.
Oh and BTW, the way you use a literal search engine with thousands or millions of results is to introduce more specific search terms to narrow your search to a reasonable number. Back then people COULD use search engines to find specific content very well that way. I used to be able to use Google to find specific pages again years later if I remembered a few specific unique words or phrases that could get me back to that specific page... I haven't been able to reliably do that in years. As you point out, that type of searching is less useful when you're doing a broader search for a vague topic and just want the "best" hits (by some metric). Early on, Google tried to combine the two, but the former approach requires search strategy and understanding how to use operators and such to get useful results in narrowing down a topic. Most internet users today never learned how to use a search engine -- they just want to type in a few vague things and expect good stuff to come up, even if it's not what they literally asked for. Google has thus decided to serve the latter crowd, though I still don't quite understand why that required them to screw up literal search for those who request it. (BTW, for those who don't know and want more literal search, verbatim on Google is really poor these days. Try the allintext: operator instead, though even that is a crapshoot was to whether the specific results you want will actually show up.)
While I guess you have a point that Pagerank was designed to deliver better results, so were all other "search engines" of the time. Pagerank was just a better algorithm than others. But by your definition all search engines back then were "answer engines," since they all were trying to rank results somehow.
The thing is: back then Google's algorithms were still based on terms actually found in the searched pages. Hence, it was still a search engine. The ranking may have been tweaked, but you were still searching for actual text and actual search terms.
Somewhere around 2005 or so, it became possible for Google to serve up top hits that no longer contained the literal search terms. At that point it ceased to be a "pure" search engine and became about trying to guess what you wanted rather than just retrieving pages with your text. As the years went by, Google deprecated and screwed up the plus operator, increasingly screwed up verbatim search until it became nonfunctional for people who just want a literal search, and incorporated "personalization" to serve up pages more like other pages you've viewed, rather than what you literally asked for.
Google hasn't been a functional search engine in about a decade.
If I'm CC'ing him, we're well past the point where I don't trust things to be going as smoothly as they should.
Exactly. If you're to the point where you need to CC an authority that doesn't need to be there, you are deliberately conveying a MESSAGE that the recipient is untrusted to complete a task or whatever.
There are other situations where it's just routine to CC a supervisor. If you get worried about those, you're just paranoid.
Very true. But each paragraph of an article also has to be verifiable.
Yes, but your previous post was about the NOTABILITY guideline. Obviously if you declare X source is not "reliable," then a paragraph with only that source can be removed.
But that has nothing to do with the notability guidelines. The entire point of your previous post was about how to pre-emptively ban an entire article through notability guidelines. As the summary notes, whether or not a particular source is "reliable" is often a judgment call. Even a "scholarly" souce can be unreliable if it's discussing information outside of its main purview. (E.g., if you're writing a paragraph on baking different types of bread, citing an academic book on Beethoven's music may not actually be a reasonable "reliable" source on bread-baking technique.)
I'm not at all making a judgment call on the Daily Mail here, just noting that judging a "reliable source" on a single sentence or something is quite a bit different from pre-emptively declaring an entire article to be non-notable for lack of ANY verifiable sources.
If your only point was "text with unreliable sources can be deleted," there was no point in even writing your previous post on notability... because basically the entire summary was about the unreliable source policy.
Wikilawyering at its best -- one policy fails, so quote another, even if it's irrelevant to the point you originally claimed to be making. I don't give a crap about Wikipedia policy guidelines, but your projection of making a pre-emptive strike at any subject matter ("ACK! This may not be notable! DELETE, DELETE, DELETE!!") is actually indicative of many editors at Wikipedia, and I think a major failing of the project. That was the MAIN point of my reply to you -- but your Wikilawyering instincts clearly took over and you chose to try to change the subject to assert your superior knowledge of the guidelines, rather than actually addressing the fact that deletionism is contributing to the ruin of Wikipedia.
Cheers!
Why do you assume the "subject" mentioned in TFS was the subject of an entire article? It could also be the only source for a "subject" of a paragraph or even a sentence within an article that has multiple sources. There are other guidelines dealing with material within an article, but notability only applies if the "subject" is an entire article. (BTW -- what you just did there? Wikilawyering. That is one of the primary reasons people hate contributing to Wikipedia. And if you're one of the deletionists -- who tend to quote notability guides most often -- you're one of the main problems with Wikipedia.)
Well, I'm not exactly in favor of such models either, but I would note in the U.S. at least that it's been quite common to bundle "workbooks" or other such course materials with textbooks for decades. Some instructors make heavy use of them, and by themselves they've often cost ~$40 in the past. In this case, apparently students can forego the $100 textbook and just pay for the "online workbook" equivalent for $40, instead of what students would do 15 years ago and have to buy the $140 textbook/workbook combo.
Also, it should be noted that many college instructors have traditionally used textbooks mostly for the standard set of exercises they can assign from them. (Which is part of the reason publishers can often so easily force the adoption of new editions, since their most common strategy is to scramble the exercises, making it difficult to use more than one edition.)
Obviously in an ideal world, I suppose every college professor would write his/her own exercises, but if you're an adjunct getting paid $1500 to teach the entire course (more common than you might think), that's a lot more work.
If you immediately know the candlelight is fire, then the meal was cooked a long time ago.
(If this experiment really measures what it claims, drop some acid, read that sentence again, and see what happens.)
Thanks for the text, though your summary doesn't quite say the same thing as the text. You said it prohibits sharing of intimate images "that were taken without consent," but what this text actually bans is sharing of intimate images where "the depicted person did not consent to the disclosure." The word "disclosure" isn't defined, but presumably it would also cover instances where the TAKING of the image was consensual but the DISTRIBUTION was NOT consensual.
People don't want to choke down 2 raw carrots and a cup of kale every day when they can slam it with some apple juice in one gulp.
Yeah, that "with some apple juice" part bugs me. It drives me a little nuts when you see those expensive "juice blends" sold at the store claiming to be full of veggies and labeled "green goodness" or "green goddess" or whatever.
Except a lot of times there's mostly high sugar apple or pear juice or whatever.
I get that most people like sweet stuff compared to savory stuff. But I think a lot of that is cultural conditioning. Stop eating a lot of products with added sugar for a while, and suddenly even a lot of vegetables start tasting "sweet" when they're ripe and fresh. It's frustrating that even the high-priced "vegetable" juice blends are mostly packaged sugar products, with a minor amount of stuff with more nutrients.
I never really got into the "juicing fad," but I did use a juicer occasionally for a while. But I rarely juiced sweet fruits -- the sweetest stuff I'd do would often be stuff like carrots. Carrot juice is actually quite sweet, sweet enough to pair with a lot of more savory or even bitter juices once you actually get used to it.
Sounds like you have a relatively unusual issue. For most of the human race, a reasonable amount of fiber (with enough liquid consumption) helps to promote digestive transit time and softens stool. If what you say is true, though, you have my sympathies for the problems it sounds like it causes you.
I have a 2-3 week travel time. Bowel movements about 1 pound (fist-sized) occur every 18-26 days.
Are you serious? Do you eat food daily? Are you on some sort of strange liquid-only diet?
Sounds like "dietary fiber sensitivity" is a thing but nobody wants to claim you can overdose on fiber.
I don't think any reasonable dietician or doctor would say you can't "overdose on fiber." But it's so incredibly rare that most people don't talk about it. But yes, if you consume massive amounts of fiber every day it can screw up nutrient absorption and other even more serious things than messing with your bowel movement. Again, given how few people even consume the "recommended" amount of fiber -- let alone excess -- it's something rarely talked about though.
And no need to go crazy on the fruit either, since most fruit is very high on sugar, and low on nutrients.
I wouldn't exactly say it's "low on nutrients," and the amount of sugar depends on the fruit. And part of the issue is how we tend to define "fruit" which is not a botanical definition but one seemingly mostly based on sweetness. If you include the varieties of botanical fruits (from cucumbers to peapods), "fruits" in general have a great variety of nutrients and aren't necessarily very sweet. And a lot of how your body processes the sugar has to do with what else you consume with it. A whole fruit at least has the fiber that regulates the digestive process a bit more.
But yeah -- if you define "fruit" as "sugary stuff" -- better to load up on more vegetables than lots of fruit in general. Still, eating whole fruit is often a lot better than eating a bunch of other junk food.
Plus, and I'm going to be called nasty things for saying this, but traffic accidents do not appear to be "way up", like they would be if smart phones were causing a ton of new accidents.
I'm not going to call you "nasty things," because you're basically right that stats don't appear to be "way up." BUT it also depends on what stats you use. You're right that "distracted driving" stats are always hard to estimate.
What we do know: overall number of crashes (including fatalities, non-fatal injuries, and property-damage-only crashes) basically had been in steady decline since the mid-1990s, when we had nearly 7 million crashes/year in the U.S. This trend lasted until ~2010, when it got down to ~5.5 million/year.
For some reason total crashes have been steadily rising again, from a low of 5.3 million in 2011 up to 6.3 million in 2015.
Granted, total number of injuries and fatalities have thankfully not been rising at the same rate (though they are rising again too), but for some reason total CRASHES have been going up quickly. (That is, particularly crashes with no significant injuries.)
The official reports say that cell phone distractions have been steadily rising, though they only claim to account for around 2% of distraction-caused accidents in 2005 rising up to 8% of distraction-caused accidents in 2015. That is obviously a significant rise in that category, but I don't know how those numbers are estimated -- and still only accounts for (according to the report) 69,000 crashes in 2015, which is only about 1% of total crashes.
But I think we need to ask -- if total crashes have risen by ~20% in the past 5 years, after >15 years of steady declines (despite increased total miles driven), why? Drunk driving numbers have generally been continuing to decline. Are drivers really just that much more reckless in general than they were a few years ago? Are the reports estimating things that poorly? Are people suddenly reporting more accidents for some reason? Or could there be some more specific reasons why we're now seeing ~1 million more crashes per year than 5 years ago?
Smart phones weren't designed for use while driving but neither were maps, kids, sleepiness, or being drunk.
Let's take those in turn, shall we?
Maps -- traditionally, most people only used these occasionally, relying on street signs, visual cues, and other general direction sense. For long trips, a lot of people would have a travel companion to use the map. And in any case, map use was usually NECESSARY to actually find your destination (which was your entire point of being in the car).
Kids -- can be horrible distractions. But again, like maps, you can't really avoid dealing with them.
Oh and most people don't really WANT to be distracted by kids and maps -- they're just forced to deal with them while driving. People WANT to look at their phones and thus seem drawn to them.
Sleepiness and being drunk -- the hallmark of bad drivers. The latter is explicitly illegal. The former is generally avoidable too, and if a cop catches you weaving and pulls you over to find you literally asleep at the wheel, you might end up with problems too.
Contrast this with phones -- which the present study says a lot of drivers use FREQUENTLY and which don't have the necessity element in most scenarios. Unlike maps (which actually get your where you're going) or kids (which can't be ignored), most of the non-mapping features of your phone use CAN be delayed. People just choose not to.
I'll finish up with " something something forest for trees."
Smartphone screens as distractions are a serious new threat. Like drunk driving and fatigue, they are not a necessary element to the driving experience and are easily avoidable... and yet people seem unable to stop using them even when doing what's pretty much the most dangerous activity most people do on a regular basis.
It's an addiction, more serious than drunk driving, because at least most people seem to recognize the dangers of drunkenness -- whereas lots of people seem to want to downplay the seriousness of the new smartphone distraction threat or, like you, just pretend "it's always been this way!" No, it hasn't. This is a new one which -- at a minimum -- ADDS to the previous potential distractions and compounds the danger.
Do the books change subtly enough from edition to edition that it would be possible to prepare a plan that would work for both the current and previous editions at the same time?
Textbook producers have long found ways around this. I mentioned exercise numbers, because that's one way they make this practice next-to-impossible.
One edition you assign problems #1-10, but in the next edition those same problems are #1, 3-4, 6, 9, 11-12, 19. Oh, except for #4 and #7 in the original edition, which have been dropped for no apparent reason and replaced with new problems. (Admittedly, in the first few editions the exercises are often edited for legitimate improvements -- clarifying them, dropping bad exercises, etc. But by the time you get to the 7th ed. or whatever, it's mostly about making it really annoying to keep using the 6th ed.)
That's just one thing they do. There are also generally various other minor differences incorporated to make it just annoying enough that it's hard to use multiple editions in the same class.
The solution is for professors to just generate their own sets of problems, rather than relying on textbook exercises. But that takes more work and is frequently one of the main reason professors choose textbooks (more for the exercises than the readings). And if it's a big lecture class that has graduate teaching assistants or whatever, it's generally easier to just point them to some answer guide that is provided by the textbook publisher or whatever, rather than having to write up detailed solutions to explain to the TAs.
There are various ways around this stuff for professors who want to do the work. But a lot of those ways end up defeating some of the main points of using a standard textbook in the first place.
They were trying to monetize access to basic data and got under cut by a competitor who did it cheaper and more customer friendly. If your webtraffic can be decimated by customers receiving a one sentence answer to their question the problem may have been your business model, not Google.
There's a very flawed assumption here, which is that "basic data" and "one sentence answers" are always inherently easy to gather, and there's no significant time or monetary investment needed to do so.
That's obviously false. There's loads of non-trivial data out there which isn't available in something like a free government database or Wikipedia or whatever. It may take significant effort or resources to gather that data. I have no idea how much effort this particular site put into its data gathering, but clearly if Google is using it as a primary source for its "snippets," it must either not be available easily elsewhere for free or other sources are less reliable.
Thus, the site is apparently providing some value by gathering information that others don't.
Whether this can be turned into a viable business model is of course a separate question, but acting like Google is blameless by just TAKING that data and reusing it without permission is -- well, Google is certainly morally suspect at a minimum here. If businesses like this can't make money gathering such data, who will gather the data?
(Note that I really don't care about celebrity net worth, so I really couldn't care less if this data went ungathered. But the model applies to lots of other potentially useful information.)
If tipping is done like in the Lyft app, then you're tipping after you've already left the car so there is actually less pressure to tip.
This is one of the things I tend to hate about cab tipping, as opposed to other services. (Tipping in general is of course annoying too; I wish people were actually just paid reasonably for their services.)
Anyhow, in most services, you tip as you are leaving the transaction (or the service person is leaving). In a cab, particularly if you are paying by card, you're often forced to tip before you even get out of the car -- frequently handing back the credit card thing to the driver, where he prints out your receipt with tip listed and hands it to you. If you have bags in the trunk or whatever, will the driver treat you the same if you don't tip well? And even if you wanted to tip in cash, it's awkward, because you generally do the transaction in the car for payment before those final parts of service are rendered (opening your door, taking out bags, etc.) -- and if you don't tip until after all of that is complete, the driver may be thinking you're a cheapskate because you haven't tipped already.
It's really awkward.
If they pick a percentage/sum by default I think they should be forced to advertise prices with that service fee though.
I'm not sure I've ever encountered a situation where that wasn't the case that a service fee was posted or discussed in advance. If you have a party of over X number of a people at a restaurant (usually 6-8 or more), menus or signs will often say there's a service charge included. If you order room service at a hotel, the menu will generally say X% service charge will be added to the cost.
However, in an ideal world, posted prices should simply include those fees, rather than designating them separately on top of the price. The only reason I assume they do so is actually to signal that an additional tip isn't necessary, which I actually appreciate given the U.S. tendency toward tipping everywhere.
If this is the reason students are spending $1200 pa, why don't community colleges design their courses around last year's textbooks (which are presumably available for much less)? Very few fields of study change significantly from year to year.
As someone who has taught at the college level, I can tell you that most professors would be thrilled to do this. Unfortunately, it only really works for a year or two. The first year after a new edition comes out, there may be sufficient stock left to source a decent amount of textbooks (though they'll still be nearly full price).
The second year, you're down to mostly used copies. But the used textbook market is unreliable. You can probably get away with using the old edition for that second year, because used textbook stocks may be reliable enough. But after that, it gets harder -- the bookstore may not be able to reliably source a lot of copies. If you go on Amazon or whatever, you'll end up buying from 3rd-party sellers who often don't pay detailed attention to textbooks... resulting in inaccuracies for listings. You'll get the student who comes in and says, "I know the current edition is 7th, and you want to use 6th -- I ordered a 6th from a used seller, but they sent me the 5th edition! Can I use it?"
A large number of students don't sell textbooks back, particularly if they already bought them used and it's an old edition that they won't make much money off of. So the used market dries up after a couple years.
And most textbooks (except in very active fields) aren't actually releasing new editions EVERY year. Instead, it's often every 3 or 4 or 5 years, which is long enough to "dry up" any used market and force everyone to upgrade.
Believe me -- I know there are always plenty of stories of professors who teach from their own books and want to make loads of money. But the majority of professors don't write textbooks, and they're often happy to stay on a consistent edition (and save students money). Who wants to update course materials to take into account all the exercise numbers changing from edition to edition, the minor rearrangements of text, etc., etc.?
They are attributing a 30-year trend to a company founded 10 years ago? Get this drivel off the front page please.
I don't see anything in the summary or TFA that says there is a steady 30-year trend. It's just comparing conventions now to what they were a few decades ago. I'd assume the guy has some data showing a more marked shift or acceleration in recent years that corresponds to his trend.
Also, note that technology hasn't only been shifting for the past 10 years. I knew people 20+ years ago who were accessing massive archives of mp3s on communal servers and choosing what to access, what to download for themselves, etc. You don't think they were making decisions on the basis of a few seconds of listening? Only a few years later, mp3 players started to become mainstream, people were managing large archives of tracks, etc. Or, go back to the 80s and the gradual spread of digital tuning on radios. I can recall the first time I saw a car radio with a "scan" function that would play a few seconds on each station before skipping to the next. Sure, older analog tuners might have those programmable buttons that would physically shift the tuner, but digital tuning made it a lot easier to shift the station quickly (or just browse random stations) when a song that didn't sound interesting came on.
So just because Spotify is the one service mentioned in the summary doesn't mean there aren't other technological shifts over the past 30 years that might be driving changes.
Anyhow, it's not only intro to vocals that's changed. I've seen a study looking at trends in the form of songs in the past couple decades, and a much higher percentage of songs foreground a chorus or some other high-intensity section as an early "hook" in the initial part of the track. That goes against the older practice of pop songs which generally had an intro, then a verse which set the tone (and gave some exposition), then perhaps a pre-chorus to build some energy, and finally a much more dramatic chorus. A higher percentage of songs today seem to be front-loading a "hook" of more dramatic music to get listeners to stop changing tracks.
So this trend is a real thing. The structure of music IS changing in response to listening habits. (Which obviously shouldn't be surprising....)
What the heck does any of this have to do with my point?
You proposed that cell phones on planes could be used to trigger bombs. I certainly realize the limitations on this, though I thought it was obvious you would too since you brought up the scenario in the first place.
My point is that YOU brought up the "security issue" of cell phone triggering bombs, and I pointed out that criminals can ALREADY do whatever they'd theoretically do, whether there's a "ban" on in-flight use or not.
I'm even more confused by what you're talking about now. Basically, my understanding of the conversation was --
YOU: "We have security implications with terrorists who could trigger bombs with cell phones."
ME: "Well, if they figured a way to do that, couldn't they do that anyway now? Terrorists don't exactly have to follow regulations."
YOU: "Cell phones don't work well on planes anyway."
HUH??