I think that's what I said. The move to Unity "dethroned Ubuntu from the top distro position." My post was just clarifying that Mint was not a "tiny" distro before that -- it may have been as high as #3 earlier, so hardly a minor player.
Ubuntu, in the early days, was Debian made easy. You could download and install an early Ubuntu release in about the same time it took you to decide which Debian CDs you needed, and what you probably wanted to install.
Hmm... that must've been in the VERY "early days." I remember trying out Ubuntu in 2006 and found it still to be a pain to even get basic things going. I owned one of the most popular Dell monitors on the market with one of the most popular and basic video cards sold in a standard Dell business desktop (which was not even a new model), and I was writing my config files manually just to get the display resolutions to work.
Anyhow, I was distrohopping a bit at the time, and I decided to give Debian a try again. (I hadn't used it since the late '90s.) Anyhow, while setting up X was probably about the same as Ubuntu, I immediately gravitated toward Debian, which seemed to (relatively) "just work." Ubuntu had bleeding-edge nonsense that broke audio, media playing, and such. Debian was much more stable: it may have required the explicit installation of proprietary stuff, but when it was installed, it seemed to work much more consistently than Ubuntu..
Rather than "Debian made easy," it seemed more like "Debian made broken." (Not surprising given then Ubuntu was based on the experimental branches of Debian software. And I was NOT a big Debian supporter before Ubuntu, so I have nothing invested in this...)
Point is -- we can debate the relative merits of the Ubuntu philosophy, but Debian was not significantly harder to install even in the early years of Ubuntu. I don't remember what Debian install was like back in the early 2000s, but if they changed things to compete with Ubuntu, those changes were pretty fast (particularly relative to the general snail-pace of Debian stable releases at the time).
Ubuntu came along and managed to make an installer that really worked, and a casual user could pop into a CD drive and install without any command-line intervention. The rest was history.
Well, sort of. Ubuntu certainly got a lot closer to that sort of experience, but it wasn't a decade ago. I still tried installing it on stock computers from major manufacturers 5 years ago and would have to go through command line hoops to get some stuff working.
Mint pulled ahead of Ubuntu around this time because (at least in my experience) it was even more focused on the casual user experience. Even when it got the hardware right, Ubuntu presented you with broken media plugins and such. Mint just focused on a polished product, and it didn't hesitate to use proprietary drivers/plugins to make things work when the open-source versions still weren't stable. While giving up some of the idealistic "purity" of Ubuntu, Mint made setup easier and more stable... which most desktop/laptop computer users want.
The whole reason Mint is so popular now is because of Unity; before that, Mint was a tiny derivative of Ubuntu, but then Unity and Gnome3 both came out and pissed everyone off, and Mint launched two projects that were Gnome2 derivatives, and tons of users switched from Ubuntu to Mint in response.
Mint wasn't exactly a "tiny derivative of Ubuntu" before Unity. It's always difficult to estimate these things, but the data of page hits over at Distrowatch puts Mint in the #3 spot of all Linux distros in 2008-2010 (pre-Unity). This analysis written in 2010 shows Mint as the rising star of the newer distros. Here's another page from early 2010 asking whether Mint had finally "killed distrohopping."
So, Mint was definitely having a meteoric rise BEFORE Unity. Unity was just the final thing that dethroned Ubuntu from the top distro spot when a lot of users abandoned Ubuntu. But many Linux users had already figured out that Mint was a lot easier and made the switch in the years before.
The best proof we have for it so far is that if it isn't there the model [which we have created based on our observations of the universe] we use doesn't work.
So... that'd be like... science, then?
THIS.
Not only that, but the entire concept of modern science is predicated on mathematical models of phenomena that can't be observed directly or explained in detail (at least at first).
Our classic history story of the Scientific Revolution often misses this point. We have this vision of people like Copernicus and Kepler and Galileo standing up against ignorant buffoons who refuse to recognize empiricism. But that wasn't it. Scientists had been doing empirical observation for thousands of years. Scientists after Copernicus rapidly (late 1500s) started looking for evidence of the earth's motion -- like stellar parallax and coriolis "forces." They couldn't measure any, and they ultimately weren't measured until the 1800s. That was a major impediment to the heliocentric theory.
But another one was Aristotle's theory of physics, which was wrapped up in detailed explanations of "causes" for everything. And everything in the universe had its "natural place" -- terrestrial matter was assumed to always come to rest, because that's what empirical observation shows us.
If the earth was in some sort of perpetual motion, what caused it? What maintained it? Why didn't the earth fly out of its orbit? Why couldn't we seem to measure it?
The first three questions were answered when Newton's theory of universal gravitation came along. There was this magical unseen force called "gravity," which kept the universe in order.
Many scientists, who believed solidly in empiricism, were highly skeptical of Newton's "occult" forces. (The word "occult" comes from the Latin meaning "hidden" or "unseen," and "occult" phenomena such as unseen forces like magnetism and gravity were associated with "magic" in the 1600s -- not "science" as we understand it.)
Newton responded to his critics by publishing an addendum to later editions of his Principia (usually known as the "General Scholium") which basically said, "Yeah -- those weird invisible 'forces'? I admit they might not be real. But the point is that the math works out, and thus this can be a model for scholarly investigation, even if we can't observe these forces directly or attribute an Aristotelean 'cause' to them."
THAT was really the crux of the Scientific Revolution. Many scientists came to accept Newton's theory, even before the first empirical evidence of heliocentrism (stellar aberration) was measured in the mid-1700s. The math worked, and thus the "model" worked. Even if we couldn't explain all the details, that was now "science."
The history of science after Newton is filled with stories of theories about stuff we couldn't observe directly (electrical charges, atom models, etc.), but which we assumed to exist because they were consistent with the math and the empirical observation. It's also filled with apparent "failures" of invisible things like phlogiston and luminiferous ether.
But those weren't really "failures" of science. They were theories based on rational empirical observation -- they may have lasted a little longer than they should have, but when they were first posited, they were reasonable explanations of what might be going on.
We STILL don't have a complete explanation for how the invisible force of gravity works. But it's well-accepted part of science. Dark matter is no different. Maybe someday it will go the way of phlogiston, but right now it's one of the best explanations around. The fact that dark matter was invented to serve a place in a mathematical explanatory model is the very definition of modern science.
2. There is a growing, serious problem with reviews submitted people who've been given a product discount and "asked" to write a review. Interestingly, they apparently are required to state that fact in the review itself, which makes it easier for me to flag all such reviews as "unhelpful".
3. Amazon has its own ludicrous program for sending free products to people expressly so they'll review the items ("Vine", I think). These are also well worthy of being flagged as unhelpful, which I try to do whenever I'm exposed to them. Come on, Amazon... I only want to hear the experiences of people who purchased the product because they needed / wanted it. I couldn't care less about the opinion of someone who received the product just because they're considered a good reviewer in general - what a dumb concept!
Huh?
So, according to your logic, ALL traditional reviews of products that existed before the internet are a "dumb concept"? Things like Consumer Reports are a "dumb concept"? (Or do you think that the employees at Consumer Reports spend their own private money for the products they review?? They need to buy all of them?)
There may be many things to criticize about the Vine program and similar programs. For example, I have heard (though I haven't seen this verified) that Vine reviewers are often selected not just because they tend to write "helpful" reviews, but because they tend to write disproportionately POSITIVE reviews.
It would be like a magazine hiring a movie critic because he tended to give 4 and 5 stars to EVERY film he saw. Obviously that's dumb, and we should criticize things like that.
But the general concept of sending an educated person a product for free and asking them what they think? That's how ALL traditional reviews basically work. I've never received a free product from Amazon or anything, but I HAVE written book reviews for professional journals based on books I received for free. I'm generally asked to review them because (1) I'm an expert in the field and (2) I have written quality reviews and articles in the past.
Do you think it's unethical for me to do this?
In general, the idea of sending people free stuff to review is that they are MORE likely to look at the product from an unbiased perspective. When you look at reviews from people who only "purchased the product because they needed / wanted it," you tend to get disproportionately positive reviews as long as the product satisfies a minimal standard for most people. They needed a thing, and if that thing does the basics, they're happy -- it the thing didn't do the basics, they wouldn't have ordered it. Also, they probably were already biased in favor of the brand or specific type of product in choosing it. A reviewer who receives a product he/she didn't ask for instead has to ask, "Is this actually something I would find useful at all? Does it have interesting features? Should anyone else buy it?"
Again, I'm NOT saying the Amazon Vine program necessarily achieves these goals well or in an unbiased manner. But I think your idea that we should discount reviews from everyone who didn't NEED that specific product is ludicrous.
There were violent strikes and sabotage of the port facilities during that time. Goes to show that when you kick over somebody's rice bowl, no matter how much better you might be making things, you're going to get pushback. A lesson that still applies, these days for the Uber economy.
It's funny, because I think you overlook the odd commonalities between the old-fashioned stevedore model and the Uber model.
Both of them are based on an idea that having a steady job with consistent employees is unnecessary. It's obviously cheaper to hire people on demand.
The traditional model for stevedores were guys who'd show up at the docks every morning and just HOPE they might get enough work that day to get paid and go home and feed their families. That just depended on whether the shipping schedules and amount of goods happened to be enough to support them.
The life of a lot of these guys was terrible -- they worked hard, when they could, but they had no job security at all... since they had no "job," per se. If they had an unlucky accident and hurt their backs or whatever, they could be out on the street begging.
Then, at some point, through strikes workers' rights movements, the stevedores finally achieved REAL jobs.
Ironically, the "Uber economy" you favor is heading toward putting its "contract workers" (people who struggle to cobble together enough part-time work to live) back in the same place that the stevedores were before unions... standing on the docks, hoping that enough ships come in today to feed the family.
(P.S. I'm not arguing in favor of corrupt unions, nor am I celebrating destructive stevedore protests. But I think we need to realize why those stevedores were so upset to lose their jobs... those were hard-won concessions that they fought to get out of an "Uber economy" model, because it made their lives miserable.)
Well, there's a bit more to it than that. "Art" allows any expressive medium, and so indeed games can be art to the extent they convey artistic intent.
That's certainly one definition of "Art," which owes a debt to the values of German Romantic philosophers of the 19th century. It frequently tends to show up these days in extreme form from pretentious people who like to shout, "But I am an artist!"
In the real world, "Art" is defined by culture, not by someone's capacity for "artistic intent." There are plenty of people in the world who want to "express" themselves in their "art," but no one pays any attention to them because what these "artists" are doing seems weird or obnoxious or even insane to most people. In essence, there is a failure to communicate. Art is a cultural product that requires both a creator and an audience who can find this "expressive" stuff which you talk about and can value it.
Collectively, we recognize "Art" in things that we are taught to see aesthetic meaning in. Other people may practice trades that require just as much skill and have just as much potential for "expression" (whatever that means), but they are seen as "tradesmen" or "craftsmen" or whatever in society.
We need only go back in history to see this used to be the case for just about everything we call "Art" today. The transitions happened at different times. The painters of the 15th century were "craftsmen" in guilds, often creating objects like altarpieces which would be displayed in churches for liturgical ceremonies or for remembrance of certain people in masses. They followed standard schemes of representing saints, etc. beside their patrons. Yet today we view them as "Artists," though we don't often think of their fellow craftsmen in the same way -- who were sewing the gilded alter cloths or vestments, who were making the jeweled chalice, who were building the organs, etc. At some point, a century or two later painting made the transition from "craft" to "Art' (with a capital A).
Instrumental music made this transition in the first few decades of the 1800s. If you read German philosophers of the late 1700s, instrumental music was classified in the same aesthetic league as wallpaper. (I'm serious -- that's what Kant said, for example.) It was something pleasant for a rich dude to have going on in the background at a fancy party, but no one would really pay attention to instrumental music and view it as "Art" (with a capital A), right?
And then along comes Beethoven and his symphonies. Suddenly a number of philosophers and critics thought his music was awesome (often in the literal sense -- inspiring awe). Within decades people were studying instrumental scores of symphonies at home and critiquing them as "Art."
This kind of Romanticist aesthetic and the myth of the "artistic genius" whose intent drives the great creative act is basically what we've inherited as the defining characteristic of "Art." But on another level, it's all a bunch of made-up nonsense.
Take landscape photography. Is that art? It wasn't in the early 20th century. Now it sort of is. But certainly it requires less skill and craft to take a shot of a sunrise over a lake than it does to skilfully restore an old historic house with a good paint job (to take your example of the house painter). It's one thing to "slap a coat of paint on" in a haphazard fashion, but good housepainters -- and particularly those who do restoration work -- are sometimes capable of amazing feats of meticulous and detailed work. But people happily view landscape photography as artistic, and perhaps even "Art," while the house painter is stuck as a "craftsman" at best, if not just a "laborer."
You have a point about the "expressive medium" -- but that's mostly a problem of the audience, not the intent of the creator. Most people just don't have the skill or the interest to appreciate the workings of someone who restores paint on historic houses, for e
Electric cars easily get 150% of the EPA range at traffic jam speeds of 30-50 MPH.
I'm not sure you understand the definition of the word "jam," which implies something is halted or stopped or nonfunctional ("that machine is jammed!").
While I've heard the word applied to stop-and-go traffic where the average speed might be 5-15 mph or so, if your average speed is over 30 mph, I can pretty definitely say that you're NOT in a traffic "jam." You may be cruising in heavy traffic. Oh, and most people would probably consider the upper range of your numbers (50 mph) to BE "highway speed," hardly a traffic jam.
You base it on the fact that the costs of basic necessities is a greater percentage of a working income than it ever has been.
No it isn't. Basic necessities cost a lot less today than they ever have!
20 years ago, a working man could pay for his rent with one week's salary. Now on the average it costs 2 weeks or more... and that's before you've paid for other necessties such as food, utilities, and car payments and gasoline.
Housing cost is about the only thing that has gone up on average in people's budgets, and that hasn't doubled -- it's gone from about 23% to 32% in the past century or so. Meanwhile, we pay a tiny fraction of what we used to on necessities like food and clothing.
And if you want to talk about the poor, well, yeah, they still pay a higher percentage on food for example than rich people. But the poorest 20% pay on average about 16% of their budget on food today -- 100 years ago, the AVERAGE household (including poor, rich, and middle class) spent about 42% of its budget on food alone!
Yes -- rent costs have gone up, and that's a problem. But the costs of almost all other necessities has spiralled down, for poor as well as rich.
I can't find anything amazing in daily life that would have changed.
I think you missed GP's point about various other regions around the world. Sure, if we skim off what we consider to be the "best" or "most developed" technology from various regions of Europe, there may not have been a lot of advances.
Regardless, social advances are important too. So are political ones. In your chosen time frame, you had Charlemagne making the first pass at consolidating political power in Europe for centuries. He (and his heirs) enacted reforms that greatly changed life. You had the spread of Christianity more widely in many parts of Europe. You had the rise of the papal structure.
Or if you don't like politics or religion -- how about education? The first universities came into being during the period you reference. And with them, new debates, new ideas -- things really got going in the late 1100s and 1200s on the intellectual scale, of course. (Long before most people start talking about the "Renaissance.")
I'll grant you that in many aspects of everyday life, this was not a particularly great period of technological development overall for Europe. But sometimes the mechanisms for technological development need social, political, and educational development before they can start happening. And those changes definitely were occurring during this period -- that should not be overlooked. Technology is only one manifestation of societal development.
Nobel didn't originally accept economics as a science either
Two questions:
(1) Do you think Nobel thought Literature was a science?
(2) When John Harvard willed his library to the new college in Cambridge, it was basically a divinity school. That divinity college adopted his name. Does that mean that any person with a degree from Harvard other than divinity doesn't really have a "Harvard degree"?
Or...
Could it possibly be that people lump the economics prize together with the others because of the institution that awards it (under the same general nomination and selection criteria, with judges drawn from the same general pool of scholars -- i.e., the Royal Swedish Academy -- at the same ceremony)?
(P.S. I don't really care whether economics is considered a "science." I just think these arguments over whether this thing is "really a Nobel" are stupid and meaningless in terms of determining the legitimacy or "science-like character" of an entire field. I'm not willing to grant Alfred Nobel's random wishes in his will that kind of power over defining "science." Are you?)
We're seeing changes now, no different than the many other changes that came before. Misogyny is just the new homophobia/racism/antisemitism/whatever.
Uh, you do realize that criticism of misogyny has been going on for over a century, right? There's nothing "new" about it, and the quest for women's rights goes back before homosexual rights and recognition of anti-Semitism as a significant problem, etc.
There's a reason people often refer to current developments as third-wave feminism, which itself is a movement over 25 years old. The problem is -- like racism and antisemitism, etc. -- outlawing discrimination (as mostly happened in 1st and 2nd wave feminism) doesn't actually stamp out bigotry completely. Instead, such sentiment is driven underground... or, as you put it, into places like Slashdot and other tiny corners of the internet.
Just to be clear -- I wasn't praising Siri's ability (or any other system's ability) to comprehend anything. The AI for being able to deal with real-world language and intelligent response is still likely a long way off, despite periodic predictions that good AI will be arriving soon.
But basic speech recognition? My Google tablet makes fewer errors when I dictate than when I manually input text on an Apple device and it helpfully "autocorrects" my correct text to say things I didn't want to.
Maybe that's the Apple strategy -- make autocorrect so bad and have it screw up your manual input so much that you'll think any voice recognition program (even if flawed) is magic!
It's possible - you don't really need to make the AI any smarter if you can just make the "consumers" dumber instead.
That's funny. And it's actually one of TFA's predictions:
By 2018, 50% of the fastest-growing companies will have fewer smart employees than instances of smart machines. These machines are easy to replicate and there will be a lot more of them.
One way to read this is that the machines will be easier to replicate. Another way to read this prediction is that companies will just stop paying a premium to hire smart people and just listen to dumb "smart" machines instead, while hiring a bunch of mindless worker drones. Actually, that's what TFA goes on to imply:
Smart systems, for example, will be analyzing how a factory is being run, or deciding whether people are completing a task at an appropriate speed.
So in other words, all we're left with is a bunch of mindless "factory" workers "completing a task" within an allotted time, and their mechanical overloads. I guess we're going to replace most mid-level management with "smart machines" to make ridiculous decisions about efficiency on the basis of bad metrics? I suppose it can't be much worse than current management practice at many companies.
Because voice recognition - just for starters - hasn't come on much in the last twenty years.
Huh? Did you actually use voice recognition 20 years ago?
I still remember the first time I tried a voice recognition program -- sometime around 1990. It had a VERY limited vocabulary. It required hours and hours of training even to recognize that for a particular speaker. Additional words could be trained, but it was annoying... and the thing just didn't work, despite the claims that it would make your life so much easier. That was 25 years ago.
I remember 10 years ago when I got a convertible ultraportable computer, which had whatever tablet version of Windows was around at that time. It claimed that the voice recognition was so much better. I tried it -- and although it required training to get better accuracy, the range of vocabulary was adequate. But it still made annoying errors all over the place.
I remember about 5 years ago when a friend suggested I try out the current version of Dragon, since he said he was finally making use of it for short emails and whatever. (He had an infant at the time, and it was convenient for times when he was busy doing other things and typing was inconvenient.) I tried it -- and it was a huge improvement over even 5 years before. Still had some errors, but a LOT better, even without training.
Then I bought a Nexus tablet last year. I saw Google's advertisement about its voice recognition. I tried it and dictated a couple paragraphs of text FLAWLESSLY -- with no training, even got a number of proper names and such correct.
I don't use Siri very often, so I don't know what she knows. But Google's voice recognition is pretty astounding compared to where things were 10 years ago, and simply magical compared to 20 years ago.
However, you've not saved time or effort, you still have to double-check everything before it goes out (and inevitably on a computer because the devices aren't even close to being able to be controlled by voice - "Oh, no, change that word elephant to giraffe, please") and the accuracy in any real-world environment or using anything other than very basic phrasing SUCKED.
Yes -- that's the reason I still haven't started using it myself regularly. You actually have to LEARN to dictate well -- it requires new speech habits (and dedicated speech recognition software does have adequate control mechanisms for correction etc., once you get used to it), and typing works so well for me that I don't have a strong motivation to learn that skill yet.
I agree with you that using speech recognition for an entire report seems stupid, unless you had a kid with a disability or something. There's a certain kind of reflective thought and interactivity that goes into longer sections of writing which I have found is just harder to do while dictating. But for short messages or emails or memos or whatever? People have been doing that for on tape for secretaries for many decades... and voice recognition is now up to the task. (If you type slowly, it could definitely be faster to dictate and make a few corrections nowadays.)
Just to be clear -- I misread a portion of the abstract dealing with "quartiles," but looking at the press release, it's clear my point (6) was wrong. (My other 5 points still stand.)
On the other hand, I'd like to make sure the findings are robust across other divisions of the data -- looking only at the "worst quartile" could potentially skew things as well. Does the correlation still hold if we look at the worst 1/3, etc.?
Exactly. What they've done is managed to replicate this study that socioeconomic factors impact premature births by finding something that correlates with low socioeconomic status and then not adjusting for it.
You conveniently left out the part of the abstract when it says they controlled for "potential confounding variables," which usually includes income and such.
(Note that I've already posted a detailed comment that points out various potential questions we should raise about this analysis. BUT, I'd say it's highly likely that the researchers DID control for socioeconomic factors -- unfortunately I can't be certain because of the paywall -- but basically all studies of this sort usually do. If they didn't, they'd be complete idiots.)
Science doesn't start with explaining the mechanisms behind unexplained phenomena - it starts with confimring that there *are* unexplained phenomena and then searching for the mechanisms.
This may be so. So let's look at the study's "confirmation" of "unexplained phenomena," shall we? Oh wait -- the study is behind a paywall, so I guess we'll just use what they tell us in the abstract:
In adjusted models, there was an association between unconventional natural gas development activity and preterm birth that increased across quartiles, with a fourth quartile odds ratio of 1.4 (95% confidence interval = 1.0, 1.9). There were no associations of activity with Apgar score, small for gestational age birth, or term birth weight (after adjustment for year).
Translation: We looked for 4 things, and only 1 thing was statistically significant. Even for the worst quartile (i.e., that with the most drilling), the effect was only an odds ratio of 1.4, though we have 95% confidence that it was between 1.0 and 1.9.
Let's note a few things here:
(1) Odds ratios are not the same as relative risk, which is the more intuitive way of understanding stats. If a study finds a relative risk of 2 for factor X, that means your chances of getting a condition with factor X are twice as much as if you didn't have X. A relative risk of 1.4 means a 40% increase in risk. Odds ratios are more complex and are used for various statistical reasons, but they often tend to exaggerate an effect -- and it's unclear from this abstract what the actual increased risk is. But it's likely less than the 40% listed in TFS.
(2) Statistically, they have a 95% confidence interval of 1.0 to 1.9. An odds ratio of 1.0 means there is no effect at all. Which means that there's probably a 5% chance the actual effect is outside of this range, possibly down to 1.0 (where there is no effect). The "no effect" line is drawn here where it's barely statistically significant (according to the typical 95% standard) for preterm birth.
(3) The study was a "retrospective cohort" study, which means that they looked at pre-existing data (rather than a "prospective cohort" which would look at a control group and a study group going forward in future). There are always dangers here in selecting a sample group that happens to line up with your analysis, since you get to pick the group you want. (Since I can't read the rest of the study, I don't know how "selective" they were in choosing which areas to study, for example.)
(4) The phrase "adjusted models" refers to earlier in the abstract where they talk about the various adjustments made for possible confounding variables and such. They also had a complex model for determining potential exposure based on "an inverse-distance squared model that incorporated distance to the mother's home; dates and durations of well pad development, drilling, and hydraulic fracturing; and production volume during the pregnancy." If that model is tweaked in various ways, it could probably completely change the study results.
Anyhow, while such adjustments are important for modelling and confounding factors, they can be manipulated (often unintentionally) by researchers in all sorts of ways.
(5) They looked for FOUR things, but they only found a statistically significant effect for ONE of them. The chances of finding at least 1 out of 4 things to satisfy a 95% threshold is about 18.5%. So if they threw in random numbers here, at least one of these things would "flag positive" in nearly 1 out of 5 times.
(6) The abstract only reports the "worst quartile" as having this (already barely) statistically significant effect. Apparently other times of the year these effects were reduced (and possibly didn't even hit the barely statistically significant effect for the worst quartile)... which then leads to the question about how a 4-month window in a study may
A symbolic logic class would be a good idea for all programmers.
A formal logic class (whether heavy on symbols or not) would be a good idea for everyone.
We can all debate how some people just have an "aptitude" for coding and people who don't, and people who just happen to have a certain kind of "intellect" and others who don't. Getting to a high skill level in programming is obviously just not a reasonable goal for most people, nor should it be.
But we could all benefit from being able to think through a problem using logic. Various tests that have been done with the general population tend to show that most people are abysmal at evaluating formal logical arguments.
We used to teach that sort of reasoning in various ways. Geometry classes used to do more formal proofs. Classical languages (especially Latin) were taught in an ahistorical way that turns them into a weird sort of logic exercise in assembling and deducing the meaning of a long convoluted sentence. (I don't think that's a good method for learning actual Latin, but it worked as a logic exercise.)
We used to test it too -- IQ tests had a big portion of it, and the GRE had a whole "analytical" section devoted to logic problems. The SAT used to have "quantitative comparisons" in the math section that required the evaluation and comparison of things in an abstract way, rather than following a simple formula/algorithm to get a precise answer. The verbal section used to have analogies, and one component to understanding how they work is thinking in terms of logic: "If A, then B..." -- how does that relate to a similar relationship "if C, then...."
Etc.
We've gradually moved training and tests in logic out of our school curricula and replaced them with rote learning and step-by-step algorithms. There's a lot of talk in educational reform about "thinking on a higher level," but the reality is that one fundamental skill toward "thinking on a higher level" is being trained in HOW TO THINK.
That's logic. Whether we're going to use a formal logic class or geometry proofs or well-designed coding exercises doesn't really matter. The fact is that most people can get better at thinking logically... if they had any training in it. But we assume that it's a skill that people should just "pick up" -- except most people simply don't. (And this has serious repercussions in terms of people's abilities to evaluate public policy arguments, to be taken in by politicians' or religious wackos' nonsense... etc., etc.)
I personally don't think a required coding course is the answer. But this is part of a bigger problem, and it's not getting better.
I'd much rather see home economics be a requirement again, and bring in some lessons on compound interest, savings, and why gambling and money lenders suck
Actually, this should be taught in a math class. Most states require three years of high-school mathematics for graduation -- generally including at least Algebra I, Geometry, and an elective (which is often encouraged to be a second year of Algebra).
What POSSIBLE excuse is there for any person to graduate high school in this country without understanding the BASIC MATH needed to survive in this world?? -- that includes understanding interest and its relationship to investments, understanding and being able to evaluate loan and credit terms, having the basic competence to design a household budget/operate a basic balance sheet... and do your own taxes (at least for most common situations). Etc.
And to be clear -- I'm not just speaking as a random person here. I once taught high school math for a couple years. I had about ~140 seniors and juniors in my Algebra II classes one year. (And these were not "honors" or "Pre-AP" level, so for most of these kids, it would be the last math class they would ever take in their lives.)
About halfway through the year, I tried to randomly use an example of compound interest, thinking it might be a familiar concept. I discovered only 2 out of my 140 students knew what compound interest was or how it impacted savings or loans or whatever.
At that point, I decided it was my moral duty as a math teacher to say "to heck with the state curriculum" and spend a few weeks going over basic math skills that young people need to survive in the world.
I completely agree with you that we need to teach basic "home economics" in the sense of the basic math one needs to run a household. And it is mostly very SIMPLE applications of the kind of stuff we're sort of teaching in math already... rather than spending 6 weeks on conic section equations (as my state Algebra II curriculum said I should) for a bunch of kids who will never take more math in their lives, why not teach them something they NEED which actually is often related to other types of equations we were working with?!
I really have no clue why this isn't mandatory everywhere -- and it should start being taught in middle school. It will have a bigger impact on 90+% of students' lives than any other math they will learn... they might actually have a fighting chance of not ending up in a consumer debt spiral out of ignorance. (Some will still end up there, but at least they'll know they're making decisions that could put them there.)
MOOC is not a commonly used term. The ones you mentioned are. Do you understand the difference?
You are correct that it isn't exactly the most common term.
But it's sort of weird how EVERY TIME this acronym comes up on Slashdot (and it's pretty often), there is this same flamewar over how nobody seems to know what it means. To wit:
This is why I'm seriously advocating that the weight of one's vote should be proportional to his knowledge + intelligent. People should be asked to take a test and the weight of their individual votes should depend on how well they do on the test.
The problem with proposals like this is that whoever is in power will design the "test" to disenfranchise other people. In case you're unaware, poll "tests" were common in the U.S. in the late 1800s and early 1900s: they were widely used to prevent black people from voting in many areas. The "tests" claimed to be about literacy or whatever, but they were made arbitrarily difficult so that blacks couldn't pass. In fact, whites couldn't pass either, but they were literally "grandfathered" in (i.e., if their grandfather who was eligible to vote, they didn't have to take the test... blacks mostly had slaves for grandfathers, so they wouldn't have been eligible to vote -- this is where the phrase comes from).
Anyhow, if we were to reinstate some sort of poll test, it may not be used to disenfranchise according to racial lines, but you can be sure that whoever is in power will find a way to stop others from voting or to make their vote count less. It's probably impossible to design a system that couldn't be manipulated once you start disenfranchising people. Who gets to define the relevant "knowledge"? How do we measure " intelligence"?
For example, "literally" has now come to mean "figuratively", due to the excessive hyperbole that most people seem to engage in these days.A complete reversal of meaning which seems stupid to me.
Just to be clear here, by "now come to mean," you are referring to about 150 years ago, correct? That's roughly when people started complaining about how "everyone" was misusing "literally" to mean its opposite.
It's unclear why the pedants are so up in arms about "literally." There are plenty of other examples of similar words that shifted to their opposite. For example, "apparent/apparently" and "probable/probably." To Shakespeare, an "apparent villain" was someone who was clearly a villain -- it was obvious. To us, an "apparent villain" is someone who usually is NOT a villain, but maybe appears to be so at first glance. To Shakespeare, something that was "probable" was able to be clearly proved, i.e., it was certain to be the truth. To us, something that is "probable" is likely but definitely uncertain.
It's weird once you actually start investigating which words the "grammar squad" decides to go after. Most of these things originated with people who randomly started bitching about certain words back in the mid-to-late 1800s. Some common usages were fine, others were singled out to be deplored. Who knows why....
(By the way, I don't use "literally" to mean "figuratively," which strikes me as a bit silly too. But that's only because one can still use "literally" to mean "literally." If it ceases to mean that in most contexts, I'll just stop using the word altogether.)
So yeah, it does happen. But as a cranky old word-Luddite, I'd prefer to use "devastated" in place of 'decimated'.
I personally avoid using the word "decimate" at all, because no matter how you use it, some member of your audience will either be confused or annoyed.
Maybe in 50 years when I'm happily dead and buried the word will be uniformly accepted as having the same meaning as "devastated".:)
Well, that time of "uniform acceptance" was around the year 1700. It's had that primary meaning since then. It was only in the 1860s or so that classicizing grammarians got annoyed with that usage and started trying to stamp it out... they obviously haven't been very successful, though they have convinced a lot of people (like you) that a usage which has been around for about 350 years is "new" and "incorrect."
2. historical - kill one in every ten of (a group of soldiers or others) as a punishment for the whole group.
Just to be clear -- pedantic lunatics have been arguing about this word for years, but in modern English it basically never meant the same as Roman decimatio regarding military practice, except in specific historical discussions.
Go ahead -- look up examples of people using the word back 300 years ago. You'll find that when the word is used to refer to destruction or killing, it means a LARGE AMOUNT, not just 10%. It never primarily meant decimatio in English, no matter how much the pedants want it to. (The word only became common in English in the mid-1600s, and by the late 1600s it clearly meant "to destroy/kill a large portion of" in most English usage.)
Moreover, if you actually trace the early English usage of the word (back in the 1600s), you'll find that when it did mean 1/10th, it didn't necessarily refer to killing at all -- it came from the medieval Latin decimatus, which referred to a TITHE (i.e., 1/10th of your income donated to the church or to taxation). "Decimation" entered English in the 1500s as a synonym for tithing, and though there are a couple military references to "decimate" in the 1600s, the two dictionaries from the time that define the word both include the tithing sense (with only one mentioning the military sense).
From the usage of tithing (and a few examples of a military sense), it rapidly turned into a word for large amount of destruction. Outside of a few random military quotations, it never had a primary English usage equivalent to the Roman army practice. It wasn't until about the 1860s -- over 200 years after decimate came to mean "destroy a large portion of" -- that wacko grammarians decided there was something "wrong" with that usage and have been complaining about it ever since.
Slashdot Mirror
I think that's what I said. The move to Unity "dethroned Ubuntu from the top distro position." My post was just clarifying that Mint was not a "tiny" distro before that -- it may have been as high as #3 earlier, so hardly a minor player.
Ubuntu, in the early days, was Debian made easy. You could download and install an early Ubuntu release in about the same time it took you to decide which Debian CDs you needed, and what you probably wanted to install.
Hmm... that must've been in the VERY "early days." I remember trying out Ubuntu in 2006 and found it still to be a pain to even get basic things going. I owned one of the most popular Dell monitors on the market with one of the most popular and basic video cards sold in a standard Dell business desktop (which was not even a new model), and I was writing my config files manually just to get the display resolutions to work.
Anyhow, I was distrohopping a bit at the time, and I decided to give Debian a try again. (I hadn't used it since the late '90s.) Anyhow, while setting up X was probably about the same as Ubuntu, I immediately gravitated toward Debian, which seemed to (relatively) "just work." Ubuntu had bleeding-edge nonsense that broke audio, media playing, and such. Debian was much more stable: it may have required the explicit installation of proprietary stuff, but when it was installed, it seemed to work much more consistently than Ubuntu..
Rather than "Debian made easy," it seemed more like "Debian made broken." (Not surprising given then Ubuntu was based on the experimental branches of Debian software. And I was NOT a big Debian supporter before Ubuntu, so I have nothing invested in this...)
Point is -- we can debate the relative merits of the Ubuntu philosophy, but Debian was not significantly harder to install even in the early years of Ubuntu. I don't remember what Debian install was like back in the early 2000s, but if they changed things to compete with Ubuntu, those changes were pretty fast (particularly relative to the general snail-pace of Debian stable releases at the time).
Ubuntu came along and managed to make an installer that really worked, and a casual user could pop into a CD drive and install without any command-line intervention. The rest was history.
Well, sort of. Ubuntu certainly got a lot closer to that sort of experience, but it wasn't a decade ago. I still tried installing it on stock computers from major manufacturers 5 years ago and would have to go through command line hoops to get some stuff working.
Mint pulled ahead of Ubuntu around this time because (at least in my experience) it was even more focused on the casual user experience. Even when it got the hardware right, Ubuntu presented you with broken media plugins and such. Mint just focused on a polished product, and it didn't hesitate to use proprietary drivers/plugins to make things work when the open-source versions still weren't stable. While giving up some of the idealistic "purity" of Ubuntu, Mint made setup easier and more stable... which most desktop/laptop computer users want.
The whole reason Mint is so popular now is because of Unity; before that, Mint was a tiny derivative of Ubuntu, but then Unity and Gnome3 both came out and pissed everyone off, and Mint launched two projects that were Gnome2 derivatives, and tons of users switched from Ubuntu to Mint in response.
Mint wasn't exactly a "tiny derivative of Ubuntu" before Unity. It's always difficult to estimate these things, but the data of page hits over at Distrowatch puts Mint in the #3 spot of all Linux distros in 2008-2010 (pre-Unity). This analysis written in 2010 shows Mint as the rising star of the newer distros. Here's another page from early 2010 asking whether Mint had finally "killed distrohopping."
So, Mint was definitely having a meteoric rise BEFORE Unity. Unity was just the final thing that dethroned Ubuntu from the top distro spot when a lot of users abandoned Ubuntu. But many Linux users had already figured out that Mint was a lot easier and made the switch in the years before.
The best proof we have for it so far is that if it isn't there the model [which we have created based on our observations of the universe] we use doesn't work.
So... that'd be like... science, then?
THIS.
Not only that, but the entire concept of modern science is predicated on mathematical models of phenomena that can't be observed directly or explained in detail (at least at first).
Our classic history story of the Scientific Revolution often misses this point. We have this vision of people like Copernicus and Kepler and Galileo standing up against ignorant buffoons who refuse to recognize empiricism. But that wasn't it. Scientists had been doing empirical observation for thousands of years. Scientists after Copernicus rapidly (late 1500s) started looking for evidence of the earth's motion -- like stellar parallax and coriolis "forces." They couldn't measure any, and they ultimately weren't measured until the 1800s. That was a major impediment to the heliocentric theory.
But another one was Aristotle's theory of physics, which was wrapped up in detailed explanations of "causes" for everything. And everything in the universe had its "natural place" -- terrestrial matter was assumed to always come to rest, because that's what empirical observation shows us.
If the earth was in some sort of perpetual motion, what caused it? What maintained it? Why didn't the earth fly out of its orbit? Why couldn't we seem to measure it?
The first three questions were answered when Newton's theory of universal gravitation came along. There was this magical unseen force called "gravity," which kept the universe in order.
Many scientists, who believed solidly in empiricism, were highly skeptical of Newton's "occult" forces. (The word "occult" comes from the Latin meaning "hidden" or "unseen," and "occult" phenomena such as unseen forces like magnetism and gravity were associated with "magic" in the 1600s -- not "science" as we understand it.)
Newton responded to his critics by publishing an addendum to later editions of his Principia (usually known as the "General Scholium") which basically said, "Yeah -- those weird invisible 'forces'? I admit they might not be real. But the point is that the math works out, and thus this can be a model for scholarly investigation, even if we can't observe these forces directly or attribute an Aristotelean 'cause' to them."
THAT was really the crux of the Scientific Revolution. Many scientists came to accept Newton's theory, even before the first empirical evidence of heliocentrism (stellar aberration) was measured in the mid-1700s. The math worked, and thus the "model" worked. Even if we couldn't explain all the details, that was now "science."
The history of science after Newton is filled with stories of theories about stuff we couldn't observe directly (electrical charges, atom models, etc.), but which we assumed to exist because they were consistent with the math and the empirical observation. It's also filled with apparent "failures" of invisible things like phlogiston and luminiferous ether.
But those weren't really "failures" of science. They were theories based on rational empirical observation -- they may have lasted a little longer than they should have, but when they were first posited, they were reasonable explanations of what might be going on.
We STILL don't have a complete explanation for how the invisible force of gravity works. But it's well-accepted part of science. Dark matter is no different. Maybe someday it will go the way of phlogiston, but right now it's one of the best explanations around. The fact that dark matter was invented to serve a place in a mathematical explanatory model is the very definition of modern science.
2. There is a growing, serious problem with reviews submitted people who've been given a product discount and "asked" to write a review. Interestingly, they apparently are required to state that fact in the review itself, which makes it easier for me to flag all such reviews as "unhelpful".
3. Amazon has its own ludicrous program for sending free products to people expressly so they'll review the items ("Vine", I think). These are also well worthy of being flagged as unhelpful, which I try to do whenever I'm exposed to them. Come on, Amazon... I only want to hear the experiences of people who purchased the product because they needed / wanted it. I couldn't care less about the opinion of someone who received the product just because they're considered a good reviewer in general - what a dumb concept!
Huh?
So, according to your logic, ALL traditional reviews of products that existed before the internet are a "dumb concept"? Things like Consumer Reports are a "dumb concept"? (Or do you think that the employees at Consumer Reports spend their own private money for the products they review?? They need to buy all of them?)
There may be many things to criticize about the Vine program and similar programs. For example, I have heard (though I haven't seen this verified) that Vine reviewers are often selected not just because they tend to write "helpful" reviews, but because they tend to write disproportionately POSITIVE reviews.
It would be like a magazine hiring a movie critic because he tended to give 4 and 5 stars to EVERY film he saw. Obviously that's dumb, and we should criticize things like that.
But the general concept of sending an educated person a product for free and asking them what they think? That's how ALL traditional reviews basically work. I've never received a free product from Amazon or anything, but I HAVE written book reviews for professional journals based on books I received for free. I'm generally asked to review them because (1) I'm an expert in the field and (2) I have written quality reviews and articles in the past.
Do you think it's unethical for me to do this?
In general, the idea of sending people free stuff to review is that they are MORE likely to look at the product from an unbiased perspective. When you look at reviews from people who only "purchased the product because they needed / wanted it," you tend to get disproportionately positive reviews as long as the product satisfies a minimal standard for most people. They needed a thing, and if that thing does the basics, they're happy -- it the thing didn't do the basics, they wouldn't have ordered it. Also, they probably were already biased in favor of the brand or specific type of product in choosing it. A reviewer who receives a product he/she didn't ask for instead has to ask, "Is this actually something I would find useful at all? Does it have interesting features? Should anyone else buy it?"
Again, I'm NOT saying the Amazon Vine program necessarily achieves these goals well or in an unbiased manner. But I think your idea that we should discount reviews from everyone who didn't NEED that specific product is ludicrous.
There were violent strikes and sabotage of the port facilities during that time. Goes to show that when you kick over somebody's rice bowl, no matter how much better you might be making things, you're going to get pushback. A lesson that still applies, these days for the Uber economy.
It's funny, because I think you overlook the odd commonalities between the old-fashioned stevedore model and the Uber model.
Both of them are based on an idea that having a steady job with consistent employees is unnecessary. It's obviously cheaper to hire people on demand.
The traditional model for stevedores were guys who'd show up at the docks every morning and just HOPE they might get enough work that day to get paid and go home and feed their families. That just depended on whether the shipping schedules and amount of goods happened to be enough to support them.
The life of a lot of these guys was terrible -- they worked hard, when they could, but they had no job security at all... since they had no "job," per se. If they had an unlucky accident and hurt their backs or whatever, they could be out on the street begging.
Then, at some point, through strikes workers' rights movements, the stevedores finally achieved REAL jobs.
Ironically, the "Uber economy" you favor is heading toward putting its "contract workers" (people who struggle to cobble together enough part-time work to live) back in the same place that the stevedores were before unions... standing on the docks, hoping that enough ships come in today to feed the family.
(P.S. I'm not arguing in favor of corrupt unions, nor am I celebrating destructive stevedore protests. But I think we need to realize why those stevedores were so upset to lose their jobs... those were hard-won concessions that they fought to get out of an "Uber economy" model, because it made their lives miserable.)
Well, there's a bit more to it than that. "Art" allows any expressive medium, and so indeed games can be art to the extent they convey artistic intent.
That's certainly one definition of "Art," which owes a debt to the values of German Romantic philosophers of the 19th century. It frequently tends to show up these days in extreme form from pretentious people who like to shout, "But I am an artist!"
In the real world, "Art" is defined by culture, not by someone's capacity for "artistic intent." There are plenty of people in the world who want to "express" themselves in their "art," but no one pays any attention to them because what these "artists" are doing seems weird or obnoxious or even insane to most people. In essence, there is a failure to communicate. Art is a cultural product that requires both a creator and an audience who can find this "expressive" stuff which you talk about and can value it.
Collectively, we recognize "Art" in things that we are taught to see aesthetic meaning in. Other people may practice trades that require just as much skill and have just as much potential for "expression" (whatever that means), but they are seen as "tradesmen" or "craftsmen" or whatever in society.
We need only go back in history to see this used to be the case for just about everything we call "Art" today. The transitions happened at different times. The painters of the 15th century were "craftsmen" in guilds, often creating objects like altarpieces which would be displayed in churches for liturgical ceremonies or for remembrance of certain people in masses. They followed standard schemes of representing saints, etc. beside their patrons. Yet today we view them as "Artists," though we don't often think of their fellow craftsmen in the same way -- who were sewing the gilded alter cloths or vestments, who were making the jeweled chalice, who were building the organs, etc. At some point, a century or two later painting made the transition from "craft" to "Art' (with a capital A).
Instrumental music made this transition in the first few decades of the 1800s. If you read German philosophers of the late 1700s, instrumental music was classified in the same aesthetic league as wallpaper. (I'm serious -- that's what Kant said, for example.) It was something pleasant for a rich dude to have going on in the background at a fancy party, but no one would really pay attention to instrumental music and view it as "Art" (with a capital A), right?
And then along comes Beethoven and his symphonies. Suddenly a number of philosophers and critics thought his music was awesome (often in the literal sense -- inspiring awe). Within decades people were studying instrumental scores of symphonies at home and critiquing them as "Art."
This kind of Romanticist aesthetic and the myth of the "artistic genius" whose intent drives the great creative act is basically what we've inherited as the defining characteristic of "Art." But on another level, it's all a bunch of made-up nonsense.
Take landscape photography. Is that art? It wasn't in the early 20th century. Now it sort of is. But certainly it requires less skill and craft to take a shot of a sunrise over a lake than it does to skilfully restore an old historic house with a good paint job (to take your example of the house painter). It's one thing to "slap a coat of paint on" in a haphazard fashion, but good housepainters -- and particularly those who do restoration work -- are sometimes capable of amazing feats of meticulous and detailed work. But people happily view landscape photography as artistic, and perhaps even "Art," while the house painter is stuck as a "craftsman" at best, if not just a "laborer."
You have a point about the "expressive medium" -- but that's mostly a problem of the audience, not the intent of the creator. Most people just don't have the skill or the interest to appreciate the workings of someone who restores paint on historic houses, for e
Electric cars easily get 150% of the EPA range at traffic jam speeds of 30-50 MPH.
I'm not sure you understand the definition of the word "jam," which implies something is halted or stopped or nonfunctional ("that machine is jammed!").
While I've heard the word applied to stop-and-go traffic where the average speed might be 5-15 mph or so, if your average speed is over 30 mph, I can pretty definitely say that you're NOT in a traffic "jam." You may be cruising in heavy traffic. Oh, and most people would probably consider the upper range of your numbers (50 mph) to BE "highway speed," hardly a traffic jam.
You base it on the fact that the costs of basic necessities is a greater percentage of a working income than it ever has been.
No it isn't. Basic necessities cost a lot less today than they ever have!
20 years ago, a working man could pay for his rent with one week's salary. Now on the average it costs 2 weeks or more... and that's before you've paid for other necessties such as food, utilities, and car payments and gasoline.
Housing cost is about the only thing that has gone up on average in people's budgets, and that hasn't doubled -- it's gone from about 23% to 32% in the past century or so. Meanwhile, we pay a tiny fraction of what we used to on necessities like food and clothing.
And if you want to talk about the poor, well, yeah, they still pay a higher percentage on food for example than rich people. But the poorest 20% pay on average about 16% of their budget on food today -- 100 years ago, the AVERAGE household (including poor, rich, and middle class) spent about 42% of its budget on food alone!
Yes -- rent costs have gone up, and that's a problem. But the costs of almost all other necessities has spiralled down, for poor as well as rich.
I can't find anything amazing in daily life that would have changed.
I think you missed GP's point about various other regions around the world. Sure, if we skim off what we consider to be the "best" or "most developed" technology from various regions of Europe, there may not have been a lot of advances.
Regardless, social advances are important too. So are political ones. In your chosen time frame, you had Charlemagne making the first pass at consolidating political power in Europe for centuries. He (and his heirs) enacted reforms that greatly changed life. You had the spread of Christianity more widely in many parts of Europe. You had the rise of the papal structure.
Or if you don't like politics or religion -- how about education? The first universities came into being during the period you reference. And with them, new debates, new ideas -- things really got going in the late 1100s and 1200s on the intellectual scale, of course. (Long before most people start talking about the "Renaissance.")
I'll grant you that in many aspects of everyday life, this was not a particularly great period of technological development overall for Europe. But sometimes the mechanisms for technological development need social, political, and educational development before they can start happening. And those changes definitely were occurring during this period -- that should not be overlooked. Technology is only one manifestation of societal development.
Nobel didn't originally accept economics as a science either
Two questions:
(1) Do you think Nobel thought Literature was a science?
(2) When John Harvard willed his library to the new college in Cambridge, it was basically a divinity school. That divinity college adopted his name. Does that mean that any person with a degree from Harvard other than divinity doesn't really have a "Harvard degree"?
Or...
Could it possibly be that people lump the economics prize together with the others because of the institution that awards it (under the same general nomination and selection criteria, with judges drawn from the same general pool of scholars -- i.e., the Royal Swedish Academy -- at the same ceremony)?
(P.S. I don't really care whether economics is considered a "science." I just think these arguments over whether this thing is "really a Nobel" are stupid and meaningless in terms of determining the legitimacy or "science-like character" of an entire field. I'm not willing to grant Alfred Nobel's random wishes in his will that kind of power over defining "science." Are you?)
We're seeing changes now, no different than the many other changes that came before. Misogyny is just the new homophobia/racism/antisemitism/whatever.
Uh, you do realize that criticism of misogyny has been going on for over a century, right? There's nothing "new" about it, and the quest for women's rights goes back before homosexual rights and recognition of anti-Semitism as a significant problem, etc.
There's a reason people often refer to current developments as third-wave feminism, which itself is a movement over 25 years old. The problem is -- like racism and antisemitism, etc. -- outlawing discrimination (as mostly happened in 1st and 2nd wave feminism) doesn't actually stamp out bigotry completely. Instead, such sentiment is driven underground... or, as you put it, into places like Slashdot and other tiny corners of the internet.
Just to be clear -- I wasn't praising Siri's ability (or any other system's ability) to comprehend anything. The AI for being able to deal with real-world language and intelligent response is still likely a long way off, despite periodic predictions that good AI will be arriving soon.
But basic speech recognition? My Google tablet makes fewer errors when I dictate than when I manually input text on an Apple device and it helpfully "autocorrects" my correct text to say things I didn't want to.
Maybe that's the Apple strategy -- make autocorrect so bad and have it screw up your manual input so much that you'll think any voice recognition program (even if flawed) is magic!
It's possible - you don't really need to make the AI any smarter if you can just make the "consumers" dumber instead.
That's funny. And it's actually one of TFA's predictions:
By 2018, 50% of the fastest-growing companies will have fewer smart employees than instances of smart machines. These machines are easy to replicate and there will be a lot more of them.
One way to read this is that the machines will be easier to replicate. Another way to read this prediction is that companies will just stop paying a premium to hire smart people and just listen to dumb "smart" machines instead, while hiring a bunch of mindless worker drones. Actually, that's what TFA goes on to imply:
Smart systems, for example, will be analyzing how a factory is being run, or deciding whether people are completing a task at an appropriate speed.
So in other words, all we're left with is a bunch of mindless "factory" workers "completing a task" within an allotted time, and their mechanical overloads. I guess we're going to replace most mid-level management with "smart machines" to make ridiculous decisions about efficiency on the basis of bad metrics? I suppose it can't be much worse than current management practice at many companies.
Because voice recognition - just for starters - hasn't come on much in the last twenty years.
Huh? Did you actually use voice recognition 20 years ago?
I still remember the first time I tried a voice recognition program -- sometime around 1990. It had a VERY limited vocabulary. It required hours and hours of training even to recognize that for a particular speaker. Additional words could be trained, but it was annoying... and the thing just didn't work, despite the claims that it would make your life so much easier. That was 25 years ago.
I remember 10 years ago when I got a convertible ultraportable computer, which had whatever tablet version of Windows was around at that time. It claimed that the voice recognition was so much better. I tried it -- and although it required training to get better accuracy, the range of vocabulary was adequate. But it still made annoying errors all over the place.
I remember about 5 years ago when a friend suggested I try out the current version of Dragon, since he said he was finally making use of it for short emails and whatever. (He had an infant at the time, and it was convenient for times when he was busy doing other things and typing was inconvenient.) I tried it -- and it was a huge improvement over even 5 years before. Still had some errors, but a LOT better, even without training.
Then I bought a Nexus tablet last year. I saw Google's advertisement about its voice recognition. I tried it and dictated a couple paragraphs of text FLAWLESSLY -- with no training, even got a number of proper names and such correct.
I don't use Siri very often, so I don't know what she knows. But Google's voice recognition is pretty astounding compared to where things were 10 years ago, and simply magical compared to 20 years ago.
However, you've not saved time or effort, you still have to double-check everything before it goes out (and inevitably on a computer because the devices aren't even close to being able to be controlled by voice - "Oh, no, change that word elephant to giraffe, please") and the accuracy in any real-world environment or using anything other than very basic phrasing SUCKED.
Yes -- that's the reason I still haven't started using it myself regularly. You actually have to LEARN to dictate well -- it requires new speech habits (and dedicated speech recognition software does have adequate control mechanisms for correction etc., once you get used to it), and typing works so well for me that I don't have a strong motivation to learn that skill yet.
I agree with you that using speech recognition for an entire report seems stupid, unless you had a kid with a disability or something. There's a certain kind of reflective thought and interactivity that goes into longer sections of writing which I have found is just harder to do while dictating. But for short messages or emails or memos or whatever? People have been doing that for on tape for secretaries for many decades... and voice recognition is now up to the task. (If you type slowly, it could definitely be faster to dictate and make a few corrections nowadays.)
On the other hand, I'd like to make sure the findings are robust across other divisions of the data -- looking only at the "worst quartile" could potentially skew things as well. Does the correlation still hold if we look at the worst 1/3, etc.?
Exactly. What they've done is managed to replicate this study that socioeconomic factors impact premature births by finding something that correlates with low socioeconomic status and then not adjusting for it.
You conveniently left out the part of the abstract when it says they controlled for "potential confounding variables," which usually includes income and such.
(Note that I've already posted a detailed comment that points out various potential questions we should raise about this analysis. BUT, I'd say it's highly likely that the researchers DID control for socioeconomic factors -- unfortunately I can't be certain because of the paywall -- but basically all studies of this sort usually do. If they didn't, they'd be complete idiots.)
Science doesn't start with explaining the mechanisms behind unexplained phenomena - it starts with confimring that there *are* unexplained phenomena and then searching for the mechanisms.
This may be so. So let's look at the study's "confirmation" of "unexplained phenomena," shall we? Oh wait -- the study is behind a paywall, so I guess we'll just use what they tell us in the abstract:
In adjusted models, there was an association between unconventional natural gas development activity and preterm birth that increased across quartiles, with a fourth quartile odds ratio of 1.4 (95% confidence interval = 1.0, 1.9). There were no associations of activity with Apgar score, small for gestational age birth, or term birth weight (after adjustment for year).
Translation: We looked for 4 things, and only 1 thing was statistically significant. Even for the worst quartile (i.e., that with the most drilling), the effect was only an odds ratio of 1.4, though we have 95% confidence that it was between 1.0 and 1.9.
Let's note a few things here:
(1) Odds ratios are not the same as relative risk, which is the more intuitive way of understanding stats. If a study finds a relative risk of 2 for factor X, that means your chances of getting a condition with factor X are twice as much as if you didn't have X. A relative risk of 1.4 means a 40% increase in risk. Odds ratios are more complex and are used for various statistical reasons, but they often tend to exaggerate an effect -- and it's unclear from this abstract what the actual increased risk is. But it's likely less than the 40% listed in TFS.
(2) Statistically, they have a 95% confidence interval of 1.0 to 1.9. An odds ratio of 1.0 means there is no effect at all. Which means that there's probably a 5% chance the actual effect is outside of this range, possibly down to 1.0 (where there is no effect). The "no effect" line is drawn here where it's barely statistically significant (according to the typical 95% standard) for preterm birth.
(3) The study was a "retrospective cohort" study, which means that they looked at pre-existing data (rather than a "prospective cohort" which would look at a control group and a study group going forward in future). There are always dangers here in selecting a sample group that happens to line up with your analysis, since you get to pick the group you want. (Since I can't read the rest of the study, I don't know how "selective" they were in choosing which areas to study, for example.)
(4) The phrase "adjusted models" refers to earlier in the abstract where they talk about the various adjustments made for possible confounding variables and such. They also had a complex model for determining potential exposure based on "an inverse-distance squared model that incorporated distance to the mother's home; dates and durations of well pad development, drilling, and hydraulic fracturing; and production volume during the pregnancy." If that model is tweaked in various ways, it could probably completely change the study results. Anyhow, while such adjustments are important for modelling and confounding factors, they can be manipulated (often unintentionally) by researchers in all sorts of ways.
(5) They looked for FOUR things, but they only found a statistically significant effect for ONE of them. The chances of finding at least 1 out of 4 things to satisfy a 95% threshold is about 18.5%. So if they threw in random numbers here, at least one of these things would "flag positive" in nearly 1 out of 5 times.
(6) The abstract only reports the "worst quartile" as having this (already barely) statistically significant effect. Apparently other times of the year these effects were reduced (and possibly didn't even hit the barely statistically significant effect for the worst quartile)... which then leads to the question about how a 4-month window in a study may
A symbolic logic class would be a good idea for all programmers.
A formal logic class (whether heavy on symbols or not) would be a good idea for everyone.
We can all debate how some people just have an "aptitude" for coding and people who don't, and people who just happen to have a certain kind of "intellect" and others who don't. Getting to a high skill level in programming is obviously just not a reasonable goal for most people, nor should it be.
But we could all benefit from being able to think through a problem using logic. Various tests that have been done with the general population tend to show that most people are abysmal at evaluating formal logical arguments.
We used to teach that sort of reasoning in various ways. Geometry classes used to do more formal proofs. Classical languages (especially Latin) were taught in an ahistorical way that turns them into a weird sort of logic exercise in assembling and deducing the meaning of a long convoluted sentence. (I don't think that's a good method for learning actual Latin, but it worked as a logic exercise.)
We used to test it too -- IQ tests had a big portion of it, and the GRE had a whole "analytical" section devoted to logic problems. The SAT used to have "quantitative comparisons" in the math section that required the evaluation and comparison of things in an abstract way, rather than following a simple formula/algorithm to get a precise answer. The verbal section used to have analogies, and one component to understanding how they work is thinking in terms of logic: "If A, then B..." -- how does that relate to a similar relationship "if C, then...."
Etc.
We've gradually moved training and tests in logic out of our school curricula and replaced them with rote learning and step-by-step algorithms. There's a lot of talk in educational reform about "thinking on a higher level," but the reality is that one fundamental skill toward "thinking on a higher level" is being trained in HOW TO THINK.
That's logic. Whether we're going to use a formal logic class or geometry proofs or well-designed coding exercises doesn't really matter. The fact is that most people can get better at thinking logically... if they had any training in it. But we assume that it's a skill that people should just "pick up" -- except most people simply don't. (And this has serious repercussions in terms of people's abilities to evaluate public policy arguments, to be taken in by politicians' or religious wackos' nonsense... etc., etc.)
I personally don't think a required coding course is the answer. But this is part of a bigger problem, and it's not getting better.
I'd much rather see home economics be a requirement again, and bring in some lessons on compound interest, savings, and why gambling and money lenders suck
Actually, this should be taught in a math class. Most states require three years of high-school mathematics for graduation -- generally including at least Algebra I, Geometry, and an elective (which is often encouraged to be a second year of Algebra).
What POSSIBLE excuse is there for any person to graduate high school in this country without understanding the BASIC MATH needed to survive in this world?? -- that includes understanding interest and its relationship to investments, understanding and being able to evaluate loan and credit terms, having the basic competence to design a household budget/operate a basic balance sheet... and do your own taxes (at least for most common situations). Etc.
And to be clear -- I'm not just speaking as a random person here. I once taught high school math for a couple years. I had about ~140 seniors and juniors in my Algebra II classes one year. (And these were not "honors" or "Pre-AP" level, so for most of these kids, it would be the last math class they would ever take in their lives.)
About halfway through the year, I tried to randomly use an example of compound interest, thinking it might be a familiar concept. I discovered only 2 out of my 140 students knew what compound interest was or how it impacted savings or loans or whatever.
At that point, I decided it was my moral duty as a math teacher to say "to heck with the state curriculum" and spend a few weeks going over basic math skills that young people need to survive in the world.
I completely agree with you that we need to teach basic "home economics" in the sense of the basic math one needs to run a household. And it is mostly very SIMPLE applications of the kind of stuff we're sort of teaching in math already... rather than spending 6 weeks on conic section equations (as my state Algebra II curriculum said I should) for a bunch of kids who will never take more math in their lives, why not teach them something they NEED which actually is often related to other types of equations we were working with?!
I really have no clue why this isn't mandatory everywhere -- and it should start being taught in middle school. It will have a bigger impact on 90+% of students' lives than any other math they will learn... they might actually have a fighting chance of not ending up in a consumer debt spiral out of ignorance. (Some will still end up there, but at least they'll know they're making decisions that could put them there.)
MOOC is not a commonly used term. The ones you mentioned are. Do you understand the difference?
You are correct that it isn't exactly the most common term. But it's sort of weird how EVERY TIME this acronym comes up on Slashdot (and it's pretty often), there is this same flamewar over how nobody seems to know what it means. To wit:
December 2012
September 2013
January 2014
January 2014
March 2015
May 2015
Etc., etc. I could go on, but I'm tired of reading through old threads.
Also, there's a headline about MOOCs on Slashdot at least once per month or so, and there has been for more than 3 years.
Is this a "common" acronym for everyone? Perhaps not. Does it appear on Slashdot on a VERY regular basis? Yeah.
Do we have these annoying exchanges about people who can't be bothered to look up an acronym every time the topic comes up? Pretty much.
This is why I'm seriously advocating that the weight of one's vote should be proportional to his knowledge + intelligent. People should be asked to take a test and the weight of their individual votes should depend on how well they do on the test.
The problem with proposals like this is that whoever is in power will design the "test" to disenfranchise other people. In case you're unaware, poll "tests" were common in the U.S. in the late 1800s and early 1900s: they were widely used to prevent black people from voting in many areas. The "tests" claimed to be about literacy or whatever, but they were made arbitrarily difficult so that blacks couldn't pass. In fact, whites couldn't pass either, but they were literally "grandfathered" in (i.e., if their grandfather who was eligible to vote, they didn't have to take the test... blacks mostly had slaves for grandfathers, so they wouldn't have been eligible to vote -- this is where the phrase comes from).
Anyhow, if we were to reinstate some sort of poll test, it may not be used to disenfranchise according to racial lines, but you can be sure that whoever is in power will find a way to stop others from voting or to make their vote count less. It's probably impossible to design a system that couldn't be manipulated once you start disenfranchising people. Who gets to define the relevant "knowledge"? How do we measure " intelligence"?
For example, "literally" has now come to mean "figuratively", due to the excessive hyperbole that most people seem to engage in these days.A complete reversal of meaning which seems stupid to me.
Just to be clear here, by "now come to mean," you are referring to about 150 years ago, correct? That's roughly when people started complaining about how "everyone" was misusing "literally" to mean its opposite.
It's unclear why the pedants are so up in arms about "literally." There are plenty of other examples of similar words that shifted to their opposite. For example, "apparent/apparently" and "probable/probably." To Shakespeare, an "apparent villain" was someone who was clearly a villain -- it was obvious. To us, an "apparent villain" is someone who usually is NOT a villain, but maybe appears to be so at first glance. To Shakespeare, something that was "probable" was able to be clearly proved, i.e., it was certain to be the truth. To us, something that is "probable" is likely but definitely uncertain.
It's weird once you actually start investigating which words the "grammar squad" decides to go after. Most of these things originated with people who randomly started bitching about certain words back in the mid-to-late 1800s. Some common usages were fine, others were singled out to be deplored. Who knows why....
(By the way, I don't use "literally" to mean "figuratively," which strikes me as a bit silly too. But that's only because one can still use "literally" to mean "literally." If it ceases to mean that in most contexts, I'll just stop using the word altogether.)
So yeah, it does happen. But as a cranky old word-Luddite, I'd prefer to use "devastated" in place of 'decimated'.
I personally avoid using the word "decimate" at all, because no matter how you use it, some member of your audience will either be confused or annoyed.
Maybe in 50 years when I'm happily dead and buried the word will be uniformly accepted as having the same meaning as "devastated". :)
Well, that time of "uniform acceptance" was around the year 1700. It's had that primary meaning since then. It was only in the 1860s or so that classicizing grammarians got annoyed with that usage and started trying to stamp it out... they obviously haven't been very successful, though they have convinced a lot of people (like you) that a usage which has been around for about 350 years is "new" and "incorrect."
2. historical - kill one in every ten of (a group of soldiers or others) as a punishment for the whole group.
Just to be clear -- pedantic lunatics have been arguing about this word for years, but in modern English it basically never meant the same as Roman decimatio regarding military practice, except in specific historical discussions.
Go ahead -- look up examples of people using the word back 300 years ago. You'll find that when the word is used to refer to destruction or killing, it means a LARGE AMOUNT, not just 10%. It never primarily meant decimatio in English, no matter how much the pedants want it to. (The word only became common in English in the mid-1600s, and by the late 1600s it clearly meant "to destroy/kill a large portion of" in most English usage.)
Moreover, if you actually trace the early English usage of the word (back in the 1600s), you'll find that when it did mean 1/10th, it didn't necessarily refer to killing at all -- it came from the medieval Latin decimatus, which referred to a TITHE (i.e., 1/10th of your income donated to the church or to taxation). "Decimation" entered English in the 1500s as a synonym for tithing, and though there are a couple military references to "decimate" in the 1600s, the two dictionaries from the time that define the word both include the tithing sense (with only one mentioning the military sense).
From the usage of tithing (and a few examples of a military sense), it rapidly turned into a word for large amount of destruction. Outside of a few random military quotations, it never had a primary English usage equivalent to the Roman army practice. It wasn't until about the 1860s -- over 200 years after decimate came to mean "destroy a large portion of" -- that wacko grammarians decided there was something "wrong" with that usage and have been complaining about it ever since.