The purpose of surge pricing is to gouge customers who want the service desperately
It's funny how you can say literally the same idea as the person you responded to, but make it sound bad by using negative words like "gouge" and "desperately". Without any sort of explanation as to why his characterization is invalid.
In practice, the result is that the provider is strongly encouraged to under-provision their network so they can charge extreme rates for normal use, citing "high" utilization as an excuse. So you end up with a poor experience at all times, rather than just during disasters.
How is that any different from charging more for their service, which they are already free to do? It might give them a tiny sliver of a PR defense, but that won't stop people from switching providers. Phone service, unlike wired internet, is actually a competitive market.
Price gouging is already generally illegal. If you're worried about excessive disaster surges, talk to your local, state, or federal representatives to put caps, or lower existing ones, on the maximum amount you can be charged, or to put in place a policy of especially low caps in the case that a state of emergency is declared.
You're right, public communication is an important part of academia, and an often ignored one. But there is a time and place to communicate to the public, and a scientific publication is neither. Inevitably, invariably, when communicating to the public a scientist must make simplifications and take shortcuts which diminish or destroy the scientific usefulness of what it is they are communicating. There is a great deal of loss of information content when translating a text intended for consumption by other professionals to make it adequate for public consumption, and academia simply wouldn't work if researchers didn't communicate to each other with full technical precision. Now, you might say that it's possible to expand a piece of technical writing to include both the technically rigorous content and a simplified explanation, but what's the point in marrying the two? For one thing, the vast majority of scientific publications are so esoteric that it is neither possible nor useful to do that, and also it would be much easier and less cumbersome for everyone involved to put the public communication in its own space, be it a university's press page, or a researchers website, or a popular science publication, or literally anything other than the original scientific publication itself. So yes, communication is a problem, but it is not one that needs to be addressed by means of changing academic writing.
It's a land-grab for esteem by having something named after the researcher.
The person doing the naming that way is never the researcher who came up with the concept, it's other people who quote the concept and refer it by the original author's name. If the concept is sufficiently useful and gets cited that way a couple of times, the name sticks.
Fun fact -- experienced researchers know their field sufficiently well that they can refer to papers by naming the authors (disambiguating by context). If you can't even remember a couple of the most important concepts by non-descriptive names, you have no hope of making it in any field anyway.
Yeah but that's basically what statistics is too. Not all of statistics needs to have a probability distribution involved. Again, the emphasis of the fields is slightly different, so you might have more people calling themselves machine learners working on, say, adversarial online algorithms, but that's not completely outside the purview of statistics either.
I agree, "explores the study" could easily be shortened to "studies". But why are we talking about less-than-perfect Wikipedia content? Or are you just grasping at straws to defend your ignorant attack on a highly practical field?
Not sure where you're getting your information, but there is absolutely consensus on what machine learning is. Machine learning is statistics, except with less emphasis on theoretical justification and more emphasis on computational problems. That's it. The philosophical questions you raise seem to be about the general concept of "learning" in the typical human notion of the word, but machine learning is a specific term referring to a specific field of study. It is not the same as "learning as performed by a machine", because very few of the people who actually work in machine learning have any interest in discussing the metaphysical nature of learning except perhaps over a round of drinks. We prefer to spend our time minimizing squared errors, parallelizing descent algorithms, and factoring matrices, not questioning whether a hypothetical book containing translations of all possible sentences can be said to truly know a language or not.
Isn't this really easy? Mail in your sample with a unique ID and a money order (without return address), see results online via said unique ID and through a VPN so it doesn't get tied to your IP. Perhaps theoretically possible to deanonymize, but practically speaking should be good enough. In fact, I'm not sure why this isn't already an option (or is it? I've never looked into any of these services).
Neural network marketing is surprisingly good. After the initial wave a few decades ago of computer scientists promising to solve all the world's problems by reinventing basic statistical methods under sexy names, I thought the hype had mostly died down by the mid 2000's. But there's been a hell of a comeback, I think in large part because of very successful marketing by the likes of Andrew Ng and whoever is behind the deep learning stuff at Google.
And then there's the recent wave of high profile doomsaying about AI with 100 year old notions. I still haven't figured what's really up with that. Could just be attention-seeking, but maybe there was something else behind it.
Uh, maybe they're trying to recreate meat because meat tastes really good? Sure, veggie burgers might be "good too", but that doesn't mean they're *as* good. I think you'd be hard pressed to find a typical meat-eater who wouldn't normally prefer the taste of meat to whatever they have at the veggie line.
None of that is evidence that Apple has made any kind of mistake. They just haven't how behaved how this guy wants them to.
What do you mean by "evidence"? You want scientific proof? A full expression in Lambda calculus? He's saying that it seems to him Apple would better serve themselves by not offering a 16GB model, and he explains why. Whether he's right or not is one question, but his claim is clear and his reasoning is simple. Your implication that there is any kind of contradiction here is asinine.
But this raises the question of what purpose is served by Apple amassing more money anyhow. Apple pays out large (and growing) sums of cash to existing shareholders in the form of dividends and buybacks, but its enormous cash stockpile keeps remorselessly marching up toward $200 billion. "Killing the 16GB phone and replacing it with a 32GB model at the low end would obtain things money can't buy — satisfied customers, positive press coverage, goodwill, a reputation for true commitment to excellence, and a demonstrated focus on the long term. A company in Apple's enviable position ought to be pushing the envelop forward on what's considered an acceptable baseline for outfitting a modern digital device, not squeezing extra pennies out of customers for no real reason."
I know we don't read articles around here, but to not even read the summary... That's going a bit far.
The best economic estimates are that free market adaptation will cost a few prevent of world GDP decades from now.
Source? To my knowledge, while there is overwhelming scientific consensus that a certain amount of AGW has happened and will happen, there isn't so much consensus about the extent of damage it will cause. I've heard nightmare scenarios of worldwide dustbowls, wildfires, frequent hurricanes, dozens/hundreds of millions of migrants, wars over water rights, etc etc, and that's without even getting into methane gun territory. While there is no certainty any of that will actually occur, I don't think there is any certainty that it won't, either. And if it does, it's not something that can be easily waved away by a few percent increase in world GDP.
Just look at what's happening to Europe now with the refugee crisis, and imagine what it might look like if half of Bangladesh was displaced by floods.
Yeah, it was totally intimidating to me when I realized I finally had a "not a taxi" service in my city that would actually show up when I needed a ride, unlike the previously existing "taxi" service that once left me waiting in 10F wind chill on the curb for three and a half hours and had absolutely no record of me having requested a taxi every single time I called. I was very intimidated that someone was willing to take my money to move me from one location to another, without necessitating a prayer and a minor miracle.
How do the drivers know when it's time to increase their price? How much time should a driver spend waiting for a ride before decreasing their bid? How frequently should a driver try to increase their bid to see if they still get rides? How much time would drivers waste working below the true market rate or waiting for rides because they're too high above the market rate? How would a rider decide what their initial bid should be so they don't end up overpaying? How would a rider decide how long to wait before increasing their bid because they're not getting any rides? How much extra time would the average rider end up waiting before they catch up to the true market rate, and how much money would they waste overpaying? Bidding might make sense when buying a house or trading commodities, but if I'm trying to catch a cab, spending even five minutes playing that game would be a pretty big deal to most people.
If schools followed that reasoning, half the kids in the country wouldn't have any school left to go to. Or do you think this case is different from the usual bullshit students spout "because internet?"
Slashdot Mirror
Wait, if all carriers are under capacity, doesn't that actually support the point made by the person you're calling a dumbass?
The purpose of surge pricing is to gouge customers who want the service desperately
It's funny how you can say literally the same idea as the person you responded to, but make it sound bad by using negative words like "gouge" and "desperately". Without any sort of explanation as to why his characterization is invalid.
That can be addressed by regulation requiring disclosure of high granularity usage and pricing data.
In practice, the result is that the provider is strongly encouraged to under-provision their network so they can charge extreme rates for normal use, citing "high" utilization as an excuse. So you end up with a poor experience at all times, rather than just during disasters.
How is that any different from charging more for their service, which they are already free to do? It might give them a tiny sliver of a PR defense, but that won't stop people from switching providers. Phone service, unlike wired internet, is actually a competitive market.
Price gouging is already generally illegal. If you're worried about excessive disaster surges, talk to your local, state, or federal representatives to put caps, or lower existing ones, on the maximum amount you can be charged, or to put in place a policy of especially low caps in the case that a state of emergency is declared.
Wheresay?
You're right, public communication is an important part of academia, and an often ignored one. But there is a time and place to communicate to the public, and a scientific publication is neither. Inevitably, invariably, when communicating to the public a scientist must make simplifications and take shortcuts which diminish or destroy the scientific usefulness of what it is they are communicating. There is a great deal of loss of information content when translating a text intended for consumption by other professionals to make it adequate for public consumption, and academia simply wouldn't work if researchers didn't communicate to each other with full technical precision. Now, you might say that it's possible to expand a piece of technical writing to include both the technically rigorous content and a simplified explanation, but what's the point in marrying the two? For one thing, the vast majority of scientific publications are so esoteric that it is neither possible nor useful to do that, and also it would be much easier and less cumbersome for everyone involved to put the public communication in its own space, be it a university's press page, or a researchers website, or a popular science publication, or literally anything other than the original scientific publication itself. So yes, communication is a problem, but it is not one that needs to be addressed by means of changing academic writing.
It's a land-grab for esteem by having something named after the researcher.
The person doing the naming that way is never the researcher who came up with the concept, it's other people who quote the concept and refer it by the original author's name. If the concept is sufficiently useful and gets cited that way a couple of times, the name sticks.
Fun fact -- experienced researchers know their field sufficiently well that they can refer to papers by naming the authors (disambiguating by context). If you can't even remember a couple of the most important concepts by non-descriptive names, you have no hope of making it in any field anyway.
Yeah but that's basically what statistics is too. Not all of statistics needs to have a probability distribution involved. Again, the emphasis of the fields is slightly different, so you might have more people calling themselves machine learners working on, say, adversarial online algorithms, but that's not completely outside the purview of statistics either.
I agree, "explores the study" could easily be shortened to "studies". But why are we talking about less-than-perfect Wikipedia content? Or are you just grasping at straws to defend your ignorant attack on a highly practical field?
Not sure where you're getting your information, but there is absolutely consensus on what machine learning is. Machine learning is statistics, except with less emphasis on theoretical justification and more emphasis on computational problems. That's it. The philosophical questions you raise seem to be about the general concept of "learning" in the typical human notion of the word, but machine learning is a specific term referring to a specific field of study. It is not the same as "learning as performed by a machine", because very few of the people who actually work in machine learning have any interest in discussing the metaphysical nature of learning except perhaps over a round of drinks. We prefer to spend our time minimizing squared errors, parallelizing descent algorithms, and factoring matrices, not questioning whether a hypothetical book containing translations of all possible sentences can be said to truly know a language or not.
I presume you mean "half a billion"
Isn't this really easy? Mail in your sample with a unique ID and a money order (without return address), see results online via said unique ID and through a VPN so it doesn't get tied to your IP. Perhaps theoretically possible to deanonymize, but practically speaking should be good enough. In fact, I'm not sure why this isn't already an option (or is it? I've never looked into any of these services).
Neural network marketing is surprisingly good. After the initial wave a few decades ago of computer scientists promising to solve all the world's problems by reinventing basic statistical methods under sexy names, I thought the hype had mostly died down by the mid 2000's. But there's been a hell of a comeback, I think in large part because of very successful marketing by the likes of Andrew Ng and whoever is behind the deep learning stuff at Google.
And then there's the recent wave of high profile doomsaying about AI with 100 year old notions. I still haven't figured what's really up with that. Could just be attention-seeking, but maybe there was something else behind it.
page 4 (PDF warning)
Uh, maybe they're trying to recreate meat because meat tastes really good? Sure, veggie burgers might be "good too", but that doesn't mean they're *as* good. I think you'd be hard pressed to find a typical meat-eater who wouldn't normally prefer the taste of meat to whatever they have at the veggie line.
None of that is evidence that Apple has made any kind of mistake. They just haven't how behaved how this guy wants them to.
What do you mean by "evidence"? You want scientific proof? A full expression in Lambda calculus? He's saying that it seems to him Apple would better serve themselves by not offering a 16GB model, and he explains why. Whether he's right or not is one question, but his claim is clear and his reasoning is simple. Your implication that there is any kind of contradiction here is asinine.
But this raises the question of what purpose is served by Apple amassing more money anyhow. Apple pays out large (and growing) sums of cash to existing shareholders in the form of dividends and buybacks, but its enormous cash stockpile keeps remorselessly marching up toward $200 billion. "Killing the 16GB phone and replacing it with a 32GB model at the low end would obtain things money can't buy — satisfied customers, positive press coverage, goodwill, a reputation for true commitment to excellence, and a demonstrated focus on the long term. A company in Apple's enviable position ought to be pushing the envelop forward on what's considered an acceptable baseline for outfitting a modern digital device, not squeezing extra pennies out of customers for no real reason."
I know we don't read articles around here, but to not even read the summary... That's going a bit far.
I'm confused. Where in the article does it say that people expect this technology to make them 100% safe?
and were clearly interested in them in the past
You mean back when those jobs looked nothing like they do today? Gee, I wonder what might have changed since those times...
The best economic estimates are that free market adaptation will cost a few prevent of world GDP decades from now.
Source? To my knowledge, while there is overwhelming scientific consensus that a certain amount of AGW has happened and will happen, there isn't so much consensus about the extent of damage it will cause. I've heard nightmare scenarios of worldwide dustbowls, wildfires, frequent hurricanes, dozens/hundreds of millions of migrants, wars over water rights, etc etc, and that's without even getting into methane gun territory. While there is no certainty any of that will actually occur, I don't think there is any certainty that it won't, either. And if it does, it's not something that can be easily waved away by a few percent increase in world GDP.
Just look at what's happening to Europe now with the refugee crisis, and imagine what it might look like if half of Bangladesh was displaced by floods.
Yeah, it was totally intimidating to me when I realized I finally had a "not a taxi" service in my city that would actually show up when I needed a ride, unlike the previously existing "taxi" service that once left me waiting in 10F wind chill on the curb for three and a half hours and had absolutely no record of me having requested a taxi every single time I called. I was very intimidated that someone was willing to take my money to move me from one location to another, without necessitating a prayer and a minor miracle.
Care to suggest an optimal algorithm for drivers to use to decide what price to ask for?
How do the drivers know when it's time to increase their price? How much time should a driver spend waiting for a ride before decreasing their bid? How frequently should a driver try to increase their bid to see if they still get rides? How much time would drivers waste working below the true market rate or waiting for rides because they're too high above the market rate? How would a rider decide what their initial bid should be so they don't end up overpaying? How would a rider decide how long to wait before increasing their bid because they're not getting any rides? How much extra time would the average rider end up waiting before they catch up to the true market rate, and how much money would they waste overpaying? Bidding might make sense when buying a house or trading commodities, but if I'm trying to catch a cab, spending even five minutes playing that game would be a pretty big deal to most people.
If schools followed that reasoning, half the kids in the country wouldn't have any school left to go to. Or do you think this case is different from the usual bullshit students spout "because internet?"