You don't have to be friends with someone to see the behavioral changes that come with serious depression. Though, personally, I do like to make friends at work. I still regularly see people I worked with decades ago, because we built enduring friendships. Actually, that reminds me, it's time to organize another lunch or two...
THIS 'device' is being put forward as a means to extend the viability of really early premature birth infants so they actually have a chance to survive - - - and NOT as an ARTIFICIAL WOMB with the ability to actually grow an infant from sperm-egg inception to birth.
True, but that doesn't mean it won't eventually become an artificial womb. If they're successful at using it to keep babies who are 15 weeks premature alive and healthy through their full development, then clearly the next step is to use it for babies who are 16 weeks premature, etc., etc. As they push back the age of viability new challenges will arise and be solved, and step by step it will get pushed back all the way to starting from an embryo. The development process will take years, maybe decades, but it's all but inevitable once we take this first step.
I share your cynicism about the idea that the true cause was an "aggressive work culture" but the same time this was a human being. You, the person hiding behind the screen and the AC title. Don't be an a-hole. Joseph probably had depression, you have a-hole disease.
Also, although job culture could not really have been the root cause, it definitely could be a contributing factor. Someone prone to depression can easily enter a downward spiral when placed under immense stress, to a degree that they're too depressed to take the obvious actions to get out of the stressful environment. If this guy came from LinkedIn and turned down a job at Apple, he obviously had excellent prospects for getting another job, and that would have been the obvious response to excessive job stress. But depressed people don't think that clearly. A good manager and good co-workers should have recognized the situation and encouraged him to seek help.
Note that I'm assuming here that the wife is right, and that it really was a toxic work environment. It's also possible that the work environment is fine and that it was just severe clinical depression. Given the rest of what we hear about Uber, though, it wouldn't shock me to learn that the work environment contributed a great deal.
I don't think you can ever permanently "brick" something. In this case they probably reflashed the firmware through the JTAG port or something similar. Bricked to the consumer but not the supplier.
You can permanently brick a device, even without hardware damage. Phones, for example, should have JTAG completely disabled for security (though many OEMs fail to do this), and depending on various bits of low-level config devices can get into a completely unflashable state. If the onboard firmware that accepts flashed images does something like sign the images with a key embedded in the SoC, and the ROM refuses to run unsigned firmware, and you can't flash normally any more, then even removing the flash memory and writing to it directly may not revive the device.
Plus, software can sometimes do hardware damage, which can perma-brick.
But, yeah, in the vast majority of cases where a device is "bricked", it can actually be revived by the manufacturer or their RMA centers. Even if JTAG isn't available and the system is tightly locked down, they typically have some keys they can use to sign messages to disable portions of the security infrastructure, specifically so that they can revive (and resell) bricked devices.
I do low-level Android development and end up bricking a few devices every year. It's pretty rare that they can't be revived by the manufacturer, but it does happen.
Perhaps I am weird but I don't understand why anyone would want to type complete sentences into a search engine. Natural language is bad at being precise and machines aren't exactly good at interpreting it.
Try it. It's what people naturally tend to do, so it's what Google optimizes for. It really does work very well, regardless of what you might expect.
Yes, medical professionals need to be board certified. But don't confuse that with doctors.
No, they don't. Board certification is an additional step that physicians can take, and many better ones do, but it is not required to practice medicine.
Yes, medical professionals need to be board certified. But don't confuse that with doctors.
No, they don't. Board certification is an additional step that physicians can take, and many better ones do, but it is not required to practice medicine.
I'll trust Jimmy's politics over my own common sense.
Common sense is neither common nor sense.
Personally, I'll take substantiated, fact-checked information over my own "common sense", which is really nothing more than the aggregate of my own biases.
WikiTribune might actually be able to write stories that evolve towards correctness through review, source-checking and debate, as Wikipedia does. I'm not sure that will actually help the "news" situation, though, because it takes too long, and by the time the facts have been found and clarified, everyone has moved on.
Google hasn't been a functional search engine in about a decade.
Perhaps by your very narrow definition. But it's vastly better than it was at finding what people are looking for, which is what they always wanted, regardless of terminology.
However, it's *not* as good at "keyword regexp bingo" as it used to be. But if you're still trying to use those old-style queries, you're doing it wrong. Try typing complete natural language questions for what you want to find. I find this works amazingly well, even on obscure technical topics which include lots of "keywords" which are heavily overloaded in other contexts.
The underlying problem is Google is supposed to be a *search engine* It's supposed to show you where to find stuff on the internet. At some point in time they decided to complete with Ask Jeeves and become an "answer engine." Good luck with that.
It has always been an answer engine, and that's the reason it became popular.
Back in the day (mid 90s) most everyone was certain that search engines could never be very useful. Lycos, Altavista, etc. weren't terrible, but they also weren't very good, because although they could effectively spider the whole web that just meant that any search matched thousands or millions of pages, and they had no way to determine which of those were the best answers for the query. The "smart money" was betting on Yahoo!'s approach of manually curating enormous lists of links.
Then Larry Page's pagerank algorithm found an excellent (not perfect, but excellent) way to figure out which of all of those answers were likely to be the best ones. That insight launched Google. It took off precisely because it provided better answers, rather than just returning a list of everything that was on the Internet. A list of everything on the Internet is not useful.
The bottom line is that CEOs are supposed to generate value for shareholders
Reports say that Meyer ordered underlings to not buy the resources to prevent and then not report the security breaches at Yahoo! That cost shareholders more than $1B in valuation on the Verizon deal.
Yep, had she done better there, perhaps Yahoo would be worth $48B instead of $47B. Considering it was worth $19B when she started, shareholders might be inclined to give her that one.
Would you accept a store charging you more for food because their magical sensor at the door (or in your fridge) has detected that your starving, or because they deduced from your clothes that you're more likely to pay more?
Not too many years ago, those were, in fact, standard practices by nearly all merchants. It's only been for the last century or two that stores have gotten in the habit of having fixed, marked prices. Before, prices were negotiated and you can bet that the merchant took into account everything he could see about the customer when deciding what price he could get.
The modern version is a little different, of course, because the online retailer *appears* to have a fixed, marked price, and there isn't an opportunity for interactive negotiation. But it's also different because the customer can easily shop a dozen other stores almost effortlessly. The customer can also do something like "wishlist" an item, which is a signal to the seller that the customer is interested in buying, but not willing to pay the posted price right now... which means there's a good chance that a slightly lower price will generate a sale.
So, I think buyers who are willing to be a little careful can effectively negotiate, and arguably hold the stronger position against online retailers. Buyers who are willing to take the first price offered, on the other hand, will pay in dollars for the time they save.
The implication of this article is that Mayer made out like a bandit while doing a bad job. But the numbers say that she didn't do a bad job. That surprised me, because my perception was the opposite, but the last time this came up, I did the numbers, here.
Under Mayer's tenure, Yahoo! generated a 21% annual growth rate in market value, beating Apple, Microsoft, IBM and Oracle, as well as the NASDAQ, S&P 500 and Dow Jones. I should point out that those companies also pay dividends, but they're all in the 1-2% range, so the dividend payouts don't change the results.
Now, you can argue that some other CEO would have done better, or that the main reason for Yahoo!'s success under her tenure was the decision to invest in Alibaba, made by her predecessor, but speculation about what someone else might have done is unproductive, and she decided to stay with that investment. The bottom line is that CEOs are supposed to generate value for shareholders, and market-beating value was generated, from a company that was clearly moribund before she was hired.
You can also argue about whether any CEO is worth the millions they get, but if you judge against other CEOs she earned her money.
But then you would end up with anti freeze which is a poison in your water supply. Plastics kill birds and fishes. Anti freeze kills humans. Which lives do you value more?
Cite? The article says nothing about anti-freeze (or anything like it) as a waste product.
Also, even if there are potentially-hazardous waste products, that doesn't mean it isn't a viable alternative to putting it in landfills. It depends what the waste products are and what is required to make them safe.
Live in a suburban/rural area, travel much and/or want to make sure you've got connectivity wherever you go? Verizon or AT&T are probably a better choice.
I live in a rural area, travel quite a bit (domestically and internationally), and need connectivity wherever I go, and I find Project Fi works better for me than Verizon (haven't tried AT&T). The combination of T-Mobile and Sprint's networks gives me roughly equal coverage to Verizon in the US (there are places I can't get coverage with my Verizon SIM and places I can't get coverage with my Fi SIM, in about equal proportions), and Fi's international coverage is great.
Disclosure: I work for Google (on Android), but that has nothing to do with my use of Fi, other than the fact that I always have a Nexus/Pixel, so I don't have to switch phones to switch carriers.
In the self-selecting petri dish provided by social media, memes evolve for truthiness far more than truthfulness. Your analysis is comprised of about 80% wishful thinking. You need to open your eyes to the actual dynamics of online discussions, rather than just what you think should happen. I long assumed that the unrestricted flow of information was all that was needed to encourage the growth of ideas, the discovery of truth and the exposure and elimination of falsehood. It's become clear that that is not the case.
I don't know what the answer is. Restricting information flow is definitely not the answer. Perhaps poking some holes in the "filter bubbles" (not actually the right term, since the phenomenon isn't caused by personalized search filtering but by personalized group selection, but it's workable) is sufficient, but I doubt it. I think what it's really going to take is for people to self-immunize by learning about memetic evolution. I have no idea how to get people to do that.
I'm guessing that sure, a lot of folks wouldn't care, but I would posit that the majority of the populace using social media even is NOT aware of the massive information collection going on, nor how it is used.
I doubt the difference is awareness so much as caring. Germany, in particular, is extremely sensitive to privacy reasons. What's more interesting is why the populace of some countries care so much more than others. German motivations seem obvious... but Russians would seem to have almost as much motivation and they're heavy users of social media.
Gabbing, food-plate moneyshots, selfie-admiration and laughing at animals does not necessarily lead to productivity.
You're implying a causal relationship, which is contradicted by the existence of many other high-performing economies -- including the most productive countries -- that do have heavy social media usage.
I don't think you read the post you responded to, and you certainly didn't watch the video or think about memetic evolution and how it might apply to your own beliefs and ideas.
Then you're just wrong, because decisions like this guy made have basically nothing to do with any sort of intelligence, and certainly not social intelligence (not by any definition of that phrase that I've ever seen). They do have something to do with motivation, but it's about the goal of the motivation, not the degree.
It's perfectly possible to have high intelligence across every category, including social intelligence, and still be foolish.
While this may be true, I think it is impossible to anticipate someone's actual social reasoning performance from any measure of social reasoning capacity to any useful degree.
The moral of the story is that even a stupid human being can be pretty smart. Particularly a sufficiently motivated stupid person.
That's an odd thing to say, since stupid is the antonym of smart. I think what you meant to say is:
The moral of the story is that even a foolish human being can be pretty smart. Particularly a sufficiently-motivated fool.
Foolishness is the opposite of wisdom, and the foolish/wise axis is roughly orthogonal to the stupid/smart axis.
Of course it also helps that intelligence comes in different flavors. Some people are good at spatial reasoning, others are good at verbal reasoning. But we often overlook social reasoning because it's not part of the traditional IQ tests. I think another reason that Social IQ testing hasn't caught on is that there is good reason to believe that social reasoning ability isn't fixed. Changes in attitude can strongly impair or enhance an individual's ability to process social information.
I don't think this has anything to do with social intelligence. It's perfectly possible to have high intelligence across every category, including social intelligence, and still be foolish. Wisdom/foolishness is in how you think about things more than in how your are able to think about things. Wise people consider the consequences of their actions carefully. I'm sure this guy was fully capable of thinking through what would happen if he got caught... he just didn't bother to do it.
Slashdot Mirror
I tend to agree that it's probably for the best not to confide your deepest vulnerabilities to people capable of using that against you later.
If that's a potential issue, I find a better job.
not sure what you are trying to prove.
That board certification is not required to practice medicine.
You don't have to be friends with someone to see the behavioral changes that come with serious depression. Though, personally, I do like to make friends at work. I still regularly see people I worked with decades ago, because we built enduring friendships. Actually, that reminds me, it's time to organize another lunch or two...
THIS 'device' is being put forward as a means to extend the viability of really early premature birth infants so they actually have a chance to survive - - - and NOT as an ARTIFICIAL WOMB with the ability to actually grow an infant from sperm-egg inception to birth.
True, but that doesn't mean it won't eventually become an artificial womb. If they're successful at using it to keep babies who are 15 weeks premature alive and healthy through their full development, then clearly the next step is to use it for babies who are 16 weeks premature, etc., etc. As they push back the age of viability new challenges will arise and be solved, and step by step it will get pushed back all the way to starting from an embryo. The development process will take years, maybe decades, but it's all but inevitable once we take this first step.
I share your cynicism about the idea that the true cause was an "aggressive work culture" but the same time this was a human being. You, the person hiding behind the screen and the AC title. Don't be an a-hole. Joseph probably had depression, you have a-hole disease.
Also, although job culture could not really have been the root cause, it definitely could be a contributing factor. Someone prone to depression can easily enter a downward spiral when placed under immense stress, to a degree that they're too depressed to take the obvious actions to get out of the stressful environment. If this guy came from LinkedIn and turned down a job at Apple, he obviously had excellent prospects for getting another job, and that would have been the obvious response to excessive job stress. But depressed people don't think that clearly. A good manager and good co-workers should have recognized the situation and encouraged him to seek help.
Note that I'm assuming here that the wife is right, and that it really was a toxic work environment. It's also possible that the work environment is fine and that it was just severe clinical depression. Given the rest of what we hear about Uber, though, it wouldn't shock me to learn that the work environment contributed a great deal.
I don't think you can ever permanently "brick" something. In this case they probably reflashed the firmware through the JTAG port or something similar. Bricked to the consumer but not the supplier.
You can permanently brick a device, even without hardware damage. Phones, for example, should have JTAG completely disabled for security (though many OEMs fail to do this), and depending on various bits of low-level config devices can get into a completely unflashable state. If the onboard firmware that accepts flashed images does something like sign the images with a key embedded in the SoC, and the ROM refuses to run unsigned firmware, and you can't flash normally any more, then even removing the flash memory and writing to it directly may not revive the device.
Plus, software can sometimes do hardware damage, which can perma-brick.
But, yeah, in the vast majority of cases where a device is "bricked", it can actually be revived by the manufacturer or their RMA centers. Even if JTAG isn't available and the system is tightly locked down, they typically have some keys they can use to sign messages to disable portions of the security infrastructure, specifically so that they can revive (and resell) bricked devices.
I do low-level Android development and end up bricking a few devices every year. It's pretty rare that they can't be revived by the manufacturer, but it does happen.
Perhaps I am weird but I don't understand why anyone would want to type complete sentences into a search engine. Natural language is bad at being precise and machines aren't exactly good at interpreting it.
Try it. It's what people naturally tend to do, so it's what Google optimizes for. It really does work very well, regardless of what you might expect.
Yes, medical professionals need to be board certified. But don't confuse that with doctors.
No, they don't. Board certification is an additional step that physicians can take, and many better ones do, but it is not required to practice medicine.
Wrong. :-p
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Board_certification
http://www.kevinmd.com/blog/2012/06/matter-doctor-board-certified-board-eligible.html
http://www.physicianspractice.com/healthcare-careers/board-certification-overrated
https://www.angieslist.com/articles/are-all-doctors-board-certified.htm
http://www.abpsus.org/physician-board-certified-specialties
I could go on, but that's enough.
Yes, medical professionals need to be board certified. But don't confuse that with doctors.
No, they don't. Board certification is an additional step that physicians can take, and many better ones do, but it is not required to practice medicine.
I'll trust Jimmy's politics over my own common sense.
Common sense is neither common nor sense.
Personally, I'll take substantiated, fact-checked information over my own "common sense", which is really nothing more than the aggregate of my own biases.
WikiTribune might actually be able to write stories that evolve towards correctness through review, source-checking and debate, as Wikipedia does. I'm not sure that will actually help the "news" situation, though, because it takes too long, and by the time the facts have been found and clarified, everyone has moved on.
I find Google to be quite good at finding stuff when I have a block of text from it. It helps to enclose it in quotes.
Google hasn't been a functional search engine in about a decade.
Perhaps by your very narrow definition. But it's vastly better than it was at finding what people are looking for, which is what they always wanted, regardless of terminology.
However, it's *not* as good at "keyword regexp bingo" as it used to be. But if you're still trying to use those old-style queries, you're doing it wrong. Try typing complete natural language questions for what you want to find. I find this works amazingly well, even on obscure technical topics which include lots of "keywords" which are heavily overloaded in other contexts.
The underlying problem is Google is supposed to be a *search engine* It's supposed to show you where to find stuff on the internet. At some point in time they decided to complete with Ask Jeeves and become an "answer engine." Good luck with that.
It has always been an answer engine, and that's the reason it became popular.
Back in the day (mid 90s) most everyone was certain that search engines could never be very useful. Lycos, Altavista, etc. weren't terrible, but they also weren't very good, because although they could effectively spider the whole web that just meant that any search matched thousands or millions of pages, and they had no way to determine which of those were the best answers for the query. The "smart money" was betting on Yahoo!'s approach of manually curating enormous lists of links.
Then Larry Page's pagerank algorithm found an excellent (not perfect, but excellent) way to figure out which of all of those answers were likely to be the best ones. That insight launched Google. It took off precisely because it provided better answers, rather than just returning a list of everything that was on the Internet. A list of everything on the Internet is not useful.
The bottom line is that CEOs are supposed to generate value for shareholders
Reports say that Meyer ordered underlings to not buy the resources to prevent and then not report the security breaches at Yahoo! That cost shareholders more than $1B in valuation on the Verizon deal.
Yep, had she done better there, perhaps Yahoo would be worth $48B instead of $47B. Considering it was worth $19B when she started, shareholders might be inclined to give her that one.
Would you accept a store charging you more for food because their magical sensor at the door (or in your fridge) has detected that your starving, or because they deduced from your clothes that you're more likely to pay more?
Not too many years ago, those were, in fact, standard practices by nearly all merchants. It's only been for the last century or two that stores have gotten in the habit of having fixed, marked prices. Before, prices were negotiated and you can bet that the merchant took into account everything he could see about the customer when deciding what price he could get.
The modern version is a little different, of course, because the online retailer *appears* to have a fixed, marked price, and there isn't an opportunity for interactive negotiation. But it's also different because the customer can easily shop a dozen other stores almost effortlessly. The customer can also do something like "wishlist" an item, which is a signal to the seller that the customer is interested in buying, but not willing to pay the posted price right now... which means there's a good chance that a slightly lower price will generate a sale.
So, I think buyers who are willing to be a little careful can effectively negotiate, and arguably hold the stronger position against online retailers. Buyers who are willing to take the first price offered, on the other hand, will pay in dollars for the time they save.
The implication of this article is that Mayer made out like a bandit while doing a bad job. But the numbers say that she didn't do a bad job. That surprised me, because my perception was the opposite, but the last time this came up, I did the numbers, here.
Under Mayer's tenure, Yahoo! generated a 21% annual growth rate in market value, beating Apple, Microsoft, IBM and Oracle, as well as the NASDAQ, S&P 500 and Dow Jones. I should point out that those companies also pay dividends, but they're all in the 1-2% range, so the dividend payouts don't change the results.
Now, you can argue that some other CEO would have done better, or that the main reason for Yahoo!'s success under her tenure was the decision to invest in Alibaba, made by her predecessor, but speculation about what someone else might have done is unproductive, and she decided to stay with that investment. The bottom line is that CEOs are supposed to generate value for shareholders, and market-beating value was generated, from a company that was clearly moribund before she was hired.
You can also argue about whether any CEO is worth the millions they get, but if you judge against other CEOs she earned her money.
They have largely self immunized already.
Bwahahaha!
But then you would end up with anti freeze which is a poison in your water supply. Plastics kill birds and fishes. Anti freeze kills humans. Which lives do you value more?
Cite? The article says nothing about anti-freeze (or anything like it) as a waste product.
Also, even if there are potentially-hazardous waste products, that doesn't mean it isn't a viable alternative to putting it in landfills. It depends what the waste products are and what is required to make them safe.
Live in a suburban/rural area, travel much and/or want to make sure you've got connectivity wherever you go? Verizon or AT&T are probably a better choice.
I live in a rural area, travel quite a bit (domestically and internationally), and need connectivity wherever I go, and I find Project Fi works better for me than Verizon (haven't tried AT&T). The combination of T-Mobile and Sprint's networks gives me roughly equal coverage to Verizon in the US (there are places I can't get coverage with my Verizon SIM and places I can't get coverage with my Fi SIM, in about equal proportions), and Fi's international coverage is great.
Disclosure: I work for Google (on Android), but that has nothing to do with my use of Fi, other than the fact that I always have a Nexus/Pixel, so I don't have to switch phones to switch carriers.
The truth is not a harmful germ.
In the self-selecting petri dish provided by social media, memes evolve for truthiness far more than truthfulness. Your analysis is comprised of about 80% wishful thinking. You need to open your eyes to the actual dynamics of online discussions, rather than just what you think should happen. I long assumed that the unrestricted flow of information was all that was needed to encourage the growth of ideas, the discovery of truth and the exposure and elimination of falsehood. It's become clear that that is not the case.
I don't know what the answer is. Restricting information flow is definitely not the answer. Perhaps poking some holes in the "filter bubbles" (not actually the right term, since the phenomenon isn't caused by personalized search filtering but by personalized group selection, but it's workable) is sufficient, but I doubt it. I think what it's really going to take is for people to self-immunize by learning about memetic evolution. I have no idea how to get people to do that.
I'm guessing that sure, a lot of folks wouldn't care, but I would posit that the majority of the populace using social media even is NOT aware of the massive information collection going on, nor how it is used.
I doubt the difference is awareness so much as caring. Germany, in particular, is extremely sensitive to privacy reasons. What's more interesting is why the populace of some countries care so much more than others. German motivations seem obvious... but Russians would seem to have almost as much motivation and they're heavy users of social media.
Gabbing, food-plate moneyshots, selfie-admiration and laughing at animals does not necessarily lead to productivity.
You're implying a causal relationship, which is contradicted by the existence of many other high-performing economies -- including the most productive countries -- that do have heavy social media usage.
I don't think you read the post you responded to, and you certainly didn't watch the video or think about memetic evolution and how it might apply to your own beliefs and ideas.
Actually, I meant what I said.
Then you're just wrong, because decisions like this guy made have basically nothing to do with any sort of intelligence, and certainly not social intelligence (not by any definition of that phrase that I've ever seen). They do have something to do with motivation, but it's about the goal of the motivation, not the degree.
It's perfectly possible to have high intelligence across every category, including social intelligence, and still be foolish.
While this may be true, I think it is impossible to anticipate someone's actual social reasoning performance from any measure of social reasoning capacity to any useful degree.
Likely true, but irrelevant.
The moral of the story is that even a stupid human being can be pretty smart. Particularly a sufficiently motivated stupid person.
That's an odd thing to say, since stupid is the antonym of smart. I think what you meant to say is:
The moral of the story is that even a foolish human being can be pretty smart. Particularly a sufficiently-motivated fool.
Foolishness is the opposite of wisdom, and the foolish/wise axis is roughly orthogonal to the stupid/smart axis.
Of course it also helps that intelligence comes in different flavors. Some people are good at spatial reasoning, others are good at verbal reasoning. But we often overlook social reasoning because it's not part of the traditional IQ tests. I think another reason that Social IQ testing hasn't caught on is that there is good reason to believe that social reasoning ability isn't fixed. Changes in attitude can strongly impair or enhance an individual's ability to process social information.
I don't think this has anything to do with social intelligence. It's perfectly possible to have high intelligence across every category, including social intelligence, and still be foolish. Wisdom/foolishness is in how you think about things more than in how your are able to think about things. Wise people consider the consequences of their actions carefully. I'm sure this guy was fully capable of thinking through what would happen if he got caught... he just didn't bother to do it.