Yeah, the obvious takeaway is compassion, but this experiment didn't have any control condition. If it were me, I'd hesitate, sure, but it could just be because I was trying to process what is going on (whether this is part of the experiment, whether the robot is malfunctioning, etc.). To truly isolate "compassionate reponse", it would have been helpful to have a condition where the robot behaved in an unexpected but less directed way, like flashing lights or emitting odd sounds. I'd bet there would be a lot of hesitation in those scenarios, too...
OK, these are cool images. However, I do think this is a bit biased toward the marketing-friendly description on the product page (marsbioimaging.com).
First, calling this a "color" image is not correct. Just as with radar, sonar, MRI, or anything else that captures non-visible light, what we are seeing is "false color". The distinction is that someone mapped signal values to colors, and that implies that those nice pics probably had some human input to make appropriate color choices (and not blue flesh, red bones, or whatever).
Second, this is not the first spectral CT, as the article seems to imply. Check out for example https://www.itnonline.com/article/spectral-imaging-brings-new-light-ct for a summary of what commercial offerings were available 3 years ago.
Don't get me wrong, it sounds like great stuff -- but there seems to be significant hype here, too.
I often don't click through a link, but instead prefer to copy it, paste it, and if needed modify it. It seems anyone doing some basic "link hygiene" like this might not get counted?
This is from a "Nature Partner Journal" (see http://www.nature.com/partnerpublishing/journals/), which is a line of open access content under the Nature brand, not Nature itself.
Normally when I read an article like this, I go to the Methods first to figure how much skepticism I'm going to have when I then check out the Results. There isn't a Methods section in this paper! I'm consequently not terribly impressed by the quality of this journal.
According to Stanford's Copyright and Fair Use summary (http://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/fair-use/cases/) that Twin Peaks case might not be the precedent they say it is.
Not a fair use. A company published a book entitled Welcome to Twin Peaks: A Complete Guide to Who’s Who and What’s What, containing direct quotations and paraphrases from the television show Twin Peaks, as well as detailed descriptions of plots, characters, and setting. Important factors: The amount of the material taken was substantial and the publication adversely affected the potential market for authorized books about the program. (Twin Peaks v. Publications Int’l, Ltd., 996 F.2d 1366 (2d Cir. 1993).)
The submitter used the word "poorest", which seems chosen rather... poorly. The SFGate article uses the somewhat less extreme term "low income", but toward the end it is also more specific about the criteria: "To qualify, applicants must live in a neighborhood designated as disadvantaged by the state. They must own their homes and make no more than 80 percent of their community’s median household income." The provider, GRID Alternatives, promises "to make renewable energy technology and job training accessible to underserved communities", which seems more in line with what is actually going on.
So, one view of this is that this is a program to direct cap-and-trade money (generally collected to be used specifically for environmentally beneficial projects) into areas of the state that wouldn't get it otherwise. It uses donated equipment and labor as well as the C&T funding, so it's not at all tax funded. Besides helping recipients in the targeted areas get cheaper power, it is possibly reducing overall electricity demand in a green way (though this is debatable, given the limits of solar power as a baseload source).
It could be described as a variant of the Traveling Salesman problem, where each node is a mower-sized swath of grass and your object is to visit very node, returning to the starting one...
> It really bothers you? How? Please tell me how I've ruined your shopping experience.
Many of these are obviously jokes, fine. I think what the OP was getting at is that there are nefarious purposes to which this can be put. Imagine if you want to "attack" a competitor, and make up a bunch of poor reviews (there have been court cases about this kind of thing, in this case about libel). Or, you could just boost your own product, or try to game the Amazon recommendation system to get your product recommended based on the fact that you "like" many popular items in a segment, plus this product.
Despite research on the topic, it's not going away anytime soon, just because it's obviously pretty hard to figure out when an "attack" on the system is happening (though there are some clues that have been used in automated detection, e.g. lots of similar rating events in a row, accounts used only to rate a few products, etc.).
Compression is just the discarding of irrelevant or less relevant information. With images or video, that means keeping the perceptually meaningful content and discarding the rest. An improvement might come about if the encoder was removing irrelevant variations (noise), or smoothing out unnecessary details away from perceptually salient objects (making them easier to see).
It's pretty hard to make an image encoder that maintains the important perceptual qualities of every possible image, so IF their encoder is good, maybe they just didn't test it on the whole range of stuff they eventually used it on.
I sort of agree. I think it's "legendary customer satisfaction" that TFA is thinking of (that's where Apple has always lead, anyway). If you have a Mac you may have the same lowish rate of problems (many of which are possibly component problems and not much to do with Apple), but statistically speaking you're more satisfied overall, which is probably driven by the large fraction *without* problems.
The conclusion that a train may be "less green" than a plane is somewhat dependent on what you look at. The article notes that this is because the particular train they looked at, the Green Line in Boston, uses local power that is being generated from carbon-emitting sources. Actually, even that is only part of the story... you can read the original research (http://www.iop.org/EJ/article/1748-9326/4/2/024008/erl9_2_024008.html) if you have some kind of institutional subscription to Environmental Research Letters. It shows that the energy use is actually lower or the train, and that another train (SF muni) does beat the "large aircraft" (the small aircraft is much worse).
The blurb may be a little misleading, since it seems to suggest that this is some kind of recommendation from the Economist, which doesn't do product reviews in general.
This is part of a (very interesting) collection of "end of year technology roundup" type articles (see for instance my favorite article on quieter tank treads). All the writer really says is "if you buy one of these the point is low cost and simplicity -- so don't be tempted to spend extra on Windows, or you might as well buy a laptop".
The author is actually kind of against the choice of Linux in a way, as he makes it sound like adding extra software is a royal pain: "Admittedly, installing third-party software can be a bit of a fiddle, and some of the advice available online threatens to lure users into the tangled depths of the Linux undergrowth, where few people will want to venture"...
The anti-smoking propaganda is so thick in the last few years that it's hard to separate the bullshit from the fact. My favorite ad is the one that says, non-chalantly and without reference to any scientific publication, that second-hand smoke causes asthma in children. The hell!?
Well, the link between asthma and tobacco smoke (both from active and secondhand sources) is pretty solid. Here's a recent reference:
Lewis SA, Antoniak M, Venn AJ, Davies L, Goodwin A, Salfield N, Britton J, Fogarty AW. Secondhand smoke, dietary fruit intake, road traffic exposures, and the prevalence of asthma: a cross-sectional study in young children. Am J Epidemiol. 2005 Mar 1;161(5):406-11.
Summary (from abstract): "The authors conclude that, of the potential risk factors considered in this study, preventing secondhand smoke exposure may be the most effective way of preventing asthma." Now, this is admittedly a step short of saying SHS "causes" asthma, but the fact that it increases the incidence does indicate it's at least contributory.
SimCity (the original, 1989) on a Mac SE.
Marathon (1994) on a Mac SE and LC. (This game was contemporaneous with Doom, and eventually evolved into Halo.)
Myst (1993) on a Mac LC.
"Modern Times" (well, loosely speaking):
Starcraft (1998) on a Mac Centris.
Myth: The Fallen Lords (1997) on a Mac Centris. (This last was extremely enjoyable in cooperative multiplayer, and was one of my first experiences with that kind of play.)
From the submission: Back in March 2004 Microsoft was ordered to open up its Windows operating system by way of making documentation available that would assist work on interoperability with other systems...
Microsoft now has 120 days to provide the information that rival server makers need to compete fairly, and it must continue to update this information in the future...
Unless the deadline was extended, their time actually ran out around July.
I wonder a little bit about the methodology. From the linked summary, it seems that the comaparison is based on a count of errors in individual articles -- fine. However, the description of how the data were arrived at indicates reviewers wrote reviews, and then editors counted errors based on them:
Each pair of entries was sent to an expert for peer review. The reviewers, who were not told which article was which, were asked to look for three types of inaccuracy: factual errors, critical omissions and misleading statements. A total of 42 useable reviews were returned. These were examined by Nature's news reporters, who tallied the total inaccuracies for each entry.
My question is, were the reviewers also blinded to which was which? Deciding how many errors to count for a written review seems highly subjective. Also, how did they decide which reviews were "useable", and how many were rejected?
That 30 mile (48 km?) range sounds awfully nice, but I would guess it's not a figure to be relied on for regular use. The
WiMAX forum's home page provides some more realistic range figures:
In a typical cell radius deployment of three to ten kilometers, WiMAX Forum Certified(TM) systems can be expected to deliver capacity of up to 40 Mbps per channel, for fixed and portable access applications. This is enough bandwidth to simultaneously support hundreds of businesses with T-1 speed connectivity and thousands of residences with DSL speed connectivity. Mobile network deployments are expected to provide up to 15 Mbps of capacity within a typical cell radius deployment of up to three kilometers.
It sounds like 3 km (under 2 miles) from a tower is best, with up to 10 km (just over 6 miles) plausible.
1- GREAT AI 2-unpredictible replay
3- DVD install
4- supreme realism (e.g if you get shot with a 9mm round your subsequent performance WILL be seriously impared, DOH)
5"good enough" graphics - nice but will not make up for bad design as afar as the immersive experince goes.
I agree with most of this, but I'd put replayability at #1 and AI down with "supreme realism". I think AI means different things to different people, and that it can also mean different things in different types of games. What I generally want is more like "AP" (artificial personalities) than AI, which is why I think it fits in with realism... but then I tend to play CRPGs rather than FPS games.
I'm playing Jade Empire now and I tend to think the replayability is relatively low. I've already tried a few characters, but there seems little point in playing them through more than the first chapter, since after that point similar options are available for any character now matter how they started out (although the different dialog options for male and female characters are quite amusing). Morrowind remains one of my favorites, primarily because of replayability.
It seems to me that there's an even more obvious problem: what is a "mid-range" system today is probably not going to be one next year, or maybe even in six months. The article doesn't mention this at all, but it seem like it wouldn't have a chance of working unless you expand your rating scale every year, or used ratings like "level 8 - 2004/Sep" (which really undercuts the idea of making things simple, and having an easy time telling how well your computer supports a given game).
I'm not sure comparing "revenues" is the best yardstick here. I think many would agree that a free OS is likely to sell for less than a commercial one... and what companies are really interested in the end is profit (or net income), not revenue.
Apple computer's revenue for 2001 is about $6 billion, if I calculated that correctly. However, their net income is "only" $200 million. Microsoft, as everyone knows, is making billions in net income, and are probably going to "win" any comparison with anyone -- except maybe in terms of consumer value.
I've seen some people refer to Nader's call for MS to pay dividends and to the Ford/Dodge court case that brought this issue up about 75 years ago. However, I haven't seen any details posted here.
The article
I saw in January about Nader's case (argument, not legal case) makes it clear what the beef is:
By not receiving a dividend, wealthy Microsoft shareholders avoid paying the top marginal income tax rate of more than 39 percent levied on such income, Nader said. Instead, wealthy shareholders take advantage of the cash pile by selling company stock, which is subject only to a capital gains tax of 20 percent, Nader said. In the letter, Nader and CPT director James Love said U.S. tax laws contain a provision called the "accumulated earnings tax," which says companies that allow earnings to accumulate beyond "reasonable needs" of the business may be required to pay a tax of 39.6 percent on those earnings.
Regarding the Ford/Dodge case, that happened in the Michigan state court system and is summarized as part of this article I found. An extract:
The lawsuit was aimed at Henry Ford's tightfisted dividend policy. Ford Motors had become one of the world's most profitable companies and was literally piling up unspent cash that it could not invest fast enough, yet was recently refusing to pay out much more than 1 percent of its net income in dividends. Because it was the company's principal shareholder, Henry Ford, who managed the company, this was a classic case of upholding the rights of minority shareholders against the tyranny of a majority investor. [...]
The court rejected Henry Ford's defense that "my ambition is to employ still more men, to spread the benefits of this industrial system to the greatest possible number, to help them build up their lives and their homes" (Dodge Bros. v. Ford, 1919: p. 505). While his assertion is usually taken at face value to violate accepted norms of proper business purpose, the court may well have been aware that he was speaking with dubious sincerity (Jardim, 1970).
As the author mentions in passing, there is some question "as to whether dicta from a state court decision remains influential after seventy-five years"... but I gather it's the only major case testing the same issue
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, the obvious takeaway is compassion, but this experiment didn't have any control condition. If it were me, I'd hesitate, sure, but it could just be because I was trying to process what is going on (whether this is part of the experiment, whether the robot is malfunctioning, etc.). To truly isolate "compassionate reponse", it would have been helpful to have a condition where the robot behaved in an unexpected but less directed way, like flashing lights or emitting odd sounds. I'd bet there would be a lot of hesitation in those scenarios, too...
OK, these are cool images. However, I do think this is a bit biased toward the marketing-friendly description on the product page (marsbioimaging.com).
First, calling this a "color" image is not correct. Just as with radar, sonar, MRI, or anything else that captures non-visible light, what we are seeing is "false color". The distinction is that someone mapped signal values to colors, and that implies that those nice pics probably had some human input to make appropriate color choices (and not blue flesh, red bones, or whatever).
Second, this is not the first spectral CT, as the article seems to imply. Check out for example https://www.itnonline.com/article/spectral-imaging-brings-new-light-ct for a summary of what commercial offerings were available 3 years ago.
Don't get me wrong, it sounds like great stuff -- but there seems to be significant hype here, too.
I often don't click through a link, but instead prefer to copy it, paste it, and if needed modify it. It seems anyone doing some basic "link hygiene" like this might not get counted?
This is from a "Nature Partner Journal" (see http://www.nature.com/partnerpublishing/journals/), which is a line of open access content under the Nature brand, not Nature itself.
Normally when I read an article like this, I go to the Methods first to figure how much skepticism I'm going to have when I then check out the Results. There isn't a Methods section in this paper! I'm consequently not terribly impressed by the quality of this journal.
According to Stanford's Copyright and Fair Use summary (http://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/fair-use/cases/) that Twin Peaks case might not be the precedent they say it is.
Not a fair use. A company published a book entitled Welcome to Twin Peaks: A Complete Guide to Who’s Who and What’s What, containing direct quotations and paraphrases from the television show Twin Peaks, as well as detailed descriptions of plots, characters, and setting. Important factors: The amount of the material taken was substantial and the publication adversely affected the potential market for authorized books about the program. (Twin Peaks v. Publications Int’l, Ltd., 996 F.2d 1366 (2d Cir. 1993).)
(emphasis added)
The submitter used the word "poorest", which seems chosen rather... poorly. The SFGate article uses the somewhat less extreme term "low income", but toward the end it is also more specific about the criteria: "To qualify, applicants must live in a neighborhood designated as disadvantaged by the state. They must own their homes and make no more than 80 percent of their community’s median household income." The provider, GRID Alternatives, promises "to make renewable energy technology and job training accessible to underserved communities", which seems more in line with what is actually going on.
So, one view of this is that this is a program to direct cap-and-trade money (generally collected to be used specifically for environmentally beneficial projects) into areas of the state that wouldn't get it otherwise. It uses donated equipment and labor as well as the C&T funding, so it's not at all tax funded. Besides helping recipients in the targeted areas get cheaper power, it is possibly reducing overall electricity demand in a green way (though this is debatable, given the limits of solar power as a baseload source).
that 3/4 of people would pick up a penny from the ground? I would pick up a piece of trash from the ground, but that doesn't mean I want trash.
It could be described as a variant of the Traveling Salesman problem, where each node is a mower-sized swath of grass and your object is to visit very node, returning to the starting one...
So, was she impressed?
> It really bothers you? How? Please tell me how I've ruined your shopping experience.
Many of these are obviously jokes, fine. I think what the OP was getting at is that there are nefarious purposes to which this can be put. Imagine if you want to "attack" a competitor, and make up a bunch of poor reviews (there have been court cases about this kind of thing, in this case about libel). Or, you could just boost your own product, or try to game the Amazon recommendation system to get your product recommended based on the fact that you "like" many popular items in a segment, plus this product.
Despite research on the topic, it's not going away anytime soon, just because it's obviously pretty hard to figure out when an "attack" on the system is happening (though there are some clues that have been used in automated detection, e.g. lots of similar rating events in a row, accounts used only to rate a few products, etc.).
They should be sure to ask for the digital negatives. Without those, I'm sure nobody will be able to disseminate these documents any further!
Compression is just the discarding of irrelevant or less relevant information. With images or video, that means keeping the perceptually meaningful content and discarding the rest. An improvement might come about if the encoder was removing irrelevant variations (noise), or smoothing out unnecessary details away from perceptually salient objects (making them easier to see).
It's pretty hard to make an image encoder that maintains the important perceptual qualities of every possible image, so IF their encoder is good, maybe they just didn't test it on the whole range of stuff they eventually used it on.
I sort of agree. I think it's "legendary customer satisfaction" that TFA is thinking of (that's where Apple has always lead, anyway). If you have a Mac you may have the same lowish rate of problems (many of which are possibly component problems and not much to do with Apple), but statistically speaking you're more satisfied overall, which is probably driven by the large fraction *without* problems.
The conclusion that a train may be "less green" than a plane is somewhat dependent on what you look at. The article notes that this is because the particular train they looked at, the Green Line in Boston, uses local power that is being generated from carbon-emitting sources. Actually, even that is only part of the story... you can read the original research (http://www.iop.org/EJ/article/1748-9326/4/2/024008/erl9_2_024008.html) if you have some kind of institutional subscription to Environmental Research Letters. It shows that the energy use is actually lower or the train, and that another train (SF muni) does beat the "large aircraft" (the small aircraft is much worse).
The blurb may be a little misleading, since it seems to suggest that this is some kind of recommendation from the Economist, which doesn't do product reviews in general.
This is part of a (very interesting) collection of "end of year technology roundup" type articles (see for instance my favorite article on quieter tank treads). All the writer really says is "if you buy one of these the point is low cost and simplicity -- so don't be tempted to spend extra on Windows, or you might as well buy a laptop".
The author is actually kind of against the choice of Linux in a way, as he makes it sound like adding extra software is a royal pain: "Admittedly, installing third-party software can be a bit of a fiddle, and some of the advice available online threatens to lure users into the tangled depths of the Linux undergrowth, where few people will want to venture"...
JF
The anti-smoking propaganda is so thick in the last few years that it's hard to separate the bullshit from the fact. My favorite ad is the one that says, non-chalantly and without reference to any scientific publication, that second-hand smoke causes asthma in children. The hell!?
Well, the link between asthma and tobacco smoke (both from active and secondhand sources) is pretty solid. Here's a recent reference:
Lewis SA, Antoniak M, Venn AJ, Davies L, Goodwin A, Salfield N, Britton J, Fogarty AW. Secondhand smoke, dietary fruit intake, road traffic exposures, and the prevalence of asthma: a cross-sectional study in young children. Am J Epidemiol. 2005 Mar 1;161(5):406-11.
Summary (from abstract): "The authors conclude that, of the potential risk factors considered in this study, preventing secondhand smoke exposure may be the most effective way of preventing asthma." Now, this is admittedly a step short of saying SHS "causes" asthma, but the fact that it increases the incidence does indicate it's at least contributory.
I gave up trying to get published in the Harvard Business Review. Now I send my articles to the Harvared Business Review -- it's a lot easier.
I played many memorable games on various Apple computers (some pre-Mac), back when this wasn't a nearly evaporated market.
"Ancient Times": "The Middle Ages": "Modern Times" (well, loosely speaking):From the submission: Back in March 2004 Microsoft was ordered to open up its Windows operating system by way of making documentation available that would assist work on interoperability with other systems ...
According to Another CNET article from late March of 2004,
Unless the deadline was extended, their time actually ran out around July.
I wonder a little bit about the methodology. From the linked summary, it seems that the comaparison is based on a count of errors in individual articles -- fine. However, the description of how the data were arrived at indicates reviewers wrote reviews, and then editors counted errors based on them:
Each pair of entries was sent to an expert for peer review. The reviewers, who were not told which article was which, were asked to look for three types of inaccuracy: factual errors, critical omissions and misleading statements. A total of 42 useable reviews were returned. These were examined by Nature's news reporters, who tallied the total inaccuracies for each entry.
My question is, were the reviewers also blinded to which was which? Deciding how many errors to count for a written review seems highly subjective. Also, how did they decide which reviews were "useable", and how many were rejected?
That 30 mile (48 km?) range sounds awfully nice, but I would guess it's not a figure to be relied on for regular use. The WiMAX forum's home page provides some more realistic range figures:
In a typical cell radius deployment of three to ten kilometers, WiMAX Forum Certified(TM) systems can be expected to deliver capacity of up to 40 Mbps per channel, for fixed and portable access applications. This is enough bandwidth to simultaneously support hundreds of businesses with T-1 speed connectivity and thousands of residences with DSL speed connectivity. Mobile network deployments are expected to provide up to 15 Mbps of capacity within a typical cell radius deployment of up to three kilometers.
It sounds like 3 km (under 2 miles) from a tower is best, with up to 10 km (just over 6 miles) plausible.
Jamie
1- GREAT AI
2-unpredictible replay
3- DVD install
4- supreme realism (e.g if you get shot with a 9mm round your subsequent performance WILL be seriously impared, DOH)
5"good enough" graphics - nice but will not make up for bad design as afar as the immersive experince goes.
I agree with most of this, but I'd put replayability at #1 and AI down with "supreme realism". I think AI means different things to different people, and that it can also mean different things in different types of games. What I generally want is more like "AP" (artificial personalities) than AI, which is why I think it fits in with realism... but then I tend to play CRPGs rather than FPS games.
I'm playing Jade Empire now and I tend to think the replayability is relatively low. I've already tried a few characters, but there seems little point in playing them through more than the first chapter, since after that point similar options are available for any character now matter how they started out (although the different dialog options for male and female characters are quite amusing). Morrowind remains one of my favorites, primarily because of replayability.
Jamie
It seems to me that there's an even more obvious problem: what is a "mid-range" system today is probably not going to be one next year, or maybe even in six months. The article doesn't mention this at all, but it seem like it wouldn't have a chance of working unless you expand your rating scale every year, or used ratings like "level 8 - 2004/Sep" (which really undercuts the idea of making things simple, and having an easy time telling how well your computer supports a given game).
I'm not sure comparing "revenues" is the best yardstick here. I think many would agree that a free OS is likely to sell for less than a commercial one... and what companies are really interested in the end is profit (or net income), not revenue.
Apple computer's revenue for 2001 is about $6 billion, if I calculated that correctly. However, their net income is "only" $200 million. Microsoft, as everyone knows, is making billions in net income, and are probably going to "win" any comparison with anyone -- except maybe in terms of consumer value.
Jamie
I've seen some people refer to Nader's call for MS to pay dividends and to the Ford/Dodge court case that brought this issue up about 75 years ago. However, I haven't seen any details posted here.
The article I saw in January about Nader's case (argument, not legal case) makes it clear what the beef is:
Regarding the Ford/Dodge case, that happened in the Michigan state court system and is summarized as part of this article I found. An extract:
As the author mentions in passing, there is some question "as to whether dicta from a state court decision remains influential after seventy-five years"... but I gather it's the only major case testing the same issue