And I think also that a photon (in free space at least) experiences no time whatever for a similar reason - it is always travelling at the speed of light.
I once speculated that the speed of light is not a 'speed' at all, but a boundary field - the boundary between two states of existence, like the surface of the ocean is the boundary layer between water and air. What we experience as light is the ripples on the boundary field. The slower one is travelling, the farther one is from the boundary (in how many dimensions?) - and something analogous is going on on the other side of the speed of light.
Funny thing, I worked a little bit on an IBM 5100 desktop computer back in the day. This was a rather cool little machine, which ran BASIC, APL and one other language I forget. IBM had an accounting package written in BASIC for the 5100, but it was rather slow. So I looked at the code, trying to find why. I found multiple instances of empty loops to 1000, just like yours. (I forget how to write BASIC so I won't try.)
That machine was also the one where I played with APL, which I still think was a cool language. It forced you to think in terms of 'input array: transform: output array' rather than the twiddly bits of for-loops. So the classic programming solution of 'nibble at the edges of a problem until you get to the middle' can't be used, and you have to sit down and think about the pure more-or-less mathematical solution in its entirety, until you can get to 'A = f(B)' for some complex function f. IOW it requires you to be smarter.
It's true that if you or I spent as many hours training as Bolt we likely still wouldn't even be able to qualify for the Olympics, but simultaneously if all Bolt did was sit on his couch and eat chips, he wouldn't either.
So obviously what we need is an Olympic chip-eating competition - perhaps two sports, one on the couch, one standing up. I'm sure some/.ers would be serious competitors!:D
Interesting question. I used to ask a related question, "How much does a bit weigh?" I learned a couple of years ago that the proper question is, "What is the area of a bit?" See the Holographic Principle, and/or an article in Scientific American two or three years ago. It has to do with the requirement that the Universe can never lose, but must always gain, entropy. When mass is sucked into a black hole, the entropy of the Universe would lose entropy, so the entropy must be left behind at the event horizon. This somehow forces the surface area of the event horizon to expand according to the mass of the black hole. Since mass entropy can be equated to information entropy, after some shenanigans I don't understand, it turns out that the area of one bit is 2x2 planck lengths.
But I suspect, since that area is related to the mass that has been sucked in, wouldn't that imply that one bit is related to that amount of mass? Which means it is related to that mass, or equivalently that energy.:D I don't think that means that the mass 'represents' one bit though - rather the opposite, one bit represents that amount of mass or energy.
Yes, with the appropriate expanded magazines. Those magazines may be illegal (I don't know) but they as I understand it, they are available for many 'hunting' weapons as well as 'assault' weapons.
No, but we can set up a fraction. Let's say that 1/1000 stars have orbiting planets. That would be infinity/1000, which equals infinity. Still not finite. As another commenter noted, there is a one-to-one mapping of rational numbers (3/4, 1/72, 399/12, etc.) to integers.
Or, as my sig used to say, "Space is big - really big. Better pack a lunch."
Instead of cutting where its needed (*entitlements*), they cut everything else instead.
FTFY - and I'm soon to be eligible for Social Security. The standard practice for all political administrations since forever has been to always propose to cut whatever is most desirable, popular and necessary, rather than what is least important, most expensive and biggest boondoggle. This assures an outcry about "Don't cut X", setting the debate about the wrong topic and leaving the politicians in charge of ever more money. It has worked since the first democracy (read about Pericles, who invented 'bread and circuses' to stay elected - and in effect bankrupted Athens). And I got an 'A' for a paper about this in college!:D
The way things are going, I will be able to enjoy a fairly nice lifestyle for 30 to 40 years on my Social Security and free medical care (my family tends to live long time), and die just in time to leave all you young, poor suckers to pay off the debt. While this works well for me, it's a bad idea for the nation. Sorry!:D
As someone who is challenged by using a circular saw (maybe I need a better saw, or a cut off saw?), it's still satisfying. I use more wood, and my cuts aren't always even. It takes a long time.
I'm not sure, but I assume by circular saw, you mean a handheld circular saw (such as SkilSaw). It's very hard to cut a cabinet-straight cut with a hand held circular saw. This gets into the whole 'cost of tools' thing, and making choices about time, cost and materials tradeoffs. (I would love to have my dad's shop that I first learned to work in - that shop had everything to build commercial quality stuff - planers, jointers, table and radial arm saws, drill presses, etc., etc. I remember learning how to sharpen chisels in that shop. I made my first toy box at the age of five in that shop.)
And yes, the blade is a big deal. One of the newer innovations is the narrow kerf blades that are now available. They are easier on the saw (less friction), and make nice narrow cuts. A dull blade is way more trouble than it's worth. There are still a few places that sharpen blades, but it's best to stick with the carbide blades in any case. And _never_ try to push the saw through the work - all you will do is heat the blade up, cause oils in the wood to come out and burn, making the blade forever sticky and possibly losing the temper of the steel.
If you can't afford or don't have room for at least a table saw, you can get by with using the circular saw, cut well outside your lines (IOW leave space between pieces), and use handheld planes - electric and/or manual - and maybe a sander to bring the line down to where it should be. But you still have to be careful about keeping the cut vertical - it's easy to end up with an edge that isn't _quite_ perpendicular to the surface (actually you can use that to your advantage sometimes - giving a slight angle (1-2 degrees) to the cut will make sure that the front edge is flush to the matching surface.)
I also happen to like routers - get one that will hold its height correctly. There's a lot you can do with a router and a home-made jig. (In fact with a good long aluminum straightedge and some clamps, you can use a router to clean up a saw cut.)
There's a show on the local PBS station called 'Rough Cuts' with Jimmie Mac that can be very enlightening for both newbies and old hands. It might be available online, I dunno. He likes to start out with a plank o' wood cut from a tree, before it's been planed. Which reminds me - in most parts of the country, if you're far enough out of the big city, you can find a local guy who has his own small sawmill. That's the place to go to get actual wood, if you want to work with local woods.
Back in the day (about 1978) my mostly-tongue-in-cheek saying went like this:
"The promise of the Industrial Revolution was that the machines could do all the work, nobody would have to work and we could all live like kings. The flip side of this is that there are no jobs. So, let's start a new political party, called the 'Technical Party', whose main platform would be to change unemployment from a problem to the objective. Why should anyone _have_ to work? Let's make it a 'Volunteer Work Force', just like the military.
Once we are elected, we will work to make having a job more like being drafted for the military - for a while until the robots get better, everyone will have to work for, say 10 years, and can then retire on a full pension. Over time that time might be reduced as robots get better. Maybe for a bit extra they can join the 'Work Reserves' and go in for a couple of days a month and two weeks in the summer. Of course some folks will want to continue in the work force, just as in today's military some folks make it a career. But most folks can just concentrate their efforts on whatever creative, amusing endeavour they want to pursue. The arts will flourish!"
Of course this ignores the question of what the uncreative people are going to do with themselves. What's to keep huge mobs of people with nothing to do off the streets, rioting for a hobby?:)
Forbes just had an interesting article about how many major manufacturers (Caterpillar, IBM, etc.) are beginning to come back to the US and building plants based on advanced robotics, nanotechnology and 3D printing. These plants can build stuff cheaper than those relatively labor-intensive plants in China, making it no longer worth the cost to ship materials back and forth across the Pacific. I think part of this next phase will be the inclusion of recyclability into the manufacturing process - if a part can be recycled using automation back into materials that can be re-used in production, the true costs go down. According to the article, even FoxConn is getting into the action - they are planning to buy a million robots and install them in plants in Taiwan, replacing plants presently in China.
Of course, this doesn't mean a bunch of low-skill jobs are coming back in the US or anywhere else. It does mean a huge threat to low-wage low-skill countries worldwide. The solution is probably going to mean permanent unemployment support in the US and other developed countries for a major part of the working-age population, and a huge demographic crisis for overpopulated countries full of low-skilled workers. Whatever happens, it's going to be interesting.
Forbes just had a good article (sorry, too lazy to find the link) about how much better things are now than they were not long ago. Thanks to smart phones, the lowliest tribesman in Kenya now is better connected to the world than Ronald Reagan (or anyone at that time) was. Homicides are down by a factor of 100 from 500 years ago. The mean (adjusted) per capita income of the poorest people in the world today has tripled in the last 50 years despite the population doubling. The percentage of women dying in childbirth is down by a factor of 100 over the last 100 years, and childhood mortality has improved similarly. And so on. (These numbers are my recollection from the article so could be off, but you get the picture.)
It's funny, none of my relatives guilt trip me like this New York Times writer that probably hasn't spent a day of his life working in a factory.
From the NYTimes author's bio:
Mr. Uchitelle was a visiting scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation in New York in 2002-03 and taught journalism for many years at Columbia University’s School of General Studies. Before joining The Times, he worked for The Associated Press as a reporter, an editor and a foreign correspondent in Latin America.
Indeed. One of my big complaints is that journalism, having become a 'profession' that you now go to college for, is now populated by people who know nothing but what their professors taught them - 1/2 propaganda and 1/2 how to hold a microphone. Back in the day reporters, editors and the like either started out in a different job or worked their way up from copy boy or runner. Either way, having spent time in the real world, they understood a few things and had a perspective on real life. Unfortunately going to journalism school doesn't teach you anything about how the world works, or the details of any part of it. As a result, nowadays listening to the news and most commentary is like listening to grade school reports from complete newbies who know nothing about the history, background or dynamics of whatever they are reporting on. And many of them show the arrogance of one who thinks they know something when they are actually ignorant (at least of the topic at hand). It's like an unending procession of valley girls (and boys) remarking 'OMG look at those big buildings where people work - umm - what's work?'
My mom taught primary school back in the day. She noticed that the kids (ages 5-8, depending on which grade she was teaching each year) who came from the apartment blocks down the street had no finger dexterity at all - their hands were like clubs because they had never had any practice _doing_ anything, never got to go outside and play, make things, but just watched TV. This was back in the mid-1960s. Many of them were 'latchkey kids' whose parents both worked, so these kids went to school, came home and sat alone in the apartment until Mom and/or Dad came home. It's been a problem for a long time.
Another part of the problem is the relative cost of parts vs. assembled units. I recall wanting to fix a toaster (about 1970) that had stopped working - the nichrome wire inside had burned out. The cost of the wire was only slightly less than the cost of a new toaster. I think it's even worse today as increasingly automated manufacturing makes assembled units so cheap. I've noticed that in general it's cheaper to buy a new bookcase than to buy the wood to build your own of the same quality, _if_ you're that good - it's hard to match the precision with which even Ikea furniture is made.
I don't know if JD allows use of its trademarks on other items, but Jim Beam's logo is everywhere - T-shirts, hats, bags, you name it. It's quite within the realm of possibility that JD might be licensed for use on a book about JD. Same thing with Harley Davidson - you don't think all those jackets have the HD logo without being licensed, I hope. So if JD wants to prevent a bunch of crap clothes from China showing up here and undercutting the prices of legitimate clothes along with any association of JD with quality, they have to provide a reasonable effort to enforce their trademark rights.
A couple of commenters have noted that there is a branch of research related to defending against this - according to one it's called "adversarial machine learning". I've been casually wondering for some time about a related question, which is very relevant to the questions of using the various 'bottom up' AI systems like SVM and neural nets as models of human intelligence and of various complex adaptive systems ('living systems') including economies and polities (and evolutionary biology for that matter). If we look at these systems (both the real world ones and the mathematical models) as decision convergence models, what is the effect of nodes that make errors once, occasionally, frequently, or continuously ? And how does a successful neural network that is dealing with a continuously changing environment accommodate an element/node that provides, for example, randomly varying responses? What about a node that 'purposely' provides poisoned responses - like a secret agent putting false data into the news? In a machine, those things may be manageable by simply starting over, but in a continuous system like a real brain, that is not an option.
I learned a while back that in the human brain, a neuron whose output signals become ignored (the output from its axons becomes weighted so low that it has no influence on the 10,000 other neurons it is talking to), it dies. The brain seems to act very much like a republic of cantankerous, disagreeable citizens arguing at many different levels (and with shifting alliances). But if one continuously shouts "We're all gonna dieeee!!!", pretty soon nobody listens any more.
To my mind that's just putting pragmatism as a philosophy or value system ahead of libertarianism.:)
Of course, real life does intrude on every philosophy, making it impossible to behave purely with regard to the philosophy. For example, as I understand it, the Jains (used to?) believe that killing even the smallest bacterium is bad, and make great efforts to avoid killing anything. When bacteria were discovered the most extreme believers began wearing masks so as to avoid inhaling and inadvertently killing bacteria that floated in the air. One wonders what they think now, to discover that by count our bodies contain 10 times as many bacterial cells as human cells, and zillions of those bacteria die every day in this very accelerated ecosystem that we call the 'gut'.
This is just one example that every 'ism' is wrong - 'isms' are an attempt to impose a rational structure on reality, which is inherently arational - or if you prefer 'beyond rational'.
all the people that bitch and complain about "freeloaders" and "people living on the government teat" that I know for a fact are collecting government services themselves or have benefited from them in the past....that's another particularly LOL-worthy demographic these days.
I used to say that if you've ever received unemployment or went to a state college (or got college loans or grants), along with a raft of other things, that you can not in good conscience call yourself a libertarian.:) Of course, there is an answer to that - you can say, "I'm opposed to those things, but must take advantage of them to compete in this environment." But that just means that you don't have the courage of your convictions, or you are a defector. Or you could say, "Well, I was young then, and learned about libertarianism later." Yeah, right! *bronx cheer*:D Let's see what happens when you lose your job - gonna take that unemployment insurance? And what about Social Security? I don't see a lot of retired libertarians turning back the checks.
Which points out the old saying - when someone says "It's not the money, it's the principal", they're lying.
So, if you're using model that contains an algorithm which attempts to measure a personality trait like narcicism, which has no defined metric in psychiatry
Umm, it appears to me that such a metric definition would result from research, possibly including (not solely, but additionally) this work.
Of course, IMHO the DSM-type definitions of behavior and psychological syndromes is based on a very problematical fundamental model. Psychology is presently still laboring in a paradigm similar to chemistry or biology in the 18th century - descriptive but not structural. If we look at plants or animals, for example, to some extent we can track both the genetics and the influence of hormones, enzymes, etc. during development to predict how the plant or animal will look in the future. In a few areas we are now starting to be able to see how low levels of cortisol during embryonic development might affect the size of a particular area of the brain; and we are beginning to get a handle on how different parts of the brain interact (it's a lot more like a republic of rather cantankerous voters than the smooth-running single machine we always considered it to be).
As we learn more, we'll get past the 'talking cure' for most psychological issues. It's possible that adjusting hormone levels and behavioral work on CU (calculating-unemotional) children will reduce greatly the percentage who grow up to be Ted Bundy - or Bernie Madoff. OTOH - it's arguable that the society needs a certain percentage of Bernie Madoffs. If not, why are they there? Or are those folks just an extreme case of a useful characteristic?
It also conflates correlation with causation. The supposed fact that they were government officials could be the result, not the cause - psychopaths are likely to be attracted to positions where they can wield power, whether in social, tribal, corporate or government environment is just a matter of convenience and availability. Also, it's hard to say whether Genghis Khan or Alexander the Great would rightly described as 'government officials'. Or a large number of ancient Roman Caesars - as often as not they came up through the military, and often achieved the emperorship by means of social manipulation as well as the use of force. I don't know of a single Caesar who came up through the bureaucracy, which would be the province of 'government officials'. So I'm inclined to disagree with the parent's proposition entirely. The only one I can think of offhand was Hitler, who did manage to get himself elected.
A recent NY times article discussed work on discovering psychopathic tendencies in young children. It's early days but there seems to be some pretty good evidence that this problem can be diagnosed and eventually possibly treated early. Psychopathy is apparently about 80% inherited. The childhood 'calculating unemotional' (CU) syndrome is strongly correlated with later psychopathic behaviors, but about 1/2 of those with the syndrome seem to grow out of it or learn how to behave in their teens, so it's unfair to stigmatize them early on and this leaves hope that the percentages can be improved.
IANA evolutionary biologist, but the fact that psychopathy and leadership are so strongly correlated, and that the syndrome appears to be solidly 1% of the population (up to about 4% in high leadership positions according to another study) implies to me that there is an evolutionary advantage both individually and for a given population as a whole. Perhaps this characteristic, or some components of it, make it more likely that a particular tribe will succeed against its neighbors (such as success in war); or maybe psychopaths' manipulative abilities improve their chances of having offspring.
Slashdot Mirror
And I think also that a photon (in free space at least) experiences no time whatever for a similar reason - it is always travelling at the speed of light.
I once speculated that the speed of light is not a 'speed' at all, but a boundary field - the boundary between two states of existence, like the surface of the ocean is the boundary layer between water and air. What we experience as light is the ripples on the boundary field. The slower one is travelling, the farther one is from the boundary (in how many dimensions?) - and something analogous is going on on the other side of the speed of light.
Funny thing, I worked a little bit on an IBM 5100 desktop computer back in the day. This was a rather cool little machine, which ran BASIC, APL and one other language I forget. IBM had an accounting package written in BASIC for the 5100, but it was rather slow. So I looked at the code, trying to find why. I found multiple instances of empty loops to 1000, just like yours. (I forget how to write BASIC so I won't try.)
That machine was also the one where I played with APL, which I still think was a cool language. It forced you to think in terms of 'input array: transform: output array' rather than the twiddly bits of for-loops. So the classic programming solution of 'nibble at the edges of a problem until you get to the middle' can't be used, and you have to sit down and think about the pure more-or-less mathematical solution in its entirety, until you can get to 'A = f(B)' for some complex function f. IOW it requires you to be smarter.
It's true that if you or I spent as many hours training as Bolt we likely still wouldn't even be able to qualify for the Olympics, but simultaneously if all Bolt did was sit on his couch and eat chips, he wouldn't either.
So obviously what we need is an Olympic chip-eating competition - perhaps two sports, one on the couch, one standing up. I'm sure some /.ers would be serious competitors! :D
Interesting question. I used to ask a related question, "How much does a bit weigh?" I learned a couple of years ago that the proper question is, "What is the area of a bit?" See the Holographic Principle, and/or an article in Scientific American two or three years ago. It has to do with the requirement that the Universe can never lose, but must always gain, entropy. When mass is sucked into a black hole, the entropy of the Universe would lose entropy, so the entropy must be left behind at the event horizon. This somehow forces the surface area of the event horizon to expand according to the mass of the black hole. Since mass entropy can be equated to information entropy, after some shenanigans I don't understand, it turns out that the area of one bit is 2x2 planck lengths.
But I suspect, since that area is related to the mass that has been sucked in, wouldn't that imply that one bit is related to that amount of mass? Which means it is related to that mass, or equivalently that energy. :D I don't think that means that the mass 'represents' one bit though - rather the opposite, one bit represents that amount of mass or energy.
Now the suits will start flying, and filing suits.
Did I get FP? Golly.
Yes, with the appropriate expanded magazines. Those magazines may be illegal (I don't know) but they as I understand it, they are available for many 'hunting' weapons as well as 'assault' weapons.
No, but we can set up a fraction. Let's say that 1/1000 stars have orbiting planets. That would be infinity/1000, which equals infinity. Still not finite. As another commenter noted, there is a one-to-one mapping of rational numbers (3/4, 1/72, 399/12, etc.) to integers.
Or, as my sig used to say, "Space is big - really big. Better pack a lunch."
Instead of cutting where its needed (*entitlements*), they cut everything else instead.
FTFY - and I'm soon to be eligible for Social Security. The standard practice for all political administrations since forever has been to always propose to cut whatever is most desirable, popular and necessary, rather than what is least important, most expensive and biggest boondoggle. This assures an outcry about "Don't cut X", setting the debate about the wrong topic and leaving the politicians in charge of ever more money. It has worked since the first democracy (read about Pericles, who invented 'bread and circuses' to stay elected - and in effect bankrupted Athens). And I got an 'A' for a paper about this in college! :D
The way things are going, I will be able to enjoy a fairly nice lifestyle for 30 to 40 years on my Social Security and free medical care (my family tends to live long time), and die just in time to leave all you young, poor suckers to pay off the debt. While this works well for me, it's a bad idea for the nation. Sorry! :D
As someone who is challenged by using a circular saw (maybe I need a better saw, or a cut off saw?), it's still satisfying. I use more wood, and my cuts aren't always even. It takes a long time.
I'm not sure, but I assume by circular saw, you mean a handheld circular saw (such as SkilSaw). It's very hard to cut a cabinet-straight cut with a hand held circular saw. This gets into the whole 'cost of tools' thing, and making choices about time, cost and materials tradeoffs. (I would love to have my dad's shop that I first learned to work in - that shop had everything to build commercial quality stuff - planers, jointers, table and radial arm saws, drill presses, etc., etc. I remember learning how to sharpen chisels in that shop. I made my first toy box at the age of five in that shop.)
And yes, the blade is a big deal. One of the newer innovations is the narrow kerf blades that are now available. They are easier on the saw (less friction), and make nice narrow cuts. A dull blade is way more trouble than it's worth. There are still a few places that sharpen blades, but it's best to stick with the carbide blades in any case. And _never_ try to push the saw through the work - all you will do is heat the blade up, cause oils in the wood to come out and burn, making the blade forever sticky and possibly losing the temper of the steel.
If you can't afford or don't have room for at least a table saw, you can get by with using the circular saw, cut well outside your lines (IOW leave space between pieces), and use handheld planes - electric and/or manual - and maybe a sander to bring the line down to where it should be. But you still have to be careful about keeping the cut vertical - it's easy to end up with an edge that isn't _quite_ perpendicular to the surface (actually you can use that to your advantage sometimes - giving a slight angle (1-2 degrees) to the cut will make sure that the front edge is flush to the matching surface.)
I also happen to like routers - get one that will hold its height correctly. There's a lot you can do with a router and a home-made jig. (In fact with a good long aluminum straightedge and some clamps, you can use a router to clean up a saw cut.)
There's a show on the local PBS station called 'Rough Cuts' with Jimmie Mac that can be very enlightening for both newbies and old hands. It might be available online, I dunno. He likes to start out with a plank o' wood cut from a tree, before it's been planed. Which reminds me - in most parts of the country, if you're far enough out of the big city, you can find a local guy who has his own small sawmill. That's the place to go to get actual wood, if you want to work with local woods.
Hahahaha! :D
Back in the day (about 1978) my mostly-tongue-in-cheek saying went like this:
"The promise of the Industrial Revolution was that the machines could do all the work, nobody would have to work and we could all live like kings. The flip side of this is that there are no jobs. So, let's start a new political party, called the 'Technical Party', whose main platform would be to change unemployment from a problem to the objective. Why should anyone _have_ to work? Let's make it a 'Volunteer Work Force', just like the military.
Once we are elected, we will work to make having a job more like being drafted for the military - for a while until the robots get better, everyone will have to work for, say 10 years, and can then retire on a full pension. Over time that time might be reduced as robots get better. Maybe for a bit extra they can join the 'Work Reserves' and go in for a couple of days a month and two weeks in the summer. Of course some folks will want to continue in the work force, just as in today's military some folks make it a career. But most folks can just concentrate their efforts on whatever creative, amusing endeavour they want to pursue. The arts will flourish!"
Of course this ignores the question of what the uncreative people are going to do with themselves. What's to keep huge mobs of people with nothing to do off the streets, rioting for a hobby? :)
I _did_ say 'of the same quality' - I wasn't trying to compare flat pack particle board to solid oak. :)
Forbes just had an interesting article about how many major manufacturers (Caterpillar, IBM, etc.) are beginning to come back to the US and building plants based on advanced robotics, nanotechnology and 3D printing. These plants can build stuff cheaper than those relatively labor-intensive plants in China, making it no longer worth the cost to ship materials back and forth across the Pacific. I think part of this next phase will be the inclusion of recyclability into the manufacturing process - if a part can be recycled using automation back into materials that can be re-used in production, the true costs go down. According to the article, even FoxConn is getting into the action - they are planning to buy a million robots and install them in plants in Taiwan, replacing plants presently in China.
Of course, this doesn't mean a bunch of low-skill jobs are coming back in the US or anywhere else. It does mean a huge threat to low-wage low-skill countries worldwide. The solution is probably going to mean permanent unemployment support in the US and other developed countries for a major part of the working-age population, and a huge demographic crisis for overpopulated countries full of low-skilled workers. Whatever happens, it's going to be interesting.
ohhhh that kind of stud finder..I had another description of that in my mind haha
I think that kind is called a 'Cosmo', and is available at the local meat market. :)
I am unable to use a stud finder, as it does not function properly when I am around it
Probably your magnetic personality! :D
Forbes just had a good article (sorry, too lazy to find the link) about how much better things are now than they were not long ago. Thanks to smart phones, the lowliest tribesman in Kenya now is better connected to the world than Ronald Reagan (or anyone at that time) was. Homicides are down by a factor of 100 from 500 years ago. The mean (adjusted) per capita income of the poorest people in the world today has tripled in the last 50 years despite the population doubling. The percentage of women dying in childbirth is down by a factor of 100 over the last 100 years, and childhood mortality has improved similarly. And so on. (These numbers are my recollection from the article so could be off, but you get the picture.)
It's funny, none of my relatives guilt trip me like this New York Times writer that probably hasn't spent a day of his life working in a factory.
From the NYTimes author's bio:
Mr. Uchitelle was a visiting scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation in New York in 2002-03 and taught journalism for many years at Columbia University’s School of General Studies. Before joining The Times, he worked for The Associated Press as a reporter, an editor and a foreign correspondent in Latin America.
Indeed. One of my big complaints is that journalism, having become a 'profession' that you now go to college for, is now populated by people who know nothing but what their professors taught them - 1/2 propaganda and 1/2 how to hold a microphone. Back in the day reporters, editors and the like either started out in a different job or worked their way up from copy boy or runner. Either way, having spent time in the real world, they understood a few things and had a perspective on real life. Unfortunately going to journalism school doesn't teach you anything about how the world works, or the details of any part of it. As a result, nowadays listening to the news and most commentary is like listening to grade school reports from complete newbies who know nothing about the history, background or dynamics of whatever they are reporting on. And many of them show the arrogance of one who thinks they know something when they are actually ignorant (at least of the topic at hand). It's like an unending procession of valley girls (and boys) remarking 'OMG look at those big buildings where people work - umm - what's work?'
My mom taught primary school back in the day. She noticed that the kids (ages 5-8, depending on which grade she was teaching each year) who came from the apartment blocks down the street had no finger dexterity at all - their hands were like clubs because they had never had any practice _doing_ anything, never got to go outside and play, make things, but just watched TV. This was back in the mid-1960s. Many of them were 'latchkey kids' whose parents both worked, so these kids went to school, came home and sat alone in the apartment until Mom and/or Dad came home. It's been a problem for a long time.
Another part of the problem is the relative cost of parts vs. assembled units. I recall wanting to fix a toaster (about 1970) that had stopped working - the nichrome wire inside had burned out. The cost of the wire was only slightly less than the cost of a new toaster. I think it's even worse today as increasingly automated manufacturing makes assembled units so cheap. I've noticed that in general it's cheaper to buy a new bookcase than to buy the wood to build your own of the same quality, _if_ you're that good - it's hard to match the precision with which even Ikea furniture is made.
I don't know if JD allows use of its trademarks on other items, but Jim Beam's logo is everywhere - T-shirts, hats, bags, you name it. It's quite within the realm of possibility that JD might be licensed for use on a book about JD. Same thing with Harley Davidson - you don't think all those jackets have the HD logo without being licensed, I hope. So if JD wants to prevent a bunch of crap clothes from China showing up here and undercutting the prices of legitimate clothes along with any association of JD with quality, they have to provide a reasonable effort to enforce their trademark rights.
Hey, it's only a two-hour drive, only straight up. Traction is the big problem ...
A couple of commenters have noted that there is a branch of research related to defending against this - according to one it's called "adversarial machine learning". I've been casually wondering for some time about a related question, which is very relevant to the questions of using the various 'bottom up' AI systems like SVM and neural nets as models of human intelligence and of various complex adaptive systems ('living systems') including economies and polities (and evolutionary biology for that matter). If we look at these systems (both the real world ones and the mathematical models) as decision convergence models, what is the effect of nodes that make errors once, occasionally, frequently, or continuously ? And how does a successful neural network that is dealing with a continuously changing environment accommodate an element/node that provides, for example, randomly varying responses? What about a node that 'purposely' provides poisoned responses - like a secret agent putting false data into the news? In a machine, those things may be manageable by simply starting over, but in a continuous system like a real brain, that is not an option.
I learned a while back that in the human brain, a neuron whose output signals become ignored (the output from its axons becomes weighted so low that it has no influence on the 10,000 other neurons it is talking to), it dies. The brain seems to act very much like a republic of cantankerous, disagreeable citizens arguing at many different levels (and with shifting alliances). But if one continuously shouts "We're all gonna dieeee!!!", pretty soon nobody listens any more.
To my mind that's just putting pragmatism as a philosophy or value system ahead of libertarianism. :)
Of course, real life does intrude on every philosophy, making it impossible to behave purely with regard to the philosophy. For example, as I understand it, the Jains (used to?) believe that killing even the smallest bacterium is bad, and make great efforts to avoid killing anything. When bacteria were discovered the most extreme believers began wearing masks so as to avoid inhaling and inadvertently killing bacteria that floated in the air. One wonders what they think now, to discover that by count our bodies contain 10 times as many bacterial cells as human cells, and zillions of those bacteria die every day in this very accelerated ecosystem that we call the 'gut'.
This is just one example that every 'ism' is wrong - 'isms' are an attempt to impose a rational structure on reality, which is inherently arational - or if you prefer 'beyond rational'.
all the people that bitch and complain about "freeloaders" and "people living on the government teat" that I know for a fact are collecting government services themselves or have benefited from them in the past....that's another particularly LOL-worthy demographic these days.
I used to say that if you've ever received unemployment or went to a state college (or got college loans or grants), along with a raft of other things, that you can not in good conscience call yourself a libertarian. :) Of course, there is an answer to that - you can say, "I'm opposed to those things, but must take advantage of them to compete in this environment." But that just means that you don't have the courage of your convictions, or you are a defector. Or you could say, "Well, I was young then, and learned about libertarianism later." Yeah, right! *bronx cheer* :D Let's see what happens when you lose your job - gonna take that unemployment insurance? And what about Social Security? I don't see a lot of retired libertarians turning back the checks.
Which points out the old saying - when someone says "It's not the money, it's the principal", they're lying.
So, if you're using model that contains an algorithm which attempts to measure a personality trait like narcicism, which has no defined metric in psychiatry
Umm, it appears to me that such a metric definition would result from research, possibly including (not solely, but additionally) this work.
Of course, IMHO the DSM-type definitions of behavior and psychological syndromes is based on a very problematical fundamental model. Psychology is presently still laboring in a paradigm similar to chemistry or biology in the 18th century - descriptive but not structural. If we look at plants or animals, for example, to some extent we can track both the genetics and the influence of hormones, enzymes, etc. during development to predict how the plant or animal will look in the future. In a few areas we are now starting to be able to see how low levels of cortisol during embryonic development might affect the size of a particular area of the brain; and we are beginning to get a handle on how different parts of the brain interact (it's a lot more like a republic of rather cantankerous voters than the smooth-running single machine we always considered it to be).
As we learn more, we'll get past the 'talking cure' for most psychological issues. It's possible that adjusting hormone levels and behavioral work on CU (calculating-unemotional) children will reduce greatly the percentage who grow up to be Ted Bundy - or Bernie Madoff. OTOH - it's arguable that the society needs a certain percentage of Bernie Madoffs. If not, why are they there? Or are those folks just an extreme case of a useful characteristic?
It also conflates correlation with causation. The supposed fact that they were government officials could be the result, not the cause - psychopaths are likely to be attracted to positions where they can wield power, whether in social, tribal, corporate or government environment is just a matter of convenience and availability. Also, it's hard to say whether Genghis Khan or Alexander the Great would rightly described as 'government officials'. Or a large number of ancient Roman Caesars - as often as not they came up through the military, and often achieved the emperorship by means of social manipulation as well as the use of force. I don't know of a single Caesar who came up through the bureaucracy, which would be the province of 'government officials'. So I'm inclined to disagree with the parent's proposition entirely. The only one I can think of offhand was Hitler, who did manage to get himself elected.
A recent NY times article discussed work on discovering psychopathic tendencies in young children. It's early days but there seems to be some pretty good evidence that this problem can be diagnosed and eventually possibly treated early. Psychopathy is apparently about 80% inherited. The childhood 'calculating unemotional' (CU) syndrome is strongly correlated with later psychopathic behaviors, but about 1/2 of those with the syndrome seem to grow out of it or learn how to behave in their teens, so it's unfair to stigmatize them early on and this leaves hope that the percentages can be improved.
IANA evolutionary biologist, but the fact that psychopathy and leadership are so strongly correlated, and that the syndrome appears to be solidly 1% of the population (up to about 4% in high leadership positions according to another study) implies to me that there is an evolutionary advantage both individually and for a given population as a whole. Perhaps this characteristic, or some components of it, make it more likely that a particular tribe will succeed against its neighbors (such as success in war); or maybe psychopaths' manipulative abilities improve their chances of having offspring.