I was struck by the similarities in the shades of colors in the Color Brewer to the use of patterns, repeats, and variations in music. When you hear the same musical pattern repeated over and over, it sets up an expectation in the mind for that pattern to continue. In the Color Blender, choosing a range of mono-chromatic values for a single hue does exactly the same thing. Once we see the pattern of a single color changing value in regular perceptual steps (more on that in a moment), it sets up an expectation that this will continue. By mapping this expectation to a data series, it's easy to understand how that might highlight and enhance one's understanding of how the data is changing, too.
I have always hated the traditional color cubes for exactly the same reason as the professor: the units of control in the interface are wholly out of step with the units of perception. Move a little, and it is supposed to change just a little, but that is not what happens in a color cube!
Music has a similar problem, in that sound is not equally perceived across the range of possible combinations of vibrations. Early musicians invented "scales" of sounds, which are really just a sequence of sweet spots in these combinations that align with our own, internal "data" series -- the series of emotions and thought. When we hear a "sad" song, it literally makes us feel sad, the sound of sadness coincides so closely with the feeling. All of the sadness-inducing notes are collected together into a single, named collection called a "minor" key, something like a library from a programming perspective.
However, even with all the libraries of sound available, it was recognized very early on that the ranges are not mathematically perfect. Sound is composed by the summation of multiple vibrations, some of which cancel each other other, and others that emphasize each other. You have to "temper" the scales, that is, slightly tune them away from mathematical perfection, as you go up or down in pitch, in order for them to be equally perceived.
All I want is a feedback system to warn me when I'm driving too close to the car ahead of me, or being followed too closely by the car behind. You need a minimum of 2 seconds lead time to avoid running into the car ahead of you, at whatever speed. 1 second is for you to react and start applying the brakes, and 1 second is for the brakes to stop the car. For rain or fog, add 1 second. For snow, +2. For ice, +4.
GOT celebrates all the ugly things people can do to each other. I watched it for a little less than a season, until I understood that the point was to just be as horrible as possible.
I don't need to seek out ugliness in my life, the real world is full enough of it as it is.
This study does not explain anything, because correlation != causation. The correlation could be entirely unrelated to fracking, for all we know, because they chose to spend their money on statistics, not on the scientific method. Imagine what it would have been like if they attempted to prove that fracking causes health problems by repeatable experimentation. Now, that would be interesting.
So, the letter "X" is supposed to stand for user "experience". But honestly, who would choose that letter to represent that word, or even that concept?
The problem begins at the very root. As long as people think the goal is to design some thing, and not to serve some one, then we will continue to disrespect the user by doing stupid things like throwing away a perfectly good interface and forcing everyone to change all at once.
I wish to dear heaven that everyone in my business would always provide a minimalist interface to everything as an option. It wouldn't be expensive, because you'd never have to change it.
Meanwhile, the US debt keeps piling up, up, up
on
Greece Rejects EU Terms
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Borrowing, who cares? Federal government spending is on auto-pilot to increase dramatically over the coming decades. When the feds run out of borrowing capacity, they will have no where else to turn but to raid people's investments. We are just as bad as the Greeks. We don't want to pay for our government, either.
This. Furthermore, the questions are primarily policy related, so they are especially meaningless. I may agree with you on climate change factually, but utterly disagree with you on what policies we should adopt regarding them. Of course "AAAS Members" don't agree with Joe and Jane Six-Pack, they don't work where they work, they don't live where they live, and so on and so on.
The days when a security breach is big news is so over. When the US Government can lose control over the employment records of every, single employee, this kind of playing around by Anonymous is just kind of sad.
Didn't the creators of Star Trek already explore this issue in depth? When machines can do all the work, money becomes obsolete. Wealth is measured in access to machines. Greed and avarice, of course, will still exist. "Hey! His replicator is bigger than mine! No fair!"
The parent comment is an excellent piece of analysis, but I want to comment on just one minor side point, which is that mailed-in ballots should be preferred over software-controlled ballots.
For the life of me, I cannot fathom why here, among the slashdot crowd of all places, is paper considered an ideal medium for counting anything. Do we not understand black-box testing? Do we not build in test assertions at every step, so that we can test our machine with another machine? Can we not imagine how horrific it would be that instead of automated tests, we printed out our assertions on a paper form, filled them in by hand, then hand-tallied the results after each build?
Now take all the issues with managing hand-written slips of paper, and magnify that by 2 because now you have to transport them by mail -- put them in an envelope (don't miss any!), put a stamp on it (don't forget!), pick them up and put them on a truck (did you get all of them?), etc., etc. Would you trust your critical data to a transport layer that didn't have guaranteed delivery? I thought not.
Humans stink at repetitive tasks, THAT'S WHY WHY WE INVENTED COMPUTERS. The ultimate repetitive task is counting, so let's use it, not go back to the Stone Age of paper.
A very hearty second. MuseScore has always been a very capable, easy-to-learn score editor. Looking over the new features, it looks like the developers are keeping that focus on functionality and usability, and aren't just larding on more stuff -- or even worse, ruining the app by changing the entire look and feel "just because". (Oh, how I hate the flat icon look. It actively makes it harder to see what you're doing. They have essentially made it impossible to classify things by sight, because you can't individuate anymore. Bah.)
I made the switch to MuseScore several years ago, and everything I've written down was done with this fine tool. Looking forward to 2.0.
Wow, who is making the argument that we should "sacrifice free speech for a better society"? That sounds positively Orwellian. Or something from China, where the government runs a massive censorship operation.
Liberal folks, this is your issue. The conservatives and libertarians are all over preserving the right to speech. Where is your support for the same? Speech is not action, it's just someone's opinion. Speech cannot hurt you, but the lack of freedom to speak most definitely can. You cannot "speak truth to power" if you cannot speak. What, no one remembers the Matrix?
https://sprout.hp.com/us/en/ This is what you need: a touch/draw surface for you to draw on, but overlaid with a video projection of what everyone else is drawing.
I don't understand this analysis. Why are you showing "profit" as being equal to gross for some stakeholders (Composers, writers, performers), but as only 5% of gross for others (labels and platforms)? And, furthermore, what's up with "estimating" the profit margin at a single number, and then applying that same number to two very different operations (labels vs. platforms)? That looks quite strange.
Hey, better be careful of what you wish for. A surprisingly large number of liberal causes depend on the principle of equal treatment. If you now have a law where it's OK to be unequal, that might open the door for others.
The President has sent his people out over the land, finding things that don't work very well. He will now spend the rest of his tenure urging various federal agencies and Congress to "stop doin' stupid stuff", accompanied, if possible, by some form of federal largess. Rinse. Relather. Repeat.
No, the scores of organizations are there because it is to their benefit to get out the vote, not because the process is hard.
When I say the process isn't hard, I mean it literally isn't hard because I have watched tens of thousands of ordinary people go through it with no problems. Shoot, even people with physical disabilities somehow manage to cast a vote.
The causes of low voter turnout are many, and difficulty with the voting process itself is not one of them, except for one factor: waiting time in the big, popular elections. Waiting time is not a factor in most elections. I am an officer of election, and have worked the polls for nearly a decade.
Despite all the hullabaloo, it is not, in fact, difficult to register to vote. It is not, in fact, difficult to show up at a polling station, check in, and cast your vote. There are scores of organizations that exist merely to help people with the process.
So, the whole rationale behind this BitCoin idea falls on its face.
"The hotel group found support from Cisco Systems. 'Unlicensed spectrum generally should be open and available to all who wish to make use of it, but access to unlicensed spectrum resources can and should be balanced against the need to protect networks, data and devices from security threats and potentially other limited network management concerns,' Mary Brown, Cisco’s director of government affairs, wrote.
While personal hotspots should be allowed in public places, the 'balance shifts in enterprise locations, where many entities use their Wi-Fi networks to convey company confidential information [and] trade secrets,' she added."
Why yes, the balance shifts in places like hotel conference centers, where many people use their own, personal hotspots precisely so they can better lock down confidential information. Please. This is a naked money grab. No more charging $thousands just for an Internet connection at a trade show.
The author says that "cryptography is underhanded", but you will look in vain to find any technical meaning of that phrase anywhere in the article. What he really means is that the major corporations (Google, Apple, et al.) are underhanded because they are working with state spies to cripple algorithms and put in back doors, etc.
But trying to cripple cryptography this is something we already are aware of, and there are ways to shore up the technology to make it much, much harder for government to spy on us in bulk. Even using weak, crippled cryptography forces the spies to expend computing resources. Cryptography is all about raising the cost of spying, when dealing with government, not with preventing spying.
You do know that ballots "filled in by hand" are actually counted by machines, yes? No one literally counts ballots by hand, the error rate is over the top. Imagine 100 people counting 10,000 ballots: how many of them would you expect will come up with the exact same answer? And, if they don't agree, how will you tell which ones were counted correctly? The answer is, you'd look for a way to remove humans from the equation, because humans are notoriously bad at repetitive tasks. You will use a machine to do the counting. Every time.
The question you really should be asking yourself is, which is more error-prone? Optically scanning a hand-written ballot and counting the votes, or reading a touchscreen. Occam's Razor alone should convince you that the system with the fewer number of moving parts and chances for errors is the more reliable.
Hm, are you really sure about this? The tagline of evolution isn't, "survival of those who just happend to be here, in no particular order, and for no particular reason", but "survival of the fittest." "Fitness" is properly a design principle, I would argue; it is an optimization (selection) with a purpose (survival). Adding millions of years and hundreds of genetic mutations to the equation doesn't change any of that.
Even your statement that "very likely you'll see increased complexity over time" betrays (if that's not too strong a word) a hidden assumption of progress. Why very likely? If truly random, why not equally unlikely?
Behind the theory of classic evolution lies a metaphysical explanation for the universe: that life "progresses", from simple to complex, from the more fundamental to the more sublime, from problem to solution. The metaphysics of evolution is very much rooted in the philosophy of positivism and progressivism. It is anti-religious not in the sense that it is against the idea of a God, necessarily, but in the sense that the concept of a God is not needed to explain the natural world. God is irrelevant.
One does not hear debate on the metaphysics of evolution very often, and that is a shame. The philosophy of Progressivism, to me, seems more like wishful thinking, than a real explanation of why things are the they way they are. Is progress absolute? Certainly any objective evaluation of history, with its long record of extinctions, would seem to argue otherwise.
Regarding the Bible's metaphysics, however, there is absolutely nothing in common between progressivism and traditional Christian teaching. The very first chapter of the very first book lays it all on the line: God said, "Let there be light. And there was light..." and so on, for 65 more books. The doctrine of the Bible is that "in Him we live and move and have our being." This couldn't be more orthogonal to the doctrine of positivism.
So, while the Pope may rightly observe that a changing creation is still a creation, I'm not sure that really gets to the heart of the matter, which is a metaphysical argument about origins.
Asimov's advice for how to run effective bull sessions for creative geniuses is based on the assumption that progress is made by a few "great men" who can see and imagine things that all others miss. This theory is not exactly politically correct these days, to say the least. Modern history books are full of attempts to find and highlight what I might call the "Forgotten Man" of history, the story of ordinary people who represent an entire class of people who collectively brought about change.
Personally, I subscribe to a combination of the two ideas. Masses of people lived for tens of thousands of years in exactly the same manner as their ancestors until someone came along with a genuinely new idea that was then adopted and perfected by mass experimentation and use. So: great men for the original ideas, but forgotten men for productizing them.
Slashdot Mirror
I was struck by the similarities in the shades of colors in the Color Brewer to the use of patterns, repeats, and variations in music. When you hear the same musical pattern repeated over and over, it sets up an expectation in the mind for that pattern to continue. In the Color Blender, choosing a range of mono-chromatic values for a single hue does exactly the same thing. Once we see the pattern of a single color changing value in regular perceptual steps (more on that in a moment), it sets up an expectation that this will continue. By mapping this expectation to a data series, it's easy to understand how that might highlight and enhance one's understanding of how the data is changing, too.
I have always hated the traditional color cubes for exactly the same reason as the professor: the units of control in the interface are wholly out of step with the units of perception. Move a little, and it is supposed to change just a little, but that is not what happens in a color cube!
Music has a similar problem, in that sound is not equally perceived across the range of possible combinations of vibrations. Early musicians invented "scales" of sounds, which are really just a sequence of sweet spots in these combinations that align with our own, internal "data" series -- the series of emotions and thought. When we hear a "sad" song, it literally makes us feel sad, the sound of sadness coincides so closely with the feeling. All of the sadness-inducing notes are collected together into a single, named collection called a "minor" key, something like a library from a programming perspective.
However, even with all the libraries of sound available, it was recognized very early on that the ranges are not mathematically perfect. Sound is composed by the summation of multiple vibrations, some of which cancel each other other, and others that emphasize each other. You have to "temper" the scales, that is, slightly tune them away from mathematical perfection, as you go up or down in pitch, in order for them to be equally perceived.
All I want is a feedback system to warn me when I'm driving too close to the car ahead of me, or being followed too closely by the car behind. You need a minimum of 2 seconds lead time to avoid running into the car ahead of you, at whatever speed. 1 second is for you to react and start applying the brakes, and 1 second is for the brakes to stop the car. For rain or fog, add 1 second. For snow, +2. For ice, +4.
GOT celebrates all the ugly things people can do to each other. I watched it for a little less than a season, until I understood that the point was to just be as horrible as possible.
I don't need to seek out ugliness in my life, the real world is full enough of it as it is.
This study does not explain anything, because correlation != causation. The correlation could be entirely unrelated to fracking, for all we know, because they chose to spend their money on statistics, not on the scientific method. Imagine what it would have been like if they attempted to prove that fracking causes health problems by repeatable experimentation. Now, that would be interesting.
So, the letter "X" is supposed to stand for user "experience". But honestly, who would choose that letter to represent that word, or even that concept?
The problem begins at the very root. As long as people think the goal is to design some thing, and not to serve some one, then we will continue to disrespect the user by doing stupid things like throwing away a perfectly good interface and forcing everyone to change all at once.
I wish to dear heaven that everyone in my business would always provide a minimalist interface to everything as an option. It wouldn't be expensive, because you'd never have to change it.
Borrowing, who cares? Federal government spending is on auto-pilot to increase dramatically over the coming decades. When the feds run out of borrowing capacity, they will have no where else to turn but to raid people's investments. We are just as bad as the Greeks. We don't want to pay for our government, either.
http://www.usgovernmentdebt.us...
And, never state your hypothesis, we might comb through your results and point out embarrassing places where the data contradicts you.
This. Furthermore, the questions are primarily policy related, so they are especially meaningless. I may agree with you on climate change factually, but utterly disagree with you on what policies we should adopt regarding them. Of course "AAAS Members" don't agree with Joe and Jane Six-Pack, they don't work where they work, they don't live where they live, and so on and so on.
Sheesh. I wish Pew had done a better job here.
The days when a security breach is big news is so over. When the US Government can lose control over the employment records of every, single employee, this kind of playing around by Anonymous is just kind of sad.
Didn't the creators of Star Trek already explore this issue in depth? When machines can do all the work, money becomes obsolete. Wealth is measured in access to machines. Greed and avarice, of course, will still exist. "Hey! His replicator is bigger than mine! No fair!"
The parent comment is an excellent piece of analysis, but I want to comment on just one minor side point, which is that mailed-in ballots should be preferred over software-controlled ballots.
For the life of me, I cannot fathom why here, among the slashdot crowd of all places, is paper considered an ideal medium for counting anything. Do we not understand black-box testing? Do we not build in test assertions at every step, so that we can test our machine with another machine? Can we not imagine how horrific it would be that instead of automated tests, we printed out our assertions on a paper form, filled them in by hand, then hand-tallied the results after each build?
Now take all the issues with managing hand-written slips of paper, and magnify that by 2 because now you have to transport them by mail -- put them in an envelope (don't miss any!), put a stamp on it (don't forget!), pick them up and put them on a truck (did you get all of them?), etc., etc. Would you trust your critical data to a transport layer that didn't have guaranteed delivery? I thought not.
Humans stink at repetitive tasks, THAT'S WHY WHY WE INVENTED COMPUTERS. The ultimate repetitive task is counting, so let's use it, not go back to the Stone Age of paper.
A very hearty second. MuseScore has always been a very capable, easy-to-learn score editor. Looking over the new features, it looks like the developers are keeping that focus on functionality and usability, and aren't just larding on more stuff -- or even worse, ruining the app by changing the entire look and feel "just because". (Oh, how I hate the flat icon look. It actively makes it harder to see what you're doing. They have essentially made it impossible to classify things by sight, because you can't individuate anymore. Bah.)
I made the switch to MuseScore several years ago, and everything I've written down was done with this fine tool. Looking forward to 2.0.
Wow, who is making the argument that we should "sacrifice free speech for a better society"? That sounds positively Orwellian. Or something from China, where the government runs a massive censorship operation.
Liberal folks, this is your issue. The conservatives and libertarians are all over preserving the right to speech. Where is your support for the same? Speech is not action, it's just someone's opinion. Speech cannot hurt you, but the lack of freedom to speak most definitely can. You cannot "speak truth to power" if you cannot speak. What, no one remembers the Matrix?
https://sprout.hp.com/us/en/ This is what you need: a touch/draw surface for you to draw on, but overlaid with a video projection of what everyone else is drawing.
I don't understand this analysis. Why are you showing "profit" as being equal to gross for some stakeholders (Composers, writers, performers), but as only 5% of gross for others (labels and platforms)? And, furthermore, what's up with "estimating" the profit margin at a single number, and then applying that same number to two very different operations (labels vs. platforms)? That looks quite strange.
Hey, better be careful of what you wish for. A surprisingly large number of liberal causes depend on the principle of equal treatment. If you now have a law where it's OK to be unequal, that might open the door for others.
The President has sent his people out over the land, finding things that don't work very well. He will now spend the rest of his tenure urging various federal agencies and Congress to "stop doin' stupid stuff", accompanied, if possible, by some form of federal largess. Rinse. Relather. Repeat.
No, the scores of organizations are there because it is to their benefit to get out the vote, not because the process is hard.
When I say the process isn't hard, I mean it literally isn't hard because I have watched tens of thousands of ordinary people go through it with no problems. Shoot, even people with physical disabilities somehow manage to cast a vote.
The causes of low voter turnout are many, and difficulty with the voting process itself is not one of them, except for one factor: waiting time in the big, popular elections. Waiting time is not a factor in most elections. I am an officer of election, and have worked the polls for nearly a decade.
Despite all the hullabaloo, it is not, in fact, difficult to register to vote. It is not, in fact, difficult to show up at a polling station, check in, and cast your vote. There are scores of organizations that exist merely to help people with the process.
So, the whole rationale behind this BitCoin idea falls on its face.
Why yes, the balance shifts in places like hotel conference centers, where many people use their own, personal hotspots precisely so they can better lock down confidential information. Please. This is a naked money grab. No more charging $thousands just for an Internet connection at a trade show.
The author says that "cryptography is underhanded", but you will look in vain to find any technical meaning of that phrase anywhere in the article. What he really means is that the major corporations (Google, Apple, et al.) are underhanded because they are working with state spies to cripple algorithms and put in back doors, etc.
But trying to cripple cryptography this is something we already are aware of, and there are ways to shore up the technology to make it much, much harder for government to spy on us in bulk. Even using weak, crippled cryptography forces the spies to expend computing resources. Cryptography is all about raising the cost of spying, when dealing with government, not with preventing spying.
You do know that ballots "filled in by hand" are actually counted by machines, yes? No one literally counts ballots by hand, the error rate is over the top. Imagine 100 people counting 10,000 ballots: how many of them would you expect will come up with the exact same answer? And, if they don't agree, how will you tell which ones were counted correctly? The answer is, you'd look for a way to remove humans from the equation, because humans are notoriously bad at repetitive tasks. You will use a machine to do the counting. Every time.
The question you really should be asking yourself is, which is more error-prone? Optically scanning a hand-written ballot and counting the votes, or reading a touchscreen. Occam's Razor alone should convince you that the system with the fewer number of moving parts and chances for errors is the more reliable.
Hm, are you really sure about this? The tagline of evolution isn't, "survival of those who just happend to be here, in no particular order, and for no particular reason", but "survival of the fittest." "Fitness" is properly a design principle, I would argue; it is an optimization (selection) with a purpose (survival). Adding millions of years and hundreds of genetic mutations to the equation doesn't change any of that.
Even your statement that "very likely you'll see increased complexity over time" betrays (if that's not too strong a word) a hidden assumption of progress. Why very likely? If truly random, why not equally unlikely?
Behind the theory of classic evolution lies a metaphysical explanation for the universe: that life "progresses", from simple to complex, from the more fundamental to the more sublime, from problem to solution. The metaphysics of evolution is very much rooted in the philosophy of positivism and progressivism. It is anti-religious not in the sense that it is against the idea of a God, necessarily, but in the sense that the concept of a God is not needed to explain the natural world. God is irrelevant.
One does not hear debate on the metaphysics of evolution very often, and that is a shame. The philosophy of Progressivism, to me, seems more like wishful thinking, than a real explanation of why things are the they way they are. Is progress absolute? Certainly any objective evaluation of history, with its long record of extinctions, would seem to argue otherwise.
Regarding the Bible's metaphysics, however, there is absolutely nothing in common between progressivism and traditional Christian teaching. The very first chapter of the very first book lays it all on the line: God said, "Let there be light. And there was light..." and so on, for 65 more books. The doctrine of the Bible is that "in Him we live and move and have our being." This couldn't be more orthogonal to the doctrine of positivism.
So, while the Pope may rightly observe that a changing creation is still a creation, I'm not sure that really gets to the heart of the matter, which is a metaphysical argument about origins.
Asimov's advice for how to run effective bull sessions for creative geniuses is based on the assumption that progress is made by a few "great men" who can see and imagine things that all others miss. This theory is not exactly politically correct these days, to say the least. Modern history books are full of attempts to find and highlight what I might call the "Forgotten Man" of history, the story of ordinary people who represent an entire class of people who collectively brought about change.
Personally, I subscribe to a combination of the two ideas. Masses of people lived for tens of thousands of years in exactly the same manner as their ancestors until someone came along with a genuinely new idea that was then adopted and perfected by mass experimentation and use. So: great men for the original ideas, but forgotten men for productizing them.