I just CAN'T believe that "social" uses of picture-taking phones will be more than a brief-lived novelty/gimmick/fad.
On the other hand, just imagine how useful one of these things could be for a field service engineer, customer service, etc. ("OK, you've got cover opened, right? See the board? Do you see a little switch pack down at the left?" "[Click] This one?" "Yes... could you get a little closer?" "OK [Click]" "Good, now see switch #6, set to 0... set it to 1."
Insurance adjusters (who now have to carry digital cameras and laptops with them)...
All sorts of situations where someone in an unfamiliar situation wants to CONSULT with someone at a remote location...
...not to show off... not to be entertaining... not to conform to an internal coding standards document... not to give an impression of "professionalism"... not to vent or blow off steam...
The purpose of comments is to be helpful and useful to whoever needs to work on the code next. 90% of the time, of course, that will be the person that wrote the code originally.
Need better air traffic computers first!
on
Droning On
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Before adding to the air traffic control load, it might be a good idea to wait until the FAA has worked the bugs out of their controversial new STARS gear. Critics say it doesn't work and is being rushed into operation...
About once a year I need to use a bit of Applescript for something, and once a year I again fall into a morass of tips-n-tricks articles, Web tutorials, popularized and out-of-date books, and a very complete Applescript manual from Apple whose existence is hard to discover and which is almost useless without good documentation on Finder scripting, which seemingly doesn't exist except for the Finder's Dictionary itself (which is about as complete as a typical.h file).
When HyperCard was introduced, it included a very decent tutorial and reference manual in stack form, and a good print manual was available from Apple.
AppleScript may not be the greatest thing since sliced bread but it is darned good.
Peace, Perl users. Relax, TCL users. No argument, REALbasic or VB fans. I'm not criticizing your favorite languages. I'm just saying AppleScript is darn good--and is beautifully integrated into the Mac OS. Not everyone wants or needs a Mac-OS-oriented scripting language, but there IS one, and it's lovely.
Why, oh why hasn't Apple produced a good set of AppleScript books--comparable to, say, those REALsoftware has for REALbasic? Why doesn't it try to SELL them as a checkoff option on their build-to-order menu?
It's great that it wasn't lost (along with so much else good System 7.5 technology). It's great that they recoded it native. It's great that it's in OS X. But it is still a hidden treasure.
Right now, about 0.001% of all Apple users know and use AppleScript. It should be more like 1%.
What we REALLY need is a 32 by 8 array of lamps--preferable incandescent--that will display, at all times, the contents of the general-purpose regsisters, another group for the segment registers, another for the EIP...
...and a way to connect a speaker to the high bit of register 0 so we can hear it "thinking..."
...and, of course a "speed" pot, and a 9-position "speed decade" pot that allow us to adjust the clock speed anywhere from 1 to 1000000000 Hz so you can see the instructions executing...
and a nice D'Arsonval analog CPU speed meter that displays the number of instructions per second that are actually being processed.
Then we can have contests to write programs that turn all the lights out, turn all the lights on, make interesting patterns in the lights, etc.
Assuming that the posting wasn't intended as flamebait, in the U. S. the term "polytechnic" is NOT "synonymous with poor-quality education." It is mostly just an indication that the school DOES have a long history.
My crystal ball says: early units will have intolerable firmware glitches, you'll be instructed to download a patch, and whammo! any files it thinks you might not be authorized to have become inaccessible...
We don't need a faster DVD recorder. What we need is someone to make sense out of all of the umpteen gazillion different DVD recordable formats--DVD-RAM, DVD+R, DVD-RW, DVD÷WR, DVD+-R, DVD\W, DVD*ROM, etc. etc. and make it clear WHICH of the silly things can actually be played reliably on the current installed base of DVD players.
Incidentally, how the heck is anything but a specialty store going to be able to STOCK all of those six or eight kinds of recordable media--in any kind of reasonable choice of manufacture, or packaging? (Do YOU know off the top of your head which of the formats are available as 2-side? As 2-layered? As 2-sided, 2-layered?)
But will they have enough resolution to pick up rusting sardine cans?
Here's Owen Wister, writing in 1902, waxing nostalgic for the good old days of the 1870's:
"Sardines were called for, and potted chicken, and devilled ham: a sophisticated nourishment, at first sight, for these sons of the sage-brush. But portable ready-made food plays of necessity a great part in the opening of a new country. These picnic pots and cans were the first of her trophies that Civilization dropped upon Wyoming's virgin soil. The cow-boy is now gone to worlds invisible; the wind has blown away the white ashes of his camp-fires; but the empty sardine box lies rusting over the face of the Western earth."
In arguments with people, I have a goal that I shoot for. I try to make sure that I've reached the point where: a) I am sure that my opponent has heard me and understood me; b) I am sure that I have heard and understood my opponent; c) I can state my opponent's views, and his or her reasons for holding them, in a manner that my opponent agrees is accurate; d) my opponent can state my views and their rationale in a manner that I agree is accurate.
Even with very intense religious or political discussions, it is usually possible to reach this goal.
And, for the most part, this goal is usually about as far as it is possible to go, at least in a single argument. After you get that far, you need to give it a rest for six months or so and not keep harping on it.
It is very unusual for anyone to say "By gosh! you're right! I just changed my mind." But if you can get a mutual understanding of each others' point of view, the chances of productive progress sometime in the future are much increased.
At work, say, with discussions with colleagues or supervisors, what typically happens (when I'm right and have presented it well) is that nobody agrees at the time, and nobody says that they've changed their mind, yet three or six months down the line I will see some partial or incremental progress in the directions I've advocated.
I believe that the same goal should be applied to the "moon-landing-hoax" debate. NASA should try to present clearly and publicly, the reasons why people believe the moon landing occurred, AND should try to address the opponents' arguments intelligently and respectfully.
NASA should not expect to convince the "it's-a-hoax" crowd nor to settle the debate, but NASA needs to acknowledge that the government has lied to us on occasion, and that saying, in effect, "it's true because we say so, and your opinions don't count because you're crackpots" is arrogant and inappropriate.
The Amazing Randi has not "settled" any debates about psychic phenomena, but he's done a lot of good.
_I_ care about false positives...
on
ISP Chief on Spam
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
The World happens to be my ISP and I sympathize with Barry Shein and respect his views.
But I darn well DO care about false positives.
A few months ago "sent" me pictures from Shutterfly, an online photo-printing service that I rather like. Of course when you "send" pictures, what actually happens is that Shutterfly sends an automated email with a link in it; you click on the link, see the pictures in low-res and get to order prints. If you get the email, that is. The World was bouncing them, because something about them made it think they were spam.
A few weeks ago, I was trying to register online for a conference I want to attend. When you register, the site sends you an automated confirmation email. Again, The World was bouncing them.
I can deal with spam by deleting it. But how can I deal with email that's been improperly bounced? Unless the person who sends it happens to mention it to you, you never find out.
When I contacted The World, their response was that they couldn't do anything UNLESS I COULD SEND THEM THE BOUNCED MESSAGE, INCLUDING HEADERS.
Sounds like an Irish bull, doesn't it? "If you fail to get this, please send it to me so I can find out why it didn't get there..."
Re:UFO stories: can't even assume they're not made
on
Starcraft
·
· Score: 2
I forgot to say: this was in the seventies...
UFO stories: can't even assume they're not made up
on
Starcraft
·
· Score: 5, Informative
...I was having a discussion with an intelligent, but credulous acquaintance who had just read a book by someone from one of the "respectable" UFO organizations (APRO or NICAP, I don't remember which).
He was extremely impressed by a very detailed report on some UFO fragments that had been shown to be some kind of metal of such extreme purity that it could not possibly have originated on Earth. The metallurgical tests had been conducted by a respected scientist in some university in South America.
I was arguing that with UFO reports, you cannot rule out the possibility that they were just made up in whole cloth. He thought this was unlikely. I suggested that we try to contact the scientist who had done the tests and find out what he had to say.
Of course, the book itself was written in a popular style without any formal citations or references you could follow up... just a line or two mentioning "Professor so-and-so in the Department of Metallurgy at the University of Sao Paulo," or wherever it was.
Well, we were at the University of Wisconsin, which has a fine library, and with a little investigation we found that the library actually had _the faculty/student directory_ for that university, and it was only a couple of years old.
Needless to say there was no listing for the cited "scientist," and, indeed, no department that seemed to match the department in which he was supposed to have worked.
My friend was shaken, but not convinced. After all, this wasn't some fly-by-night organization we were dealing with, this was APRO. (Or NICAP).
Fortunately, Pocket PC's are so expensive...
on
PocketMac Pro 2 Released
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
...that nobody who owns one will mind paying $70 to add a capability that a $100 Palm has right out of the box.
Good grief, can it be that simple? I just went to that Web site and it appears as if by spending five minutes filling in a form I have submitted a claim and will eventually receive a small check in the mail.
(Or did I just give my name, address, date of birth, and last four SS digits to a scam artist?)
If this is for real, it should be widely publicized.
"The Lord of the Rings," like C. S. Lewis's "Narnia" books and his "Ransom" trilogy (Out of the Silent Planet/Perelandra/That Hideous Strength) draw from similar sources. The two writers knew each other, borrowed ideas and themes from each other, and belonged to a group called "The Inklings."
Part of the shared vision is a Christian world view, more evident to the casual observer in Lewis's writing than Tolkien's. It's a politically conservative vision, too, and one in which military force is seen as the solution to problems--and given epic, heroic dimensions that few have seen in real wars since World War I.
Compare the scouring of the Shire to the passage in which a village is renovated/destroyed in the name of progress in "That Hideous Strength," and compare Tolkien's evil sorcerors to Lewis's evil scientists.
I happen to think LOTR may be the greatest work of literature written in my lifetime, by the way.
Nevertheless, Tolkien, Lewis, along with G. K Chesterton, W. B. Yeats, and other worthies are the sort of people W. S. Gilbert had in mind when the Mikado speaks of "that idiot who praises in enthusiastic tone/Every century but this and every country but his own."
The idea that the Middle Ages were better or happier or more spiritually healthy than the present is so alien to the American way of thinking that we can hardly recognize it when we see it.
The fundamental principle underlying current privacy practices in the United States is: "It is perfectly acceptable for a company to violate your privacy so long as it is for the purpose of selling you things."
Obviously companies believe this, and on present evidence I'd say that most consumers believe this, too.
In a novel by John D. MacDonald, a condominium buyer is told by the sales agent that the long fine-print contract he's signing is "a formality." Later, when the buyer discovers all sorts of problems with the condo and the agent is stonewalling him on getting them fixed, the agent says "After all, it says in the contract you signed that..."
The buyer protests "But you said that was just a formality." The agent says "That's right--it is a formal, binding legal contract enforceable in a court of law."
In real life, when it is honestly a negotiating situation, when I see things I really don't like in contracts I test them. "Can I strike this out?" "Can I write here, 'I have sixty-day return privileges and ask you to initial it?'" The results are very unpredictable. When the clause really IS just boilerplate that they don't actually plan to use, very often they will be perfectly agreeable, and you can get the verbal understanding down on paper. But occasionally, they'll freak out--that clause is in there for a reason and they've been ordered not to let anyone mess with it.
Unfortunately, none of this shrink-wrap and click-through stuff is a situation where you really have any power or any ability to negotiate. You can't strike out clauses and see if they'll agree to accept them.
Nevertheless, it's a very good idea to assume that contracts really do mean what they say and that all the fine print and boilerplate really might become operative someday.
All prophets should use probabilities. That way, nobody can ever prove you wrong.
Say "The world will end on 1/11/2003 with probability 0.6" Suppose it doesn't end, so what? Someone's going to come back and say "Ha! It didn't end! The probability couldn't have ever been higher than 0.3!"
Suppose you say "Buy Acme Widget stock. It will go up 120% in the next 6 weeks, probability 0.8" People buy it. It goes up 120% in the next 6 weeks. They get rich. Are they going to come back and say, "Well, yeah, SURE, it did that, but you said the probability was 0.8 and it was really only 0.7"
In the seventies, I was a graduate student in zoology. I thought I saw a distinct change in culture occurring.
On the one hand you had people typified by older zoologists, who were gentlemanly academic putterers, studying animals and publishing papers. Their ambitions seemed to be a full professorship, continuously funded grants, support for their graduate students, and a bit more lab space.
On the other hand you had people typified by younger molecular biologists, who were hard-driving, competitive, and occasionally arrogant. Some of them gave me the impression that commercial success was in the back of their minds--maybe not even far in the back.
I don't mean to suggest this was a zoology-versus-molecular-biology thing. It was more a change in the zeitgeist. During the years I was a grad student I was certain that I was seeing science becoming more and more competitive.
You could see the "methods" sections in papers becoming shorter and more perfunctory, for example. I was aware of at least some cases in which scientists guarded some of their techniques because they WANTED to be able to get results that others could not get.
As anyone who's read "The Double Helix" knows, competition in science was not new. It was, of course, hard to be sure, then and now, how much of this perception was accurate and how much was just my growing awareness of what had always been there.
Naturally, this was a frequent topic of spirited conversation.
I remember saying, "Well, IF my perceptions are correct, one of the things we should expect to see over the next decade or so is an increasing number of scandals involving faked data."
And I really think this is what we've seen.
(Of course I don't have numbers to back this up--faked data is not new, either).
Amazon reader reviews include a one-to-five-star rating, and the review proper. Readers of Amazon reader reviews are invited to click "Yes" or "No" to "Was this review helpful to you?" and each review is preceded by the notice "15 of 29 people found the following review helpful."
It's very noticeable that there is a strong correlation between the number of stars and the number of readers finding the review helpful. Generally speaking, three stars or less will garner a high percentage of "unhelpful" replies.
Presumably (although I don't know for sure) these factor into your "reviewer rank," which is, of course, just a number in a database and not an indication of your merit as a person.
I don't know WHY this happens. Although I do know that authors read and respond to their own reviews. I don't believe it's astroturfing. I suspect that people just like positive reviews better than negative reviews. I dunno.
If you don't believe this influences ratings, then, well, you have more integrity and independence than I do. I try to be honest in my reviews, but, frankly, I rarely give less than three stars any more because I don't like seeing my reviews rated as "unhelpful."
Slashdot Mirror
I just CAN'T believe that "social" uses of picture-taking phones will be more than a brief-lived novelty/gimmick/fad.
On the other hand, just imagine how useful one of these things could be for a field service engineer, customer service, etc. ("OK, you've got cover opened, right? See the board? Do you see a little switch pack down at the left?" "[Click] This one?" "Yes... could you get a little closer?" "OK [Click]" "Good, now see switch #6, set to 0... set it to 1."
Insurance adjusters (who now have to carry digital cameras and laptops with them)...
All sorts of situations where someone in an unfamiliar situation wants to CONSULT with someone at a remote location...
...not to show off... not to be entertaining... not to conform to an internal coding standards document... not to give an impression of "professionalism"... not to vent or blow off steam...
The purpose of comments is to be helpful and useful to whoever needs to work on the code next. 90% of the time, of course, that will be the person that wrote the code originally.
Before adding to the air traffic control load, it might be a good idea to wait until the FAA has worked the bugs out of their controversial new STARS gear. Critics say it doesn't work and is being rushed into operation...
About once a year I need to use a bit of Applescript for something, and once a year I again fall into a morass of tips-n-tricks articles, Web tutorials, popularized and out-of-date books, and a very complete Applescript manual from Apple whose existence is hard to discover and which is almost useless without good documentation on Finder scripting, which seemingly doesn't exist except for the Finder's Dictionary itself (which is about as complete as a typical .h file).
When HyperCard was introduced, it included a very decent tutorial and reference manual in stack form, and a good print manual was available from Apple.
AppleScript may not be the greatest thing since sliced bread but it is darned good.
Peace, Perl users. Relax, TCL users. No argument, REALbasic or VB fans. I'm not criticizing your favorite languages. I'm just saying AppleScript is darn good--and is beautifully integrated into the Mac OS. Not everyone wants or needs a Mac-OS-oriented scripting language, but there IS one, and it's lovely.
Why, oh why hasn't Apple produced a good set of AppleScript books--comparable to, say, those REALsoftware has for REALbasic? Why doesn't it try to SELL them as a checkoff option on their build-to-order menu?
It's great that it wasn't lost (along with so much else good System 7.5 technology). It's great that they recoded it native. It's great that it's in OS X. But it is still a hidden treasure.
Right now, about 0.001% of all Apple users know and use AppleScript. It should be more like 1%.
and a nice D'Arsonval analog CPU speed meter that displays the number of instructions per second that are actually being processed.
Then we can have contests to write programs that turn all the lights out, turn all the lights on, make interesting patterns in the lights, etc.
Assuming that the posting wasn't intended as flamebait, in the U. S. the term "polytechnic" is NOT "synonymous with poor-quality education." It is mostly just an indication that the school DOES have a long history.
For example, WPI (Worcester Polytechnic Institute) and RPI (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute) are both fine schools.
My crystal ball says: early units will have intolerable firmware glitches, you'll be instructed to download a patch, and whammo! any files it thinks you might not be authorized to have become inaccessible...
We don't need a faster DVD recorder. What we need is someone to make sense out of all of the umpteen gazillion different DVD recordable formats--DVD-RAM, DVD+R, DVD-RW, DVD÷WR, DVD+-R, DVD\W, DVD*ROM, etc. etc. and make it clear WHICH of the silly things can actually be played reliably on the current installed base of DVD players.
Incidentally, how the heck is anything but a specialty store going to be able to STOCK all of those six or eight kinds of recordable media--in any kind of reasonable choice of manufacture, or packaging? (Do YOU know off the top of your head which of the formats are available as 2-side? As 2-layered? As 2-sided, 2-layered?)
But will they have enough resolution to pick up rusting sardine cans?
Here's Owen Wister, writing in 1902, waxing nostalgic for the good old days of the 1870's:
"Sardines were called for, and potted chicken, and devilled ham: a sophisticated nourishment, at first sight, for these sons of the sage-brush. But portable ready-made food plays of necessity a great part in the opening of a new country. These picnic pots and cans were the first of her trophies that Civilization dropped upon Wyoming's virgin soil. The cow-boy is now gone to worlds invisible; the wind has blown away the white ashes of his camp-fires; but the empty sardine box lies rusting over the face of the Western earth."
In arguments with people, I have a goal that I shoot for. I try to make sure that I've reached the point where: a) I am sure that my opponent has heard me and understood me; b) I am sure that I have heard and understood my opponent; c) I can state my opponent's views, and his or her reasons for holding them, in a manner that my opponent agrees is accurate; d) my opponent can state my views and their rationale in a manner that I agree is accurate.
Even with very intense religious or political discussions, it is usually possible to reach this goal.
And, for the most part, this goal is usually about as far as it is possible to go, at least in a single argument. After you get that far, you need to give it a rest for six months or so and not keep harping on it.
It is very unusual for anyone to say "By gosh! you're right! I just changed my mind." But if you can get a mutual understanding of each others' point of view, the chances of productive progress sometime in the future are much increased.
At work, say, with discussions with colleagues or supervisors, what typically happens (when I'm right and have presented it well) is that nobody agrees at the time, and nobody says that they've changed their mind, yet three or six months down the line I will see some partial or incremental progress in the directions I've advocated.
I believe that the same goal should be applied to the "moon-landing-hoax" debate. NASA should try to present clearly and publicly, the reasons why people believe the moon landing occurred, AND should try to address the opponents' arguments intelligently and respectfully.
NASA should not expect to convince the "it's-a-hoax" crowd nor to settle the debate, but NASA needs to acknowledge that the government has lied to us on occasion, and that saying, in effect, "it's true because we say so, and your opinions don't count because you're crackpots" is arrogant and inappropriate.
The Amazing Randi has not "settled" any debates about psychic phenomena, but he's done a lot of good.
... and use the proceeds to buy a new coffee pot or better coffee for the old coffee pot or something...
Am I the only one who sees a distinct likeness between the pictures of Niklass Zenstrom and Bill Gates?
The World happens to be my ISP and I sympathize with Barry Shein and respect his views.
But I darn well DO care about false positives.
A few months ago "sent" me pictures from Shutterfly, an online photo-printing service that I rather like. Of course when you "send" pictures, what actually happens is that Shutterfly sends an automated email with a link in it; you click on the link, see the pictures in low-res and get to order prints. If you get the email, that is. The World was bouncing them, because something about them made it think they were spam.
A few weeks ago, I was trying to register online for a conference I want to attend. When you register, the site sends you an automated confirmation email. Again, The World was bouncing them.
I can deal with spam by deleting it. But how can I deal with email that's been improperly bounced? Unless the person who sends it happens to mention it to you, you never find out.
When I contacted The World, their response was that they couldn't do anything UNLESS I COULD SEND THEM THE BOUNCED MESSAGE, INCLUDING HEADERS.
Sounds like an Irish bull, doesn't it? "If you fail to get this, please send it to me so I can find out why it didn't get there..."
I forgot to say: this was in the seventies...
...I was having a discussion with an intelligent, but credulous acquaintance who had just read a book by someone from one of the "respectable" UFO organizations (APRO or NICAP, I don't remember which).
He was extremely impressed by a very detailed report on some UFO fragments that had been shown to be some kind of metal of such extreme purity that it could not possibly have originated on Earth. The metallurgical tests had been conducted by a respected scientist in some university in South America.
I was arguing that with UFO reports, you cannot rule out the possibility that they were just made up in whole cloth. He thought this was unlikely. I suggested that we try to contact the scientist who had done the tests and find out what he had to say.
Of course, the book itself was written in a popular style without any formal citations or references you could follow up... just a line or two mentioning "Professor so-and-so in the Department of Metallurgy at the University of Sao Paulo," or wherever it was.
Well, we were at the University of Wisconsin, which has a fine library, and with a little investigation we found that the library actually had _the faculty/student directory_ for that university, and it was only a couple of years old.
Needless to say there was no listing for the cited "scientist," and, indeed, no department that seemed to match the department in which he was supposed to have worked.
My friend was shaken, but not convinced. After all, this wasn't some fly-by-night organization we were dealing with, this was APRO. (Or NICAP).
...that nobody who owns one will mind paying $70 to add a capability that a $100 Palm has right out of the box.
Good grief, can it be that simple? I just went to that Web site and it appears as if by spending five minutes filling in a form I have submitted a claim and will eventually receive a small check in the mail.
(Or did I just give my name, address, date of birth, and last four SS digits to a scam artist?)
If this is for real, it should be widely publicized.
You're right.
"The Lord of the Rings," like C. S. Lewis's "Narnia" books and his "Ransom" trilogy (Out of the Silent Planet/Perelandra/That Hideous Strength) draw from similar sources. The two writers knew each other, borrowed ideas and themes from each other, and belonged to a group called "The Inklings."
Part of the shared vision is a Christian world view, more evident to the casual observer in Lewis's writing than Tolkien's. It's a politically conservative vision, too, and one in which military force is seen as the solution to problems--and given epic, heroic dimensions that few have seen in real wars since World War I.
Compare the scouring of the Shire to the passage in which a village is renovated/destroyed in the name of progress in "That Hideous Strength," and compare Tolkien's evil sorcerors to Lewis's evil scientists.
I happen to think LOTR may be the greatest work of literature written in my lifetime, by the way.
Nevertheless, Tolkien, Lewis, along with G. K Chesterton, W. B. Yeats, and other worthies are the sort of people W. S. Gilbert had in mind when the Mikado speaks of "that idiot who praises in enthusiastic tone/Every century but this and every country but his own."
The idea that the Middle Ages were better or happier or more spiritually healthy than the present is so alien to the American way of thinking that we can hardly recognize it when we see it.
The fundamental principle underlying current privacy practices in the United States is: "It is perfectly acceptable for a company to violate your privacy so long as it is for the purpose of selling you things."
Obviously companies believe this, and on present evidence I'd say that most consumers believe this, too.
In a novel by John D. MacDonald, a condominium buyer is told by the sales agent that the long fine-print contract he's signing is "a formality." Later, when the buyer discovers all sorts of problems with the condo and the agent is stonewalling him on getting them fixed, the agent says "After all, it says in the contract you signed that..."
The buyer protests "But you said that was just a formality." The agent says "That's right--it is a formal, binding legal contract enforceable in a court of law."
In real life, when it is honestly a negotiating situation, when I see things I really don't like in contracts I test them. "Can I strike this out?" "Can I write here, 'I have sixty-day return privileges and ask you to initial it?'" The results are very unpredictable. When the clause really IS just boilerplate that they don't actually plan to use, very often they will be perfectly agreeable, and you can get the verbal understanding down on paper. But occasionally, they'll freak out--that clause is in there for a reason and they've been ordered not to let anyone mess with it.
Unfortunately, none of this shrink-wrap and click-through stuff is a situation where you really have any power or any ability to negotiate. You can't strike out clauses and see if they'll agree to accept them.
Nevertheless, it's a very good idea to assume that contracts really do mean what they say and that all the fine print and boilerplate really might become operative someday.
I love it!
All prophets should use probabilities. That way, nobody can ever prove you wrong.
Say "The world will end on 1/11/2003 with probability 0.6" Suppose it doesn't end, so what? Someone's going to come back and say "Ha! It didn't end! The probability couldn't have ever been higher than 0.3!"
Suppose you say "Buy Acme Widget stock. It will go up 120% in the next 6 weeks, probability 0.8" People buy it. It goes up 120% in the next 6 weeks. They get rich. Are they going to come back and say, "Well, yeah, SURE, it did that, but you said the probability was 0.8 and it was really only 0.7"
In the seventies, I was a graduate student in zoology. I thought I saw a distinct change in culture occurring.
On the one hand you had people typified by older zoologists, who were gentlemanly academic putterers, studying animals and publishing papers. Their ambitions seemed to be a full professorship, continuously funded grants, support for their graduate students, and a bit more lab space.
On the other hand you had people typified by younger molecular biologists, who were hard-driving, competitive, and occasionally arrogant. Some of them gave me the impression that commercial success was in the back of their minds--maybe not even far in the back.
I don't mean to suggest this was a zoology-versus-molecular-biology thing. It was more a change in the zeitgeist. During the years I was a grad student I was certain that I was seeing science becoming more and more competitive.
You could see the "methods" sections in papers becoming shorter and more perfunctory, for example. I was aware of at least some cases in which scientists guarded some of their techniques because they WANTED to be able to get results that others could not get.
As anyone who's read "The Double Helix" knows, competition in science was not new. It was, of course, hard to be sure, then and now, how much of this perception was accurate and how much was just my growing awareness of what had always been there.
Naturally, this was a frequent topic of spirited conversation.
I remember saying, "Well, IF my perceptions are correct, one of the things we should expect to see over the next decade or so is an increasing number of scandals involving faked data."
And I really think this is what we've seen.
(Of course I don't have numbers to back this up--faked data is not new, either).
I've posted a few score Amazon reader reviews.
Amazon reader reviews include a one-to-five-star rating, and the review proper. Readers of Amazon reader reviews are invited to click "Yes" or "No" to "Was this review helpful to you?" and each review is preceded by the notice "15 of 29 people found the following review helpful."
It's very noticeable that there is a strong correlation between the number of stars and the number of readers finding the review helpful. Generally speaking, three stars or less will garner a high percentage of "unhelpful" replies.
Presumably (although I don't know for sure) these factor into your "reviewer rank," which is, of course, just a number in a database and not an indication of your merit as a person.
I don't know WHY this happens. Although I do know that authors read and respond to their own reviews. I don't believe it's astroturfing. I suspect that people just like positive reviews better than negative reviews. I dunno.
If you don't believe this influences ratings, then, well, you have more integrity and independence than I do. I try to be honest in my reviews, but, frankly, I rarely give less than three stars any more because I don't like seeing my reviews rated as "unhelpful."
Matthew Rothenberg kindly replied to my email querying about this. Here is the Macintouch item and here is
a more detailed story Rothenberg mentioned.