There are people who are not immune suppressed that are not protected, even if they were vaccinated. The number of immune suppressed people is small and tolerable, just like the people for whom the vaccine was ineffective. It is only when we start adding all the kids of people that have philosophical objections to the list that we get into the unacceptable risk territory.
1. We don't know whose vaccines were ineffective until the actually contract the disease.
2. While the number of people whose vaccines were ineffective and the number of immune suppressed people is known, the number of people with philosophical objections is a cultural phenomenon and can vary wildly.
3. The number of people with suppressed immune systems is small enough not to put us over the tipping point. We could ban them from schools too, but we don't have to.
4. If we could guarantee that the number of people with philosophical objections would be small enough, it would also be fine. We could implement a lottery for stupid people to try to be exempted and still keep numbers of unvaccinated people small, but it's just easier to remove this exemption for people who don't need it, and ultimately better for them.
Is it your job to follow traffic laws? Why should your right to drive how you want in your own car be infringed by the desire of some people for safe roads?
The owners of the NYSE own the NYSE. By "fixing the flaws" I don't necessarily mean "fix the NYSE". If a rival exchange usurp the NYSE and offer a fair platform for trading, I consider that to be a valid "fix" to the flaw. We don't even need everyone to switch. If enough companies offer stock on the new exchange, and if enough regular folks switch to the new exchange, there won't be enough suckers to mooch from in the NYSE. It will just be HFTs tryng to cheat eachother, rather than HFTs cheating humans.
In short, it's not required that the NYSE do anything. All that is required is for the people being cheated to opt out.
There are lots of variations that I think would work better than what currently exists. My only concern with your system is that companies with lots of money will have more information than. If the offer information is private, they can test the market by offering to sell and buy small amounts stocks at certain prices and if it is not accepted, they have information that no one else does. Firms like goldman, for relatively little money can build a better picture of the value of everything than the little guy.
You don't need to detect any patterns of trading. You simply have to remove the advantage that those patterns of trading provide.
For example: Let's say it's a big problem that some young people wake up super early and pick out all the best fruit at the super market before the old people can get there, and resell it at a higher price. Let's call them "fruit scalpers".
One way to solve the problem is to try to detect fruit scalpers and refuse to sell to them. Another way to solve the problem is to no longer allow people to select the fruit they buy before deciding to purchase it by putting the fruit in a package or having a randomly selected fruit provided after payment.
If you do this, then advantage fruit scalpers get by being first to the store is eliminated. The store doesn't have to figure out who is a fruit scalper or a real customer (potentially a hard problem).
Obviously this is just an example, and fruit scalping is not a real problem, and nobody would like the solution to this example in real life. It is just an example I came up with to illustrate how you can disincentivize a behavior without bothering to detect it.
Why not just disallow this practice (i.e. by forcing transactions on offers that are accepted) rather than making it illegal? Could it be because big companies also exploit these features (although maybe not so blatantly), to profit?
I don't think you can get rid of computers from trading, but you can remove the advantage that they have. The NYSE is designed as a skewed playing field, giving an advantage to those paying for faster access. I don't think it will be possible to create rules for an exchange that are 100% fair, but I think simply not actively tilting the rules in favor of companies like Goldman Sachs will be an enormous improvement.
There are ways to limit the effectiveness of strategies currently employed by HFT algorithms. You could take measures to curb disingenuous trade offers. You could randomize the times that offers are published to different agents and lengthen them in order to give humans with regular internet connections a chance to compete on a more level playing field.
The system in place at the NYSE is not the only way to do things. It is the way to do things that maximizes profit for the NYSE as long as regular people are willing to play in an unfair game.
Maybe people who care about investing more than speculation will have enough political will to prop up an alternative that can surpass the NYSE and it's ilk.
It sounds like it's a flaw in the NYSE and similar exchanges as well as greedy HFT algorithms. It seems like fixing these flaws is far more important than just arresting people who exploit them.
Who was actually harmed by this crash? A bunch of wall street speculators running computer programs to trade faster than regular people. Who gives a shit. If anything, it exposes the vulnerability so it can be fixed.
It's entirely possible to have an exchange where there is no unfair advantage given to people who have paid for faster access to trade offers. But this is the system Wallstreet wants, and I can't say I feel bad when crooks get cheated.
I think your examples are actually very good at illustrating the crux of the problem, but I think I reach a different conclusion. I feel like a flashlight is indeed more invasive than some kind of passive perception device or a dog.
I think in principle a good system would be one where I can drive whatever kind of car (e.g. hermetically sealed, tinted windows, EM resistant, etc) and the cops can try to detect whatever they want without invading my space or damaging my property or making me wait for a long time for their detector to arrive.
I don't know how practical it is to implement the ideological extreme of this point of view, but I think it's a good frame of view to have in an ever changing world with new technologies.
How is that any different than an X-ray/millimeter-wave/infrared device being used to determine the contents of the vehicles?
it's not.
In both cases (sniffing-dog and machine) a tool outside of the officer's five senses is being used.
The delineation of a human's "5 senses" is sort of arbitrary. The officer is using his ears to hear the dog barking, or his eyes to read the meter on a machine. Both are extensions of biological senses, of which humans have in varying degrees of sensitivity.
If someone is stopped by an officer with a dog, the dog is legally allowed to sniff around the vehicle, but even if the officer has a scanning device with him he's not allowed to use it short of a probable cause existing.
He is not allowed to use either on the inside of your car.
A search is a search, regardless of whether it uses scent molecules or infrared/millimeter-wave/x-ray/ultrasonic energy, and it's also a search regardless of whether or not the "detector" has fur and a collar.
A search that invades your personal property is different than a search which is of surrounding area that is not within your personal space.
The dog created the probable cause for the actual search. The ruling was that you can't unduly detain people unless you already have probable cause.
The dog sniffing around your car is not considered a search of the car (because it's searching the area around the car that is not part of your personal property. If your car is leaking drug molecules that a dog can smell, then that is probable cause for a search of your car. It's like if there is blood leaking out of your car onto the street, it's probable cause for a search.
Now in the case of drug odors, only dogs can smell them, but in the future if cops just have drug odor detectors with them, presumably they won't even need to wait for dogs, and they will have probable cause immediately.
The idea is that a cop is allowed to notice that a crime has likely been committed without invading your personal space, but he is not allowed to detain you until he finds something. He has to either notice it or let you go.
I think you need think about UI design and forget about the technology issues. The technology exists to enable GUIs but the GUIs exist to enable particular use cases. Different use cases means different GUIs.
I'm not saying the GUIs aren't different. I'm saying that the GUIs in the examples you provided should easily be sharing 90% of their code. I'm not saying that the GUIs are not "different", I'm saying that different GUIs that provide similar functionality (e.g. playing music, viewing emails, etc) can share a lot of the same code.
It isn't just save/load a particular non-district binary.
I was actually envisioning something like a simple key/value pair system.
The 3 way merge being the most critical. Apple customers are coming to expect that they can do work on their phone then pick up their tablet and work on the same data seamlessly. For that to happen the system has to be able to intelligently deal with the situation where changes have occurred:
The idea of a 3 way merge is not something apple invented. If you want 3 way merge, then create an abstract class for it, and have separate implementations for different platforms.
Because of visual quality that's possible when you lock down the pixels:
left is rastor right is vector.
This is a photograph not an icon. Photos are inherently raster graphics. It's not like android can't render raster graphics. You should store images in whatever format is more suitable. If apple can't handle vector graphics, that seems like a serious deficiency. My point was simply that vector graphics are easily converted to raster graphics of any size. The reverse is not possible (as illustrated by your example).
Apple's belief is, that icons (which are seen over and over again) should be hand drawn at the right resolution to be perfect not auto-generated. Versatility here you are gaining at the cost of image quality.
It doesn't really affect the image quality. The whole point of vector graphics is that they look good (or rather about as good as they *can* look) at any resolution.
The point of my comment is that the results of the pilot program will be suspect because the people running it will likely not be qualified to do a good job (i.e. just like how the people running the ipad procurement project). The pilot program will appear to go really well, then when it comes time to do the full program that is a total cluster fuck, an investigation will reveal that the pilot program was also flawed but it was not noticed (due to incompetence) or covered up (due to corruption), or both.
That's not the case at all on iOS. They are genuinely different versions with different functionality. Here is a link to an article with 20 apps iphone vs. iPad version side by side. You can see this is a different GUI: http://www.cnet.com/pictures/a... [cnet.com]
I don't doubt that some phone and tablet apps are written completely separately. But event he ones that are shown on your link, I would be shocked if 90% - 99% of the code between the 2 apps was the same (even if they are distributed separately.
The business logic will be the same, and even most of the GUI code is probably the same (i.e. same custom widget code, etc). The only part that I would expect to be different is the GUI layouts of those widgets for the different screen sizes.
https://polymer-topeka.appspot.com
This is what I have been playing around in lately. If you get to the demo quiz, you'll notice that the UI changes based on the size of the window it is in. The exact same code is usable on any size screen.
If anyone is still making completely different apps for different devices, they are doing it wrong.
For example an iOS application you generally are going to want to use iCloud integration to automatically tie information between: iPhone, iPads, Macs and (potentially) the watch. On Android you are going to want Google integration and tie it into Google's excellent application framework. Those two systems are nothing like one another in how they handle data.
Storing data to the cloud and restoring the data from the cloud should be abstracted. If you had an OO app, you'd just have concrete classes to implement the google and apple cloud save/load features.
Those two systems are nothing like one another in how they handle data.
I never used apple cloud stuff, but I can;t even imagine something so different that it would not find into a "save data/load data" kind of API.
Or for another example on iOS you are expected to draw icons and controls at specific resolutions while with Android you are expected to use vector graphics.
Why doesn't apple do vector graphics?... Anyway the answer is easy. You just do all the graphics as vector graphics and then generate the raster graphics for specific resolutions when needed (that's actually exactly what happens when rendering vector graphics anyway). I would be tempted to do this even if I was developing an iOS only app, because of how versatile it would be.
OS matters. Lots of enterprise software comes on one OS, take it or leave it, and paying them to change anything would counteract any savings from buying less expensive hardware. Custom software can be appallingly expensive to develop.
They had a budget of $500 million for just the ipads and $800 million for just the software. I work in the defense industry and our contracts are to develop software AND hardware and are well below these figures.
Moreover, iPads are not particularly expensive for what you get. Getting quality Android tablets wouldn't cost all that much less, if any.
You can get quality android tablets for half the price of a comparable ipad. You can get a chromebook for half the price of a quality android tablet. And keep in mind these are school children that we are giving these devices to. They are going to be covered in food and thrown on the ground and stolen by bullies, etc. We should be buying the most cost effective devices, and I can all but guarantee that the ipad is not it, especially at the volumes we are talking about.
When I was in school back in the 90's we had to buy a $80 ti-82. Now you can get a chromebook for $200 that's more powerful than even the best laptops from a few years earlier. Even if we had the money to buy $700 ipads for every student, that extra $500 / per student would be far better spent on increasing teacher salaries and attracting better teachers.
With 1.3 billion dollars, the school district could have probably commissioned an electronic text book to be written in every single subject taught in school, they could have bought 6.5 million chromebooks without even negotiating a bulk discount.
Anyone who thinks this was a good idea needs to get their head examined. This is the LA school system, where kids can barely read and teachers and kids are living in poverty.
The basic rule of picking a computer system is that you figure out what you need it to do, you figure out which applications will work, and you buy a system that runs those applications. If the available applications run on the iPad, paying to have them rewritten for Android is going to be far more expensive than just buying the iPads.
That's the basic rule when you are buying a few computers. It's not the rule when you are purchasing half a $1 billion of computer systems. When your computer budget is larger than the GDP of some small countries, you should be exploring the possibility of saving money by developing custom software.
Similarly, the average person will require a certain amount of training on new platforms and new software. Training costs. Moving to a different platform, even a less expensive one, can be more expensive, given the need for training and possibly different infrastructure and administration.
These kids aren't upgrading from a previous ipad.
There is no good argument that a teacher should become familiar with more than two similar types of computers. That isn't their job. Their job is to take what they can get and teach with it. For somebody like me, learning something new about computers is worthwhile, because if nothing else it broadens the experience that I live on. I'm not a teacher.
The computers don't matter. The OS barely matters, and it gets changed like 1 or 2 times a year. The application that is running on it is what matters, and even an idiot can be taught how to push the button to start an app on any OS, even one they've never used before.
This is like saying that people shouldn't be forced to learn to drive more than 2 makes of cars.
If anything this should be a reason *to* use android (if it was a good reason to begin with). There are more android phones out there, and more android users than iOS users. If anything, teachers are more likely to be familiar with android (52% market) than with iOS (35%).
Not that that should matter. Saying "I can't learn to use software" is like saying "I can't follow and remember instructions", and it should disqualify you from most jobs.
No one is asking anyone to be a hacker. Teachers are only being asked to do what every other person is required to do whether it's filling out an electronic timecard or entering products into an inventory software. It's just following directions. And it's usually a lot easier than the non-interactive paper counterpart.
Unity is definitely fast enough. Titanium, Phonegap, Xamarin... would also likely go fast enough. I was disagreeing with HTML5 by itself. Those aren't really designed for authors though.
I brought up HTML as a solution when I thought "interactive books" were like wikipedia pages with some buttons, which HTML5 is more than capable of doing and doing well.
No they aren't especially on iOS / Apple. Take a look at how many iOS applications have tablet specific versions.
Even the apps that have tablet specific version, no doubt share much (if not the vast majority) of the software. They may be separate apps for commercial purposes, or saving space in terms of higher resolution icons, sprites, etc. I don't consider that to be tablet specific development. It's development for one platform with a little bit of effort spent on specializing UI for phone or tablet.
They never had to. JavaScript porting languages always existed. The problem is that users notice cross platform's lowest common denominator and don't like it.
What I am saying is that they don't even get the performance problem anymore. Games used to be the one thing that couldn't be cross platform because of how hardware specific they were, are now fully capable of being targetted to multiple platforms including mobile platforms.
When done right, the apps written in cross platform environments are not noticeably slower than apps written specifically for one architecture in all but the most resource hungry apps.
Ideally what I would like to see is for school districts across states, and countries to form a consortium to develop open source text books (i.e. like a text book version of wikipedia), that schools could use royalty free. This would really help developing nations as well as American school districts. It would eliminate a lot of wasted effort in creating so many textbooks that contain basically the same information. A parabola still works the same way regardless of which edition of which math book we are using.
The textbook industry is rife with corruption, because of the massive payday you get if you can manage to get a constract for a whole school district. And the content is basically just current public domain knowledge packaged together with some artwork.
You could still pay people to contribute to the textbooks, but the difference would be that the content would not be owned by publishers. It would be public domain.
Affects child development. The pattern looks like autism, but nobody's drawn that conclusion; what they have concluded is that electronic devices are more interesting to children than the real world, and cause them to develop emotionally stunted, withdrawn, and more interested in things than people. It's notable you can identify an autistic infant by watching if it's interested in human faces or in objects.
Alright so where's the experiment that proves this? Where is the randomized controlled trial? You can;t just claim these things because they seem plausible. You actually have to do science (the whole part, not just the beginning).
How was emotional development measured? what was the sample size? How were confounding factors controlled for? And after that is proven, now you need to prove that the link of causal rather than just correlative.
How do you know it's not just that autistic kids prefer things over people? How do you know it's the phone causing the autism or autism like behavior?
This is the point where pseudo science assumes they know the answer and where real science (if it were being done) would start.
In real science, people try to prove that their hypothesis is wrong, to see if it can withstand scrutiny. In the pseudo science world you have these fake studies that set out to collect evidence to prove a conclusion that they have decided on beforehand.
I feel like your framing of this as "debating the science" implies an undeserved legitimacy to what I would more appropriately call "condemning pseudo science".
I don't expect parents to only do things that are scientifically proven to help their kids. I expect them to use their intuition and judgement. If you think screens are harming your kids, then restrict their use. Make your kids listen to Mozart for 3 hours a day. Feed them only whole foods. I am all for that. Just don't pretend it's based on science. And especially don't call it science because guessing (hypothesizing) is part of science too.
The superintendent felt that interactive books were the future of education and content absorption.
They also Pearson to make the software. (i.e. they weren't just buying existing software). They could have commisioned software to be made on any platform, or even for it to have been cross platform.
Your use of the word "video game" for these titles I think means you haven't seen then.
I have seen some screenshots, and I see why you don't think they would be perform well in HTML5. They have video game level graphics. This is also why I pointed out unity as an example of a popular framework that targets all the platforms I mentioned (that you seemed doubtful of). Unity is marketed as a game engine, but you can make whatever apps you want that require performant graphics.
The web is more interactive than a book. That allowed for vastly more content and student led exploration.
I agree with this statement. I think interactive books would be very helpful in illustrating concepts in ways that a static medium can't. I was envisioning something like wikipedia with it's animations and maybe some added interactivity. I don't think you need to see a emmersive 3d world of an artists conception of ancient Rome to effectively learn.
Interactive books do the same thing. For example a science book my daughter has allows her to conduct the experiments associated with a concept in a simulator right after learning the concept. That helps retention and understanding.
I think this can be done much more cheaply than ipads and proprietary interactive textbooks of the sort you are describing. I think kids are capable of learning concepts with a lower production value. (i.e. the kind found in HTML5, like wikipedia).
1) There are more of them
This is irrelevant if you are commissioning your own.
2) On average they are better written.
debatable and see my point for #1
3) They can be more easily written because there are a limited number of platforms
Developers actually prefer android for development, but prefer iOS for profit potential.
4) There are better authoring tools.
Such as? Android apps are java which has a much bigger following than objective C or swift.
No they aren't. And the way you can tell they aren't is by looking at variables on usage. For example average phone application interaction is 30 seconds. Average tablet interaction is closer to 5 minutes. The fact they run the same OS doesn't matter the fact the glass is bigger does.
The fact that they run the same OS means that the time spent on developing "phone software" vs. "tablet software" is the same, because the same software runs on both. While you may feel subjectively that phones and tablets are very different, the people developing the apps that run on them are targeting both platforms simultaneously. It's crazy not to. In fact, now the trend is to target phone, tablet, and desktop browser simultaneously with things like google polymer, and phonegap, etc.
Developers don't like writing different software for phone, tablet, and desktop, windows, mac, linux, and all combinations, and now with modern tools, they really don't have to.
The only thing the size of the glass effects is which UI profile gets loaded. Properly designed software can easily abstract the functionality from the presentation, like in a MVC (model view controller) design.
You are now changing the requirements. I'm going to stop here.
I am not changing the requirements. I'm raising my objections to the requirements once it became clear what they were.
The argument you originally raised was that Android had an equally good selection of interactive textbooks.
That was not my argument. My argument was that android was as good a platform for whatever "interactive books" could mean. I even asked for clarification, and learned that what you were in fact referring to were more like specific educational video games, and then raised my objection.
And this was not my original argument (it's a new one), android also has plenty of games (many educational). I don't see any reason why the games you cited are more educational that the games on android.
For end users with specific software in mind the question is whether the platform supports that software.
Yes, so if you need a specific educational video game about ancient Rome that only runs on iOS, I agree that you should buy something that runs iOS. What I am disputing is the claim that those are the specific apps that are needed on tablets for kids (now that I know that's what you are referring to).
As for the conflation of phones and tablets as far as software. That's precisely the problem with Android tablet software it isn't designed for tablets but rather is quite often phone (i.e. designed to run on a 4-6 inch screen) software running on a tablet.
They are the same. Tablets are just bigger phones. Many even have access to cell networks. They are the same components with bigger batteries and bigger screens. The platform is the same in both android and iOS and windows. I am not inventing this idea, Apple, Google, and Microsoft all came to the same conclusion that these devices are basically the same, which is why they run the same OS.
In regards to you accusing me of changing my argument, notice that I didn;t accuse you of changing the what you meant by an "interactive book". I acknowledge that maybe I just didn't know what you meant by it.
OK, I get that, I'm not sure that's more prevalent, and I was just providing a counter example. In Uruguay, spending on technology for education is a lot wiser at the government level, than it is at the private level.
Governments are different. what may work well in one country may not work well in another.
I think that the market and the private interests are overrated. There are lots of cases where markets just don't work, and private interests add up against the common good. In those cases, people spending other people's money can end up with a better result, even accounting for corruption or lack of accountability.
I 100% agree with this statement.
The government works better than the market when it works well. But what do you do when it doesn't?
The market gives you a level of success with very little investment. For situations where it is possible to engineer a centralized solution that works better than the market, we should absolutely do that. We can have the government make roads and power lines, and it's better than if we had an ad hoc system made by random people and companies.
But there are lots of systems where the solutions are very complicated and expensive to implement. In these sorts of systems a free market is better. We don't really want the government deciding prices on every good and service. The market does that for free. We don't want the government deciding when people should end relationships with eachother. They don't always make good decisions, but the market of relationships works better than a government solution.
I think we really could do good public schools in America if we poured enough resources into it. But currently it is just not our priority. Even though we spend more money per student than any other country in the world, we are usually ranked near last among developed nations. We have a bunch of people with jobs that they can't be fired from, that have very little interest or capability to do a good job. And despite spending so much on education, teachers get paid very little, which attracts the bottom rung of society to become teachers.
I think a lot of parents would probably prefer to send their kids to schools with amazing teachers that get paid a lot, even if the classrooms didn't have ipads.
In this situation, all it takes is for one private school to offer this alternative to make it possible. To change public school policies requires changing state laws and electing certain people to school boards, etc.
The private sector is like firewood, and the government is like a nuclear reactor. nuclear reactors are much better than firewood when they work correctly, but it takes a lot of investment to get them to work correctly.
In America our government is like 1% working nuclear reactors, and 49% broken ones, and 50% firewood. I am not saying we need more or less government. I am saying we need better government. We should shout down some of those broken nuclear reactors (convert them to firewood), and use those resources better. I'd rather have 25% working nuclear reactors and 75% firewood.
The less nuclear reactors we have, the more resources we can dedicate to making sure they actually work properly, and that we are getting the benefit from our investment.
A lot of it is based in cobbled-together science: we know a bunch of things about human development, about psychology, and about impacts of exposure to certain stimuli; we use those to intuit new things. This is basically how new theories are formed, as scientific understanding of two things doesn't necessarily equate to scientific understanding of the effects of plugging those two things together; it does, however, give you a basis for doing so, and a reasonable assumption that outcomes following the predicted model are probably causal.
This is how science starts.
Yeah, the hypothesis phase is the start of the scientific method, and it involves intuition and making shit up.
You are supposed to complete the process (i.e. doing experiments and performing analysis of the results), before you claim to have any useful answers.
Here is an even more basic question to answer before doing any science. You say technology is "bad for children before a certain age". What is your criteria for determining a good vs. bad outcome? Attention span? Obesity? obedience? intelligence? maturity? We may not even agree on what is subjectively good or bad. One parent may love that their child is good at video games, and another may not like video games and prefer they played baseball.
Even if we agreed on what good and bad outcomes are. The vast majority of these soft science studies are very poorly done. They have small sample sizes. They can not be replicated. The interpretations of the results are flawed. The methodology is flawed, etc. And even worse is the "journalistic" interpretation of these studies that are the predigested versions that people read on the internet.
Go look in these studies that show video games cause kids to be violent, or that TV rots your brain, or that rap music is detrimental, etc. Words you will not see in those studies "randomized controlled trial", "statistical significance", etc. You will find a lot of correlations cited with 0 evidence of causation (e.g. deaths are highly correlated with hospital visits. clearly hospitals cause of death).
It may seem to a lot of parents that technology is bad for kids. And in our society parents get to decide (within reason) what is good and bad for their kids. But this isn't science. This is just a preference.
You can't scientifically prove that pizza is more delicious that sushi. All you can do is prove that more people prefer pizza over sushi (or the opposite).
There is probably enough scientific evidence to prove that parents prefer kids who play sports over kids who play video games. But this is not proof that technology is bad for them.
Slashdot Mirror
There are people who are not immune suppressed that are not protected, even if they were vaccinated. The number of immune suppressed people is small and tolerable, just like the people for whom the vaccine was ineffective. It is only when we start adding all the kids of people that have philosophical objections to the list that we get into the unacceptable risk territory.
1. We don't know whose vaccines were ineffective until the actually contract the disease.
2. While the number of people whose vaccines were ineffective and the number of immune suppressed people is known, the number of people with philosophical objections is a cultural phenomenon and can vary wildly.
3. The number of people with suppressed immune systems is small enough not to put us over the tipping point. We could ban them from schools too, but we don't have to.
4. If we could guarantee that the number of people with philosophical objections would be small enough, it would also be fine. We could implement a lottery for stupid people to try to be exempted and still keep numbers of unvaccinated people small, but it's just easier to remove this exemption for people who don't need it, and ultimately better for them.
Is it your job to follow traffic laws? Why should your right to drive how you want in your own car be infringed by the desire of some people for safe roads?
The owners of the NYSE own the NYSE. By "fixing the flaws" I don't necessarily mean "fix the NYSE". If a rival exchange usurp the NYSE and offer a fair platform for trading, I consider that to be a valid "fix" to the flaw. We don't even need everyone to switch. If enough companies offer stock on the new exchange, and if enough regular folks switch to the new exchange, there won't be enough suckers to mooch from in the NYSE. It will just be HFTs tryng to cheat eachother, rather than HFTs cheating humans.
In short, it's not required that the NYSE do anything. All that is required is for the people being cheated to opt out.
There are lots of variations that I think would work better than what currently exists. My only concern with your system is that companies with lots of money will have more information than. If the offer information is private, they can test the market by offering to sell and buy small amounts stocks at certain prices and if it is not accepted, they have information that no one else does. Firms like goldman, for relatively little money can build a better picture of the value of everything than the little guy.
You don't need to detect any patterns of trading. You simply have to remove the advantage that those patterns of trading provide.
For example: Let's say it's a big problem that some young people wake up super early and pick out all the best fruit at the super market before the old people can get there, and resell it at a higher price. Let's call them "fruit scalpers".
One way to solve the problem is to try to detect fruit scalpers and refuse to sell to them. Another way to solve the problem is to no longer allow people to select the fruit they buy before deciding to purchase it by putting the fruit in a package or having a randomly selected fruit provided after payment.
If you do this, then advantage fruit scalpers get by being first to the store is eliminated. The store doesn't have to figure out who is a fruit scalper or a real customer (potentially a hard problem).
Obviously this is just an example, and fruit scalping is not a real problem, and nobody would like the solution to this example in real life. It is just an example I came up with to illustrate how you can disincentivize a behavior without bothering to detect it.
Why not just disallow this practice (i.e. by forcing transactions on offers that are accepted) rather than making it illegal? Could it be because big companies also exploit these features (although maybe not so blatantly), to profit?
Is it unethical to behave unethically in an unethical market?
So HFT as a whole should also be illegal by your logic.
I don't think you can get rid of computers from trading, but you can remove the advantage that they have. The NYSE is designed as a skewed playing field, giving an advantage to those paying for faster access. I don't think it will be possible to create rules for an exchange that are 100% fair, but I think simply not actively tilting the rules in favor of companies like Goldman Sachs will be an enormous improvement.
There are ways to limit the effectiveness of strategies currently employed by HFT algorithms. You could take measures to curb disingenuous trade offers. You could randomize the times that offers are published to different agents and lengthen them in order to give humans with regular internet connections a chance to compete on a more level playing field.
The system in place at the NYSE is not the only way to do things. It is the way to do things that maximizes profit for the NYSE as long as regular people are willing to play in an unfair game.
Maybe people who care about investing more than speculation will have enough political will to prop up an alternative that can surpass the NYSE and it's ilk.
It sounds like it's a flaw in the NYSE and similar exchanges as well as greedy HFT algorithms. It seems like fixing these flaws is far more important than just arresting people who exploit them.
Who was actually harmed by this crash? A bunch of wall street speculators running computer programs to trade faster than regular people. Who gives a shit. If anything, it exposes the vulnerability so it can be fixed.
It's entirely possible to have an exchange where there is no unfair advantage given to people who have paid for faster access to trade offers. But this is the system Wallstreet wants, and I can't say I feel bad when crooks get cheated.
I think your examples are actually very good at illustrating the crux of the problem, but I think I reach a different conclusion. I feel like a flashlight is indeed more invasive than some kind of passive perception device or a dog.
I think in principle a good system would be one where I can drive whatever kind of car (e.g. hermetically sealed, tinted windows, EM resistant, etc) and the cops can try to detect whatever they want without invading my space or damaging my property or making me wait for a long time for their detector to arrive.
I don't know how practical it is to implement the ideological extreme of this point of view, but I think it's a good frame of view to have in an ever changing world with new technologies.
How is that any different than an X-ray/millimeter-wave/infrared device being used to determine the contents of the vehicles?
it's not.
In both cases (sniffing-dog and machine) a tool outside of the officer's five senses is being used.
The delineation of a human's "5 senses" is sort of arbitrary. The officer is using his ears to hear the dog barking, or his eyes to read the meter on a machine. Both are extensions of biological senses, of which humans have in varying degrees of sensitivity.
If someone is stopped by an officer with a dog, the dog is legally allowed to sniff around the vehicle, but even if the officer has a scanning device with him he's not allowed to use it short of a probable cause existing.
He is not allowed to use either on the inside of your car.
A search is a search, regardless of whether it uses scent molecules or infrared/millimeter-wave/x-ray/ultrasonic energy, and it's also a search regardless of whether or not the "detector" has fur and a collar.
A search that invades your personal property is different than a search which is of surrounding area that is not within your personal space.
The dog created the probable cause for the actual search. The ruling was that you can't unduly detain people unless you already have probable cause.
The dog sniffing around your car is not considered a search of the car (because it's searching the area around the car that is not part of your personal property. If your car is leaking drug molecules that a dog can smell, then that is probable cause for a search of your car. It's like if there is blood leaking out of your car onto the street, it's probable cause for a search.
Now in the case of drug odors, only dogs can smell them, but in the future if cops just have drug odor detectors with them, presumably they won't even need to wait for dogs, and they will have probable cause immediately.
The idea is that a cop is allowed to notice that a crime has likely been committed without invading your personal space, but he is not allowed to detain you until he finds something. He has to either notice it or let you go.
I think you need think about UI design and forget about the technology issues. The technology exists to enable GUIs but the GUIs exist to enable particular use cases. Different use cases means different GUIs.
I'm not saying the GUIs aren't different. I'm saying that the GUIs in the examples you provided should easily be sharing 90% of their code. I'm not saying that the GUIs are not "different", I'm saying that different GUIs that provide similar functionality (e.g. playing music, viewing emails, etc) can share a lot of the same code.
It isn't just save/load a particular non-district binary.
I was actually envisioning something like a simple key/value pair system.
The 3 way merge being the most critical. Apple customers are coming to expect that they can do work on their phone then pick up their tablet and work on the same data seamlessly. For that to happen the system has to be able to intelligently deal with the situation where changes have occurred:
The idea of a 3 way merge is not something apple invented. If you want 3 way merge, then create an abstract class for it, and have separate implementations for different platforms.
Because of visual quality that's possible when you lock down the pixels: left is rastor right is vector.
This is a photograph not an icon. Photos are inherently raster graphics. It's not like android can't render raster graphics. You should store images in whatever format is more suitable. If apple can't handle vector graphics, that seems like a serious deficiency. My point was simply that vector graphics are easily converted to raster graphics of any size. The reverse is not possible (as illustrated by your example).
Apple's belief is, that icons (which are seen over and over again) should be hand drawn at the right resolution to be perfect not auto-generated. Versatility here you are gaining at the cost of image quality.
It doesn't really affect the image quality. The whole point of vector graphics is that they look good (or rather about as good as they *can* look) at any resolution.
The point of my comment is that the results of the pilot program will be suspect because the people running it will likely not be qualified to do a good job (i.e. just like how the people running the ipad procurement project). The pilot program will appear to go really well, then when it comes time to do the full program that is a total cluster fuck, an investigation will reveal that the pilot program was also flawed but it was not noticed (due to incompetence) or covered up (due to corruption), or both.
That's not the case at all on iOS. They are genuinely different versions with different functionality. Here is a link to an article with 20 apps iphone vs. iPad version side by side. You can see this is a different GUI: http://www.cnet.com/pictures/a... [cnet.com]
I don't doubt that some phone and tablet apps are written completely separately. But event he ones that are shown on your link, I would be shocked if 90% - 99% of the code between the 2 apps was the same (even if they are distributed separately.
The business logic will be the same, and even most of the GUI code is probably the same (i.e. same custom widget code, etc). The only part that I would expect to be different is the GUI layouts of those widgets for the different screen sizes.
https://polymer-topeka.appspot.com
This is what I have been playing around in lately. If you get to the demo quiz, you'll notice that the UI changes based on the size of the window it is in. The exact same code is usable on any size screen.
If anyone is still making completely different apps for different devices, they are doing it wrong.
For example an iOS application you generally are going to want to use iCloud integration to automatically tie information between: iPhone, iPads, Macs and (potentially) the watch. On Android you are going to want Google integration and tie it into Google's excellent application framework. Those two systems are nothing like one another in how they handle data.
Storing data to the cloud and restoring the data from the cloud should be abstracted. If you had an OO app, you'd just have concrete classes to implement the google and apple cloud save/load features.
Those two systems are nothing like one another in how they handle data.
I never used apple cloud stuff, but I can;t even imagine something so different that it would not find into a "save data/load data" kind of API.
Or for another example on iOS you are expected to draw icons and controls at specific resolutions while with Android you are expected to use vector graphics.
Why doesn't apple do vector graphics?... Anyway the answer is easy. You just do all the graphics as vector graphics and then generate the raster graphics for specific resolutions when needed (that's actually exactly what happens when rendering vector graphics anyway). I would be tempted to do this even if I was developing an iOS only app, because of how versatile it would be.
OS matters. Lots of enterprise software comes on one OS, take it or leave it, and paying them to change anything would counteract any savings from buying less expensive hardware. Custom software can be appallingly expensive to develop.
They had a budget of $500 million for just the ipads and $800 million for just the software. I work in the defense industry and our contracts are to develop software AND hardware and are well below these figures.
Moreover, iPads are not particularly expensive for what you get. Getting quality Android tablets wouldn't cost all that much less, if any.
You can get quality android tablets for half the price of a comparable ipad. You can get a chromebook for half the price of a quality android tablet. And keep in mind these are school children that we are giving these devices to. They are going to be covered in food and thrown on the ground and stolen by bullies, etc. We should be buying the most cost effective devices, and I can all but guarantee that the ipad is not it, especially at the volumes we are talking about.
When I was in school back in the 90's we had to buy a $80 ti-82. Now you can get a chromebook for $200 that's more powerful than even the best laptops from a few years earlier. Even if we had the money to buy $700 ipads for every student, that extra $500 / per student would be far better spent on increasing teacher salaries and attracting better teachers.
With 1.3 billion dollars, the school district could have probably commissioned an electronic text book to be written in every single subject taught in school, they could have bought 6.5 million chromebooks without even negotiating a bulk discount.
Anyone who thinks this was a good idea needs to get their head examined. This is the LA school system, where kids can barely read and teachers and kids are living in poverty.
The basic rule of picking a computer system is that you figure out what you need it to do, you figure out which applications will work, and you buy a system that runs those applications. If the available applications run on the iPad, paying to have them rewritten for Android is going to be far more expensive than just buying the iPads.
That's the basic rule when you are buying a few computers. It's not the rule when you are purchasing half a $1 billion of computer systems. When your computer budget is larger than the GDP of some small countries, you should be exploring the possibility of saving money by developing custom software.
Similarly, the average person will require a certain amount of training on new platforms and new software. Training costs. Moving to a different platform, even a less expensive one, can be more expensive, given the need for training and possibly different infrastructure and administration.
These kids aren't upgrading from a previous ipad.
There is no good argument that a teacher should become familiar with more than two similar types of computers. That isn't their job. Their job is to take what they can get and teach with it. For somebody like me, learning something new about computers is worthwhile, because if nothing else it broadens the experience that I live on. I'm not a teacher.
The computers don't matter. The OS barely matters, and it gets changed like 1 or 2 times a year. The application that is running on it is what matters, and even an idiot can be taught how to push the button to start an app on any OS, even one they've never used before.
This is like saying that people shouldn't be forced to learn to drive more than 2 makes of cars.
If anything this should be a reason *to* use android (if it was a good reason to begin with). There are more android phones out there, and more android users than iOS users. If anything, teachers are more likely to be familiar with android (52% market) than with iOS (35%).
Not that that should matter. Saying "I can't learn to use software" is like saying "I can't follow and remember instructions", and it should disqualify you from most jobs.
No one is asking anyone to be a hacker. Teachers are only being asked to do what every other person is required to do whether it's filling out an electronic timecard or entering products into an inventory software. It's just following directions. And it's usually a lot easier than the non-interactive paper counterpart.
Unity is definitely fast enough. Titanium, Phonegap, Xamarin... would also likely go fast enough. I was disagreeing with HTML5 by itself. Those aren't really designed for authors though.
I brought up HTML as a solution when I thought "interactive books" were like wikipedia pages with some buttons, which HTML5 is more than capable of doing and doing well.
No they aren't especially on iOS / Apple. Take a look at how many iOS applications have tablet specific versions.
Even the apps that have tablet specific version, no doubt share much (if not the vast majority) of the software. They may be separate apps for commercial purposes, or saving space in terms of higher resolution icons, sprites, etc. I don't consider that to be tablet specific development. It's development for one platform with a little bit of effort spent on specializing UI for phone or tablet.
They never had to. JavaScript porting languages always existed. The problem is that users notice cross platform's lowest common denominator and don't like it.
What I am saying is that they don't even get the performance problem anymore. Games used to be the one thing that couldn't be cross platform because of how hardware specific they were, are now fully capable of being targetted to multiple platforms including mobile platforms.
When done right, the apps written in cross platform environments are not noticeably slower than apps written specifically for one architecture in all but the most resource hungry apps.
Ideally what I would like to see is for school districts across states, and countries to form a consortium to develop open source text books (i.e. like a text book version of wikipedia), that schools could use royalty free. This would really help developing nations as well as American school districts. It would eliminate a lot of wasted effort in creating so many textbooks that contain basically the same information. A parabola still works the same way regardless of which edition of which math book we are using.
The textbook industry is rife with corruption, because of the massive payday you get if you can manage to get a constract for a whole school district. And the content is basically just current public domain knowledge packaged together with some artwork.
You could still pay people to contribute to the textbooks, but the difference would be that the content would not be owned by publishers. It would be public domain.
Affects child development. The pattern looks like autism, but nobody's drawn that conclusion; what they have concluded is that electronic devices are more interesting to children than the real world, and cause them to develop emotionally stunted, withdrawn, and more interested in things than people. It's notable you can identify an autistic infant by watching if it's interested in human faces or in objects.
Alright so where's the experiment that proves this? Where is the randomized controlled trial? You can;t just claim these things because they seem plausible. You actually have to do science (the whole part, not just the beginning).
How was emotional development measured? what was the sample size? How were confounding factors controlled for? And after that is proven, now you need to prove that the link of causal rather than just correlative.
How do you know it's not just that autistic kids prefer things over people? How do you know it's the phone causing the autism or autism like behavior?
This is the point where pseudo science assumes they know the answer and where real science (if it were being done) would start.
In real science, people try to prove that their hypothesis is wrong, to see if it can withstand scrutiny. In the pseudo science world you have these fake studies that set out to collect evidence to prove a conclusion that they have decided on beforehand.
I feel like your framing of this as "debating the science" implies an undeserved legitimacy to what I would more appropriately call "condemning pseudo science".
I don't expect parents to only do things that are scientifically proven to help their kids. I expect them to use their intuition and judgement. If you think screens are harming your kids, then restrict their use. Make your kids listen to Mozart for 3 hours a day. Feed them only whole foods. I am all for that. Just don't pretend it's based on science. And especially don't call it science because guessing (hypothesizing) is part of science too.
The superintendent felt that interactive books were the future of education and content absorption.
They also Pearson to make the software. (i.e. they weren't just buying existing software). They could have commisioned software to be made on any platform, or even for it to have been cross platform.
Your use of the word "video game" for these titles I think means you haven't seen then.
I have seen some screenshots, and I see why you don't think they would be perform well in HTML5. They have video game level graphics. This is also why I pointed out unity as an example of a popular framework that targets all the platforms I mentioned (that you seemed doubtful of). Unity is marketed as a game engine, but you can make whatever apps you want that require performant graphics.
The web is more interactive than a book. That allowed for vastly more content and student led exploration.
I agree with this statement. I think interactive books would be very helpful in illustrating concepts in ways that a static medium can't. I was envisioning something like wikipedia with it's animations and maybe some added interactivity. I don't think you need to see a emmersive 3d world of an artists conception of ancient Rome to effectively learn.
Interactive books do the same thing. For example a science book my daughter has allows her to conduct the experiments associated with a concept in a simulator right after learning the concept. That helps retention and understanding.
I think this can be done much more cheaply than ipads and proprietary interactive textbooks of the sort you are describing. I think kids are capable of learning concepts with a lower production value. (i.e. the kind found in HTML5, like wikipedia).
1) There are more of them
This is irrelevant if you are commissioning your own.
2) On average they are better written.
debatable and see my point for #1
3) They can be more easily written because there are a limited number of platforms
Developers actually prefer android for development, but prefer iOS for profit potential.
4) There are better authoring tools.
Such as? Android apps are java which has a much bigger following than objective C or swift.
No they aren't. And the way you can tell they aren't is by looking at variables on usage. For example average phone application interaction is 30 seconds. Average tablet interaction is closer to 5 minutes. The fact they run the same OS doesn't matter the fact the glass is bigger does.
The fact that they run the same OS means that the time spent on developing "phone software" vs. "tablet software" is the same, because the same software runs on both. While you may feel subjectively that phones and tablets are very different, the people developing the apps that run on them are targeting both platforms simultaneously. It's crazy not to. In fact, now the trend is to target phone, tablet, and desktop browser simultaneously with things like google polymer, and phonegap, etc.
Developers don't like writing different software for phone, tablet, and desktop, windows, mac, linux, and all combinations, and now with modern tools, they really don't have to.
The only thing the size of the glass effects is which UI profile gets loaded. Properly designed software can easily abstract the functionality from the presentation, like in a MVC (model view controller) design.
To put this into context: we have hard science showing that exposing kids to electronic screens is bad.
In what way is it bad? You say it's harmful to child development. In what way?
You are now changing the requirements. I'm going to stop here.
I am not changing the requirements. I'm raising my objections to the requirements once it became clear what they were.
The argument you originally raised was that Android had an equally good selection of interactive textbooks.
That was not my argument. My argument was that android was as good a platform for whatever "interactive books" could mean. I even asked for clarification, and learned that what you were in fact referring to were more like specific educational video games, and then raised my objection.
And this was not my original argument (it's a new one), android also has plenty of games (many educational). I don't see any reason why the games you cited are more educational that the games on android.
For end users with specific software in mind the question is whether the platform supports that software.
Yes, so if you need a specific educational video game about ancient Rome that only runs on iOS, I agree that you should buy something that runs iOS. What I am disputing is the claim that those are the specific apps that are needed on tablets for kids (now that I know that's what you are referring to).
As for the conflation of phones and tablets as far as software. That's precisely the problem with Android tablet software it isn't designed for tablets but rather is quite often phone (i.e. designed to run on a 4-6 inch screen) software running on a tablet.
They are the same. Tablets are just bigger phones. Many even have access to cell networks. They are the same components with bigger batteries and bigger screens. The platform is the same in both android and iOS and windows. I am not inventing this idea, Apple, Google, and Microsoft all came to the same conclusion that these devices are basically the same, which is why they run the same OS.
In regards to you accusing me of changing my argument, notice that I didn;t accuse you of changing the what you meant by an "interactive book". I acknowledge that maybe I just didn't know what you meant by it.
OK, I get that, I'm not sure that's more prevalent, and I was just providing a counter example. In Uruguay, spending on technology for education is a lot wiser at the government level, than it is at the private level.
Governments are different. what may work well in one country may not work well in another.
I think that the market and the private interests are overrated. There are lots of cases where markets just don't work, and private interests add up against the common good. In those cases, people spending other people's money can end up with a better result, even accounting for corruption or lack of accountability.
I 100% agree with this statement.
The government works better than the market when it works well. But what do you do when it doesn't?
The market gives you a level of success with very little investment. For situations where it is possible to engineer a centralized solution that works better than the market, we should absolutely do that. We can have the government make roads and power lines, and it's better than if we had an ad hoc system made by random people and companies.
But there are lots of systems where the solutions are very complicated and expensive to implement. In these sorts of systems a free market is better. We don't really want the government deciding prices on every good and service. The market does that for free. We don't want the government deciding when people should end relationships with eachother. They don't always make good decisions, but the market of relationships works better than a government solution.
I think we really could do good public schools in America if we poured enough resources into it. But currently it is just not our priority. Even though we spend more money per student than any other country in the world, we are usually ranked near last among developed nations. We have a bunch of people with jobs that they can't be fired from, that have very little interest or capability to do a good job. And despite spending so much on education, teachers get paid very little, which attracts the bottom rung of society to become teachers.
I think a lot of parents would probably prefer to send their kids to schools with amazing teachers that get paid a lot, even if the classrooms didn't have ipads.
In this situation, all it takes is for one private school to offer this alternative to make it possible. To change public school policies requires changing state laws and electing certain people to school boards, etc.
The private sector is like firewood, and the government is like a nuclear reactor. nuclear reactors are much better than firewood when they work correctly, but it takes a lot of investment to get them to work correctly.
In America our government is like 1% working nuclear reactors, and 49% broken ones, and 50% firewood. I am not saying we need more or less government. I am saying we need better government. We should shout down some of those broken nuclear reactors (convert them to firewood), and use those resources better. I'd rather have 25% working nuclear reactors and 75% firewood.
The less nuclear reactors we have, the more resources we can dedicate to making sure they actually work properly, and that we are getting the benefit from our investment.
A lot of it is based in cobbled-together science: we know a bunch of things about human development, about psychology, and about impacts of exposure to certain stimuli; we use those to intuit new things. This is basically how new theories are formed, as scientific understanding of two things doesn't necessarily equate to scientific understanding of the effects of plugging those two things together; it does, however, give you a basis for doing so, and a reasonable assumption that outcomes following the predicted model are probably causal.
This is how science starts.
Yeah, the hypothesis phase is the start of the scientific method, and it involves intuition and making shit up.
You are supposed to complete the process (i.e. doing experiments and performing analysis of the results), before you claim to have any useful answers.
Here is an even more basic question to answer before doing any science. You say technology is "bad for children before a certain age". What is your criteria for determining a good vs. bad outcome? Attention span? Obesity? obedience? intelligence? maturity? We may not even agree on what is subjectively good or bad. One parent may love that their child is good at video games, and another may not like video games and prefer they played baseball.
Even if we agreed on what good and bad outcomes are. The vast majority of these soft science studies are very poorly done. They have small sample sizes. They can not be replicated. The interpretations of the results are flawed. The methodology is flawed, etc. And even worse is the "journalistic" interpretation of these studies that are the predigested versions that people read on the internet.
Go look in these studies that show video games cause kids to be violent, or that TV rots your brain, or that rap music is detrimental, etc. Words you will not see in those studies "randomized controlled trial", "statistical significance", etc. You will find a lot of correlations cited with 0 evidence of causation (e.g. deaths are highly correlated with hospital visits. clearly hospitals cause of death).
It may seem to a lot of parents that technology is bad for kids. And in our society parents get to decide (within reason) what is good and bad for their kids. But this isn't science. This is just a preference.
You can't scientifically prove that pizza is more delicious that sushi. All you can do is prove that more people prefer pizza over sushi (or the opposite).
There is probably enough scientific evidence to prove that parents prefer kids who play sports over kids who play video games. But this is not proof that technology is bad for them.