Trouble is there is a fallacy here. If Hitler had won the war there would have been a revisionist canpaign to expunge his sins or to mitigate them somewhat, consider Stalin? And Hitler drew on the support of Christians in Germany, and being Catholic or Lutheran did not decide the issue, either of religion or of morality, and it rarely does.
So maybe the point of the OP is that believing that there is something greater than one self, in whatever form you choose, reduces stress. But prejudging the complexity of the world with proscribed answers also might reduce stress. On the other hand, there are many many paths to the same outcome than merely given by the world's organized religious organizations. There is a spiritual meaning for human beings quite apart from the traditions given in these world religions. Maybe doing some art might have the same effect, for example.
I wonder if this is the metal poor ( low Z > 4) halo star reported recently? Also, is this an evolved binary system where the outer layers of the secondary have accreted on the primary making it metastable? Some different equillibrium of a metal-poor star might be allowed in this condition than would be possible with large stars approaching solar metalicity.
None of this surprises me. It seems that every effort by Google is to create a captive market, even one that looks like it is using open standards, but really ins't. Google Docs comes to mind. In fact I think that Google Docs is managed by Microsoft or by Microsoft alumni around Office 2000 for market capture with a dumbed down legacy platform that only partly supports decade old standards. This is intentional, so it is no surprise that Google would try to roll it own GUI standard, even one that is based on X11 or QT.
I really wonder if programmer shortages really exist or if it just a ploy by employers to undercut the worth of people who are already writing code? This is quite distinct from the facile discussion about "coder" vs "computer scientist" or "designer" and all the complexity of skills needed. Clearly there is a big difference from writing some static language with few abstractions, even coding HTML, CSS, and Javascript, and Haskal or Python. It may be that maintaining legacy code such as FORTRAN and COBOL is real demand that is in fact hard to satisfy, and that there are too many people trained in newer more powerful environments. I just don't know, but I am somewhat skeptical of claims of shortages where the range of need is so complex. It sounds like the real problem has always been matching skills a certain person has with a need out there and that the average recruiter, even the average technical recruiter out there, is not very good at making the matches.
Even more problematic is this tendency to believe that in economically disadvantaged places like Oakland Ca, or St. Louis Mo. that teaching inner-city kids how to "program" is going to help but a very few of them. You may find people who are able to thrive as developers at random in any population, but the number will be small in any given collection of people. Teaching large numbers of people the basics, and especially if the language chosen is strongly typed, like Java, is just not going to get very far for most. Just because software development is glamorous doesn't mean everyone should do it, or even try. In my experience it requires a special set of skills and attitudes that in fact few people have.
I think that basic language literacy skills, very possibly using a computer, are more important for disadvantaged youth than programming skills, or that programming should be used as a tool in pursuit of another interest. So that if people can find self-expression in imagery, or graphic arts, or writing, they these come first and that programming be viewed as a tool that might aid that pursuit.
Finally, it must be said again that opportunity is based not on the needs people have in a Capitalist economy, but in the recognition by investors that funding a need of people is worthwhile. Since investment has run askew because of financialization and international investment, there is no one to one mapping of need with resources. There is some mapping but it hingers on the wisdom of investors, which is something that reasonable people can question.
A troll always asks a rhetorical question. That seems to be the critical definition of what they do. It can be abusive and confrontational as well as more socially acceptable, but the effect is the same, to push buttons.
Still, even if you suspect that the OP is trolling, you can answer the question straight, so not all trolls are to be dismissed outright and even the obvious bias of the question can be sidestepped. It might be the case that the premise of the question is false, not all SV workers are greedy and selfish youth, some might be diligent hardware engineers, for example, developing robotic systems for limb prosthesis. Even though I have been a sharp critic of Google's social media approach, there is no doubt that wearable technology or self driving cars have individual merit.
Suppose that the draw for talent is dissipation of merit in short-term profitable pursuits, social media, marketing, the pron industry. One may conclude that it is the venture capitalists and investors who are to blame, not the people who come to work for the companies they fund, and it is the management of the companies who solicit the funds from investors with dissipative ideas who are to blame. I have proposed the same fault WRT the lopsided economy and the acute housing shortage in the San Francisco Bay Area. Maybe it is good that those high rollers are looking over their shoulders at push back. Just recognize that people, no matter how smart, are still going to have lack of awareness ( the original meaning of stupid) and act with self interest mostly (selfishness) if the money is there. I feel that the criticism should be directed at investors, here.
Even those have to be funded.... by the House. Try reading the Constitution. The Senate does not originate revenue spending, it is the House. The compromise is between the two legislative bodies to get anything done, but the funding originates in the House and is approved by the entire Congress.
Which is why you write crappy designs, You don't understand the behavior of your users as a result of not thinking about psychology. I hope you don't write interfaces and web pages, because if you do you are likely to contribute to the poor designs out there, Even something as innocent, no-brainer, as choosing to code a text area widget or use a blog for a conversation is enough to reveal your ignorance and lack of virtue.
Do you even understand why we hate Slashdot Beta? It is because of human behavior, the result of psychology. The ececs at Dice are not fools, they know what they are doing and why. They know that they are trading our ability to effectively talk to one another for the ease of their business partners to mine what we post, by adopting a social media design, a blog design.
So maybe Number Theory and all of Discrete Math is too much for AA students. But it seems they are the most important part of Knuth's course, So how about symbolic logic and a little set theory? Maybe even teaching the use of logic constructs in most programming languages, use of logical operators as well as logic statements is enough, and possibly also logic in Regular Expressions, as a little extra.
Absolutely, some exposure to social science and psychology should be required. The reason is the massive mistake of the Javascript Textarea Widget as the standard for communications and the widespread use of blogs. The design of web logs, blogs, and their misuse is an engineering decision made by web site owners and social media companies and it is a huge error based on the psychology of human communication. We are seeing the misapplication of programming and data structures and data mining in the area of human communication on the Internet and that is due to the ignorance of designers, whether computer scientists or not, to human factors and to the way that the chosen technology inhibits effective communication. This is especially obvious when the answer was known and used long BEFORE the decisions were made about websites and blogging. In the test-based era of Mail User Agents and related tools, it was well understood what people needed to write to one another effectively, and that has been replaced by simple tools that are not as effective and interfere with proper communication.
It would be easy for someone with a social science and psychology background to test blogging against its alternatives in discussion forums to find out what design helps people communicate effectively and resolve what differences they have. I bet that such a study will find that people are more satisfied with greater complexity available in the older discussion forums than in a blog.This huge error is due to the narrow training of designers. if not the greed of the investors in social media companies. Google has an archive of USENET postings from 1985 on, and it consciously chose to ingnore the lesson of the older designs,
The opposition to Dice's Beta UI for Slashdot is actually rooted in exactly the same error. It is why most of you dislike Facebook so much, Mark Zuckerberg has said that he wants "Simplicity" but not so his users can talk to one another without pain, but so that his business partners can spy on users easier. So tech deserves to fail for not taking user psychology into account in its design choices.
I am glad I don't live in the UK. I even feel suspicious about people here in the U.S. who have a British accent unless I know something trustworthy about them. It puts me on guard because if I think that people would intrude on other people's rights so easily for class and money reasons that they cannot be trusted to respect mine.
I wonder how much manpower is still spent maintaining and writing FORTRAN? Oh, I know that in fortran 90 there are structures and classes with methods, but think for a moment about all that legacy code still running out there, not to mention that many scientists still like Fortran for calculations. Maybe lots of scientists have migrated to Matlab but they need to turn to Fortran to unlock some of their old data.
Dice wants to turn Slashdot into a social media (blog) site to generate business data. That deserves to kill Slashdot. FUCK Beta. I will close my account if Dice does this and take my comments to Reddit.
First, ot seems to me that Jews are somewhat more tolerant of different views on things than others of the Abrahanic tradition, Christians and Moslms; there seems to be a dialectical approach to dogna in the training of young Jews. Still because Jews, Christians and Moslms share the same roots, they can make the same sort of mistakes when their faith is a source of power. I call that mistake "The Sin of Abraham". It is the myth that any one tribe or ethnicity or group of mankind is more select than another, spiritually, or in the eyes of God. It is an idea that should be expunged from religion and why it is so important to western religion is a matter of historical empire and ethnocentrism that should be discouraged. It is surely the unassailable basis of all of the friction between the world religions that share it, and it is a myth as bad as Creationism.
It does not surprise me that some Conservative Jews would deny evolution, just as Christians and others might deny it. Creationism is a rehtorical position whose sole role is to protect dogma based on an authoritarian use of Scripture. It is based on using faith as a argument by force and is a testiment to the weakness of a faith that does not rest on morality by deed rather than moral authority in which an elite gets to abuse others. It is better to do right by deed than by prescription or order.
Fundamentally, music is just a form of whining. Some whiners are better than others.
This sounds too hard bitten to me, too Pragmatic, too Protestant Ethic as well, as though anything that excites emotion is a sin. Of course you are entitled to your opinion and even to project your lack of sensitivity as the article was about the fact that people differ widely in their tastes and sensitivity to music., but at the risk of overgeneralizing and sounding a bit too judgmental.
This raises the question, do you have a medium in which you excel? Graphics, drawing, painting, or written word, or some craft, woodworking or putting parts together, masonry or carpentry or furniture making? Art can have many forms of expression, even as two extremes "We have no art, we do the best we can." and "Art is anything you can get away with." Both are true.
Almost never listen at home, never listen to it while driving, and at work I listen to white noise with over-the-ear noise-cancelling headphones all day because of misophonia.
But I love playing the piano.
You sound more sensitive to music than most. Do you have music in your head all the time? Do you want to concentrate on only those pieces that you are playing at the piano and no have any other music on your mind? Can you sight-sing from sheet music? Maybe that will help you control what music is in your mind at any one time. I don't play piano well enough to manage all the music in my awareness, so either I play those pieces on a personal player or I read from the sheet music, a score, or a reduction.
Some public places play loud music because they think that it makes a situation where people aren't talking to one another more exciting than if it was quiet. It might be an interesting experiment to run to pipe white noise into such a setting to see if the effect is different. White noise generators are more common than you think, any place with a water fountian serves that purpose, which is why the effect of fountains in public places is so interesting as regards noisy music in bars. I know of a cafe modled on ones in Europe with a fountain. There the fountain serves to raise the noise floor over the noisy throrghfare in front of the cafe, but a high noise floor from a "live" room and fountain and expresso machines is a cheap if annoying way to give conversations some privacy. It may be the Italian answer to privacy of conversation in public, but it can be annoying. I have stopped going to that cafe because I realize that quieter places can be found,
The other reason places play music is to entertain the help, to structure their time. Now, I dislike music in public places, as well as the public address system at my local supermarket and so I come prepared with my own portable music. If the place's music is played low, I will put up with it, except that if places play classical music they universally play it softer than pop. The reason for this may be that classical recordings have generally a wider dynamic range than pop recordings, so they learn to avoid the loud parts by setting the level low for all. Another reason may be that classical music in public is viewed as something to be muted for fear of people who don't like it and that pop can be played louder as a result. I used to get upset if I couldn't really hear some interesting or favorite classical piece played too softly, now I BYO and don't care what they play unless it is too loud to hear what I am playing. This is for the case where I want to go out to get a coffee and am not expecting to talk to someone.
First, I do not deny the claim made in the OP, that some people may not be able to process music and derive pleasure from that. I am quite the opposite and may be far more sensitive to music as opposed to any other art form, but like many visually impaired people, this may not come as any surprise.
An incident of about 15 years ago comes to mind. I had a collegue in a technical support group who seemed to have some difficulty rapidly processing speech. Others in the group wrongly thought he was stupid, which was clearly not the case as he was able to keep up with his case load and resolve customer problems in a technical area.
I discovered a big clue to this one day. I happened to have a MIDI file of Contrapunctus I from Bach's Art of Fugue which he heard. The experience was for him obviously painful and disconcerting. Now, I had no other evidence that he disliked music, but his tastes obviously didn't run to Bach. The issue was that he didn't seem to have the ability to deal with the multiple voices all at once. Of course he is not alone, one had to bring some native abilities to that as well as some experience and even for me listening to a complex piece for the first time can be disorienting, but in a period of lime, several hearings, the logic of pieces emerges for me, and there are people who are more adept that this than I. What I do know is that music lights up those parts of the brain that are also used in processing speech, the structure of language, its semantics and syntax, and musical form seems to share structure with language. This person seemed to be slower at picking up content from speech than is normal, which is not the same as lacking the ability to think about what was said as effectively at everyone else, eventually. This speed of processing might be a clue to why people may not respond to music or how it shapes their tastes.
This may help to explain why many people seem to be more aware of lyrics than the music. For them vocal music is more like peotry set to music and many of them seem to prefer music with words than instramentals alone. I am just the opposite. I have to work to get the lyrics, my awareness taken up with the music, the details of counterpoint and harmony. It doesn't matter the genre for me either, the effect is the same, I remember the textural details of a composition or an arrangement of it even going back to early childhood, and long before I bother with the lyrics, so it is easy to recognize a cover of a pop standard.
But what may be closer to the mark is that many companies go into this expecting a quick return and discover that it takes more effort than that, and so they move on to some other fad of business. It is the short leash they are on held by investors who are clamoring for instant ROI that drives this, not a real scientific curiosity. So do you think that counting clicks or doing RegEx matches in blog posts translates to pay back? Or is it just the same old confidence game that has always existed, you find a fool to part with his money.
Only if you have testable hypothesis. The "Science" part is dubious for exactly the same reason the "Science" in economics is dubious. The "Science" in Computer Science is a little more substancial, but it is closer to mathematics than any emperical science.
But don't forget, tell Dice to junk the Beta UI for Slashdot! It is a social media scam, dsigned to simplify the interface into a blog so it is easier to data mine. So FUCK Beta, and FUCK analytics, and FUCK business data, and if needed, FUCK data scientists.
What do you think that some web content going "viral" refers to?
And HTML IS a STanDard, it is not?
Not to mention the business model of most web sites and apps, to INFECT the minds of its viewers, and the sex part if to FUCK with their minds, Business as Usual, the sexual imagery is apt.
Slashdot Mirror
Its a reduction in stress, not a lesson in tact.
Hitler meditated daily.
I think you proved his point.
Trouble is there is a fallacy here. If Hitler had won the war there would have been a revisionist canpaign to expunge his sins or to mitigate them somewhat, consider Stalin? And Hitler drew on the support of Christians in Germany, and being Catholic or Lutheran did not decide the issue, either of religion or of morality, and it rarely does.
So maybe the point of the OP is that believing that there is something greater than one self, in whatever form you choose, reduces stress. But prejudging the complexity of the world with proscribed answers also might reduce stress. On the other hand, there are many many paths to the same outcome than merely given by the world's organized religious organizations. There is a spiritual meaning for human beings quite apart from the traditions given in these world religions. Maybe doing some art might have the same effect, for example.
I wonder if this is the metal poor ( low Z > 4) halo star reported recently? Also, is this an evolved binary system where the outer layers of the secondary have accreted on the primary making it metastable? Some different equillibrium of a metal-poor star might be allowed in this condition than would be possible with large stars approaching solar metalicity.
None of this surprises me. It seems that every effort by Google is to create a captive market, even one that looks like it is using open standards, but really ins't. Google Docs comes to mind. In fact I think that Google Docs is managed by Microsoft or by Microsoft alumni around Office 2000 for market capture with a dumbed down legacy platform that only partly supports decade old standards. This is intentional, so it is no surprise that Google would try to roll it own GUI standard, even one that is based on X11 or QT.
I really wonder if programmer shortages really exist or if it just a ploy by employers to undercut the worth of people who are already writing code? This is quite distinct from the facile discussion about "coder" vs "computer scientist" or "designer" and all the complexity of skills needed. Clearly there is a big difference from writing some static language with few abstractions, even coding HTML, CSS, and Javascript, and Haskal or Python. It may be that maintaining legacy code such as FORTRAN and COBOL is real demand that is in fact hard to satisfy, and that there are too many people trained in newer more powerful environments. I just don't know, but I am somewhat skeptical of claims of shortages where the range of need is so complex. It sounds like the real problem has always been matching skills a certain person has with a need out there and that the average recruiter, even the average technical recruiter out there, is not very good at making the matches.
Even more problematic is this tendency to believe that in economically disadvantaged places like Oakland Ca, or St. Louis Mo. that teaching inner-city kids how to "program" is going to help but a very few of them. You may find people who are able to thrive as developers at random in any population, but the number will be small in any given collection of people. Teaching large numbers of people the basics, and especially if the language chosen is strongly typed, like Java, is just not going to get very far for most. Just because software development is glamorous doesn't mean everyone should do it, or even try. In my experience it requires a special set of skills and attitudes that in fact few people have.
I think that basic language literacy skills, very possibly using a computer, are more important for disadvantaged youth than programming skills, or that programming should be used as a tool in pursuit of another interest. So that if people can find self-expression in imagery, or graphic arts, or writing, they these come first and that programming be viewed as a tool that might aid that pursuit.
Finally, it must be said again that opportunity is based not on the needs people have in a Capitalist economy, but in the recognition by investors that funding a need of people is worthwhile. Since investment has run askew because of financialization and international investment, there is no one to one mapping of need with resources. There is some mapping but it hingers on the wisdom of investors, which is something that reasonable people can question.
A troll always asks a rhetorical question. That seems to be the critical definition of what they do. It can be abusive and confrontational as well as more socially acceptable, but the effect is the same, to push buttons.
Still, even if you suspect that the OP is trolling, you can answer the question straight, so not all trolls are to be dismissed outright and even the obvious bias of the question can be sidestepped. It might be the case that the premise of the question is false, not all SV workers are greedy and selfish youth, some might be diligent hardware engineers, for example, developing robotic systems for limb prosthesis. Even though I have been a sharp critic of Google's social media approach, there is no doubt that wearable technology or self driving cars have individual merit.
Suppose that the draw for talent is dissipation of merit in short-term profitable pursuits, social media, marketing, the pron industry. One may conclude that it is the venture capitalists and investors who are to blame, not the people who come to work for the companies they fund, and it is the management of the companies who solicit the funds from investors with dissipative ideas who are to blame. I have proposed the same fault WRT the lopsided economy and the acute housing shortage in the San Francisco Bay Area. Maybe it is good that those high rollers are looking over their shoulders at push back. Just recognize that people, no matter how smart, are still going to have lack of awareness ( the original meaning of stupid) and act with self interest mostly (selfishness) if the money is there. I feel that the criticism should be directed at investors, here.
Even those have to be funded .... by the House. Try reading the Constitution. The Senate does not originate revenue spending, it is the House. The compromise is between the two legislative bodies to get anything done, but the funding originates in the House and is approved by the entire Congress.
Maybe the fault is in the private sector for not being productive enough to improve the ratio of govt. outlays to GDP? It is just a statistic :-)
Which is why you write crappy designs, You don't understand the behavior of your users as a result of not thinking about psychology. I hope you don't write interfaces and web pages, because if you do you are likely to contribute to the poor designs out there, Even something as innocent, no-brainer, as choosing to code a text area widget or use a blog for a conversation is enough to reveal your ignorance and lack of virtue.
Do you even understand why we hate Slashdot Beta? It is because of human behavior, the result of psychology. The ececs at Dice are not fools, they know what they are doing and why. They know that they are trading our ability to effectively talk to one another for the ease of their business partners to mine what we post, by adopting a social media design, a blog design.
So maybe Number Theory and all of Discrete Math is too much for AA students. But it seems they are the most important part of Knuth's course, So how about symbolic logic and a little set theory? Maybe even teaching the use of logic constructs in most programming languages, use of logical operators as well as logic statements is enough, and possibly also logic in Regular Expressions, as a little extra.
Absolutely, some exposure to social science and psychology should be required. The reason is the massive mistake of the Javascript Textarea Widget as the standard for communications and the widespread use of blogs. The design of web logs, blogs, and their misuse is an engineering decision made by web site owners and social media companies and it is a huge error based on the psychology of human communication. We are seeing the misapplication of programming and data structures and data mining in the area of human communication on the Internet and that is due to the ignorance of designers, whether computer scientists or not, to human factors and to the way that the chosen technology inhibits effective communication. This is especially obvious when the answer was known and used long BEFORE the decisions were made about websites and blogging. In the test-based era of Mail User Agents and related tools, it was well understood what people needed to write to one another effectively, and that has been replaced by simple tools that are not as effective and interfere with proper communication.
It would be easy for someone with a social science and psychology background to test blogging against its alternatives in discussion forums to find out what design helps people communicate effectively and resolve what differences they have. I bet that such a study will find that people are more satisfied with greater complexity available in the older discussion forums than in a blog.This huge error is due to the narrow training of designers. if not the greed of the investors in social media companies. Google has an archive of USENET postings from 1985 on, and it consciously chose to ingnore the lesson of the older designs,
The opposition to Dice's Beta UI for Slashdot is actually rooted in exactly the same error. It is why most of you dislike Facebook so much, Mark Zuckerberg has said that he wants "Simplicity" but not so his users can talk to one another without pain, but so that his business partners can spy on users easier. So tech deserves to fail for not taking user psychology into account in its design choices.
I am glad I don't live in the UK. I even feel suspicious about people here in the U.S. who have a British accent unless I know something trustworthy about them. It puts me on guard because if I think that people would intrude on other people's rights so easily for class and money reasons that they cannot be trusted to respect mine.
Oh come on, everybody knows about dike swarms, dikes and sills, pegmatite dikes :-)
I wonder how much manpower is still spent maintaining and writing FORTRAN? Oh, I know that in fortran 90 there are structures and classes with methods, but think for a moment about all that legacy code still running out there, not to mention that many scientists still like Fortran for calculations. Maybe lots of scientists have migrated to Matlab but they need to turn to Fortran to unlock some of their old data.
Dice wants to turn Slashdot into a social media (blog) site to generate business data. That deserves to kill Slashdot. FUCK Beta. I will close my account if Dice does this and take my comments to Reddit.
Maybe it isn't too uncommon!
First, ot seems to me that Jews are somewhat more tolerant of different views on things than others of the Abrahanic tradition, Christians and Moslms; there seems to be a dialectical approach to dogna in the training of young Jews. Still because Jews, Christians and Moslms share the same roots, they can make the same sort of mistakes when their faith is a source of power. I call that mistake "The Sin of Abraham". It is the myth that any one tribe or ethnicity or group of mankind is more select than another, spiritually, or in the eyes of God. It is an idea that should be expunged from religion and why it is so important to western religion is a matter of historical empire and ethnocentrism that should be discouraged. It is surely the unassailable basis of all of the friction between the world religions that share it, and it is a myth as bad as Creationism.
It does not surprise me that some Conservative Jews would deny evolution, just as Christians and others might deny it. Creationism is a rehtorical position whose sole role is to protect dogma based on an authoritarian use of Scripture. It is based on using faith as a argument by force and is a testiment to the weakness of a faith that does not rest on morality by deed rather than moral authority in which an elite gets to abuse others. It is better to do right by deed than by prescription or order.
Fundamentally, music is just a form of whining. Some whiners are better than others.
This sounds too hard bitten to me, too Pragmatic, too Protestant Ethic as well, as though anything that excites emotion is a sin. Of course you are entitled to your opinion and even to project your lack of sensitivity as the article was about the fact that people differ widely in their tastes and sensitivity to music., but at the risk of overgeneralizing and sounding a bit too judgmental.
This raises the question, do you have a medium in which you excel? Graphics, drawing, painting, or written word, or some craft, woodworking or putting parts together, masonry or carpentry or furniture making? Art can have many forms of expression, even as two extremes "We have no art, we do the best we can." and "Art is anything you can get away with." Both are true.
Almost never listen at home, never listen to it while driving, and at work I listen to white noise with over-the-ear noise-cancelling headphones all day because of misophonia.
But I love playing the piano.
You sound more sensitive to music than most. Do you have music in your head all the time? Do you want to concentrate on only those pieces that you are playing at the piano and no have any other music on your mind? Can you sight-sing from sheet music? Maybe that will help you control what music is in your mind at any one time. I don't play piano well enough to manage all the music in my awareness, so either I play those pieces on a personal player or I read from the sheet music, a score, or a reduction.
Some public places play loud music because they think that it makes a situation where people aren't talking to one another more exciting than if it was quiet. It might be an interesting experiment to run to pipe white noise into such a setting to see if the effect is different. White noise generators are more common than you think, any place with a water fountian serves that purpose, which is why the effect of fountains in public places is so interesting as regards noisy music in bars. I know of a cafe modled on ones in Europe with a fountain. There the fountain serves to raise the noise floor over the noisy throrghfare in front of the cafe, but a high noise floor from a "live" room and fountain and expresso machines is a cheap if annoying way to give conversations some privacy. It may be the Italian answer to privacy of conversation in public, but it can be annoying. I have stopped going to that cafe because I realize that quieter places can be found,
The other reason places play music is to entertain the help, to structure their time. Now, I dislike music in public places, as well as the public address system at my local supermarket and so I come prepared with my own portable music. If the place's music is played low, I will put up with it, except that if places play classical music they universally play it softer than pop. The reason for this may be that classical recordings have generally a wider dynamic range than pop recordings, so they learn to avoid the loud parts by setting the level low for all. Another reason may be that classical music in public is viewed as something to be muted for fear of people who don't like it and that pop can be played louder as a result. I used to get upset if I couldn't really hear some interesting or favorite classical piece played too softly, now I BYO and don't care what they play unless it is too loud to hear what I am playing. This is for the case where I want to go out to get a coffee and am not expecting to talk to someone.
First, I do not deny the claim made in the OP, that some people may not be able to process music and derive pleasure from that. I am quite the opposite and may be far more sensitive to music as opposed to any other art form, but like many visually impaired people, this may not come as any surprise.
An incident of about 15 years ago comes to mind. I had a collegue in a technical support group who seemed to have some difficulty rapidly processing speech. Others in the group wrongly thought he was stupid, which was clearly not the case as he was able to keep up with his case load and resolve customer problems in a technical area.
I discovered a big clue to this one day. I happened to have a MIDI file of Contrapunctus I from Bach's Art of Fugue which he heard. The experience was for him obviously painful and disconcerting. Now, I had no other evidence that he disliked music, but his tastes obviously didn't run to Bach. The issue was that he didn't seem to have the ability to deal with the multiple voices all at once. Of course he is not alone, one had to bring some native abilities to that as well as some experience and even for me listening to a complex piece for the first time can be disorienting, but in a period of lime, several hearings, the logic of pieces emerges for me, and there are people who are more adept that this than I. What I do know is that music lights up those parts of the brain that are also used in processing speech, the structure of language, its semantics and syntax, and musical form seems to share structure with language. This person seemed to be slower at picking up content from speech than is normal, which is not the same as lacking the ability to think about what was said as effectively at everyone else, eventually. This speed of processing might be a clue to why people may not respond to music or how it shapes their tastes.
This may help to explain why many people seem to be more aware of lyrics than the music. For them vocal music is more like peotry set to music and many of them seem to prefer music with words than instramentals alone. I am just the opposite. I have to work to get the lyrics, my awareness taken up with the music, the details of counterpoint and harmony. It doesn't matter the genre for me either, the effect is the same, I remember the textural details of a composition or an arrangement of it even going back to early childhood, and long before I bother with the lyrics, so it is easy to recognize a cover of a pop standard.
But what may be closer to the mark is that many companies go into this expecting a quick return and discover that it takes more effort than that, and so they move on to some other fad of business. It is the short leash they are on held by investors who are clamoring for instant ROI that drives this, not a real scientific curiosity. So do you think that counting clicks or doing RegEx matches in blog posts translates to pay back? Or is it just the same old confidence game that has always existed, you find a fool to part with his money.
Only if you have testable hypothesis. The "Science" part is dubious for exactly the same reason the "Science" in economics is dubious. The "Science" in Computer Science is a little more substancial, but it is closer to mathematics than any emperical science.
But don't forget, tell Dice to junk the Beta UI for Slashdot! It is a social media scam, dsigned to simplify the interface into a blog so it is easier to data mine. So FUCK Beta, and FUCK analytics, and FUCK business data, and if needed, FUCK data scientists.
What do you think that some web content going "viral" refers to?
And HTML IS a STanDard, it is not?
Not to mention the business model of most web sites and apps, to INFECT the minds of its viewers, and the sex part if to FUCK with their minds, Business as Usual, the sexual imagery is apt.
Sorry, I meant "Simplicity". That typo got away!