Actually evidence from the 1950s was mixed -- as it still is -- but in fact most of it stands up pretty well. What's a problem is the interpretation of that evidence and its limited nature (e.g. not knowing about different types of cholesterol).
For example it was established in the 50s that high blood cholesterol was a risk factor for cardiovascular disease. This is still believed as true, but what they didn't know at the time is what factors affected blood cholesterol. It was (plausibly although not conclusively) suspected by many that fat consumption would increase it; nobody suspected sugar... why should they?
In complex systems like the body there is usually conflicting evidence early on, which is resolved by further study.
I'd think from a military standpoint what you want is soldiers who make better battlefield decisions, not ones that engage in a stereotypical behavior regardless of circumstance.
The human brain is both massively adaptable and subject to modification by information inputs. Which means you can indoctrinate men into becoming mindless killing machines. The problem is that historically that approach doesn't seem to be effective either tactically or strategically. US Marines faced waves of suicide attackers in the Pacific theater of WW2, which must have been terrifying, but in the end worked to the US advantage.
On the other hand George Washington's great talent as a general was retreating. He could attack a much larger and better equipped army and then make his army disappear before they could react. That was terrifying in its own way, and much more miltarily effective.
Given a fight between men fighting to kill and men fighting to survive, all other things being equal I'd put my money on the men trying to survive.
You know, this kind of shallow cynicism actually makes you easier to dupe, because it's not evidence-based; it's what-sounds-truthy-based.
This article was published in Nature, which requires a complete disclosure of institutional affiliations and financial conflicts. That doesn't mean the system is perfect, but it's about as good as it gets, especially given that Nature is one of the most prestigious scientific journals in the world. Nature Medicine has an eye-popping 30.357 impact factor, making it the fourth most highly cited medical journal in the world after the New England Journal of Medicine, The Lancet, and Journal of the American Medical Association.
Does it mean you should immediately believe anything that's published in Nature Medicine? No. You should wait until it is cited in a literature review article in one of those top journals before making any health decisions based on it. However as individual papers go, this is as credible as they get.
Researchers have been trying to take caffeine down for decades. Nobody can quite believe that something so enjoyable as coffee isn't bad for you. In fact doctors used to routinely warn their patients off coffee because of all the bad things it would do to them, but in fact when researchers tried to confirm all the things doctors knew about why coffee was bad for you, none of them turned out to be true, with narrow exceptions for certain populations (e.g., coffee doesn't cause ulcers as we used to be told, but if you have an ulcer coffee will make the symptoms worse).
What researchers found were surprising benefits, including what appears to be evidence of reduction in risks for multiple forms of cancer and even a reduction in suicide risk.
Coffee is well on its way to becoming the first evidence-backed superfood.
Jobs was a high functioning sociopath. Woz was a goose that laid golden eggs. The thing is people like Woz can sometimes end up doing better under someone who exploits them than on their own, as long as the exploitation is sufficiently impersonal.
Everyone wants to own both the distribution channel and the content being sold over that channel. Netflix, Amazon, Hulu...
They all want their own programming so that going to a different store means losing access to content. If Apple's content does appear on Netflix, you can be sure of two things: (1) it'll be old episodes and (2) their programs will include melodramatic, never-ending story arcs.
I think it'll be interesting to see if it actually does hurt productivity.
Here's what I think will happen. A very few people will be seriously hampered in their work. Most people will end up about as productive as they were before. And some people may do a little better.
Who knows what jobs will be available in twenty years, between AI and offshoring? Coding doesn't look like a sure thing at all.
If you are going to focus on a skill, focus on ones that serve in that kind of future environment: being able to pick up on human context and nuance; to decode, no just the literal level of communication, but implicit levels of communication. Because even if AI and foreigners take our coding jobs, somebody is going to have to lay out specifications, and that take imagination and subtlety.
And you know what would be really, really good for developing those kinds of skills? Reading and discussing books.
yes India has terrible controls on their antibiotic use, but remember that US farmers are using large amounts of antibiotics too keep their overcrowded livestock from dying too soon.
India is a country with a median annual income of $616. With 1.2 billion people, well, a lot of things like providing medical care are going to be tough. We're headed that way too. While per capita GDP growth has recovered from the Great Recession, median income has declined.
The problem is the 26 antibiotics all work the same way. Given that the gene in question encodes an enzyme which blocks that process, you don't have to administer all 26 to know that none of them will work.
This is kind of an oversimplified view of affairs as they now stand.
The newer players aren't competitors to NASA; they're competitors to NASA's traditional vendors. They probably wouldn't exist were it not for government policy to encourage and support more independent, entrepreneurial approaches to launch system development and management.
I agree. I also think we should make successful completion of an H-1b term as an automatic qualification for a green card. If the talent is so important to bring in, then talent plus experience is even more important to keep here, and eventually naturalize.
The program as it now exists simply primes the pump for offshoring and overseas tech transfer.
I'm a boomer and trust me, we had our share of functional illiterates, innumerates, and all-around ignorant people. Look at the 60-ish people you know. Allowing for greater life experience (e.g. remembering Dr. King rather than having just read about him), do we seem as a group so uniformly wonderfully educated to you? I thought not.
I think millennials are on the whole just a little better educated than we were. The problem is that they need to be a lot better educated.
The world is changing faster. Information sources are more varied and less reliable. In an era where it has never been easier to surround yourself with crackpots you need to be a more independent thinkers than boomers, who despite our counter-culture pretensions are as big a generation of sheep as this country has ever produced. When we entered the workforce there were lots of good-paying jobs we could do with just a three R's education. For millennials those jobs have gone overseas or are being lost to automation.
So in the current environment, the average person needs capabilities that would have made him elite in past generations. That's why so many more Americans go to college: 68% in 2014 vs. 45% in 1960.
So it's no surprise if the average college graduate isn't as impressive as the average college in past generations:you're looking at a different sample, one more representative of the population as a whole.
Speaking as one who lived through the period you are talking about, 8 track never really took off, except in cars. Cassettes were already big deal when I was in high school, and I graduated in '79. They just hadn't peaked yet.
In the 70s Chromium Dioxide tapes and Dolby started to appear on home stereo cassette decks, and by the end of the decade 8 tracks were largely displaced in cars by cassettes.
The thing that really made cassettes take off, however, was the Sony Walkman. That made it possible for the first time to listen to your choice of music, with reasonable fidelity, any time you wanted to. Around the same time boomboxes came in.
I have a Samsung Galaxy S6, and I hate it. And it's not the UI tweaks, which are minor but generally actually pretty good. And the camera is astonishingly good. No the problem is that the battery life is so bad I have to keep it on Ultra-battery-saving mode unless I'm certain to have access to a charger later in the day. Reviews said battery life was "unimpressive", but what they should have said it was that it was disastrously bad.
Samsung's had to have known this would be a problem. So what does that tell you about Samsung's attitude toward users?
It tells me that Samsung isn't a company I want to deal with in the future, because their interest in user experience ends with what happens on the showroom floor.
What makes you think doing better than existing studios is the goal? I think the goal is to find some way to extract more revenue out of their iTunes customers. The result doesn't have to be artistically better than what's out there (although that is one strategy). It doesn't have to be financially more successful on its own than Netflix or Hulu. It just has to turn a new profit.
There are basically three ways to grow profits. (1) Get in on the ground in a new and growing market; (2) become more efficient; (3) become larger and more complex. Figuring out the next big thing is tricky. Becoming more efficient is hard. Becoming larger and more complex doesn't benefit stockholders all that much, but it's an easy way to make your senior managers richer.
Not one single Falcon has landed without mayor damage today. But they want to push without fixing the problems they already have.
Which is normal for rocketry when you're trying anything new. Every program either (a) re-uses proven components or (b) deals with early very high failure rates or both. It took ten years to go from the first firing of the Saturn V's rocket engine (the Rocketdyne F1) to it's firs successful use, and there explosions along the way.
PTSD has specific diagnostic criteria even including exclusion criteria (e.g. not due to substance abuse). The term isn't overbroad, it's just misused, like "Type A personality", which doesn't mean what people think it means.
Well, that's kind of a strawman argument; the employees aren't saying that nobody should have to do it; they're saying that if management's plans require someone to do it then management should also have a plan for dealing with the mental health consequences.
Well, any professional programmer should understand the concept of operator overloading; however my problem with the way you're framing the problem is that you're assuming an individual programmer has a choice about the features of the language he has to deal with. If you're a lone wolf, sure. But most of us have to maintain code other people create.
I believe GP was puckishly alluding to the fact a "near-miss" by definition implies an instantaneous orbital distance approximately equal to that of the Earth.
As for near Earth asteroid orbits being perturbed -- sure. It's believed that most of them will remain in their orbits for only a few million years before they are ejected or hit something.
But it may clarify things to note that asteroids routinely strike the Earth's atmosphere. Automated systems on any night might pick up a dozen meteors an hour you'd be able to see -- if you happen to be looking in the right direction and you don't blink. The catch is most of the asteroids that create these meteors are tiny -- grains of dust or pea sized grave. Around 100 tons of meteors fall on the Earth every day, mostly dust particles.
From an orbital mechanics standpoint there's no real difference between an asteroid the size of a grain of rice and a one the size of a school bus. So probably the best way to think of it is that asteroid strikes are a routine event that happen every few minutes. It's just that from a public safety standpoint we're only interested in unusually large specimens.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually evidence from the 1950s was mixed -- as it still is -- but in fact most of it stands up pretty well. What's a problem is the interpretation of that evidence and its limited nature (e.g. not knowing about different types of cholesterol).
For example it was established in the 50s that high blood cholesterol was a risk factor for cardiovascular disease. This is still believed as true, but what they didn't know at the time is what factors affected blood cholesterol. It was (plausibly although not conclusively) suspected by many that fat consumption would increase it; nobody suspected sugar... why should they?
In complex systems like the body there is usually conflicting evidence early on, which is resolved by further study.
I'd think from a military standpoint what you want is soldiers who make better battlefield decisions, not ones that engage in a stereotypical behavior regardless of circumstance.
The human brain is both massively adaptable and subject to modification by information inputs. Which means you can indoctrinate men into becoming mindless killing machines. The problem is that historically that approach doesn't seem to be effective either tactically or strategically. US Marines faced waves of suicide attackers in the Pacific theater of WW2, which must have been terrifying, but in the end worked to the US advantage.
On the other hand George Washington's great talent as a general was retreating. He could attack a much larger and better equipped army and then make his army disappear before they could react. That was terrifying in its own way, and much more miltarily effective.
Given a fight between men fighting to kill and men fighting to survive, all other things being equal I'd put my money on the men trying to survive.
You know, this kind of shallow cynicism actually makes you easier to dupe, because it's not evidence-based; it's what-sounds-truthy-based.
This article was published in Nature, which requires a complete disclosure of institutional affiliations and financial conflicts. That doesn't mean the system is perfect, but it's about as good as it gets, especially given that Nature is one of the most prestigious scientific journals in the world. Nature Medicine has an eye-popping 30.357 impact factor, making it the fourth most highly cited medical journal in the world after the New England Journal of Medicine, The Lancet, and Journal of the American Medical Association.
Does it mean you should immediately believe anything that's published in Nature Medicine? No. You should wait until it is cited in a literature review article in one of those top journals before making any health decisions based on it. However as individual papers go, this is as credible as they get.
Researchers have been trying to take caffeine down for decades. Nobody can quite believe that something so enjoyable as coffee isn't bad for you. In fact doctors used to routinely warn their patients off coffee because of all the bad things it would do to them, but in fact when researchers tried to confirm all the things doctors knew about why coffee was bad for you, none of them turned out to be true, with narrow exceptions for certain populations (e.g., coffee doesn't cause ulcers as we used to be told, but if you have an ulcer coffee will make the symptoms worse).
What researchers found were surprising benefits, including what appears to be evidence of reduction in risks for multiple forms of cancer and even a reduction in suicide risk.
Coffee is well on its way to becoming the first evidence-backed superfood.
Jobs was a high functioning sociopath. Woz was a goose that laid golden eggs. The thing is people like Woz can sometimes end up doing better under someone who exploits them than on their own, as long as the exploitation is sufficiently impersonal.
Everyone wants to own both the distribution channel and the content being sold over that channel. Netflix, Amazon, Hulu...
They all want their own programming so that going to a different store means losing access to content. If Apple's content does appear on Netflix, you can be sure of two things: (1) it'll be old episodes and (2) their programs will include melodramatic, never-ending story arcs.
I think it'll be interesting to see if it actually does hurt productivity.
Here's what I think will happen. A very few people will be seriously hampered in their work. Most people will end up about as productive as they were before. And some people may do a little better.
Who knows what jobs will be available in twenty years, between AI and offshoring? Coding doesn't look like a sure thing at all.
If you are going to focus on a skill, focus on ones that serve in that kind of future environment: being able to pick up on human context and nuance; to decode, no just the literal level of communication, but implicit levels of communication. Because even if AI and foreigners take our coding jobs, somebody is going to have to lay out specifications, and that take imagination and subtlety.
And you know what would be really, really good for developing those kinds of skills? Reading and discussing books.
Well, you could allow ULA to have an (also ultimately government subsidized) monopoly. See if that saves you money.
yes India has terrible controls on their antibiotic use, but remember that US farmers are using large amounts of antibiotics too keep their overcrowded livestock from dying too soon.
India is a country with a median annual income of $616. With 1.2 billion people, well, a lot of things like providing medical care are going to be tough. We're headed that way too. While per capita GDP growth has recovered from the Great Recession, median income has declined.
Whatever, evolution is a lie. God made new kinds of viruses to punish the non beliebers.
You know, even if there weren't real people who actually think this way this comment still wouldn't be funny.
The problem is the 26 antibiotics all work the same way. Given that the gene in question encodes an enzyme which blocks that process, you don't have to administer all 26 to know that none of them will work.
This is kind of an oversimplified view of affairs as they now stand.
The newer players aren't competitors to NASA; they're competitors to NASA's traditional vendors. They probably wouldn't exist were it not for government policy to encourage and support more independent, entrepreneurial approaches to launch system development and management.
Wealth has its privileges.
I agree. I also think we should make successful completion of an H-1b term as an automatic qualification for a green card. If the talent is so important to bring in, then talent plus experience is even more important to keep here, and eventually naturalize.
The program as it now exists simply primes the pump for offshoring and overseas tech transfer.
I'm a boomer and trust me, we had our share of functional illiterates, innumerates, and all-around ignorant people. Look at the 60-ish people you know. Allowing for greater life experience (e.g. remembering Dr. King rather than having just read about him), do we seem as a group so uniformly wonderfully educated to you? I thought not.
I think millennials are on the whole just a little better educated than we were. The problem is that they need to be a lot better educated.
The world is changing faster. Information sources are more varied and less reliable. In an era where it has never been easier to surround yourself with crackpots you need to be a more independent thinkers than boomers, who despite our counter-culture pretensions are as big a generation of sheep as this country has ever produced. When we entered the workforce there were lots of good-paying jobs we could do with just a three R's education. For millennials those jobs have gone overseas or are being lost to automation.
So in the current environment, the average person needs capabilities that would have made him elite in past generations. That's why so many more Americans go to college: 68% in 2014 vs. 45% in 1960.
So it's no surprise if the average college graduate isn't as impressive as the average college in past generations:you're looking at a different sample, one more representative of the population as a whole.
Unfortunately not. The difference is whether they have more to gain in releasing what they collect, or threatening to release.
Speaking as one who lived through the period you are talking about, 8 track never really took off, except in cars. Cassettes were already big deal when I was in high school, and I graduated in '79. They just hadn't peaked yet.
In the 70s Chromium Dioxide tapes and Dolby started to appear on home stereo cassette decks, and by the end of the decade 8 tracks were largely displaced in cars by cassettes.
The thing that really made cassettes take off, however, was the Sony Walkman. That made it possible for the first time to listen to your choice of music, with reasonable fidelity, any time you wanted to. Around the same time boomboxes came in.
I have a Samsung Galaxy S6, and I hate it. And it's not the UI tweaks, which are minor but generally actually pretty good. And the camera is astonishingly good. No the problem is that the battery life is so bad I have to keep it on Ultra-battery-saving mode unless I'm certain to have access to a charger later in the day. Reviews said battery life was "unimpressive", but what they should have said it was that it was disastrously bad.
Samsung's had to have known this would be a problem. So what does that tell you about Samsung's attitude toward users?
It tells me that Samsung isn't a company I want to deal with in the future, because their interest in user experience ends with what happens on the showroom floor.
What makes you think doing better than existing studios is the goal? I think the goal is to find some way to extract more revenue out of their iTunes customers. The result doesn't have to be artistically better than what's out there (although that is one strategy). It doesn't have to be financially more successful on its own than Netflix or Hulu. It just has to turn a new profit.
There are basically three ways to grow profits. (1) Get in on the ground in a new and growing market; (2) become more efficient; (3) become larger and more complex. Figuring out the next big thing is tricky. Becoming more efficient is hard. Becoming larger and more complex doesn't benefit stockholders all that much, but it's an easy way to make your senior managers richer.
Not one single Falcon has landed without mayor damage today. But they want to push without fixing the problems they already have.
Which is normal for rocketry when you're trying anything new. Every program either (a) re-uses proven components or (b) deals with early very high failure rates or both. It took ten years to go from the first firing of the Saturn V's rocket engine (the Rocketdyne F1) to it's firs successful use, and there explosions along the way.
PTSD has specific diagnostic criteria even including exclusion criteria (e.g. not due to substance abuse). The term isn't overbroad, it's just misused, like "Type A personality", which doesn't mean what people think it means.
Well, it went out the window when you agreed to the TOS you didn't read.
Well, that's kind of a strawman argument; the employees aren't saying that nobody should have to do it; they're saying that if management's plans require someone to do it then management should also have a plan for dealing with the mental health consequences.
Well, any professional programmer should understand the concept of operator overloading; however my problem with the way you're framing the problem is that you're assuming an individual programmer has a choice about the features of the language he has to deal with. If you're a lone wolf, sure. But most of us have to maintain code other people create.
I believe GP was puckishly alluding to the fact a "near-miss" by definition implies an instantaneous orbital distance approximately equal to that of the Earth.
As for near Earth asteroid orbits being perturbed -- sure. It's believed that most of them will remain in their orbits for only a few million years before they are ejected or hit something.
But it may clarify things to note that asteroids routinely strike the Earth's atmosphere. Automated systems on any night might pick up a dozen meteors an hour you'd be able to see -- if you happen to be looking in the right direction and you don't blink. The catch is most of the asteroids that create these meteors are tiny -- grains of dust or pea sized grave. Around 100 tons of meteors fall on the Earth every day, mostly dust particles.
From an orbital mechanics standpoint there's no real difference between an asteroid the size of a grain of rice and a one the size of a school bus. So probably the best way to think of it is that asteroid strikes are a routine event that happen every few minutes. It's just that from a public safety standpoint we're only interested in unusually large specimens.