I just hate how they take the conclusion "the same number of hurricanes, or less" and yet still spin it into a scary prediction, by leading it with a "the wind might blow harder".
Use your common sense. Hurricanes are routine events. We have them every single year, and the majority don't cause much damage. It's the most extreme hurricanes that cause damage, so it's the frequency of those extreme hurricanes that matters.
It was pushed by the evangelical Protestant churches.
AND it was seen as women's rights issue, which in the context of a society in which women are totally dependent upon men makes sense.
You can't look at ninety or a hundred years ago through the assumptions and associations of today. A hundred years ago evangelical didn't automatically mean "conservative". Many evangelicals were socially progressive (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Gospel) because of Biblical teachings on social justice and charity. So what happened to liberal evangelicalism? The Scopes "Monkey" Trial.
Everyone knows about Clarence Darrow, populist, labor and criminal lawyer, and sometimes Democratic politician. What people forget was that his opponent Williams Jenning Bryan was from the far left wing of the Democrats. Bryan was a an enemy of the big trusts, of the gold standard, an advocate of direct democracy and a firebrand anti-imperialist. He was also an evangelical Christian, prohibitionist, and anti-evolution.
The Scopes Trial was a terrible blow for the evangelical movement in this country. Scopes *was convicted*, but during the trial Darrow put Bryan on the stand and savaged his belief in the literal truth of the Bible. This drove a wedge between secular liberals and evangelical liberals, and to some degree evangelical Christianity dropped of the political radar screen, except to be held up to occasional ridicule in books like Elmer Gantry.Their Scopes wounds were compounded by new developments in medicine: contraception, safe abortion, and new ethical problems around the end of life. But while evangelicals were quiet, they didn't *disappear*, something the Republicans noticed as they were licking their own wounds from Watergate. Evangelicals had once been the Americans most inclined to socialism, but the militant secularism of Marxist communism made it easy to entice them to the right.
Now, speaking as a liberal, Prohibition is unquestionably a liberal idea. It just wasn't a *good* liberal idea. Liberalism and conservatism are not at their roots ideologies; otherwise you'd go mad trying trace them through the ages. What is liberal in one generation is conservative in the next. They're attitudes. A liberal thinks things can be fixed if we're willing to try something new. Conservatives look at this as social engineering, and it its most extreme form it *can* be. Now personally I don't think the Republican party is a conservative party. It's just a different *kind* of liberal party from the Democratic party. It's a party which courts conservatives with hot button issues like abortion, but pursues a radical agenda.
False. If Chinese solar companies started raping us with price, then a new company (located in EU, US, India, Korea, or even China itself) will rise-up and sell the panels for less.
Spoken like somebody who has no understanding of engineering at all and learned about business from political screeds. Somebody's going to invest the money in complex high tech manufacturing plants to compete with a monopolist who can undercut his prices any time it wants?
You seem to think actual experience and practical know-how aren't factors in competitiveness. That's to be a common American delusion these days, that money capital can conjure intellectual capital out of thin air. The killer advantage Chinese solar companies have isn't low labor prices, it's not even government subsidies anymore. It's the practical manufacturing expertise they obtained with those subsidies. And because China is now producing solar panels on a scale larger than anyone else, they've got know how that enables them to bring technical advances in solar technology to market faster than any startup could.
Ironically, undervaluing know-how was the mistake the Maoists made in the Great Leap Forward. They thought all they needed to do to supply their needs for something like steel was to study the theory of steel production then build steel mills starting from first principles. They didn't understand that actual experience designing and operating a successful mill was critical to getting past the cottage industry stage. The *next* generation of Chinese leadership learned that lesson, which is why China's economic development policies all make acquiring know-how the top priority. Cut a sweet short term deal with foreign companies, but insist the production happen in China so that China gains the most valuable asset that company has: practical know-how.
All of the Harry Potter books are within what would be a reasonable copyright term, so she's entitled to maximize the money she makes from them. It makes perfect sense to hold back the eBooks until the hardcopy sales dropped, and she's done the right thing here, which is not to penalize legitimate users of the eBooks in the name of piracy prevention.
With the radioactive materials melting their way through the bottom of the vessel,
Well, given what the article says, that is very, very far from likely.
The biggest concern I had as this disaster unfolded was things kept happening that we completely did not expect. This not only showed we were poorly prepared, it showed that our understanding of the situation was severely flawed. It's human nature to look for evidence that confirms our belief, but an objective observer would conclude our belief is simply wrong.
And now we find out that the radiation levels are much higher than expected and there's only 6% of the cooling water level we thought there was. Does it prove something horrible is going to happen? No. It proves we have no freakin' idea of what's going on.
This isn't like jury selection. It's more like... no it actually IS expert testimony.
I was on a jury recently, and it was everything you'd hope a jury to be. Serious debate. Called for evidence during deliberation to scrutinize. Sent intelligent questions to the judge about the law. Had long, but reasonable discussions. One was a domestic assault case, and there were several people in the medical profession and a prison guard on the jury. They used their experience in their decision but it wasn't taken as testimony. Agonized, agonized, agonized until finding the defendant not guilty.
Seriously, it was the best group deliberative process I'd ever taken part in, after almost thirty years in business.
(1) Having more organs available for transplant benefits everyone but the prisoner, including the judge. (2) Under the policy of harvesting executed prisoners' organs, more organs would be available.
These two assumptions are enough to establish there's a conflict of interest, and they're practically tautologies. The key is that they're not conditioned on the guilt of the defendant.
Well,remember you're going on a third hand report. TFA wording strongly suggests that the author of the article is giving us his *interpretation* of the guidelines, rather than describing the guidelines themselves:
Even showing the position of the car moving on the map could be considered a dynamic image.
(emphasis mine)
So once more we're getting up on our high horses to fight a straw man. If you follow the links, what you find is that the NHTSA is advocating *voluntary* guidelines in which manufacturers *test* the effect of user interface on driver attention under realistic workloads. Here is the actual bit in question, which TFA author didn't bother to quote:
V.5.bDynamic map displays. The display of either static or quasi-static maps (quasi-static maps are static maps that are updated frequently, perhaps as often as every few seconds, but are not continuously moving) for the purpose of providing driving directions is acceptable. Dynamic, continuously-moving maps are not recommended.
I think what they're concerned about is the way your GPS spins the map one way then the other as you move through a curve, which is not really critical to navigating. And they're not *banning* that. If you read the original document what they want is for manufacturers to perform empirical tests of a user interface's impact on driver attention.
One valuable thing I learned from the liberal arts courses I took in college was never to pass judgment on what somebody said based on *reports* of what that was. In other words, RTFA. If you do look at the NHTSA document, you'll see that it is not as stupid as it has been made out to be. It stresses voluntary compliance, adherence to industry user interface standards, and empirical testing.
By the late 1970's, lots of people discovered firsthand the problems with trapped moisture, lack of ventilation, lack of natural light, and lack of egress options.
That's a result of lacking engineering and architectural know-how. You get some guy who's never designed a house who suddenly gets the brainstorm that he's going to build himself a hobbit hole, or a geodesic dome, or a house made out of discarded glass bottles. The spirit of DIY was a very 1960s (roughly 1965-1975) thing: you don't have to rely on "the system", you could build your own house, grow your own food, weave your own cloth etc. DIY's the second coolest thing about the 60's (after to the conjunction of birth control pills and the rarity of VDs that couldn't be cured with penicillin).
But of course the vast majority of these experiments were a disaster, but if you took the people who had the most success, who maybe put the extra effort in to figure out how to solve the problems of an earthen house, their results would be strikingly different than the dark, dingy holes in the ground (with ends of worms etc.). My brother lived next to a guy like that, an architect who made his career building "underground" houses. He designed his houses terraced into the south facing slope of natural hills. Inside you'd never know you were in an underground house.
Edgy (adj.): 1) bearing a superficial resemblance to creative without being so; 2) desperately gimmicky 3) displaying contempt for an audience's intelligence or taste, 4) produced by someone who isn't interesting in storytelling but who can describe a story in a way attractive to someone who has money and isn't interested in storytelling either.
Interesting how un-Access-like the base app is. Is Access 2003's functionality that hard to duplicate?
Having a manual?
The problem with Base isn't that it's clunky. From my perspective sooner or later *any* product like this starts to look clunky. The problem with Base is that it's almost entirely undocumented except for a handful of "how to's".
Take the underlying database engine: HSQL. It's actually quite a nice system. Even the rather old version that ships with LibreOffice is head and shoulders above Microsoft's JET both in correctness and standards compliance. And HSQL has pretty good documentation. So you'd think this would be a strength for Base, but it's not because Base doesn't ship all HSQL libraries and a lot of things simply don't work, like user defined functions and triggers. It's not just a lack of a GUI for them; you can't get HSQL features to work even through a database console window.
What exactly doesn't work? We don't know *because there's no documentation*. I eagerly went to the 3.5 release notes for Base, which I reproduce here in their entirety:
* Lots of bug fixes
* Integrated PostgreSQL native driver. Will be shipped out of the box with LibreOffice 3.5. The driver is still beta-quality, but works well (and much faster than alternatives such as JDBC or ODBC) for basic features. We will continue to improve the driver in the 3.6 release cycle. (Lionel Elie Mamane)
Now I could dig into the project website and find out what was changed, but the point of release notes is not having to do that. That's a pattern with Base. The way you figure out how or if something works in Base is to search the support forums, even if that thing is fairly basic.
The UI of Base *is* clunky. The report editor is quite simply the worst I've ever seen, not because it fails to reproduce some kind of MS Access secret UI sauce. Actually those bits aren't bad. The Base report editor fails on basic user interface operations. Simply selecting report elements and placing them where you want them to go is an exercise in frustration. But that wouldn't deter me from using Base. It's HSQL being crippled in undocumented ways that's the deal-killer for me.
I recently evaluated Base for a pro-bono client who needed and access-like platform for providing volunteers with data entry and reporting capabilities on their own computers. On the face of it Base would appear to be ideal, but after spending over a week trying to find ways around Base's limitations that would not become a support nightmare, my recommendation was to stick with Access.
In the past thirty years there has been a successful re-branding of the American identity along the lines of pure rugged individualism. It's not that individualism isn't part of the American character -- it is. But American society has historically also had a robust streak of egalitarianism and communal responsibility, which in the re-branding of America has been given a new label: "socialism".
"Socialism" in the contemporary American political dialog doesn't mean socialism in the economic or political science sense, any more than the "enzymes" in detergent ads or "protein" in shampoo ads are used for their scientific meaning. "Socialism" is marketing cant for "foreign". The political marketers have succeeded in chopping away half of the American character and shoving it out beyond the pale.
Marketing is all about purging communication of the complexity and nuance needed for critical thought, making it a tool better fit for manipulation. Thus we have the first generation of Americans who see "egalitarianism" as the antonym of "individualism".
So they track the control room? In case it starts moving around??
That was the sense I got. These are *civil* engineers, after all. My wife once visited the Fundy Tidal Power Project. It had a million dollar visitor center, but the engineers still worked in white trailers.
The impression I got was that they were going to communicate with the device from the surface near the tunnel face rather than from the tunnel mouth or bore holes. They only way GPS would make sense in this situation is if they used acoustic methods to locate the actual boring machine from a movable station.
Sometimes I think in our eagerness to pass judgments on books, we neglect to actually *read* them. At least not with real critical objectivity.
When *Twilight* became a phenomenon I bought a copy and did my best to read it with enjoyment. While it was not *my* cup of tea, I think I saw why fans feel it's special. It's not just the obvious reasons; it's clear to me that Stephanie Meyers is actually quite a talented writer. What she's not is a *skillful* writer, at least at the time she wrote tha book. *Twilight*'s dialog meanders painfully and its characters are wish-fulfillment automatons who lack nuance and surprise; but *Twilight* also contains flashes of quite good writing that you'd miss if you were skimming it solely to find material to pillory it with. These flashes of talent are what earn the book its fans, despite its flaws.
We all tend to overlook faults in books we love, but all books have them. So I don't feel the need to prove to people who love this book that they're contemptible for doing so. In fact I don't see the point.
Frankly, the mania for correcting the mistakes of others, even when those "mistakes" have no conceivable bearing on us, strikes me as a kind of mental illness. Evidently it's a common form of insanity.
Well then perhaps I misunderstood you. I took your point to be that if people's productivity dropped, that employers would look to hire more staff to make up the difference. That would be incorrect, because hiring depends on anticipated marginal revenues.
Firstly it talks about how people would get more work done if they didn't do overtime. Then it suggests that overtime is responsible for cutting down number of jobs. The second points very existence relies on the first point being false
That's assuming employment conditions are the result of rational and well-informed decision making. As an IT consultant I can't tell you how many times I've walked into organizations and seen business processes that were a total disaster.
The reason this happens is that true productivity is not so easy to measure as it is taking place. In an ideal world there'd be a meter that floated over every employee's head that showed how much real value he was creating at that very moment. In some kind of piece-work jobs, you can almost do that. How many good screws did this machine operator produce? But at the other end of the spectrum are jobs whose value can only be measured in light of future events: how much will this software cost to support? How much customer satisfaction has this representative created? How attractive is this web site's design?
So people use proxy measures of productivity. Did we deliver the module on time? How many phone calls did this representative handle? Did we bill the number of hours we planned? These are crude figures you can goose up by keeping asses in chairs for more hours. In fact ass-chair-hours is the crudest productivity measure of all.
When organizations are under a financial strain, the planning horizons of the people in them contract. As a result, foresight doesn't temper reliance on crude proxy measures of value as it should. When it gets bad enough then a 20% head count reduction with a 25% increase in chair-hours per ass looks an awful lot like a productivity increase, regardless of the reduction in true value created.
Now we get to real economics. Econ 101 tells us that employers add more employees until spending the next marginal dollar on labor brings in less than a marginal dollar in revenue. If employers are using bad measures of productivity, then their investment in labor will be irrational. Suppose you're trying to make one employee do the work of two, *but the result is that he gets half as much done* as one employee should. You can tell from your income statement that you're just squeaking by, so you conclude you can't afford to hire a second employee. But your model of employee is productivity is screwed up. Addiing a second employee won't *double* widget production; it'll *quadruple* it.
One of the interesting things I learned from reading Mary Roach's *Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex* (ISBN-13: 978-0393064643) is that it's very difficult for researchers to get funding for research that has anything to do with sex. Scientists resort to stratagems like including "physiology" in study titles, or simply paying for their research out of their own pocket.
You oughtn't have to make a special "applicability" argument to research on sex, given that it is not only an important part of human welfare, it's fundamental to the survival of most life forms on Earth. Anything like that *other* than sex would not be controversial in the least. We don't demand an immediate explanation of why a researcher is interested in anatomy, genetics, nutrition or non-reproductive physiology, but sex research is automatically assumed frivolous until proven otherwise.
Now I wouldn't want to draw too confident a physiological or genetic parallel between Drosophila melanogaster and human behavior. Perhaps we'll find out it is mere coincidence that alcohol plays a special role in Drosophila reproductive behavior (these are *fruit* flies, after all). That it has humorous parallels with human reproductive behavior doesn't negate the scientific value of knowing more about this extremely important research species.
On the other hand, there might be something other than coincidence at work here, and that would be *very* significant.
In either case, our discomfort with our *own* reproductive behavior has no bearing on the scientific value of research like this.
You should never cite an encyclopedia in a paper, period, unless you're writing a paper about encyclopedias.
I understand that's the "rule", but I think it's a stupid one. The reason for the rule is legitimate: you ough to rely mainly on primary sources. You don't want to cite the encyclopedia entry on Adam Smith; you want to cite Wealth of Nations directly. That's fine, but if mindlessly enforced (as it is), it means many facts that are useful but not necessarily central to your point aren't given sources at all; they're treated as "common knowledge".
For example suppose you are doing a paper on the history of computer privacy, and you cite the landmark 1973 HEW report "Records, Computers and the Rights of Citizens". But if you look at the report itself it's clear that the report while delivered in July 1973, was started in the Spring of 1972. This means it was developed as the Watergate Scandal was unfolding. That particular tidbit explains a great deal that is curious about this report, for the report lays out a strong case for privacy restraints on private aggregators of commercial data, but then actually recommends *against* such restraints in the conclusion. On January 30, 1973 HEW Secretary Eliot Richardson shifted to Defense, after most of the report had been compiled. The conclusions were written under the his more conservative replacement, Caspar Weinberger.
Now you have three choice for dealing with a fact like that. You can just allude to it without citations. You can cite an encyclopedia entry on Eliot Richardson. Or you can try to dig up original references in US government documents. Well, the search for original sources for a fact like this isn't really worth the trouble, and the encyclopedia citation is forbidden, so what people do in cases like this is simply go ahead and use the fact without citing a source.
I think the *rational* standard would be to have a source for *every* fact, but allow any reputable reference work as a source for auxiliary facts where there is no question on interpretation of paraphrasing. The "no encyclopedia" rule bans encyclopedias but allows similar kinds of references to be used, even though those references are not primary sources either. I could cite the CRC handbook on, say, the atomic weight of iron, but it's not a primary source. That'd be the papers in chemical or physics journals used by the CRC editors.
I seem to recall "thin clients" making that same claim, and it never caught on. How many businesses invested in those, only to have to re-sell them cheap on eBay?
Often technologies fail, not because they're useless, but because the timing is wrong and all the pieces you need to make them work aren't ready, or the implementation isn't good enough to deliver on the promise.
Tablets were like that. Microsoft made a big tablet push in 2001. It flopped. Nine years later the iPad took off. If Apple had attempted the iPad in 2001, *that* would have flopped too, because battery life would have forced a clunky form factor. In fact seven years earlier Apple *had* flopped, with the Newton, a device I happened to like a great deal but which lacked the killer application for iOS: media playback.
It may be thin clients flopped because none of them were good enough, cheap enough; or it could be that some complementary technology wasn't available at the time. Be very careful about the lessons you draw from product flops.
If you want a disturbing example of an effective comment system, look at the neo-Nazi forum Stormfront.
Stormfront is a logical consequence of the big promise of the Internet, to allow people in small and sometimes unpopular groups to reach out to others like them across the globe and form *virtual* communities. This necessarily includes groups we might not consider *deserving*.
I did some research on Stormfront for a satire I was writing in set in the 1930s, and it was quite useful because the ideas, even the same sources of information used by the respectable racists of the 30s are still alive there. But Stormfront is not what you'd expect. You have the obvious heavy-breathing nut-cases, but they're consistently upbraided by voices of pseudo-reason. It's not they disagree in the least on things like the racial inferiority of blacks or Asians, or the wickedness of Jews, it's that they object to expressing these beliefs in a manner that reveals the hatred and ignorance behind them.
What they do at Stormfront is train commenters to sound more reasonable; to take people stuck in isolated fringe groups like the KKK or the neo-Nazis and equip them the rhetorical tools to pursue their agenda in more mainstream political groups. I suspect this may be quite an influential radicalizing force in some near-mainstream groups. Nothing encourages people to give pursue otherwise taboo ideas is the presence of other people who've already taken the plunge. This is a double-edged sword.
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I just hate how they take the conclusion "the same number of hurricanes, or less" and yet still spin it into a scary prediction, by leading it with a "the wind might blow harder".
Use your common sense. Hurricanes are routine events. We have them every single year, and the majority don't cause much damage. It's the most extreme hurricanes that cause damage, so it's the frequency of those extreme hurricanes that matters.
On paper, yes. In reality that was the rest of the world expressing relief that the US hadn't elected another Republican president.
It was pushed by the evangelical Protestant churches.
AND it was seen as women's rights issue, which in the context of a society in which women are totally dependent upon men makes sense.
You can't look at ninety or a hundred years ago through the assumptions and associations of today. A hundred years ago evangelical didn't automatically mean "conservative". Many evangelicals were socially progressive (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Gospel) because of Biblical teachings on social justice and charity. So what happened to liberal evangelicalism? The Scopes "Monkey" Trial.
Everyone knows about Clarence Darrow, populist, labor and criminal lawyer, and sometimes Democratic politician. What people forget was that his opponent Williams Jenning Bryan was from the far left wing of the Democrats. Bryan was a an enemy of the big trusts, of the gold standard, an advocate of direct democracy and a firebrand anti-imperialist. He was also an evangelical Christian, prohibitionist, and anti-evolution.
The Scopes Trial was a terrible blow for the evangelical movement in this country. Scopes *was convicted*, but during the trial Darrow put Bryan on the stand and savaged his belief in the literal truth of the Bible. This drove a wedge between secular liberals and evangelical liberals, and to some degree evangelical Christianity dropped of the political radar screen, except to be held up to occasional ridicule in books like Elmer Gantry.Their Scopes wounds were compounded by new developments in medicine: contraception, safe abortion, and new ethical problems around the end of life. But while evangelicals were quiet, they didn't *disappear*, something the Republicans noticed as they were licking their own wounds from Watergate. Evangelicals had once been the Americans most inclined to socialism, but the militant secularism of Marxist communism made it easy to entice them to the right.
Now, speaking as a liberal, Prohibition is unquestionably a liberal idea. It just wasn't a *good* liberal idea. Liberalism and conservatism are not at their roots ideologies; otherwise you'd go mad trying trace them through the ages. What is liberal in one generation is conservative in the next. They're attitudes. A liberal thinks things can be fixed if we're willing to try something new. Conservatives look at this as social engineering, and it its most extreme form it *can* be. Now personally I don't think the Republican party is a conservative party. It's just a different *kind* of liberal party from the Democratic party. It's a party which courts conservatives with hot button issues like abortion, but pursues a radical agenda.
False. If Chinese solar companies started raping us with price, then a new company (located in EU, US, India, Korea, or even China itself) will rise-up and sell the panels for less.
Spoken like somebody who has no understanding of engineering at all and learned about business from political screeds. Somebody's going to invest the money in complex high tech manufacturing plants to compete with a monopolist who can undercut his prices any time it wants?
You seem to think actual experience and practical know-how aren't factors in competitiveness. That's to be a common American delusion these days, that money capital can conjure intellectual capital out of thin air. The killer advantage Chinese solar companies have isn't low labor prices, it's not even government subsidies anymore. It's the practical manufacturing expertise they obtained with those subsidies. And because China is now producing solar panels on a scale larger than anyone else, they've got know how that enables them to bring technical advances in solar technology to market faster than any startup could.
Ironically, undervaluing know-how was the mistake the Maoists made in the Great Leap Forward. They thought all they needed to do to supply their needs for something like steel was to study the theory of steel production then build steel mills starting from first principles. They didn't understand that actual experience designing and operating a successful mill was critical to getting past the cottage industry stage. The *next* generation of Chinese leadership learned that lesson, which is why China's economic development policies all make acquiring know-how the top priority. Cut a sweet short term deal with foreign companies, but insist the production happen in China so that China gains the most valuable asset that company has: practical know-how.
So? Is it evil to like money now?
All of the Harry Potter books are within what would be a reasonable copyright term, so she's entitled to maximize the money she makes from them. It makes perfect sense to hold back the eBooks until the hardcopy sales dropped, and she's done the right thing here, which is not to penalize legitimate users of the eBooks in the name of piracy prevention.
With the radioactive materials melting their way through the bottom of the vessel,
Well, given what the article says, that is very, very far from likely.
The biggest concern I had as this disaster unfolded was things kept happening that we completely did not expect. This not only showed we were poorly prepared, it showed that our understanding of the situation was severely flawed. It's human nature to look for evidence that confirms our belief, but an objective observer would conclude our belief is simply wrong.
And now we find out that the radiation levels are much higher than expected and there's only 6% of the cooling water level we thought there was. Does it prove something horrible is going to happen? No. It proves we have no freakin' idea of what's going on.
The precedent has *already* been set, and the City of Boston settled *as a result*.
This isn't like jury selection. It's more like ... no it actually IS expert testimony.
I was on a jury recently, and it was everything you'd hope a jury to be. Serious debate. Called for evidence during deliberation to scrutinize. Sent intelligent questions to the judge about the law. Had long, but reasonable discussions. One was a domestic assault case, and there were several people in the medical profession and a prison guard on the jury. They used their experience in their decision but it wasn't taken as testimony. Agonized, agonized, agonized until finding the defendant not guilty.
Seriously, it was the best group deliberative process I'd ever taken part in, after almost thirty years in business.
Well, let's list the assumptions
(1) Having more organs available for transplant benefits everyone but the prisoner, including the judge.
(2) Under the policy of harvesting executed prisoners' organs, more organs would be available.
These two assumptions are enough to establish there's a conflict of interest, and they're practically tautologies. The key is that they're not conditioned on the guilt of the defendant.
Well,remember you're going on a third hand report. TFA wording strongly suggests that the author of the article is giving us his *interpretation* of the guidelines, rather than describing the guidelines themselves:
Even showing the position of the car moving on the map could be considered a dynamic image.
(emphasis mine)
So once more we're getting up on our high horses to fight a straw man. If you follow the links, what you find is that the NHTSA is advocating *voluntary* guidelines in which manufacturers *test* the effect of user interface on driver attention under realistic workloads. Here is the actual bit in question, which TFA author didn't bother to quote:
V.5.bDynamic map displays. The display of either static or quasi-static maps (quasi-static maps are static maps that are updated frequently, perhaps as often as every few seconds, but are not continuously moving) for the purpose of providing driving directions is acceptable. Dynamic, continuously-moving maps are not recommended.
I think what they're concerned about is the way your GPS spins the map one way then the other as you move through a curve, which is not really critical to navigating. And they're not *banning* that. If you read the original document what they want is for manufacturers to perform empirical tests of a user interface's impact on driver attention.
One valuable thing I learned from the liberal arts courses I took in college was never to pass judgment on what somebody said based on *reports* of what that was. In other words, RTFA. If you do look at the NHTSA document, you'll see that it is not as stupid as it has been made out to be. It stresses voluntary compliance, adherence to industry user interface standards, and empirical testing.
By the late 1970's, lots of people discovered firsthand the problems with trapped moisture, lack of ventilation, lack of natural light, and lack of egress options.
That's a result of lacking engineering and architectural know-how. You get some guy who's never designed a house who suddenly gets the brainstorm that he's going to build himself a hobbit hole, or a geodesic dome, or a house made out of discarded glass bottles. The spirit of DIY was a very 1960s (roughly 1965-1975) thing: you don't have to rely on "the system", you could build your own house, grow your own food, weave your own cloth etc. DIY's the second coolest thing about the 60's (after to the conjunction of birth control pills and the rarity of VDs that couldn't be cured with penicillin).
But of course the vast majority of these experiments were a disaster, but if you took the people who had the most success, who maybe put the extra effort in to figure out how to solve the problems of an earthen house, their results would be strikingly different than the dark, dingy holes in the ground (with ends of worms etc.). My brother lived next to a guy like that, an architect who made his career building "underground" houses. He designed his houses terraced into the south facing slope of natural hills. Inside you'd never know you were in an underground house.
Edgy (adj.): 1) bearing a superficial resemblance to creative without being so; 2) desperately gimmicky 3) displaying contempt for an audience's intelligence or taste, 4) produced by someone who isn't interesting in storytelling but who can describe a story in a way attractive to someone who has money and isn't interested in storytelling either.
Interesting. I can't help but feeling the pot is calling the kettle black here, though
Well, I hold myself to the same standard, which isn't so much about advising others, or even correcting them, but spoiling their harmless pleasures.
Interesting how un-Access-like the base app is. Is Access 2003's functionality that hard to duplicate?
Having a manual?
The problem with Base isn't that it's clunky. From my perspective sooner or later *any* product like this starts to look clunky. The problem with Base is that it's almost entirely undocumented except for a handful of "how to's".
Take the underlying database engine: HSQL. It's actually quite a nice system. Even the rather old version that ships with LibreOffice is head and shoulders above Microsoft's JET both in correctness and standards compliance. And HSQL has pretty good documentation. So you'd think this would be a strength for Base, but it's not because Base doesn't ship all HSQL libraries and a lot of things simply don't work, like user defined functions and triggers. It's not just a lack of a GUI for them; you can't get HSQL features to work even through a database console window.
What exactly doesn't work? We don't know *because there's no documentation*. I eagerly went to the 3.5 release notes for Base, which I reproduce here in their entirety:
* Lots of bug fixes
* Integrated PostgreSQL native driver. Will be shipped out of the box with LibreOffice 3.5. The driver is still beta-quality, but works well (and much faster than alternatives such as JDBC or ODBC) for basic features. We will continue to improve the driver in the 3.6 release cycle. (Lionel Elie Mamane)
Now I could dig into the project website and find out what was changed, but the point of release notes is not having to do that. That's a pattern with Base. The way you figure out how or if something works in Base is to search the support forums, even if that thing is fairly basic.
The UI of Base *is* clunky. The report editor is quite simply the worst I've ever seen, not because it fails to reproduce some kind of MS Access secret UI sauce. Actually those bits aren't bad. The Base report editor fails on basic user interface operations. Simply selecting report elements and placing them where you want them to go is an exercise in frustration. But that wouldn't deter me from using Base. It's HSQL being crippled in undocumented ways that's the deal-killer for me.
I recently evaluated Base for a pro-bono client who needed and access-like platform for providing volunteers with data entry and reporting capabilities on their own computers. On the face of it Base would appear to be ideal, but after spending over a week trying to find ways around Base's limitations that would not become a support nightmare, my recommendation was to stick with Access.
In the past thirty years there has been a successful re-branding of the American identity along the lines of pure rugged individualism. It's not that individualism isn't part of the American character -- it is. But American society has historically also had a robust streak of egalitarianism and communal responsibility, which in the re-branding of America has been given a new label: "socialism".
"Socialism" in the contemporary American political dialog doesn't mean socialism in the economic or political science sense, any more than the "enzymes" in detergent ads or "protein" in shampoo ads are used for their scientific meaning. "Socialism" is marketing cant for "foreign". The political marketers have succeeded in chopping away half of the American character and shoving it out beyond the pale.
Marketing is all about purging communication of the complexity and nuance needed for critical thought, making it a tool better fit for manipulation. Thus we have the first generation of Americans who see "egalitarianism" as the antonym of "individualism".
So they track the control room? In case it starts moving around??
That was the sense I got. These are *civil* engineers, after all. My wife once visited the Fundy Tidal Power Project. It had a million dollar visitor center, but the engineers still worked in white trailers.
The impression I got was that they were going to communicate with the device from the surface near the tunnel face rather than from the tunnel mouth or bore holes. They only way GPS would make sense in this situation is if they used acoustic methods to locate the actual boring machine from a movable station.
From TFA:
The machines are monitored from a surface control room which tracks their positions using GPS.
So this would be more like having GPS in your dive boat than having GPS underwater.
Call me when they can load one up on a big green supersonic aircraft and deploy it anywhere in the world on a moment's notice.
Sometimes I think in our eagerness to pass judgments on books, we neglect to actually *read* them. At least not with real critical objectivity.
When *Twilight* became a phenomenon I bought a copy and did my best to read it with enjoyment. While it was not *my* cup of tea, I think I saw why fans feel it's special. It's not just the obvious reasons; it's clear to me that Stephanie Meyers is actually quite a talented writer. What she's not is a *skillful* writer, at least at the time she wrote tha book. *Twilight*'s dialog meanders painfully and its characters are wish-fulfillment automatons who lack nuance and surprise; but *Twilight* also contains flashes of quite good writing that you'd miss if you were skimming it solely to find material to pillory it with. These flashes of talent are what earn the book its fans, despite its flaws.
We all tend to overlook faults in books we love, but all books have them. So I don't feel the need to prove to people who love this book that they're contemptible for doing so. In fact I don't see the point.
Frankly, the mania for correcting the mistakes of others, even when those "mistakes" have no conceivable bearing on us, strikes me as a kind of mental illness. Evidently it's a common form of insanity.
Well then perhaps I misunderstood you. I took your point to be that if people's productivity dropped, that employers would look to hire more staff to make up the difference. That would be incorrect, because hiring depends on anticipated marginal revenues.
Firstly it talks about how people would get more work done if they didn't do overtime. Then it suggests that overtime is responsible for cutting down number of jobs. The second points very existence relies on the first point being false
That's assuming employment conditions are the result of rational and well-informed decision making. As an IT consultant I can't tell you how many times I've walked into organizations and seen business processes that were a total disaster.
The reason this happens is that true productivity is not so easy to measure as it is taking place. In an ideal world there'd be a meter that floated over every employee's head that showed how much real value he was creating at that very moment. In some kind of piece-work jobs, you can almost do that. How many good screws did this machine operator produce? But at the other end of the spectrum are jobs whose value can only be measured in light of future events: how much will this software cost to support? How much customer satisfaction has this representative created? How attractive is this web site's design?
So people use proxy measures of productivity. Did we deliver the module on time? How many phone calls did this representative handle? Did we bill the number of hours we planned? These are crude figures you can goose up by keeping asses in chairs for more hours. In fact ass-chair-hours is the crudest productivity measure of all.
When organizations are under a financial strain, the planning horizons of the people in them contract. As a result, foresight doesn't temper reliance on crude proxy measures of value as it should. When it gets bad enough then a 20% head count reduction with a 25% increase in chair-hours per ass looks an awful lot like a productivity increase, regardless of the reduction in true value created.
Now we get to real economics. Econ 101 tells us that employers add more employees until spending the next marginal dollar on labor brings in less than a marginal dollar in revenue. If employers are using bad measures of productivity, then their investment in labor will be irrational. Suppose you're trying to make one employee do the work of two, *but the result is that he gets half as much done* as one employee should. You can tell from your income statement that you're just squeaking by, so you conclude you can't afford to hire a second employee. But your model of employee is productivity is screwed up. Addiing a second employee won't *double* widget production; it'll *quadruple* it.
One of the interesting things I learned from reading Mary Roach's *Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex* (ISBN-13: 978-0393064643) is that it's very difficult for researchers to get funding for research that has anything to do with sex. Scientists resort to stratagems like including "physiology" in study titles, or simply paying for their research out of their own pocket.
You oughtn't have to make a special "applicability" argument to research on sex, given that it is not only an important part of human welfare, it's fundamental to the survival of most life forms on Earth. Anything like that *other* than sex would not be controversial in the least. We don't demand an immediate explanation of why a researcher is interested in anatomy, genetics, nutrition or non-reproductive physiology, but sex research is automatically assumed frivolous until proven otherwise.
Now I wouldn't want to draw too confident a physiological or genetic parallel between Drosophila melanogaster and human behavior. Perhaps we'll find out it is mere coincidence that alcohol plays a special role in Drosophila reproductive behavior (these are *fruit* flies, after all). That it has humorous parallels with human reproductive behavior doesn't negate the scientific value of knowing more about this extremely important research species.
On the other hand, there might be something other than coincidence at work here, and that would be *very* significant.
In either case, our discomfort with our *own* reproductive behavior has no bearing on the scientific value of research like this.
You should never cite an encyclopedia in a paper, period, unless you're writing a paper about encyclopedias.
I understand that's the "rule", but I think it's a stupid one. The reason for the rule is legitimate: you ough to rely mainly on primary sources. You don't want to cite the encyclopedia entry on Adam Smith; you want to cite Wealth of Nations directly. That's fine, but if mindlessly enforced (as it is), it means many facts that are useful but not necessarily central to your point aren't given sources at all; they're treated as "common knowledge".
For example suppose you are doing a paper on the history of computer privacy, and you cite the landmark 1973 HEW report "Records, Computers and the Rights of Citizens". But if you look at the report itself it's clear that the report while delivered in July 1973, was started in the Spring of 1972. This means it was developed as the Watergate Scandal was unfolding. That particular tidbit explains a great deal that is curious about this report, for the report lays out a strong case for privacy restraints on private aggregators of commercial data, but then actually recommends *against* such restraints in the conclusion. On January 30, 1973 HEW Secretary Eliot Richardson shifted to Defense, after most of the report had been compiled. The conclusions were written under the his more conservative replacement, Caspar Weinberger.
Now you have three choice for dealing with a fact like that. You can just allude to it without citations. You can cite an encyclopedia entry on Eliot Richardson. Or you can try to dig up original references in US government documents. Well, the search for original sources for a fact like this isn't really worth the trouble, and the encyclopedia citation is forbidden, so what people do in cases like this is simply go ahead and use the fact without citing a source.
I think the *rational* standard would be to have a source for *every* fact, but allow any reputable reference work as a source for auxiliary facts where there is no question on interpretation of paraphrasing. The "no encyclopedia" rule bans encyclopedias but allows similar kinds of references to be used, even though those references are not primary sources either. I could cite the CRC handbook on, say, the atomic weight of iron, but it's not a primary source. That'd be the papers in chemical or physics journals used by the CRC editors.
I seem to recall "thin clients" making that same claim, and it never caught on. How many businesses invested in those, only to have to re-sell them cheap on eBay?
Often technologies fail, not because they're useless, but because the timing is wrong and all the pieces you need to make them work aren't ready, or the implementation isn't good enough to deliver on the promise.
Tablets were like that. Microsoft made a big tablet push in 2001. It flopped. Nine years later the iPad took off. If Apple had attempted the iPad in 2001, *that* would have flopped too, because battery life would have forced a clunky form factor. In fact seven years earlier Apple *had* flopped, with the Newton, a device I happened to like a great deal but which lacked the killer application for iOS: media playback.
It may be thin clients flopped because none of them were good enough, cheap enough; or it could be that some complementary technology wasn't available at the time. Be very careful about the lessons you draw from product flops.
If you want a disturbing example of an effective comment system, look at the neo-Nazi forum Stormfront.
Stormfront is a logical consequence of the big promise of the Internet, to allow people in small and sometimes unpopular groups to reach out to others like them across the globe and form *virtual* communities. This necessarily includes groups we might not consider *deserving*.
I did some research on Stormfront for a satire I was writing in set in the 1930s, and it was quite useful because the ideas, even the same sources of information used by the respectable racists of the 30s are still alive there. But Stormfront is not what you'd expect. You have the obvious heavy-breathing nut-cases, but they're consistently upbraided by voices of pseudo-reason. It's not they disagree in the least on things like the racial inferiority of blacks or Asians, or the wickedness of Jews, it's that they object to expressing these beliefs in a manner that reveals the hatred and ignorance behind them.
What they do at Stormfront is train commenters to sound more reasonable; to take people stuck in isolated fringe groups like the KKK or the neo-Nazis and equip them the rhetorical tools to pursue their agenda in more mainstream political groups. I suspect this may be quite an influential radicalizing force in some near-mainstream groups. Nothing encourages people to give pursue otherwise taboo ideas is the presence of other people who've already taken the plunge. This is a double-edged sword.