Your T-Rex analogy is right on the money, but GP posed a *car* analogy. That means you have to counter with an *alternative car analogy*. It doesn't have to be a *good* one.
Sorry, I don't make the rules here, I just accept them uncritically, then mindlessly impose them upon others. Just like anyone else.
Depends on the environment in which you use the device. If you're in what the sysadmins call "the Big Blue Room", light is coming from a single, very strong source set very far away. If you are in an office with little natural lighting, then you've got dozens of weak light sources scattered all over the place.
A diffused reflection from the light in the Big Blue Room is still powerful enough overwhelm the picture from a matte finish monitor. A glossy surface is preferable there because it directs that light away from your eyes except at one narrow angle. In an artificially lit office the lights aren't powerful enough to cause an objectionable glare off a matte monitor, but they are bright enough to generate an objectionable reflection off a glossy monitor. In that case, as you adjust your glossy monitor to avoid one light source you tend to pick up another.
So why don't glossy LCDs look like crap in a showroom? Because if the designer of that showroom has any sense, he situates the lighting so that prospective buyers aren't turned off by glare.
This has to be the crappiest piece of confounded (and I *mean* "confounded") pseudoscience I've ever seen on Slashdot.
Let's do a thought experiment, and interpret the results according to the method proposed. We show subject A a picture of a black cat, and subject B a picture of a white cat. Looking at an MRI of each subject, we note there's considerable overlap in the brain areas activated. From this we conclude that "black" is really the same thing as "white".
That's pretty much what we have there. We show group A religious art. We show subject B product design art. Seeing that some of the same brain areas are stimulated in either case, we decide that product design and religion are somehow the same thing. Now that's in intriguing hypothesis, and the experiment certainly doesn't *preclude* that hypothesis, but neither does it prove the hypothesis. That there should be considerable overlap in the response to two different kinds of art is hardly surprising. Visual stimulus is translated into pleasure and aesthetic appreciation; recognition of common motifs; maybe even (if we want to stretch a bit in this case) the anticipation of reward with just a frisson of anxiety over whether one is going to actually receive it.
In related news, Exxon announces that Windows 8 ARM computers will not run on gasoline. "At last a full-blooded Windows computer that is guaranteed to be non-flammable!" gushes an anonymous/. contributor.
That's really not an analogous situation. This guy *was* showing his work, he was using sound but non-standard algorithms, which a few minutes watching him work would demonstrate beyond any reasonable doubt. That's not the same as acting on a hunch you can't justify.
Yes, there are real world situations where using less than optimal but standard procedures is required. Laboratory work, for example. No doubt there is always some better way to perform a lab analysis, but consistency is paramount when amassing data. Still, in the real world, *quickness* at reaching a solution also matters a great deal, provided the methods are sound and justifiable.
Now I've seen the assignments given in elementary, middle and high school, and there is a huge premium placed on making them easy to grade, perhaps a higher premium than on educational value. And that *is* a problem. I'm not against requiring that work be shown; on the contrary. But like every other good idea it is subject to abuse and should be tempered by common sense.
I agree with your assessment of the fragility of the solution the system would arrive at, but I disagree that genetic algorithms would be able to "solve" this problem "easily".
It's worth taking an analytical look at the problem, to see how hard it is. As I mention in a response to TFA, as a first approximation we can formulate the problem as a matrix equation:
CX = B
Where B is a column vector for each of the m=100 representative taxpayer's tax burden. C is an m x n matrix of the contributions of each of the n tax provisions under consideration to the total tax burden of each of the m taxpayer's total burden. X is a column vector with an entry for each of the n provisions of tax code, either 0 (drop) or 1 (keep).
The problem of optimizing the tax code by Brin's method is to find the solution X to the equation such that |X| is minimized.
Now the actual problem is somewhat easier than this, because we don't need an exact solution for each b in B: we just want each b' generated by X to have a relative error less than some factor e (|b - b'| / b < e). But this formulation tells us some interesting things about the problem. First, since m < n, there *may be* a large number of solutions X that satisfy our criteria, which is good because we already have a bad solution in hand (X = 1). Second, since the values in X are restricted to integers, there may not be any exact solutions other than X = 1. Third, no efficient algorithm is likely to be found that works for arbitrarily small values of e. Such an algorithm would efficiently find an exact solution to CX=B, an instance of binary linear programming (one of Karp's list of 21 NP-Complete problems.
So there are two important parameters to this problem which determine whether something like a genetic algorithm on conventional hardware might be successful. First, how big is the relative error factor e? Second, how small does |X|/n have to be for this to be worth trying? I'd say that we'd have to shoot for something smaller than |X|/n < 0.5 before the difference would be really noticeable. I'm guessing that unless we get very lucky, any monte carlo method would converge to some trivial reduction in complexity, or get bogged down in the huge search space.
I think this idea isn't economically or politically feasible, for the reason you say and others. But successful computations of quite large instances of NP-Hard problems (e.g. a recent solution to an instance of traveling salesman with 86K points) on high performance computing clusters makes me think a one time attempt at aggressive reduction in complexity might be technically feasible. However it wouldn't be easy, i wouldn't be guaranteed to yield much simplification, and the result wouldn't be as politically neutral as Brin supposes. For example he assumes we can start by discarding any tax provisions that benefit fewer than one hundred taxpayers. It seems to me the existence of those provisions undermines his whole premise, which that only groups of *representative* tax payers have any political significance. If so, how did these little perquisites make it into the the tax code?
Who sits on huge piles of cash? One thing that everybody should have learned from the recent mortgage backed security crisis is that this doesn't happen. Banks, big companies and super-rich individuals don't keep the bulk of their "cash" in vaults in the form of paper money, coins, bullion and the like. Most of their "cash" is money invested in easily liquidated investment instruments that generate a small but highly reliable return.
In any case, if you believe that economic rationality generates the optimum distribution of resources, it makes no sense to incent anything one way or the other. A perfect tax code in that case would be perfectly neutral with respect to any economic decision, whether it was to invest your money or to use it to stock your mansion with dancing girls (who presumably have to earn a living too). I don't happen to believe that markets are perfect, but one thing people with substantial surplus wealth don't need to be dissuaded from is keeping their money stuffed in a mattress.
The closest thing anybody does to keeping huge piles of cash in a mattress is being too risk averse, tending to put your resources in safe investments that are easy to get out of. That's what keeps employment down; employees suck money out of an enterprise and are messy and difficult to shed. If you don't think there's going to be work in the future, you avoid taking on new employees. If you see big opportunities coming, you take the risk of hiring more people.
C.S. Lewis, the preeminent Christian apologist and popular moralist of the 20th century, was hardly opposed to the physical or moral betterment of the masses. What he is talking about isn't giving, it's taking with hypocritical, self-serving justification. Most of us are familiar with the King James version of the Second Commandment as "Thou shalt not take the Lord's name in vain." The verb translated as "take" might better be translated as "carry", as in a banner or a tool. So Second Commandment isn't primarily about swearing; it forbids the use of religion to justify selfish ends.
Giving back by the elite is a good thing and sensible on their part, but as with everything there is a dark side; nobody's intentions are ever perfectly pure. I live in a city which probably has more universities per capita than any other city in the world, built in part to satisfy the vogue for public works among the elite; in part no doubt to feed their egos; and in a few cases to assuage their consciences. The part of the Harvard campus between Harvard Square and the Charles River was purchased by the Forbes family (a family member once told me) with dirty money from the "China Trade", the polite name for pushing cheap Turkish opium in China. But however mixed the motivations were, we non-elites are much better of than if the elites had just taken their money and used it pay for a lavish lifestyle.
So, if these Global Online Academy people find some way of making their courses available to the rest of us, that's great as far as I'm concerned. I think there is a tendency in some of these schools to indoctrinate students in the belief that the current economic status quo reflects natural justice and no more. That is a concern, but no more than other biases that all we non-elites were educated with. But if you think this material's primary motive is indoctrination, it doesn't make sense to view the decision not to make the material available to the masses as a self-interested one. More likely it is a matter of charging to pay for the development costs. The public-minded elites do like to see that projects are financially sustainable before investing in them.
Re:If I were to change the US educational system..
on
Let Them Eat Khan Academy
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Showing steps has its drawbacks too. It biases things towards specific mechanics chosen for either pedagogical purposes or ease of marking rather than practicality or insight. I'll illustrate this with an anecdote.
Many years ago when I was at MIT, there was a guy in the dorm who always finished his problems sets in a fraction of the time of the rest of us, although he sometimes got marked down for not "showing his work". It turned out he could perform many astonishing feats of algebra in his head. Naturally, my curiosity was aroused, so I questioned him about this. He said he never learned the "proper" ways of doing things because they were so tedious. It was so much easier just to see the answer. Yet while he was intelligent enough, apart from math he didn't seem like a superhuman genius. He'd simply worked out algorithms for doing things that didn't require a lot of working memory, either in his head or (like the rest of us) using paper as supplementary memory. He'd turned a kind of corner in algebra, like the one when you're learning a foreign language and start to think in it instead of translating word by word and puzzling over book grammar. I lost track with this guy after college, and I've often wished that I'd thought to write down the "tricks" he had for simplifying algebra so I could make them available to the world.
The point of this story isn't that the educational system should be built around the needs of rare individuals like this. It's that it's important for teachers to know their students as individuals. A teacher should be intimately familiar with each student's strengths and weaknesses, and use that knowledge to guide students to mastery of the subject, rather than verifying that the student goes through the same standardized set of motions.
In some places Economics is an easy degree. Not everywhere. I had a friend who taught one of the introductory level Economics courses for majors. He shocked his class by giving them one week to finish "Wealth of Nations" at the start of the course, and it didn't get easier from there. His position was that the world didn't need more half-assed econ grads. I had another friend who taught the anatomy class that washed out many jocks who wanted to become certified athletic trainers and sports therapists. She had no mercy, out of consideration for the people whose injuries might be treated by some student who managed to pass her class without learning any anatomy.
A CS degree really isn't all that hard, except for maybe two subjects that are really applied math: analysis of algorithms and computation theory. Find a CS department that will let you can scrape an easy C in those subjects and voila: easy degree.
This points out an angle that's worth considering in this story. How strong is the department? If the department is weak and it's not attracting students, and there isn't initiative to fix those things or money, then why not pull the plug? Sure, CS may be the most important subject area taught at the University, but all the more reason not to disservice students with an inferior program.
Not that I'm saying this department is weak; as far as I know it's a terrific department. But the decision to cut the department isn't purely a matter of whether the subject is important. It's a matter of whether the department is economically successful, or successful at serving a public need.
It's not about pride, it's about cashing in, or preventing a rival from cashing in, or both. We saw that last week when Karl Rove went on the air criticizing Obama for taking credit for the work of the SEALs, then going on to brag that he had a "personal relationship" (yuck) with some members of SEAL Team Six. Disney is just as unseemly but predictable here.
In any case, I haven't heard anybody official claim Osama was "accidentally killed". Nor have I seen any explanation of the orders and rules of engagement the commando team was operating under. Nor have we any idea whether the man who shot Osama was following those orders. Not that orders excuse anything, but they can shed light on a thing. For example, if the orders were, "kill, even if he surrenders," then I think everyone involved would be guilty of murder. But we have no reason to believe that. I do think the orders with respect to killing Osama should be made public; the fact that they haven't make me think that either (a) they would cause diplomatic or political problems or (b) they weren't followed correctly but nobody wants to deal with that.
The SEAL who shot certainly showed presence of mind in wounding Osama's wife rather than killing her, but I wouldn't ask anyone to put his life at risk for Osama, no matter how small that risk was. Not unless he had put himself in our custody. So if the orders came down to "... if he doesn't surrender immediately, shoot him," I'd be completely OK with that.
While I agree with you about the relative value of the laptop and a life, I don't think the ethical calculation is necessarily as simple as weighing those two factors. I'd be quite willing to exonerate the people who retrieved the laptop of any *duty* to risk their lives for a hunk of plastic, but I'm not quite ready to condemn them for choosing to do so.
The world is full of so many huge injustices that it hardly seems worth bothering with petty ones like this. Even the guy who lost the laptop wasn't going to bother to fill out a complaint. These are the little affronts to our sense of right and wrong that are so commonplace and measly we can't really rouse ourselves to do anything about them, even when they happen to us. And in isolation this decision may be the sensible one.
Yet I think this steady drip-drip-drip of petty indignities takes its toll on us. Indignation no longer pricks us to action because we've allowed it to become a constant, niggling, unsatisfiable itch. Our problems may be nothing compared to the murdered people being piled up like cordwood in places like Syria and Libya, but habitual acceptance of those little injustices doesn't sharpen our sense of outrage at the great injustices. Far from it. I think we' re more likely to look on a great injustice as just one more unfortunate thing we can't do anything about.
So, once in a while somebody has to stand up and do something that looks a little ridiculous from the standpoint of any utilitarian calculus of value, because our confidence our ability to do anything in the face of injustice is rotting away in that interminable stream of almost-but-not-quite-inconsequential grievances. Every so often (as in the scene from the movie), somebody has to stand up and say, "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore."
Speaking as a fellow father with a daughter, I remind you that your daughter would not benefit from her relatives being convicted of felony assault and battery. Nor would she benefit when the boy's relatives return the escalation favor by going after your family. Common sense tells you not to take an action like that without considering what the probable reaction (and over-reaction) of the people affected.
I teach my kids to be assertive. Assertive doesn't mean you go around punching people in the face, it means you stand up for yourself in a manner that is firm, self-confident and brooks no nonsense. Is a punch in the face on the assertive person's decision tree? Sure, but if you're assertive you've got plenty of ways to end the nonsense before it ever comes to that. If everyone in the world was assertive there'd be a lot less need for confrontation, physical _or_ legal.
As an advocate of assertiveness, I'd disagree with the GP poster's apparent opinion that the best thing to do is to let an incident such as he describes slide. People don't stop doing crap like that on their own, so somebody has to put a stop to it. As an assertive parent I'd call the boy's parents up and discuss the incident in a non-confrontational way. With mom I'd emphasize with all the evident kindness I could muster the kind of trouble sonny-boy was headed for if he kept this up. The discussion that ensues between sonny and his mom should be some payback for the embarrassment sonny inflicted on others. With dad I'd have a man-to-man talk. If anybody should be beating sonny-boy senseless, it's his dear old dad. I wouldn't threaten to call the cops because I want sonny's parents on my side. But I would keep that option in my hip pocket, in case sonny didn't get the message.
I'd question the GP's apparent belief that the incident just blew over on its own. Once somebody starts in on something that low-down, cowardly and mean, it takes on a life of its own. If it just *seems* like the incident blew over, then it's probable somebody quickly took firm and effective measures that shut the nonsense down before people were demanding the boy's head on a stick.
As for TFA, I'd say the actions taken were sensible and the outcome just. The victims of the injury banded together along with their friends in a way that makes them a formidable target to any copycats. The authorities were alerted and responded, but didn't go overboard. They taught the perpetrator a lesson he's unlikely to forget, but without ruining his future prospects.
Well, if it weren't Clinton who was doing it nothing he said under oath would be called "perjury". What he did was "prevaricate". He quibbled. He split hairs. He demanded definitions from Ken Starr and cynically exploited semantic loopholes in them. Was that sleazy? Sure. Was it misleading? Absolutely. Was it lying? Morally, yes. Technically, no. He just pissed Ken Starr off by out-lawyering him, so Starr decided to bring him down politically by bringing a charge that wouldn't hold up in court and certainly wouldn't succeed in the US Senate.
No we don't, and if anything, we should be comparing them against what we did before - metal detectors, bomb sniffers. They're a whole lot more invasive and they don't do shit.
That's essentially what I said. The basic methods used before 9/11, along with stricter post 9/11 standards for what can be carried on (e.g. no box cutters), account for most if not nearly all the deterrence of hijack since then. Here's where we differ: Since the TSA performs these duties, I think it is reasonable to say that the TSA has effectively deterred hijackings.
I think you're confounding "TSA" with specific methods introduced with the TSA like body scanning and enhanced pat downs that are of dubious value.
I was talking to an old timer in the TSA line; he said that in the 70s, you could bring guns on the plane - they had a locker that they'd store your gun in for you.
Yes, and there were 5 major hijackings worldwide in 1970 alone, and well over twenty for the decade. There were almost as many hijackings in 1970 as there were in the decade since 9/11 (8), even though there were far fewer flights back then. Which is why they developed metal detectors in the 70s. I started flying around the time they were introduced.
The locker thing is a good idea, but it's not any different than checking your gun with your luggage. It'd be nice if they did that for things like your swiss army knife rather than making you throw it away, but one of the things that has happened since the 1970s is that air travel has become cheap. Air travel used to be glamorous... and expensive. If people paid the equivalent of what they used to back in 1970, you'd get a lot more amenities.
Unsupported assertion. We had plenty of deterrence on 9/10/2001
It's an easily supportable assertion, unless you insist that I prove a negative assertion *by example*, which is of course impossible to do.
I'm not sure there is an identifiable, unambiguously "libertarian" position on patents.
Some people believe in the right to "own" an idea or expression in the same way one owns a piece of land or a physical object. For libertarians in that camp, the artificial institution of "intellectual property" merely institutionalizes theft by artificially restricting the owner's natural rights over his property (e.g. expiring exclusive rights to patents, or allowing fair use in copyright).
Other people don't think that ideas can be "owned" like a piece of land or a physical object. Libertarians who agree with that are bound to see "intellectual property" as restricting peoples' rights over their property by forbidding them to use it in a way that "infringes" on some patent.
The one thing that seems certain is that anything like the current system of intellectual property is bound to tick off most libertarians. It's a system in which the government sets arbitrary limits on individual behavior using ad hoc, pragmatic criteria for "the public good" rather than upon fundamental individual rights. From a libertarian perspective, limiting individual liberty "for the public good" is an oxymoron, because there is no concept of "the public good" other than the exercise of individual liberties.
The question isn't whether the TSA has prevented any hijacking attempts. The question is which of TSAs measures are cost effective and which are a waste of time and money.
Given that we *know* there are people out there who would like to hijack American planes, and there haven't been any attempts made, we have to assume that *some* of what TSA is doing is an effective deterrence to attempts. For example, metal detectors combined with the inspection of carry-on luggage are surely an effective deterrent to carrying on firearms and other weapons. But does body scanning provide any measurable addition to secruity? If it does, is that worth the cost? I don't know, but I'm skeptical.
That brings up another good question, which is opportunity cost. Last summer a teenager stowed aboard the landing gear well of an airliner bound for Boston. It turns out there was a similar case a few years ago where a man stowed away in the wheel well of a jet in Africa that was bound for the US. In both cases the stowaway died from exposure, but had he been a terrorist he could easily have planted a bomb. This tells us that the TSA is missing some crucial, probably low-tech security procedures. The money and effort spent on the questionable body scanning system would surely have been better spent on securing the non-passenger parts of the airliner before it leaves the ground.
Even if you got rid of the security theater and the more intrusive searches, the TSA would not be a beloved agency. Bureaucratic pig-headedness is bad customer service, but it is necessary for deterrence. If a rule is triggered, the procedure must be followed; you can't allow an agent in the field to override the rule with common sense. He'd be right nearly every time he gave somebody a pass, which is precisely why you can't let that happen. Relaxing the rules would become a habit, and some places would become much more lax than others.
The time to fix things we don't like about airport security isn't when we're at the security checkpoint. It's when the rules are set down. If a TSA agent realizes that the rule technically requires him to pat down a baby, he ought to do it. Then the agency should review the rule and clarify or modify it as necessary.
What is remarkable in the Fukushima case is the contrast between the attention to safety before the reactor was built and after it was operational. When they built the tsunami barrier it was sufficiently high given scientific knowledge at the time. Later on management was informed that recent discoveries concerning the historical range of tsunami heights had eroded their safety factor to an unacceptable degree. The only action they took in response to that was to raise one of the emergency generators by five inches. They had "responded" to the problem, but not in the critical minded, defense-in-depth mode one uses in the planning stage.
It is true that changes are more expensive after a project has been built; but would it really have been that expensive to raise the generators enough to cope with the plant flooding, considering what was at stake? I think there was something else at work here, a bug in human psychology that tends to inflate the dangers involved with change but discount the dangers of the status quo.
and how well 7 runs on netbooks even though it is slower than congealed shit.
For the record I have a Lenovo S10-T atom based netbook/tablet convertible running Windows 7 and the speed is fine as far as I can see. On the other hand the tablet functionality is pure crap.
The bottom line is that there is no single track for becoming a "successful adult". If there were a formula, it would be this: learn to make the most of your natural strengths while addressing your natural weaknesses. Suppose a geek kid is a non-conformist because he doesn't know how to fit in. If we imagine him as a successful adult, he'd be a person who knows how to get along with others but is still comfortable standing out from the crowd. The popular kid who was always climbing the social ladder as a successful adult has priorities deeper than how other people perceive him, but retains his superior people skills.
In any case, holding up famous people as exemplars is dubious, not just for the improbability, but because of the incredibly shallow idea that fame and wealth translate into success. Citizen Kane was a successful adult by that standard. Stephen King is worth reading on this score -- his memoir and the introduction to the re-release of the Dark Tower series. In his view, life never stops beating you down no matter how much "success" you've enjoyed -- and he should know.
You see, when the Keynesian gods tell you that economy is about consumption, they are full of it, completely wrong. Consumption is a trivial consequence of production. If nothing is produced, nothing will be consumed. Production IS economy.
This is balderdash, which is not to say there isn't a kernel of truth in it. That kernel is this: if there were no production there'd be no consumption. But it's just as true to say that if there were no consumption, there'd be no production. Not for long at least.
For that matter, it might be better to say "production IS consumption", because you have to consume things like labor and materials in order to produce something. And there's the rub. If what you are apparently saying is true, a widget manufacturer could simply produce as many widgets as he physically could, and consumption of those widgets would happen as a "trivial consequence." And in a very restricted sense that's correct. Stuck with more widgets than he could sell at the current price, he'd drop that price until somebody took them off his hands. Then he'd go out of business.
Now none of this has much relevance one way or other to the political debate about America's economic relationship to China. People feel it's important for a country like America to have a manufacturing economy. I tend to agree with those people, but if it's important, it's not important for *economic reasons*. The invisible hand doesn't give a fig for one country or another, it just cares about efficient allocation of resources.
*We* think most Americans should be able to earn a middle class wage. We think that's very important. The market doesn't agree with our priorities.When trade barriers with China were dropped, probably most people thought that Chinese labor couldn't do the things that American labor did. They were wrong. Since Chinese labor was cheaper than American labor, the result will be downward pressure on American wages until they equalize, plus or minus some adjustment for which labor force is more productive. As our wages stagnated *despite* our increased productivity, we Americans continued our consumption habits by securing credit on the wealth we had accumulated in prior generations. When we found we'd miscalculated that, the results were predictably ugly. That shouldn't be surprising. The invisible hand has a lot more drastic tools at its disposal than than foreclosure, and is quite unmoved by an individual's aspirations to continue living in his house, or to continue living at all.
We should not confound economic theory with our political priorities. The result will be bad theory and misplaced priorities.
Slashdot Mirror
If you're considering a wing, why not an autogyrating rotor?
Your T-Rex analogy is right on the money, but GP posed a *car* analogy. That means you have to counter with an *alternative car analogy*. It doesn't have to be a *good* one.
Sorry, I don't make the rules here, I just accept them uncritically, then mindlessly impose them upon others. Just like anyone else.
You can take my analogies away, but you'll have to pry hyperbole from my cold, dead hands.
Depends on the environment in which you use the device. If you're in what the sysadmins call "the Big Blue Room", light is coming from a single, very strong source set very far away. If you are in an office with little natural lighting, then you've got dozens of weak light sources scattered all over the place.
A diffused reflection from the light in the Big Blue Room is still powerful enough overwhelm the picture from a matte finish monitor. A glossy surface is preferable there because it directs that light away from your eyes except at one narrow angle. In an artificially lit office the lights aren't powerful enough to cause an objectionable glare off a matte monitor, but they are bright enough to generate an objectionable reflection off a glossy monitor. In that case, as you adjust your glossy monitor to avoid one light source you tend to pick up another.
So why don't glossy LCDs look like crap in a showroom? Because if the designer of that showroom has any sense, he situates the lighting so that prospective buyers aren't turned off by glare.
And why should anyone trust that message? Can you be sure it was generated by the trusted firmware?
This has to be the crappiest piece of confounded (and I *mean* "confounded") pseudoscience I've ever seen on Slashdot.
Let's do a thought experiment, and interpret the results according to the method proposed. We show subject A a picture of a black cat, and subject B a picture of a white cat. Looking at an MRI of each subject, we note there's considerable overlap in the brain areas activated. From this we conclude that "black" is really the same thing as "white".
That's pretty much what we have there. We show group A religious art. We show subject B product design art. Seeing that some of the same brain areas are stimulated in either case, we decide that product design and religion are somehow the same thing. Now that's in intriguing hypothesis, and the experiment certainly doesn't *preclude* that hypothesis, but neither does it prove the hypothesis. That there should be considerable overlap in the response to two different kinds of art is hardly surprising. Visual stimulus is translated into pleasure and aesthetic appreciation; recognition of common motifs; maybe even (if we want to stretch a bit in this case) the anticipation of reward with just a frisson of anxiety over whether one is going to actually receive it.
In related news, Exxon announces that Windows 8 ARM computers will not run on gasoline. "At last a full-blooded Windows computer that is guaranteed to be non-flammable!" gushes an anonymous /. contributor.
That's really not an analogous situation. This guy *was* showing his work, he was using sound but non-standard algorithms, which a few minutes watching him work would demonstrate beyond any reasonable doubt. That's not the same as acting on a hunch you can't justify.
Yes, there are real world situations where using less than optimal but standard procedures is required. Laboratory work, for example. No doubt there is always some better way to perform a lab analysis, but consistency is paramount when amassing data. Still, in the real world, *quickness* at reaching a solution also matters a great deal, provided the methods are sound and justifiable.
Now I've seen the assignments given in elementary, middle and high school, and there is a huge premium placed on making them easy to grade, perhaps a higher premium than on educational value. And that *is* a problem. I'm not against requiring that work be shown; on the contrary. But like every other good idea it is subject to abuse and should be tempered by common sense.
I agree with your assessment of the fragility of the solution the system would arrive at, but I disagree that genetic algorithms would be able to "solve" this problem "easily".
It's worth taking an analytical look at the problem, to see how hard it is. As I mention in a response to TFA, as a first approximation we can formulate the problem as a matrix equation:
CX = B
Where B is a column vector for each of the m=100 representative taxpayer's tax burden. C is an m x n matrix of the contributions of each of the n tax provisions under consideration to the total tax burden of each of the m taxpayer's total burden. X is a column vector with an entry for each of the n provisions of tax code, either 0 (drop) or 1 (keep).
The problem of optimizing the tax code by Brin's method is to find the solution X to the equation such that |X| is minimized.
Now the actual problem is somewhat easier than this, because we don't need an exact solution for each b in B: we just want each b' generated by X to have a relative error less than some factor e (|b - b'| / b < e). But this formulation tells us some interesting things about the problem. First, since m < n, there *may be* a large number of solutions X that satisfy our criteria, which is good because we already have a bad solution in hand (X = 1). Second, since the values in X are restricted to integers, there may not be any exact solutions other than X = 1. Third, no efficient algorithm is likely to be found that works for arbitrarily small values of e. Such an algorithm would efficiently find an exact solution to CX=B, an instance of binary linear programming (one of Karp's list of 21 NP-Complete problems.
So there are two important parameters to this problem which determine whether something like a genetic algorithm on conventional hardware might be successful. First, how big is the relative error factor e? Second, how small does |X|/n have to be for this to be worth trying? I'd say that we'd have to shoot for something smaller than |X|/n < 0.5 before the difference would be really noticeable. I'm guessing that unless we get very lucky, any monte carlo method would converge to some trivial reduction in complexity, or get bogged down in the huge search space.
I think this idea isn't economically or politically feasible, for the reason you say and others. But successful computations of quite large instances of NP-Hard problems (e.g. a recent solution to an instance of traveling salesman with 86K points) on high performance computing clusters makes me think a one time attempt at aggressive reduction in complexity might be technically feasible. However it wouldn't be easy, i wouldn't be guaranteed to yield much simplification, and the result wouldn't be as politically neutral as Brin supposes. For example he assumes we can start by discarding any tax provisions that benefit fewer than one hundred taxpayers. It seems to me the existence of those provisions undermines his whole premise, which that only groups of *representative* tax payers have any political significance. If so, how did these little perquisites make it into the the tax code?
Who sits on huge piles of cash? One thing that everybody should have learned from the recent mortgage backed security crisis is that this doesn't happen. Banks, big companies and super-rich individuals don't keep the bulk of their "cash" in vaults in the form of paper money, coins, bullion and the like. Most of their "cash" is money invested in easily liquidated investment instruments that generate a small but highly reliable return.
In any case, if you believe that economic rationality generates the optimum distribution of resources, it makes no sense to incent anything one way or the other. A perfect tax code in that case would be perfectly neutral with respect to any economic decision, whether it was to invest your money or to use it to stock your mansion with dancing girls (who presumably have to earn a living too). I don't happen to believe that markets are perfect, but one thing people with substantial surplus wealth don't need to be dissuaded from is keeping their money stuffed in a mattress.
The closest thing anybody does to keeping huge piles of cash in a mattress is being too risk averse, tending to put your resources in safe investments that are easy to get out of. That's what keeps employment down; employees suck money out of an enterprise and are messy and difficult to shed. If you don't think there's going to be work in the future, you avoid taking on new employees. If you see big opportunities coming, you take the risk of hiring more people.
C.S. Lewis, the preeminent Christian apologist and popular moralist of the 20th century, was hardly opposed to the physical or moral betterment of the masses. What he is talking about isn't giving, it's taking with hypocritical, self-serving justification. Most of us are familiar with the King James version of the Second Commandment as "Thou shalt not take the Lord's name in vain." The verb translated as "take" might better be translated as "carry", as in a banner or a tool. So Second Commandment isn't primarily about swearing; it forbids the use of religion to justify selfish ends.
Giving back by the elite is a good thing and sensible on their part, but as with everything there is a dark side; nobody's intentions are ever perfectly pure. I live in a city which probably has more universities per capita than any other city in the world, built in part to satisfy the vogue for public works among the elite; in part no doubt to feed their egos; and in a few cases to assuage their consciences. The part of the Harvard campus between Harvard Square and the Charles River was purchased by the Forbes family (a family member once told me) with dirty money from the "China Trade", the polite name for pushing cheap Turkish opium in China. But however mixed the motivations were, we non-elites are much better of than if the elites had just taken their money and used it pay for a lavish lifestyle.
So, if these Global Online Academy people find some way of making their courses available to the rest of us, that's great as far as I'm concerned. I think there is a tendency in some of these schools to indoctrinate students in the belief that the current economic status quo reflects natural justice and no more. That is a concern, but no more than other biases that all we non-elites were educated with. But if you think this material's primary motive is indoctrination, it doesn't make sense to view the decision not to make the material available to the masses as a self-interested one. More likely it is a matter of charging to pay for the development costs. The public-minded elites do like to see that projects are financially sustainable before investing in them.
Showing steps has its drawbacks too. It biases things towards specific mechanics chosen for either pedagogical purposes or ease of marking rather than practicality or insight. I'll illustrate this with an anecdote.
Many years ago when I was at MIT, there was a guy in the dorm who always finished his problems sets in a fraction of the time of the rest of us, although he sometimes got marked down for not "showing his work". It turned out he could perform many astonishing feats of algebra in his head. Naturally, my curiosity was aroused, so I questioned him about this. He said he never learned the "proper" ways of doing things because they were so tedious. It was so much easier just to see the answer. Yet while he was intelligent enough, apart from math he didn't seem like a superhuman genius. He'd simply worked out algorithms for doing things that didn't require a lot of working memory, either in his head or (like the rest of us) using paper as supplementary memory. He'd turned a kind of corner in algebra, like the one when you're learning a foreign language and start to think in it instead of translating word by word and puzzling over book grammar. I lost track with this guy after college, and I've often wished that I'd thought to write down the "tricks" he had for simplifying algebra so I could make them available to the world.
The point of this story isn't that the educational system should be built around the needs of rare individuals like this. It's that it's important for teachers to know their students as individuals. A teacher should be intimately familiar with each student's strengths and weaknesses, and use that knowledge to guide students to mastery of the subject, rather than verifying that the student goes through the same standardized set of motions.
There are no easy majors; only easy departments.
In some places Economics is an easy degree. Not everywhere. I had a friend who taught one of the introductory level Economics courses for majors. He shocked his class by giving them one week to finish "Wealth of Nations" at the start of the course, and it didn't get easier from there. His position was that the world didn't need more half-assed econ grads. I had another friend who taught the anatomy class that washed out many jocks who wanted to become certified athletic trainers and sports therapists. She had no mercy, out of consideration for the people whose injuries might be treated by some student who managed to pass her class without learning any anatomy.
A CS degree really isn't all that hard, except for maybe two subjects that are really applied math: analysis of algorithms and computation theory. Find a CS department that will let you can scrape an easy C in those subjects and voila: easy degree.
This points out an angle that's worth considering in this story. How strong is the department? If the department is weak and it's not attracting students, and there isn't initiative to fix those things or money, then why not pull the plug? Sure, CS may be the most important subject area taught at the University, but all the more reason not to disservice students with an inferior program.
Not that I'm saying this department is weak; as far as I know it's a terrific department. But the decision to cut the department isn't purely a matter of whether the subject is important. It's a matter of whether the department is economically successful, or successful at serving a public need.
It's not about pride, it's about cashing in, or preventing a rival from cashing in, or both. We saw that last week when Karl Rove went on the air criticizing Obama for taking credit for the work of the SEALs, then going on to brag that he had a "personal relationship" (yuck) with some members of SEAL Team Six. Disney is just as unseemly but predictable here.
In any case, I haven't heard anybody official claim Osama was "accidentally killed". Nor have I seen any explanation of the orders and rules of engagement the commando team was operating under. Nor have we any idea whether the man who shot Osama was following those orders. Not that orders excuse anything, but they can shed light on a thing. For example, if the orders were, "kill, even if he surrenders," then I think everyone involved would be guilty of murder. But we have no reason to believe that. I do think the orders with respect to killing Osama should be made public; the fact that they haven't make me think that either (a) they would cause diplomatic or political problems or (b) they weren't followed correctly but nobody wants to deal with that.
The SEAL who shot certainly showed presence of mind in wounding Osama's wife rather than killing her, but I wouldn't ask anyone to put his life at risk for Osama, no matter how small that risk was. Not unless he had put himself in our custody. So if the orders came down to "... if he doesn't surrender immediately, shoot him," I'd be completely OK with that.
While I agree with you about the relative value of the laptop and a life, I don't think the ethical calculation is necessarily as simple as weighing those two factors. I'd be quite willing to exonerate the people who retrieved the laptop of any *duty* to risk their lives for a hunk of plastic, but I'm not quite ready to condemn them for choosing to do so.
The world is full of so many huge injustices that it hardly seems worth bothering with petty ones like this. Even the guy who lost the laptop wasn't going to bother to fill out a complaint. These are the little affronts to our sense of right and wrong that are so commonplace and measly we can't really rouse ourselves to do anything about them, even when they happen to us. And in isolation this decision may be the sensible one.
Yet I think this steady drip-drip-drip of petty indignities takes its toll on us. Indignation no longer pricks us to action because we've allowed it to become a constant, niggling, unsatisfiable itch. Our problems may be nothing compared to the murdered people being piled up like cordwood in places like Syria and Libya, but habitual acceptance of those little injustices doesn't sharpen our sense of outrage at the great injustices. Far from it. I think we' re more likely to look on a great injustice as just one more unfortunate thing we can't do anything about.
So, once in a while somebody has to stand up and do something that looks a little ridiculous from the standpoint of any utilitarian calculus of value, because our confidence our ability to do anything in the face of injustice is rotting away in that interminable stream of almost-but-not-quite-inconsequential grievances. Every so often (as in the scene from the movie), somebody has to stand up and say, "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore."
Speaking as a fellow father with a daughter, I remind you that your daughter would not benefit from her relatives being convicted of felony assault and battery. Nor would she benefit when the boy's relatives return the escalation favor by going after your family. Common sense tells you not to take an action like that without considering what the probable reaction (and over-reaction) of the people affected.
I teach my kids to be assertive. Assertive doesn't mean you go around punching people in the face, it means you stand up for yourself in a manner that is firm, self-confident and brooks no nonsense. Is a punch in the face on the assertive person's decision tree? Sure, but if you're assertive you've got plenty of ways to end the nonsense before it ever comes to that. If everyone in the world was assertive there'd be a lot less need for confrontation, physical _or_ legal.
As an advocate of assertiveness, I'd disagree with the GP poster's apparent opinion that the best thing to do is to let an incident such as he describes slide. People don't stop doing crap like that on their own, so somebody has to put a stop to it. As an assertive parent I'd call the boy's parents up and discuss the incident in a non-confrontational way. With mom I'd emphasize with all the evident kindness I could muster the kind of trouble sonny-boy was headed for if he kept this up. The discussion that ensues between sonny and his mom should be some payback for the embarrassment sonny inflicted on others. With dad I'd have a man-to-man talk. If anybody should be beating sonny-boy senseless, it's his dear old dad. I wouldn't threaten to call the cops because I want sonny's parents on my side. But I would keep that option in my hip pocket, in case sonny didn't get the message.
I'd question the GP's apparent belief that the incident just blew over on its own. Once somebody starts in on something that low-down, cowardly and mean, it takes on a life of its own. If it just *seems* like the incident blew over, then it's probable somebody quickly took firm and effective measures that shut the nonsense down before people were demanding the boy's head on a stick.
As for TFA, I'd say the actions taken were sensible and the outcome just. The victims of the injury banded together along with their friends in a way that makes them a formidable target to any copycats. The authorities were alerted and responded, but didn't go overboard. They taught the perpetrator a lesson he's unlikely to forget, but without ruining his future prospects.
Well, if it weren't Clinton who was doing it nothing he said under oath would be called "perjury". What he did was "prevaricate". He quibbled. He split hairs. He demanded definitions from Ken Starr and cynically exploited semantic loopholes in them. Was that sleazy? Sure. Was it misleading? Absolutely. Was it lying? Morally, yes. Technically, no. He just pissed Ken Starr off by out-lawyering him, so Starr decided to bring him down politically by bringing a charge that wouldn't hold up in court and certainly wouldn't succeed in the US Senate.
No we don't, and if anything, we should be comparing them against what we did before - metal detectors, bomb sniffers. They're a whole lot more invasive and they don't do shit.
That's essentially what I said. The basic methods used before 9/11, along with stricter post 9/11 standards for what can be carried on (e.g. no box cutters), account for most if not nearly all the deterrence of hijack since then. Here's where we differ: Since the TSA performs these duties, I think it is reasonable to say that the TSA has effectively deterred hijackings.
I think you're confounding "TSA" with specific methods introduced with the TSA like body scanning and enhanced pat downs that are of dubious value.
I was talking to an old timer in the TSA line; he said that in the 70s, you could bring guns on the plane - they had a locker that they'd store your gun in for you.
Yes, and there were 5 major hijackings worldwide in 1970 alone, and well over twenty for the decade. There were almost as many hijackings in 1970 as there were in the decade since 9/11 (8), even though there were far fewer flights back then. Which is why they developed metal detectors in the 70s. I started flying around the time they were introduced.
The locker thing is a good idea, but it's not any different than checking your gun with your luggage. It'd be nice if they did that for things like your swiss army knife rather than making you throw it away, but one of the things that has happened since the 1970s is that air travel has become cheap. Air travel used to be glamorous ... and expensive. If people paid the equivalent of what they used to back in 1970, you'd get a lot more amenities.
Unsupported assertion. We had plenty of deterrence on 9/10/2001
It's an easily supportable assertion, unless you insist that I prove a negative assertion *by example*, which is of course impossible to do.
I'm not sure there is an identifiable, unambiguously "libertarian" position on patents.
Some people believe in the right to "own" an idea or expression in the same way one owns a piece of land or a physical object. For libertarians in that camp, the artificial institution of "intellectual property" merely institutionalizes theft by artificially restricting the owner's natural rights over his property (e.g. expiring exclusive rights to patents, or allowing fair use in copyright).
Other people don't think that ideas can be "owned" like a piece of land or a physical object. Libertarians who agree with that are bound to see "intellectual property" as restricting peoples' rights over their property by forbidding them to use it in a way that "infringes" on some patent.
The one thing that seems certain is that anything like the current system of intellectual property is bound to tick off most libertarians. It's a system in which the government sets arbitrary limits on individual behavior using ad hoc, pragmatic criteria for "the public good" rather than upon fundamental individual rights. From a libertarian perspective, limiting individual liberty "for the public good" is an oxymoron, because there is no concept of "the public good" other than the exercise of individual liberties.
The question isn't whether the TSA has prevented any hijacking attempts. The question is which of TSAs measures are cost effective and which are a waste of time and money.
Given that we *know* there are people out there who would like to hijack American planes, and there haven't been any attempts made, we have to assume that *some* of what TSA is doing is an effective deterrence to attempts. For example, metal detectors combined with the inspection of carry-on luggage are surely an effective deterrent to carrying on firearms and other weapons. But does body scanning provide any measurable addition to secruity? If it does, is that worth the cost? I don't know, but I'm skeptical.
That brings up another good question, which is opportunity cost. Last summer a teenager stowed aboard the landing gear well of an airliner bound for Boston. It turns out there was a similar case a few years ago where a man stowed away in the wheel well of a jet in Africa that was bound for the US. In both cases the stowaway died from exposure, but had he been a terrorist he could easily have planted a bomb. This tells us that the TSA is missing some crucial, probably low-tech security procedures. The money and effort spent on the questionable body scanning system would surely have been better spent on securing the non-passenger parts of the airliner before it leaves the ground.
Even if you got rid of the security theater and the more intrusive searches, the TSA would not be a beloved agency. Bureaucratic pig-headedness is bad customer service, but it is necessary for deterrence. If a rule is triggered, the procedure must be followed; you can't allow an agent in the field to override the rule with common sense. He'd be right nearly every time he gave somebody a pass, which is precisely why you can't let that happen. Relaxing the rules would become a habit, and some places would become much more lax than others.
The time to fix things we don't like about airport security isn't when we're at the security checkpoint. It's when the rules are set down. If a TSA agent realizes that the rule technically requires him to pat down a baby, he ought to do it. Then the agency should review the rule and clarify or modify it as necessary.
can we start pulling our users out of Windows?
What is remarkable in the Fukushima case is the contrast between the attention to safety before the reactor was built and after it was operational. When they built the tsunami barrier it was sufficiently high given scientific knowledge at the time. Later on management was informed that recent discoveries concerning the historical range of tsunami heights had eroded their safety factor to an unacceptable degree. The only action they took in response to that was to raise one of the emergency generators by five inches. They had "responded" to the problem, but not in the critical minded, defense-in-depth mode one uses in the planning stage.
It is true that changes are more expensive after a project has been built; but would it really have been that expensive to raise the generators enough to cope with the plant flooding, considering what was at stake? I think there was something else at work here, a bug in human psychology that tends to inflate the dangers involved with change but discount the dangers of the status quo.
and how well 7 runs on netbooks even though it is slower than congealed shit.
For the record I have a Lenovo S10-T atom based netbook/tablet convertible running Windows 7 and the speed is fine as far as I can see. On the other hand the tablet functionality is pure crap.
The bottom line is that there is no single track for becoming a "successful adult". If there were a formula, it would be this: learn to make the most of your natural strengths while addressing your natural weaknesses. Suppose a geek kid is a non-conformist because he doesn't know how to fit in. If we imagine him as a successful adult, he'd be a person who knows how to get along with others but is still comfortable standing out from the crowd. The popular kid who was always climbing the social ladder as a successful adult has priorities deeper than how other people perceive him, but retains his superior people skills.
In any case, holding up famous people as exemplars is dubious, not just for the improbability, but because of the incredibly shallow idea that fame and wealth translate into success. Citizen Kane was a successful adult by that standard. Stephen King is worth reading on this score -- his memoir and the introduction to the re-release of the Dark Tower series. In his view, life never stops beating you down no matter how much "success" you've enjoyed -- and he should know.
You see, when the Keynesian gods tell you that economy is about consumption, they are full of it, completely wrong. Consumption is a trivial consequence of production. If nothing is produced, nothing will be consumed. Production IS economy.
This is balderdash, which is not to say there isn't a kernel of truth in it. That kernel is this: if there were no production there'd be no consumption. But it's just as true to say that if there were no consumption, there'd be no production. Not for long at least.
For that matter, it might be better to say "production IS consumption", because you have to consume things like labor and materials in order to produce something. And there's the rub. If what you are apparently saying is true, a widget manufacturer could simply produce as many widgets as he physically could, and consumption of those widgets would happen as a "trivial consequence." And in a very restricted sense that's correct. Stuck with more widgets than he could sell at the current price, he'd drop that price until somebody took them off his hands. Then he'd go out of business.
Now none of this has much relevance one way or other to the political debate about America's economic relationship to China. People feel it's important for a country like America to have a manufacturing economy. I tend to agree with those people, but if it's important, it's not important for *economic reasons*. The invisible hand doesn't give a fig for one country or another, it just cares about efficient allocation of resources.
*We* think most Americans should be able to earn a middle class wage. We think that's very important. The market doesn't agree with our priorities.When trade barriers with China were dropped, probably most people thought that Chinese labor couldn't do the things that American labor did. They were wrong. Since Chinese labor was cheaper than American labor, the result will be downward pressure on American wages until they equalize, plus or minus some adjustment for which labor force is more productive. As our wages stagnated *despite* our increased productivity, we Americans continued our consumption habits by securing credit on the wealth we had accumulated in prior generations. When we found we'd miscalculated that, the results were predictably ugly. That shouldn't be surprising. The invisible hand has a lot more drastic tools at its disposal than than foreclosure, and is quite unmoved by an individual's aspirations to continue living in his house, or to continue living at all.
We should not confound economic theory with our political priorities. The result will be bad theory and misplaced priorities.