Except for baseball, which is the sport of math nerds.
People who've never seen a baseball are amazed by the fact that it's mostly waiting around for something to happen. It's really impossible to enjoy baseball until you've seen a couple of hundred games. Baseball is a game of situations, and what you do in all that waiting is to compare the current situation to analogous situations and argue over which aspects of the current situation are most salient (e.g. this particular batter has gone 0 for 5 against left handed pitchers on days that have an "e" in their name). It's a process that turns ordinary people into statistics geeks.
The difference is the bowler can see both batsmen. In baseball the catcher is the player who can see what the opposing players are doing, so he calls the pitches. The pitcher, however, doesn't always agree; sometimes they ask for a different signal.
But that's the problem with writers, isn't it? That combination of imagination and persuasiveness makes accounts of their experiences highly unreliable, though entertaining.
Mark Twain lost the fortune he made writing investing in inventions. The problem was that he couldn't resist something that fired his imagination.
I'm surprised she managed to become a "writer" if she can't even get dressed in the morning without being distracted.
Seems like fairly typical behavior for a writer. You're pulling on your pants, and suddenly notice the curious way that dust motes in ray of sunlight swirl on the thermal currents of the room. It occurs to you that maybe that's the way a space battle might look like, with thousands of ships moving in three dimensions.
Who is doing that? We have the entire history of recorded meteorology to draw upon; it's quite easy to identify a single storm as a statistical outlier.
Generally any data point more than 1.5 IQRs above the third quartile is an outlier, and should be a rare bird. Of course you do on occasion run into a rare bird, but if you start seeing them on a regular basis that means either you are having implausibly strange luck or something underlying has changed.
Harvey lost speed very quickly after making landfall. The problem is it also dumped all that moisture it picked up from the warm Gulf waters.
Hurricanes may be defined by their wind speeds, but wind speed is only one of the ways they can kill you. There's rainfall and storm surge, too.
Hurricane Sandy had the lowest central pressure of any hurricane ever to make landfall north of North Carolina. It had a massive extent and came with huge storm swells that were guaranteed to coincide with local high tide.
The first TIROS satellite was launched in 1960, although it failed shortly thereafter. We've had continuous photographic satellite coverage of Atlantic hurricanes since TIROS-3 in 1961.
So we've had a geographically comprehensive, detailed, reliable record of hurricane winds speeds for the past 56 years.
Having been a business owner myself, with an excitable and somewhat undisciplined partner, I have no illusions about economic models predicated on perfectly rational choices. However, most people know not to hire someone if they won't generate the revenue to cover their salary.
The flip side is often problematic: people who refuse to hire the help they need and so limit their profits. That's very common.
Of course they understood they had money problems. What they didn't know was the consequence of their solution to those problems, which was essentially to privatize the army.
Imagine you are a Roman in the Second Century BC; over the past 500 years Rome has grown from a village to the dominant force on the peninsula, to a pan-Mediterranean power. It would seem to you to be a kind of iron law of history: expansion is always good for Rome.
What you don't know is that you are approaching a kind of inflection point -- several inflection points actually. Despite the enormous wealth expansion is bringing into the city, you are reaching the point where Rome can't pay for expansion by taxes and do it with volunteers. The adaptations Rome will make to deal with that will fundamentally alter the character of Rome's cherished institutions, and Romans themselves.
My point is that there are limits to the power of experience to predict the future. Sometimes circumstances which have remained unchanged for centuries evaporate overnight. So while our experience since the Industrial Revolution tells us not to assume that technological innovation will result in net job losses, we shouldn't be to quick to jump to the opposite conclusion either. We should always keep an eye peeled for things we have always taken for granted that might not be so certain.
Workers are hired until the marginal value of their labor equals the marginal cost of that labor. You hire Alice at $50,000 salary because she'll bring in $100,000. Bob, because of diminishing returns, will only bring in $75,000, but at $50K hiring him is still a no-brainer. But if Carol will only bring in $50,000, you won't hire her unless you can get her for less than that.
What this means is there is no general economic law that connects changes in worker productivity to a particular kind of change in employment levels. It depends on what you do with that productivity.
Imagine a world in which computers were laboriously assembled by workers on breadboards using prototyping techniques. Let's say it costs you $10,000 to assemble a computer this way. In that case you'd only sell a small number of computers because they'd be highly specialized machines. Now suppose you introduce modern assembly techniques, with printed circuit boards and wave soldering. Now the computer which cost you ten thousand dollars to assemble can be made for well under $100.
If you continue to sell a very small number of computers at high prices, you'll lay off most of your workforce. On the other hand if you start selling your computers for $180, you'll end up adding to your workforce. Both scenarios turn increased worker productivity into increased profit, but in different ways.
Now let's imagine an entirely different scenario: a fast food restaurant. It's hard to imagine selling a lot more Big Macs because you drop the price. Nonetheless the same principle applies. If you can find a way to make money off the newly surplus labor, employment wont' go down. If you can't, you'll let people go.
It is pretty clear from existing law that if you are in the US illegally and are caught, you are to be deported.
Is it? There's a difference between empowering the executive branch from deporting someone and mandating that. Insofar as the executive branch is empowered to make exceptions, it can set up formal guidelines under which it exercises those powers.
Your answer does not actually address the poster's question. The legal justification for President Obama's power to enact DACA was based on powers (supposedly) statutorily delegated to the Executive Branch by Congress.
Now you can argue that the Obama Administration overreached by misinterpreting Congressional statutes, and that'd be at least plausible. But that's not what the Trump administration is claiming. AG Sessions is claiming that establishing DACA was unconstitutional.
Now nobody (almost nobody) suggests that Congress doesn't have the authority to create a program like DACA; so to argue that DACA is unconstitutional you'd have to show that Congress's power to delegate its functions were limited in some way. For that it's quite reasonable to ask for chapter and verse citations; or at least legal precedent.
Well, I don't see history that way. For one thing, if designers were becoming obsolete because of the web, there'd have been nothing they could do about it. No, the web gained font tags, and then later style sheets, because people felt the need for designers' services.
Good design adds a lot to a website, but there's no way to enable a good designer to do a better-than-average job without empowering a bad designer to make a mess.
or a case of designers who haven't figured out yet how to make the new design styles functional.
The other day someone showed me an Android app that was confusing them. It had a "like" button that appeared disabled. In Material Design the widget would be called a "Toggle button with an icon", and here's the thing about it that particular widget: it only has two states: on or off; there is no "disabled" state. The visual cue for "not focused" looks to any ordinary mortal like the visual cue that other widgets with a disabled state (like the humble checkbox) use for "disabled".
I'm retired now, but having designed apps and user interfaces for decades, I can follow the designer's logic here: I only need two states: like/not liked. A flat icon button look sooo much cleaner than a frumpy old checkbox, and if I need to disable the thing I'll just make it invisible. But the thing is users haven't read the MD design guidelines; they have infer what's going on from the conflicting cues MD gives them.
Now the MD guidelines do kinda sorta steer you toward using toggle buttons in situations where they're unlikely to cause confusion, but design still takes judgment. And reading the MD guidelines, it strikes me that most people who need to produce an Android UI are presented with many subtle judgments to make when choosing between alternatives, and where there are a lot of choices there are a lot of opportunities to make bad choices.
I think UI glitches happen for the same reason that security glitches do: not enough developer training and schedule pressure. MD makes it easy to create a UI that looks modern and clean, but your job isn't done when a UI looks good; it has to minimize the cognitive load on the user as well. To do that there's no substitute for closely observing an untrained user struggling with your app. Find every little bump that trips him up and file it flat, even if you have to use a dumpy old checkbox.
I suspect the one thing which Oracle wanted from Sun was control of Java. Not necessarily for nefarious purposes (although a more ruthless company I have seldom encountered); it was just intolerable given the commitment they'd made to Java to have it in anyone else's hands.
MySQL was a great project, but there is no way it threatens Oracle's database customer base.
Oracle has an aggressive lock-in strategy for its database customers; to that end not only does it offer myriad proprietary ways of doing things, it offers some genuinely impressive technical capabilities; it also works hard to co-opt DBAs by having them acquire a number of Oracle-specific skills. This makes it both difficult and unattractive to move away from Oracle.
One thing Oracle got into early was copy-on-write technology. This gave them far better transaction isolation than their competitors. It's even possible to create long-running forks of a databases, and then later merge those forks -- just like forking and merging a source code tree.
Sure, as a backing store for your web site, pretty much anything will do the job. Oracle is overkill -- in fact relational databases in general are overkill.
Frankly think both sides of this debate are equally absurd, starting with calling what is shown in popular entertainment "Computer Science". It's usually just a sloppy plot device but if it fell into any category it's usually highly unrealistic pen testing.
I question whether people really by this kind of propagandistic career advice; I mean, shouldn't you know something about an individual before you steer her toward a particular field? Particularly one in which her career is apt to be relatively short? On the flip side I find people who act offended by seeing people different from them on the screen utterly ridiculous.
I feel about STEM the way C.S. Lewis felt about poetry -- which he loved naturally. But he viewed educational attempts to make poetry "interesting" were just plain stupid. He thought there is nothing that will kill someone's enthusiasm for a thing than ham-fisted attempts to manipulate them into liking it. And in my experience that's especially true of teenagers.
Lewis's solution to producing the next generation of poets is worth considering for STEM too. Make sure everyone is adequately *educated* in poetry, and then those with a natural affinity for poetry will naturally like it. Now insofar as the evidence shows that girls in school are not getting the STEM education they ought to be, that ought to be fixed, whether the cause is unconscious sexism or something else. But I think the focus on media isn't so much evidence-based as it is a reflection of our our obsession with media celebrity.
If we need more STEM brainpower, what we have to do is make sure everybody is trained to a certain minimal level in it. Then we need to ensure that talented people with the interest in STEM have a practical path to advanced knowledge regardless of their family wealth or geographic location, from K-8 enrichment all the way up to the terminal degree offered in each field.
First, the main concern with early fast breeder reactor designs was proliferation. Engineering can reduce the convenience of proliferation, but it won't ever eliminate it because generating Pu-239 is inherent to the process. That's not a luddite concern; it's real.
Second, fast breeders at least don't appear to be as economical as originally hoped. The assumption when the tech was proposed was that uranium supply wouldn't keep up with demand, but in fact uranium turns out to be reasonably plentiful. Even under a scenario of greatly increased nuclear adoption it would be many decades before we'd need to turn to breeders. On the cost side, the breeder reactors that have been built have proven to be much less reliable and more expensive to operate than hoped. Of course engineering advances could make breeders cheaper to build and run, but you could say that of conventional nuclear plants too.
Finally, breeders still have radioactive waste problems; different, and likely more tractable ones, but from an economic standpoint that's meaningless because we allow companies to build conventional plants as if the future waste problem will solve itself. The need to solve the problems from a plant you break ground on today is so far in the future it has no financial reality. So I suspect to get breeder technology off the ground, you'd ironically have to crack down on nuclear power in general.
It takes a lot more for a technology to be economically feasible than for it to be physically possible. A lot depends on the cost of the alternatives. As long as fossil fuel companies are allowed to externalize their costs on the scale that they do, and conventional nuclear power is allowed to ignore the future costs their plants will incur, advances in novel nuclear technologies are bound to occur at a snail's pace.
You can imagine a future society running on thorium fuel cycle nuclear plants, it isn't hard to do, and that future can look reasonably good. But imagining something being done is a lot different than knowing how to get it done. You've got to convince people to spend money on stuff that costs more in the short- to mid-term.
Slashdot Mirror
So supervised learning doesn't count as "machine learning"? It sound like a fairly generic classification setup.
You're confusing encoding with encrypting.
There's a big difference between encoding something in a secret way and encrypting.
Except for baseball, which is the sport of math nerds.
People who've never seen a baseball are amazed by the fact that it's mostly waiting around for something to happen. It's really impossible to enjoy baseball until you've seen a couple of hundred games. Baseball is a game of situations, and what you do in all that waiting is to compare the current situation to analogous situations and argue over which aspects of the current situation are most salient (e.g. this particular batter has gone 0 for 5 against left handed pitchers on days that have an "e" in their name). It's a process that turns ordinary people into statistics geeks.
The difference is the bowler can see both batsmen. In baseball the catcher is the player who can see what the opposing players are doing, so he calls the pitches. The pitcher, however, doesn't always agree; sometimes they ask for a different signal.
But that's the problem with writers, isn't it? That combination of imagination and persuasiveness makes accounts of their experiences highly unreliable, though entertaining.
Mark Twain lost the fortune he made writing investing in inventions. The problem was that he couldn't resist something that fired his imagination.
I'm surprised she managed to become a "writer" if she can't even get dressed in the morning without being distracted.
Seems like fairly typical behavior for a writer. You're pulling on your pants, and suddenly notice the curious way that dust motes in ray of sunlight swirl on the thermal currents of the room. It occurs to you that maybe that's the way a space battle might look like, with thousands of ships moving in three dimensions.
Sure they can *accurately* be measured by remote sensing. They just can't be measured as *precisely*.
Who is doing that? We have the entire history of recorded meteorology to draw upon; it's quite easy to identify a single storm as a statistical outlier.
Generally any data point more than 1.5 IQRs above the third quartile is an outlier, and should be a rare bird. Of course you do on occasion run into a rare bird, but if you start seeing them on a regular basis that means either you are having implausibly strange luck or something underlying has changed.
Harvey lost speed very quickly after making landfall. The problem is it also dumped all that moisture it picked up from the warm Gulf waters.
Hurricanes may be defined by their wind speeds, but wind speed is only one of the ways they can kill you. There's rainfall and storm surge, too.
Hurricane Sandy had the lowest central pressure of any hurricane ever to make landfall north of North Carolina. It had a massive extent and came with huge storm swells that were guaranteed to coincide with local high tide.
The first TIROS satellite was launched in 1960, although it failed shortly thereafter. We've had continuous photographic satellite coverage of Atlantic hurricanes since TIROS-3 in 1961.
So we've had a geographically comprehensive, detailed, reliable record of hurricane winds speeds for the past 56 years.
Weather may not be climate, but the statistical behavior of weather certainly is.
Having been a business owner myself, with an excitable and somewhat undisciplined partner, I have no illusions about economic models predicated on perfectly rational choices. However, most people know not to hire someone if they won't generate the revenue to cover their salary.
The flip side is often problematic: people who refuse to hire the help they need and so limit their profits. That's very common.
Of course they understood they had money problems. What they didn't know was the consequence of their solution to those problems, which was essentially to privatize the army.
Imagine you are a Roman in the Second Century BC; over the past 500 years Rome has grown from a village to the dominant force on the peninsula, to a pan-Mediterranean power. It would seem to you to be a kind of iron law of history: expansion is always good for Rome.
What you don't know is that you are approaching a kind of inflection point -- several inflection points actually. Despite the enormous wealth expansion is bringing into the city, you are reaching the point where Rome can't pay for expansion by taxes and do it with volunteers. The adaptations Rome will make to deal with that will fundamentally alter the character of Rome's cherished institutions, and Romans themselves.
My point is that there are limits to the power of experience to predict the future. Sometimes circumstances which have remained unchanged for centuries evaporate overnight. So while our experience since the Industrial Revolution tells us not to assume that technological innovation will result in net job losses, we shouldn't be to quick to jump to the opposite conclusion either. We should always keep an eye peeled for things we have always taken for granted that might not be so certain.
Workers are hired until the marginal value of their labor equals the marginal cost of that labor. You hire Alice at $50,000 salary because she'll bring in $100,000. Bob, because of diminishing returns, will only bring in $75,000, but at $50K hiring him is still a no-brainer. But if Carol will only bring in $50,000, you won't hire her unless you can get her for less than that.
What this means is there is no general economic law that connects changes in worker productivity to a particular kind of change in employment levels. It depends on what you do with that productivity.
Imagine a world in which computers were laboriously assembled by workers on breadboards using prototyping techniques. Let's say it costs you $10,000 to assemble a computer this way. In that case you'd only sell a small number of computers because they'd be highly specialized machines. Now suppose you introduce modern assembly techniques, with printed circuit boards and wave soldering. Now the computer which cost you ten thousand dollars to assemble can be made for well under $100.
If you continue to sell a very small number of computers at high prices, you'll lay off most of your workforce. On the other hand if you start selling your computers for $180, you'll end up adding to your workforce. Both scenarios turn increased worker productivity into increased profit, but in different ways.
Now let's imagine an entirely different scenario: a fast food restaurant. It's hard to imagine selling a lot more Big Macs because you drop the price. Nonetheless the same principle applies. If you can find a way to make money off the newly surplus labor, employment wont' go down. If you can't, you'll let people go.
It is pretty clear from existing law that if you are in the US illegally and are caught, you are to be deported.
Is it? There's a difference between empowering the executive branch from deporting someone and mandating that. Insofar as the executive branch is empowered to make exceptions, it can set up formal guidelines under which it exercises those powers.
Your answer does not actually address the poster's question. The legal justification for President Obama's power to enact DACA was based on powers (supposedly) statutorily delegated to the Executive Branch by Congress.
Now you can argue that the Obama Administration overreached by misinterpreting Congressional statutes, and that'd be at least plausible. But that's not what the Trump administration is claiming. AG Sessions is claiming that establishing DACA was unconstitutional.
Now nobody (almost nobody) suggests that Congress doesn't have the authority to create a program like DACA; so to argue that DACA is unconstitutional you'd have to show that Congress's power to delegate its functions were limited in some way. For that it's quite reasonable to ask for chapter and verse citations; or at least legal precedent.
Well, I don't see history that way. For one thing, if designers were becoming obsolete because of the web, there'd have been nothing they could do about it. No, the web gained font tags, and then later style sheets, because people felt the need for designers' services.
Good design adds a lot to a website, but there's no way to enable a good designer to do a better-than-average job without empowering a bad designer to make a mess.
or a case of designers who haven't figured out yet how to make the new design styles functional.
The other day someone showed me an Android app that was confusing them. It had a "like" button that appeared disabled. In Material Design the widget would be called a "Toggle button with an icon", and here's the thing about it that particular widget: it only has two states: on or off; there is no "disabled" state. The visual cue for "not focused" looks to any ordinary mortal like the visual cue that other widgets with a disabled state (like the humble checkbox) use for "disabled".
I'm retired now, but having designed apps and user interfaces for decades, I can follow the designer's logic here: I only need two states: like/not liked. A flat icon button look sooo much cleaner than a frumpy old checkbox, and if I need to disable the thing I'll just make it invisible. But the thing is users haven't read the MD design guidelines; they have infer what's going on from the conflicting cues MD gives them.
Now the MD guidelines do kinda sorta steer you toward using toggle buttons in situations where they're unlikely to cause confusion, but design still takes judgment. And reading the MD guidelines, it strikes me that most people who need to produce an Android UI are presented with many subtle judgments to make when choosing between alternatives, and where there are a lot of choices there are a lot of opportunities to make bad choices.
I think UI glitches happen for the same reason that security glitches do: not enough developer training and schedule pressure. MD makes it easy to create a UI that looks modern and clean, but your job isn't done when a UI looks good; it has to minimize the cognitive load on the user as well. To do that there's no substitute for closely observing an untrained user struggling with your app. Find every little bump that trips him up and file it flat, even if you have to use a dumpy old checkbox.
Oracle couldn't afford IBM.
Thank the $deity.
I suspect the one thing which Oracle wanted from Sun was control of Java. Not necessarily for nefarious purposes (although a more ruthless company I have seldom encountered); it was just intolerable given the commitment they'd made to Java to have it in anyone else's hands.
MySQL was a great project, but there is no way it threatens Oracle's database customer base.
Oracle has an aggressive lock-in strategy for its database customers; to that end not only does it offer myriad proprietary ways of doing things, it offers some genuinely impressive technical capabilities; it also works hard to co-opt DBAs by having them acquire a number of Oracle-specific skills. This makes it both difficult and unattractive to move away from Oracle.
One thing Oracle got into early was copy-on-write technology. This gave them far better transaction isolation than their competitors. It's even possible to create long-running forks of a databases, and then later merge those forks -- just like forking and merging a source code tree.
Sure, as a backing store for your web site, pretty much anything will do the job. Oracle is overkill -- in fact relational databases in general are overkill.
Well, there's political correctness. But there's also uncertainty as to the exact dates for Jesus of Nazareth's life... assuming he existed.
Frankly think both sides of this debate are equally absurd, starting with calling what is shown in popular entertainment "Computer Science". It's usually just a sloppy plot device but if it fell into any category it's usually highly unrealistic pen testing.
I question whether people really by this kind of propagandistic career advice; I mean, shouldn't you know something about an individual before you steer her toward a particular field? Particularly one in which her career is apt to be relatively short? On the flip side I find people who act offended by seeing people different from them on the screen utterly ridiculous.
I feel about STEM the way C.S. Lewis felt about poetry -- which he loved naturally. But he viewed educational attempts to make poetry "interesting" were just plain stupid. He thought there is nothing that will kill someone's enthusiasm for a thing than ham-fisted attempts to manipulate them into liking it. And in my experience that's especially true of teenagers.
Lewis's solution to producing the next generation of poets is worth considering for STEM too. Make sure everyone is adequately *educated* in poetry, and then those with a natural affinity for poetry will naturally like it. Now insofar as the evidence shows that girls in school are not getting the STEM education they ought to be, that ought to be fixed, whether the cause is unconscious sexism or something else. But I think the focus on media isn't so much evidence-based as it is a reflection of our our obsession with media celebrity.
If we need more STEM brainpower, what we have to do is make sure everybody is trained to a certain minimal level in it. Then we need to ensure that talented people with the interest in STEM have a practical path to advanced knowledge regardless of their family wealth or geographic location, from K-8 enrichment all the way up to the terminal degree offered in each field.
First, the main concern with early fast breeder reactor designs was proliferation. Engineering can reduce the convenience of proliferation, but it won't ever eliminate it because generating Pu-239 is inherent to the process. That's not a luddite concern; it's real.
Second, fast breeders at least don't appear to be as economical as originally hoped. The assumption when the tech was proposed was that uranium supply wouldn't keep up with demand, but in fact uranium turns out to be reasonably plentiful. Even under a scenario of greatly increased nuclear adoption it would be many decades before we'd need to turn to breeders. On the cost side, the breeder reactors that have been built have proven to be much less reliable and more expensive to operate than hoped. Of course engineering advances could make breeders cheaper to build and run, but you could say that of conventional nuclear plants too.
Finally, breeders still have radioactive waste problems; different, and likely more tractable ones, but from an economic standpoint that's meaningless because we allow companies to build conventional plants as if the future waste problem will solve itself. The need to solve the problems from a plant you break ground on today is so far in the future it has no financial reality. So I suspect to get breeder technology off the ground, you'd ironically have to crack down on nuclear power in general.
It takes a lot more for a technology to be economically feasible than for it to be physically possible. A lot depends on the cost of the alternatives. As long as fossil fuel companies are allowed to externalize their costs on the scale that they do, and conventional nuclear power is allowed to ignore the future costs their plants will incur, advances in novel nuclear technologies are bound to occur at a snail's pace.
You can imagine a future society running on thorium fuel cycle nuclear plants, it isn't hard to do, and that future can look reasonably good. But imagining something being done is a lot different than knowing how to get it done. You've got to convince people to spend money on stuff that costs more in the short- to mid-term.
Because hurricanes generate forces completely beyond the comprehension of engineers.