I was going to be an actuary, but an actuary talked me out of it. She'd graduated from the same undergraduate university I went to a couple years before me and came back to talk to us about the job. I'd heard some rumblings that entry-level actuaries didn't enjoy their jobs very much, so after her presentation, during the refreshments, I asked her if she liked her job. She said that she didn't do a lot of statistics, which didn't really answer the question...but it did.
I eventually decided to go to grad school for statistics. The same week we found out that I'd been accepted at a school, my department also heard that she'd been accepted at another school to major in statistics. I had my answer, albeit a year or two later.
I don't know whatever became of her but she definitely changed my life with that one answer, and I remember that evening better than almost any other in college. I have absolutely no regrets about the career path I chose (I now work in statistics for the federal government, and I love my job).
Note to aspiring actuaries: I don't mean to be down on the career. As the parent pointed out, it's a great job, but it wasn't the one for me (or that woman). You should research your career path as much as you can and make a decision that's right for you. Remember there's no free lunch, either: people that retire at 50 probably had to work at an EA Games-like pace to get there.
Oh, I don't disagree with that. I'm just saying that the people who DO go off road or carry heavy loads or tow with them have a good reason for needing them, and they don't bother me. It's the people that slow down their SUV to go over a bump in the road that make me want to slap them...
Yep, and there are plenty of people that need an SUV for work or whatever. Most anti-SUV people I know don't have a problem with people that actually need something like that. The Chevy Suburban has existed since the 30s or something, LONG before the SUV moniker and hatred appeared, and they've sold models every year they made them.
I've heard that phones only update so often - they aren't continuously monitoring the strength of the signal, but instead check it a couple times a minute to save battery life. If you've moved since the last check, then the signal strength may have changed, and it updates when it goes to contact the tower to complete your call... Just a theory. IANAWE (wireless engineer).
I read an article a week or two ago talking about how people are committing fraud by giving their keys to someone else, who takes the car, dumps it somewhere, and torches it. The article mentioned that a common way to catch these incidents is to ask where the other key is. I think it was in the AAA magazine that I saw it.
I understand the insurance company's side of it in that case, and I wonder if this situation is just one that got "caught" in the crossfire - it was a legitimate claim but looked a LOT like the fraudulent ones.
I think we'll have more advanced technologies, sure. I just think this one technology won't come to pass. Human speech is far too varied, with far too many idiomatic expressions (well, in English at least), that a computer will never be able to figure it out.
For example, for a computer to grasp sarcasm, it'll have to understand emotions and rolled eyes and other visual cues. And even the bleeding-edge Star Trek android didn't grasp emotions (well, the one that did was insane). Yet there are plenty of people out there that don't get sarcasm now - and they have emotions.
How many times do even people misinterpret what is said? It happens all the time. Yet a computer is somehow going to do better than that? Also, people on Star Trek always talked perfectly (as another poster pointed out) - but in real life people stutter, mispronounce words, use incorrect words, get interrupted, toss in some "ums" and "ahs", etc.
I really think that people are underestimating the magnitude of the problem. It's not just speech recognition - it's emotion recognition and situational awareness as well. Sure computers will get more powerful, but to pull of Star Trek-style speech recognition, we'll need some damn impressive algorithms for them, and they'll probably require top of the line computers even then.
The computer in Star Trek (at least in the Next Generation) was WAY too smart. For it to do what it supposedly did in the show, it would have to be sitting there, monitoring the conversation all the time, and be totally able to understand the context of what was being said to know what to do. Not only when people directly asked the computer a question, but also when people wanted to converse with someone.
For example, how does the computer know that Picard wants to call Riker and isn't just talking about him? Oh and keep in mind the computer never misinterpreted something. In other examples, people would carry on intelligent conversations with the computer - all those holodeck scenes, Troi ordering chocolate, etc.
Star Trek-style of SR I think would be the holy grail and is probably always going to be out of reach. Barring some amazing breakthrough in AI algorithms, the computer power required just for the situations above would be incredible - and that's computer time that probably could be put to better use elsewhere, even if it was found to be possible.
I think the computer in the original Star Trek was more realistic - but even there the voice-recognition was far beyond what we're capable of today, as Microsoft has demonstrated so well. Plus all the blinkenlights that seemed to have no useful purpose were cool.;)
A friend of mine has that model and the picture is beautiful. He calls it "Mammoth."
Another benefit - the unit only weighs 99 lbs. So, while it's awkward, it's definitely moveable by two people. He and I carried it down the steps at his place.
Did you notice what site it's posted on? It's not on the AP, Reuters, Washington Post, Reuters, BBC, etc. It's a local TV news site. I'm not saying it's false, I'm saying "consider the source" before you fly off the handle.
But of course this is/. and we can't be bothered with getting the full story before we post our indignant comments...
Personally, I'm considering the source. The local stations here will do everything they can to sensationalize a story...I don't know why any other networks or affiliates would be any different. (I don't trust the news outlets much, but I trust local television stations FAR less.)
I wish my washer and dryer would IM me or text message me when the cycle is done. Although the dryer has a buzzer, it's in a back room behind my garage, so unless I happen to be in the kitchen or the garage, I never hear it. In fact, I have no idea what the buzzer on it sounds like. The washer doesn't have any sort of alarm, it just stops, so I have even less chance of knowing that it has finished, unless I time it.
I know the idea sounds silly...but it'd be great for a situation like mine (which, granted, is relatively rare).
I imagine it's similarly painful for experts in other fields to hear their field discussed by reporters.
I'm a statistician, and I can attest that is DEFINITELY the case for me. Few days go by that I don't see or hear bad statistics in papers, magazines, radio, or television. Informal internet polls get reported as fact (I'm looking at you, Popular Science)... few statistics give any sort of error margin, and even if they do, many times the person reporting the statistic doesn't understand the importance of the error margin (for example, the infamous boys are better at math than girls claim)... Yeah. Anyone with basic software can churn out a number and claim they have a good statistic, after they've (intentionally or unintentionally) biased their results.
I can't wait until we can start searching the tags - a search for "FUD" and "NOTFUD" will return the same results! Oh, and "STUPID" will be a REAL useful search.
Keep in mind your monitor at work is Dell corporate sales and support, not Dell home consumer sales and support. I suspect many of the problems with support are more of the home consumer end rather than corporate.
I've heard similar stories about Dell's service reputation declining - even PC World (biased as they are to the largest advertiser, which used to be Dell) knocked them down a notch on their annual survey a couple years back. (To keep everything "even" they knocked everyone else down a notch, too - but the fact that they went so far to lower the ranking of their biggest advertiser speaks volumes.)
The thing about reputations is that you can't build a good one overnight. And, it takes a lot less time to ruin a good reputation than it does to build one.
"Wow! 10 megahertz...now 4.77 megahertz...and back to 10!" Yeah. Hours of fun those were.
I guess there were some programs (mostly games?) that relied on the processor running at 4.77 megahertz. I do recall a few DOS-based games where you simply had to de-turbo to be able to play it. Sopwith comes to mind, though I'm not sure if it fell into that category.
I wonder if the RIAA has done any public image surveys since they decided to start terrorizing their consumers?
Why would they bother? The RIAA's customer is the music labels, and as long as the labels are happy, that's all that matters. And the labels are happy because they're making a ton of money off music despite what the RIAA is doing.
Thanks - that's the first real application I've heard of for this device. Why would I want this unit otherwise? To take a picture of a place means I'd already have to have been there once, right? Which means I can probably find it again, even without the picture. Unless they come preloaded with pictures, but that doesn't seem practical except for relatively small regions.
I was waiting for someone to rant about how they should be called the "Copyright Infringement Party", but no dice so far. The people that jump on that every time the issue comes up are probably off having a heart attack or something.
In other words, "Any small number becomes sufficiently large when multiplied by a large number."
It's easy to take the.2 watts or whatever and multiply it out to make it sound huge. Meanwhile, the number of computers running for people to simply read and post in this article on Slashdot is probably dwarfing that - but no one's complaining about that in this thread.
Slashdot Mirror
Young man...
There's no need to feel down!
I was going to be an actuary, but an actuary talked me out of it. She'd graduated from the same undergraduate university I went to a couple years before me and came back to talk to us about the job. I'd heard some rumblings that entry-level actuaries didn't enjoy their jobs very much, so after her presentation, during the refreshments, I asked her if she liked her job. She said that she didn't do a lot of statistics, which didn't really answer the question...but it did.
I eventually decided to go to grad school for statistics. The same week we found out that I'd been accepted at a school, my department also heard that she'd been accepted at another school to major in statistics. I had my answer, albeit a year or two later.
I don't know whatever became of her but she definitely changed my life with that one answer, and I remember that evening better than almost any other in college. I have absolutely no regrets about the career path I chose (I now work in statistics for the federal government, and I love my job).
Note to aspiring actuaries: I don't mean to be down on the career. As the parent pointed out, it's a great job, but it wasn't the one for me (or that woman). You should research your career path as much as you can and make a decision that's right for you. Remember there's no free lunch, either: people that retire at 50 probably had to work at an EA Games-like pace to get there.
Oh, I don't disagree with that. I'm just saying that the people who DO go off road or carry heavy loads or tow with them have a good reason for needing them, and they don't bother me. It's the people that slow down their SUV to go over a bump in the road that make me want to slap them...
Yep, and there are plenty of people that need an SUV for work or whatever. Most anti-SUV people I know don't have a problem with people that actually need something like that. The Chevy Suburban has existed since the 30s or something, LONG before the SUV moniker and hatred appeared, and they've sold models every year they made them.
I've heard that phones only update so often - they aren't continuously monitoring the strength of the signal, but instead check it a couple times a minute to save battery life. If you've moved since the last check, then the signal strength may have changed, and it updates when it goes to contact the tower to complete your call... Just a theory. IANAWE (wireless engineer).
I read an article a week or two ago talking about how people are committing fraud by giving their keys to someone else, who takes the car, dumps it somewhere, and torches it. The article mentioned that a common way to catch these incidents is to ask where the other key is. I think it was in the AAA magazine that I saw it.
I understand the insurance company's side of it in that case, and I wonder if this situation is just one that got "caught" in the crossfire - it was a legitimate claim but looked a LOT like the fraudulent ones.
Fascinating post - thank you.
I think we'll have more advanced technologies, sure. I just think this one technology won't come to pass. Human speech is far too varied, with far too many idiomatic expressions (well, in English at least), that a computer will never be able to figure it out.
For example, for a computer to grasp sarcasm, it'll have to understand emotions and rolled eyes and other visual cues. And even the bleeding-edge Star Trek android didn't grasp emotions (well, the one that did was insane). Yet there are plenty of people out there that don't get sarcasm now - and they have emotions.
How many times do even people misinterpret what is said? It happens all the time. Yet a computer is somehow going to do better than that? Also, people on Star Trek always talked perfectly (as another poster pointed out) - but in real life people stutter, mispronounce words, use incorrect words, get interrupted, toss in some "ums" and "ahs", etc.
I really think that people are underestimating the magnitude of the problem. It's not just speech recognition - it's emotion recognition and situational awareness as well. Sure computers will get more powerful, but to pull of Star Trek-style speech recognition, we'll need some damn impressive algorithms for them, and they'll probably require top of the line computers even then.
The computer in Star Trek (at least in the Next Generation) was WAY too smart. For it to do what it supposedly did in the show, it would have to be sitting there, monitoring the conversation all the time, and be totally able to understand the context of what was being said to know what to do. Not only when people directly asked the computer a question, but also when people wanted to converse with someone.
;)
For example, how does the computer know that Picard wants to call Riker and isn't just talking about him? Oh and keep in mind the computer never misinterpreted something. In other examples, people would carry on intelligent conversations with the computer - all those holodeck scenes, Troi ordering chocolate, etc.
Star Trek-style of SR I think would be the holy grail and is probably always going to be out of reach. Barring some amazing breakthrough in AI algorithms, the computer power required just for the situations above would be incredible - and that's computer time that probably could be put to better use elsewhere, even if it was found to be possible.
I think the computer in the original Star Trek was more realistic - but even there the voice-recognition was far beyond what we're capable of today, as Microsoft has demonstrated so well. Plus all the blinkenlights that seemed to have no useful purpose were cool.
A friend of mine has that model and the picture is beautiful. He calls it "Mammoth."
Another benefit - the unit only weighs 99 lbs. So, while it's awkward, it's definitely moveable by two people. He and I carried it down the steps at his place.
Did you notice what site it's posted on? It's not on the AP, Reuters, Washington Post, Reuters, BBC, etc. It's a local TV news site. I'm not saying it's false, I'm saying "consider the source" before you fly off the handle.
/. and we can't be bothered with getting the full story before we post our indignant comments...
But of course this is
Personally, I'm considering the source. The local stations here will do everything they can to sensationalize a story...I don't know why any other networks or affiliates would be any different. (I don't trust the news outlets much, but I trust local television stations FAR less.)
I wish my washer and dryer would IM me or text message me when the cycle is done. Although the dryer has a buzzer, it's in a back room behind my garage, so unless I happen to be in the kitchen or the garage, I never hear it. In fact, I have no idea what the buzzer on it sounds like. The washer doesn't have any sort of alarm, it just stops, so I have even less chance of knowing that it has finished, unless I time it.
I know the idea sounds silly...but it'd be great for a situation like mine (which, granted, is relatively rare).
I imagine it's similarly painful for experts in other fields to hear their field discussed by reporters.
I'm a statistician, and I can attest that is DEFINITELY the case for me. Few days go by that I don't see or hear bad statistics in papers, magazines, radio, or television. Informal internet polls get reported as fact (I'm looking at you, Popular Science)... few statistics give any sort of error margin, and even if they do, many times the person reporting the statistic doesn't understand the importance of the error margin (for example, the infamous boys are better at math than girls claim)... Yeah. Anyone with basic software can churn out a number and claim they have a good statistic, after they've (intentionally or unintentionally) biased their results.
Great site, with some cool pictures of their own.
I can't wait until we can start searching the tags - a search for "FUD" and "NOTFUD" will return the same results! Oh, and "STUPID" will be a REAL useful search.
Keep in mind your monitor at work is Dell corporate sales and support, not Dell home consumer sales and support. I suspect many of the problems with support are more of the home consumer end rather than corporate.
I've heard similar stories about Dell's service reputation declining - even PC World (biased as they are to the largest advertiser, which used to be Dell) knocked them down a notch on their annual survey a couple years back. (To keep everything "even" they knocked everyone else down a notch, too - but the fact that they went so far to lower the ranking of their biggest advertiser speaks volumes.)
The thing about reputations is that you can't build a good one overnight. And, it takes a lot less time to ruin a good reputation than it does to build one.
"Wow! 10 megahertz...now 4.77 megahertz...and back to 10!" Yeah. Hours of fun those were.
I guess there were some programs (mostly games?) that relied on the processor running at 4.77 megahertz. I do recall a few DOS-based games where you simply had to de-turbo to be able to play it. Sopwith comes to mind, though I'm not sure if it fell into that category.
When I had Cox internet service, I was having problems with my connection one day, so I called them. Here's a line from the support person:
"Yes, we are showing an outage in your area, and we're working on it. Now...let's check your settings..."
I wonder if the RIAA has done any public image surveys since they decided to start terrorizing their consumers?
Why would they bother? The RIAA's customer is the music labels, and as long as the labels are happy, that's all that matters. And the labels are happy because they're making a ton of money off music despite what the RIAA is doing.
Thanks - that's the first real application I've heard of for this device. Why would I want this unit otherwise? To take a picture of a place means I'd already have to have been there once, right? Which means I can probably find it again, even without the picture. Unless they come preloaded with pictures, but that doesn't seem practical except for relatively small regions.
I was waiting for someone to rant about how they should be called the "Copyright Infringement Party", but no dice so far. The people that jump on that every time the issue comes up are probably off having a heart attack or something.
In other words, "Any small number becomes sufficiently large when multiplied by a large number."
.2 watts or whatever and multiply it out to make it sound huge. Meanwhile, the number of computers running for people to simply read and post in this article on Slashdot is probably dwarfing that - but no one's complaining about that in this thread.
It's easy to take the
Isn't that what FTP is for? The Food Transfer Protocol?
From that page:
"Note: The Garber Facility is no longer open for public tours"