Our devs would write a java app and it would require it's own server but it would use maybe 20% if not less of the resources.
This is the part I don't get, that is left out of the answers above (the migration issue makes sense independently, though!)
My question is simple: how on Earth do you write an app that "would require its own server" but only use 10 or 20 percent of the machine's resources? I Just Don't Get It when you say an app would "require its own server" but not max out the server's resources.
Where is the "requirement" coming from, if it's not a resource utilization requirement?
Just being highly adaptable to the environment is our strongest suit
Except we weren't particularly adaptable to our environment until less than ten thousand years ago, when we invented cities.
Yet we (or our non-homo-sapiens ancestors) had been using tools and fire for hundreds of thousands of years before that.
So clearly we had sufficient intelligence to (as the GP says) teach kids to build fires without showing the least scintilla of the kind of intelligence that writes operas, solves equations or builds space craft. Lots of creatures use tools. None of them come close to anything like specifically human intelligence.
So fire use and tool making are clearly not sufficiently interesting for evolution to work strongly on directly, or we would have seen something more interesting happen in the hundreds of thousands of years preceding the invention of agriculture and cities (or even the neolithic revolution or whatever it's called, which preceded cities by some tens of thousands of years.)
Or we would have seen the same selection effects at work on other tool-using species. Hasn't happened, and while you can make up reasons for this the most plausible explanation, to me, is that it hasn't because there is simply no great advantage in being a marginally better tool-user, which is all evolution can produce.
There is a huge gap between "teaching your kids to use fire" and "building a city" or "writing an epic poem". Evolution, without sexual selection, has no way of bridging that gap.
Indeed: the article doesn't mention anything at all about what is actually going on here. It just throws out a confusing buzzword. Junk science reporting at its worst.
The analogy you describe makes sense to me, but unlike the idiots who decided to call this a "time lens" I know that the term will do nothing but confuse the ignorant, despite the relative elegance of the analogy.
There has to be some significant and permanent effect on the frequency dispersion, though, just as there is a significant and permanent effect on the momentum dispersion of a pulse due to a "spacial lens" (a term which I'm sure has never been seen outside of discussions of this badly misnamed analogy). Liousville's Theorem insists upon it.
So while I guess it is possible that the centre frequency of the pulse isn't changed, there are going to be huge effects on the overall frequency structure due to the "temporal focusing".
So why not call this a "frequency lens" in analogy to the more ordinary "momentum lens"? It would capture the elegant analogy, but be far less misleading to the innocent laypeople who are now being blindsided by the dishonest and stupid terminology of "time lens".
Doesn't that mean they compressed the amount of time it took light to travel that distance, and therefore changed the speed of light? Or was this simply a compression of the distance between the photons?
Neither. They've created a frequency upshifter (possibly one with interesting spectral properties to preserve the integrity of the encoded information, although the New Sensationalist article is so completely incoherent it's impossible to say if they have actually achieved that result) and given it the most dishonest, misleading name possible to confuse people, as posters above have noted, to grab attention.
They've got attention, but they haven't conveyed any information.
Here's a question that's irrelevant to your comment but relevant to the article, asked because you seem to know something about this stuff: do you have any idea what the units mean? They are given on the maps in the article as "ma^-1". a is the metric symbol for ares, the unit of area (usually encountered as the root of hectare) but meters per are doesn't make a lot of sense as a unit of thickness.
I'm presuming they are some subject-matter-specific unit (a practice I am strongly against, as they tend to insulate certain areas of science from others, making it harder for outsiders to gain a coherent view of things.)
Doesn't intelligence make us humans much more fit to our environment?
I'm not sure which is funnier, your comment or that fact that someone modded you insightful.
The specific kind of intelligence found in modern humans--the kind that writes operas and builds space craft and creates the general theory of relativity--is a problem for evolutionary theory because it has no conceivable use in our ancient habitat, and there is no evidence that it was used for anything very interesting back then compared to the vast capacity that we actually know it has. It's as modern humans had the capacity to fly by flapping their arms, but had only been doing so for the past five or ten thousand years, staying Earthbound for the previous millennia.
Human intelligence has the capacity to do things incredibly well that no other organism has the capacity to do at all, and which have no apparent benefit to stone age hunter-gatherers.
The current best theory, which is accessibly described in the book "The Red Queen" is that human intelligence is a peacock's tail: guys who were able to entertain women with humour, art, cleverness of various kinds were more likely to breed. The offspring of those couplings were more likely to appreciate each other's charms, producing a run-away selection effect of the kind that generates other bizarre and functionally useless features in a wide variety of species that have been subject to a similar process of sexual selection.
In the case of humans, because you can't appreciate intelligence without being intelligent yourself, women were dragged along by the same process as men, explaining why there are such tiny differences in male and female intellectual capabilities that you have to do incredibly precise laboratory measurements to see any distinction at all, and even then people will find reasonable grounds to argue about it.
So the question is, do these data agree with these models?
Probably not. Think about the meaning of the statement in the summary: "The maps also show surprising, extensive thinning in Antarctica, affecting the ice sheet far inland. "
This is something of a requirement in the rigidly formulaic coverage of any story touching on GCC: that scientists are SHOCKED, SHOCKED, I TELL YOU, that the world looks nothing like their models. The stories are always spun such that the message is "things are getting worse even faster than we thought!" rather than the equally reasonable, "We have no clue what's going on!"
The climate is not a one-dimensional system that can be characterized by a single number. The interpretation of these data to mean "things are getting worse" relies on the assumption that we understand pretty well what is going on, but only the rate is completely and utterly wrong. This interpretation is either disingenuous or stupid (or, most likely, both) on the part of its promoters.
Given clear and repeated evidence of our lack of understanding of the climate system (no surprise given how rudimentary and frequently unphysical our models are) the various claims to certainty that people make are increasingly implausible.
On the other hand, given how little we know about our climate, dumping gigatonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere is probably not such a hot idea either, particularly when the resources required to do that are in relatively short supply and result in huge amounts of money flowing to people who don't like us very much (Dick Cheney, for instance.)
When you are done, you might have a messy go-cart, but itâ(TM)ll sure as hell fly...ONCE.
I guess the last word got edited out.
I'm all for the least formal processes consistent with the production of reasonable quality software shipping on schedule using the resources you have available. But anyone who has had to maintain the code written by cowboys (which is what DTP's are) knows how much damage their unbridled attitude can do to a company.
The article acknowledges this at the end: DTPs are pretty boys. They make it all look so easy, because they can make excellent and refined judgments on the fly about what corners to cut and what bits are genuinely critical. But the reality is that anyone who thinks they are a DTP isn't one, and they'll cut too many corners, and produce something that is the equivalent of a go-cart that makes it through one race and then falls to bits, because duct tape just isn't that durable, and people who rely on it in production environments are dangerous idiots.
I was actually thinking of that guy in Colorado (Peilke?) who has long argued that global atmospheric heat content is what we should be talking about. A quick skim doesn't convince me the Essex et al paper is a joke, and an equally quick skim of the replies to it don't convince me the responders have even understood the fundamental physical basis for Essex et al's argument.
You are correct that heat is only one form of internal energy, although physicists have a slightly different take on the nature of heat than chemists, so I don't agree with your characterization of heat as strictly a type of energy transfer. So yes, by all means be pedantic and talk about "atmospheric internal energy". That is a physically meaningful quality, whereas neither you nor anyone else has suggested why taking any kind of average of dry-bulb temperatures is in any way physically interesting. And if it is not physically interesting, it is not climatologically interesting.
But hey, I'm only a physicist, not a climatologist, so clearly not qualified to talk about what is or is not physically meaningful. All I can say is that I still don't understand what anyone thinks they are doing with global average temperature, but whatever it is, it isn't physics.
Judging my scientific literacy based on the comments I make on/. would be a mistake: I try very hard to dumb down my presentation to bring it within reach of the average/. reader. I also try to mention (to the point of boring repetition) that I think global ocean heat content is an important signal in global climate change, and the evidence suggests that it is increasing.
If you value ecosystems' stability, you should be fighting the weed tooth and nail because to allow it to expand will quite possibly result in a violent change to the ecosystem that is bad for us
I quite agree with this, and I think your response to my remarks is cogent. I was objecting to the almost mystical invocation of "balance" as a seemingly sacred property of ecosystems, whereas it really is nothing but a crude pragmatic concern over human economic interests.
As a human with economic interests I'm all for having crude pragmatic concerns with them, but I'm not in favour of dressing up those crude pragmatic concerns in the cloak of "ecosystem balance" as if that was somehow a categorical good on all timescales.
There is resistance to the change because of 'menus are the way we are used to doing things' not necessarily the way things should be done.
Menus are 'intuitive' precisely because they are the way we are used to doing things. They are a UI metaphor that has been around for a generation. I can make an argument for all kinds of ahistorical "better" ways of doing things in engineering, but usability necessarily studies things in the actual context of real users.
So when you say, "the way things should be done" you have to specify a context for your statement to be meaningful, and in the context of the real world we actually live in menus are the way things should be done if you value usability by actual users who are alive today, not theoretical users in some alternative universe where the menu was never invented.
I'm willing to bet there is objective research behind the ribbon, but that it shows nothing like a factor of two usability improvement over menus, however you want to measure usability (speed of discovering new features, speed of using known ones, etc.)
I wish someone would tell me how you compute the mean temperature of a composite substance like the atmosphere.
Global atmospheric heat content is meaningful. Global mean temperature is not. Unless someone would care to explain how you actually compute it in a physically meaningful way?
Just don't try introducing ANOTHER alien species to try and achieve balance, it will just lead to other problems that disturb the ecosystem
I'm not sure what this "balance" thing is that people keep on talking about. It's as if they believe that ecosystems without humans are in some kind of stable equilibrium, which is bizarre and counter-factual. Not only do new species show up now and then without human intervention, environmental conditions change, and species-interactions occur, that prevent anything remotely resembling stability beyond the very basic level required for the moderately long-term persistance of life.
It is certainly the case that any analysis of ecosystems that assumes general equilibrium as a starting point is going to miss almost everything important, like the pre-Darwinian gradualists who didn't understand that sudden, violent change was an important driver of geologic history.
From a human, economic, point of view this weed is a pain. From nature's point of view--assuming it had one--this weed is a success, and the more rapidly it extends its range the more successful it will be. If you value ecosystemic "balance" then you should be rooting for the weed (as it were) because the sooner humans stop interfering with its spread the sooner a new quasi-equilibrium will be established. If, on the other hand, you are simply a conservative, and value the world as it is because that is the world you know, you should say so and argue on that basis, and not impute your conservative beliefs to some equilibrium principle that is false to fact.
The other collaborations simply stopped once there was a winner.
If you look at the leaderboard you'll see that the performance of teams drops off dramatically, so that by number 19 you're already down to 9% improvement. To use your Olympic analogy, it's like 20 people running the 100 m and two of them coming in over a second behind the leader. It's remarkably difficult to find full reports of sprint times--including the losers--but given there's about a second between men's and women's times in the 100 m it seems unlikely that the slowest men are routinely that slow.
The dispersion of results after so many years of hard work remains extremely high. Thus the observation that most collaborations are not effective.
Basically prize systems benefit from people's inability to accurately assess their real chances of winning - or put another way, prize systems free ride off of people's self-delusion.
Pretty much. I had a look at the data early on, verified that by a tiny bit of cleverness I could hit the existing performance mark with far less iron than I'm sure NetFlix throws at the problem, recognized that getting improvements over that were going to take huge efforts in time and computing resources given the structure of the data, looked at what the other teams were doing--which was running hundreds of different algorithms and merging the results, validating my judgement on the difficulty of the problem--and decided the scope of the problem was far bigger than the resources I had available.
Anyone with a reasonable level of algorithmic experience on large numerical datasets would have made the same judgement, leaving only two kinds of people in the competition: the ones with huge corporate or university resources available to them, or the ones who had no real clue how hard the problem actually was. Sometimes the latter were able to collaborate with the former, which was probably useful. Every team needs its deluded optimists.
Also, I wonder how well these systems will handle contextual clues that people pick up on automatically?
"Contextual clues" like a dark-skinned guy in London rushing to catch the Tube wearing a ski jacket on a warmish day?
Those are the kind of "contextual clues" that people use all the time to make lethal misjudgements, and in the case at hand resulted in a completely innocent Brazilian who was legally in Britain going legally about his legal business being murdered by police.
Given how badly humans are known empirically to suck at making these kinds of judgments only an arrogant idiot would think of programming a machine to emulate us. But of course, arrogant idiots are incapable of adjusting their beliefs in response to empirical data, so they probably aren't even aware of how badly they suck at this.
Also according to the article, they ran it against 10 friends who they know to be gay but who aren't "out" on Facebook. It hit 100%.
Which it would do if it simply tagged every person as gay.
Seriously, this is the lamest claim I've ever seen. These guys clearly have zero clue as to how to validate unsupervised learning algorithms. The words "Matthews Coefficient" appears nowhere in the article, for a start.
Their claims are not implausible, but the economic value of their work is in their marketing, not in their statistical smarts. They haven't done even the most rudimentary validation, and as someone who has spent a lot of time professionally on classification problems I can say with fairly high reliability that they have no clue what they're doing.
Unfortunately, having a clue is hazardous to your success in this kind of enterprise, because the valid methods may not support the right stereotypes.
middle management will think twice about being the one to tell company executives, uhh, that person was fired last month.
Sorry, why do you believe that, exactly?
You must be assuming that people communicate with each other, or have memories longer than ten seconds, or something. It's true that some people do. Middle managers do not.
Nothing you can do will ever prevent you from being fired. Everyone should always be in the job market, with an up-to-date resume' and at least some awareness of where the good positions are, so when, not if, you get summarily fired/downsized/laid-off/outsourced you will be psychologically ready to hit the ground running.
The president of the company has personally told me on several occasions that he views me as a very valuable employee. That I have a bright future there and that he would rather not ever see me go.
Translation: we want to make you feel valued rather than pay you more, and are preparing to guilt the hell out of you when you realize how much you're worth and get a better offer somewhere else.
I absolutely hate it when the bosses tell me how valuable I am, because it is utterly meaningless bullshit unless it comes in the form of increased pay or increased vacation or other tangibles--being sent on a course I'm interested in, etc. Words from the mouth of a human being are worth nothing, and they'll still push you over the side in a moment when it happens to appear convenient for them to do so.
Great, now my manager knows I'm getting projects done and knows what I'm currently working on,
Why do you think that? I've rarely had a conversation with a manager that has actually changed their state of knowledge. Just because you've had a conversation with your manager doesn't mean your manager has had a conversation with you.
Furthermore, your manager's statement that he needs $otherModule is simply because he just got off the phone with someone who mentioned it, not because there is any actual business urgency.
You're touchingly naive about what is going on, and maybe in your small company you've got good people, but in any large organization you are necessarily dealing with mediocrities who have no interest in what you are doing and no clue what is important.
. Companies will retain workers that are valuable, regardless of where they're from.
Sure they will--just look at what Circuit City did. No company would ever lay off its most valuable, experienced workers in a vain attempt to shore up the bottom line.
Workers need to get with the program: all companies everywhere treat you like a resource that is disposable at the first whim of a PHB. Workers should therefore treat employment as nothing but a long-term consulting gig and always be on the lookout for the next one, and take it the moment there is a compelling reason to do so, regardless of any feelings of loyalty the PHBs might try to instill in their more manipulative moments.
So it's better to lift a lighter weight more often, than a heavier one just a couple of times.
People differ. I've had more gains from "one max rep" style workouts (where you start at the heaviest weight you can do a single rep with and work down) than anything else. Anyone who believes there is one single optimal workout for all people is ignorant of the real, empirical variation between individuals and not qualified to give workout advice.
Like everything else, it probably varies with person. My strength has increased about 50% in the past nine months (check out the Big Five workout and the book "Body By Science"--best workout I've ever used.) but my bulk has hardly increased at all--I'm a hard gainer.
This is also true of the brain, as anyone who has studied anything about strokes in the past 20 years (since the advent of CT) has known: some people have highly plastic neurological function, so the destruction of some areas does not necessarily permanently decrease the function that those areas nominally supply.
Only idiots who believe their grade-school view of the brain implicitly are surprised by any of this.
Slashdot Mirror
Our devs would write a java app and it would require it's own server but it would use maybe 20% if not less of the resources.
This is the part I don't get, that is left out of the answers above (the migration issue makes sense independently, though!)
My question is simple: how on Earth do you write an app that "would require its own server" but only use 10 or 20 percent of the machine's resources? I Just Don't Get It when you say an app would "require its own server" but not max out the server's resources.
Where is the "requirement" coming from, if it's not a resource utilization requirement?
Just being highly adaptable to the environment is our strongest suit
Except we weren't particularly adaptable to our environment until less than ten thousand years ago, when we invented cities.
Yet we (or our non-homo-sapiens ancestors) had been using tools and fire for hundreds of thousands of years before that.
So clearly we had sufficient intelligence to (as the GP says) teach kids to build fires without showing the least scintilla of the kind of intelligence that writes operas, solves equations or builds space craft. Lots of creatures use tools. None of them come close to anything like specifically human intelligence.
So fire use and tool making are clearly not sufficiently interesting for evolution to work strongly on directly, or we would have seen something more interesting happen in the hundreds of thousands of years preceding the invention of agriculture and cities (or even the neolithic revolution or whatever it's called, which preceded cities by some tens of thousands of years.)
Or we would have seen the same selection effects at work on other tool-using species. Hasn't happened, and while you can make up reasons for this the most plausible explanation, to me, is that it hasn't because there is simply no great advantage in being a marginally better tool-user, which is all evolution can produce.
There is a huge gap between "teaching your kids to use fire" and "building a city" or "writing an epic poem". Evolution, without sexual selection, has no way of bridging that gap.
The article doesn't really mention it
Indeed: the article doesn't mention anything at all about what is actually going on here. It just throws out a confusing buzzword. Junk science reporting at its worst.
The analogy you describe makes sense to me, but unlike the idiots who decided to call this a "time lens" I know that the term will do nothing but confuse the ignorant, despite the relative elegance of the analogy.
There has to be some significant and permanent effect on the frequency dispersion, though, just as there is a significant and permanent effect on the momentum dispersion of a pulse due to a "spacial lens" (a term which I'm sure has never been seen outside of discussions of this badly misnamed analogy). Liousville's Theorem insists upon it.
So while I guess it is possible that the centre frequency of the pulse isn't changed, there are going to be huge effects on the overall frequency structure due to the "temporal focusing".
So why not call this a "frequency lens" in analogy to the more ordinary "momentum lens"? It would capture the elegant analogy, but be far less misleading to the innocent laypeople who are now being blindsided by the dishonest and stupid terminology of "time lens".
Doesn't that mean they compressed the amount of time it took light to travel that distance, and therefore changed the speed of light? Or was this simply a compression of the distance between the photons?
Neither. They've created a frequency upshifter (possibly one with interesting spectral properties to preserve the integrity of the encoded information, although the New Sensationalist article is so completely incoherent it's impossible to say if they have actually achieved that result) and given it the most dishonest, misleading name possible to confuse people, as posters above have noted, to grab attention.
They've got attention, but they haven't conveyed any information.
Thanks! (likewise to the AC)
Here's a question that's irrelevant to your comment but relevant to the article, asked because you seem to know something about this stuff: do you have any idea what the units mean? They are given on the maps in the article as "ma^-1". a is the metric symbol for ares, the unit of area (usually encountered as the root of hectare) but meters per are doesn't make a lot of sense as a unit of thickness.
I'm presuming they are some subject-matter-specific unit (a practice I am strongly against, as they tend to insulate certain areas of science from others, making it harder for outsiders to gain a coherent view of things.)
Doesn't intelligence make us humans much more fit to our environment?
I'm not sure which is funnier, your comment or that fact that someone modded you insightful.
The specific kind of intelligence found in modern humans--the kind that writes operas and builds space craft and creates the general theory of relativity--is a problem for evolutionary theory because it has no conceivable use in our ancient habitat, and there is no evidence that it was used for anything very interesting back then compared to the vast capacity that we actually know it has. It's as modern humans had the capacity to fly by flapping their arms, but had only been doing so for the past five or ten thousand years, staying Earthbound for the previous millennia.
Human intelligence has the capacity to do things incredibly well that no other organism has the capacity to do at all, and which have no apparent benefit to stone age hunter-gatherers.
The current best theory, which is accessibly described in the book "The Red Queen" is that human intelligence is a peacock's tail: guys who were able to entertain women with humour, art, cleverness of various kinds were more likely to breed. The offspring of those couplings were more likely to appreciate each other's charms, producing a run-away selection effect of the kind that generates other bizarre and functionally useless features in a wide variety of species that have been subject to a similar process of sexual selection.
In the case of humans, because you can't appreciate intelligence without being intelligent yourself, women were dragged along by the same process as men, explaining why there are such tiny differences in male and female intellectual capabilities that you have to do incredibly precise laboratory measurements to see any distinction at all, and even then people will find reasonable grounds to argue about it.
So the question is, do these data agree with these models?
Probably not. Think about the meaning of the statement in the summary: "The maps also show surprising, extensive thinning in Antarctica, affecting the ice sheet far inland. "
This is something of a requirement in the rigidly formulaic coverage of any story touching on GCC: that scientists are SHOCKED, SHOCKED, I TELL YOU, that the world looks nothing like their models. The stories are always spun such that the message is "things are getting worse even faster than we thought!" rather than the equally reasonable, "We have no clue what's going on!"
The climate is not a one-dimensional system that can be characterized by a single number. The interpretation of these data to mean "things are getting worse" relies on the assumption that we understand pretty well what is going on, but only the rate is completely and utterly wrong. This interpretation is either disingenuous or stupid (or, most likely, both) on the part of its promoters.
Given clear and repeated evidence of our lack of understanding of the climate system (no surprise given how rudimentary and frequently unphysical our models are) the various claims to certainty that people make are increasingly implausible.
On the other hand, given how little we know about our climate, dumping gigatonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere is probably not such a hot idea either, particularly when the resources required to do that are in relatively short supply and result in huge amounts of money flowing to people who don't like us very much (Dick Cheney, for instance.)
The killer (literally) quote for me was:
When you are done, you might have a messy go-cart, but itâ(TM)ll sure as hell fly. ..ONCE.
I guess the last word got edited out.
I'm all for the least formal processes consistent with the production of reasonable quality software shipping on schedule using the resources you have available. But anyone who has had to maintain the code written by cowboys (which is what DTP's are) knows how much damage their unbridled attitude can do to a company.
The article acknowledges this at the end: DTPs are pretty boys. They make it all look so easy, because they can make excellent and refined judgments on the fly about what corners to cut and what bits are genuinely critical. But the reality is that anyone who thinks they are a DTP isn't one, and they'll cut too many corners, and produce something that is the equivalent of a go-cart that makes it through one race and then falls to bits, because duct tape just isn't that durable, and people who rely on it in production environments are dangerous idiots.
I was actually thinking of that guy in Colorado (Peilke?) who has long argued that global atmospheric heat content is what we should be talking about. A quick skim doesn't convince me the Essex et al paper is a joke, and an equally quick skim of the replies to it don't convince me the responders have even understood the fundamental physical basis for Essex et al's argument.
You are correct that heat is only one form of internal energy, although physicists have a slightly different take on the nature of heat than chemists, so I don't agree with your characterization of heat as strictly a type of energy transfer. So yes, by all means be pedantic and talk about "atmospheric internal energy". That is a physically meaningful quality, whereas neither you nor anyone else has suggested why taking any kind of average of dry-bulb temperatures is in any way physically interesting. And if it is not physically interesting, it is not climatologically interesting.
But hey, I'm only a physicist, not a climatologist, so clearly not qualified to talk about what is or is not physically meaningful. All I can say is that I still don't understand what anyone thinks they are doing with global average temperature, but whatever it is, it isn't physics.
Judging my scientific literacy based on the comments I make on /. would be a mistake: I try very hard to dumb down my presentation to bring it within reach of the average /. reader. I also try to mention (to the point of boring repetition) that I think global ocean heat content is an important signal in global climate change, and the evidence suggests that it is increasing.
If you value ecosystems' stability, you should be fighting the weed tooth and nail because to allow it to expand will quite possibly result in a violent change to the ecosystem that is bad for us
I quite agree with this, and I think your response to my remarks is cogent. I was objecting to the almost mystical invocation of "balance" as a seemingly sacred property of ecosystems, whereas it really is nothing but a crude pragmatic concern over human economic interests.
As a human with economic interests I'm all for having crude pragmatic concerns with them, but I'm not in favour of dressing up those crude pragmatic concerns in the cloak of "ecosystem balance" as if that was somehow a categorical good on all timescales.
There is resistance to the change because of 'menus are the way we are used to doing things' not necessarily the way things should be done.
Menus are 'intuitive' precisely because they are the way we are used to doing things. They are a UI metaphor that has been around for a generation. I can make an argument for all kinds of ahistorical "better" ways of doing things in engineering, but usability necessarily studies things in the actual context of real users.
So when you say, "the way things should be done" you have to specify a context for your statement to be meaningful, and in the context of the real world we actually live in menus are the way things should be done if you value usability by actual users who are alive today, not theoretical users in some alternative universe where the menu was never invented.
I'm willing to bet there is objective research behind the ribbon, but that it shows nothing like a factor of two usability improvement over menus, however you want to measure usability (speed of discovering new features, speed of using known ones, etc.)
global mean temperatures
I wish someone would tell me how you compute the mean temperature of a composite substance like the atmosphere.
Global atmospheric heat content is meaningful. Global mean temperature is not. Unless someone would care to explain how you actually compute it in a physically meaningful way?
Just don't try introducing ANOTHER alien species to try and achieve balance, it will just lead to other problems that disturb the ecosystem
I'm not sure what this "balance" thing is that people keep on talking about. It's as if they believe that ecosystems without humans are in some kind of stable equilibrium, which is bizarre and counter-factual. Not only do new species show up now and then without human intervention, environmental conditions change, and species-interactions occur, that prevent anything remotely resembling stability beyond the very basic level required for the moderately long-term persistance of life.
It is certainly the case that any analysis of ecosystems that assumes general equilibrium as a starting point is going to miss almost everything important, like the pre-Darwinian gradualists who didn't understand that sudden, violent change was an important driver of geologic history.
From a human, economic, point of view this weed is a pain. From nature's point of view--assuming it had one--this weed is a success, and the more rapidly it extends its range the more successful it will be. If you value ecosystemic "balance" then you should be rooting for the weed (as it were) because the sooner humans stop interfering with its spread the sooner a new quasi-equilibrium will be established. If, on the other hand, you are simply a conservative, and value the world as it is because that is the world you know, you should say so and argue on that basis, and not impute your conservative beliefs to some equilibrium principle that is false to fact.
Must be a management problem...
Which management will investigate and decide that the only solution to is... more management.
The other collaborations simply stopped once there was a winner.
If you look at the leaderboard you'll see that the performance of teams drops off dramatically, so that by number 19 you're already down to 9% improvement. To use your Olympic analogy, it's like 20 people running the 100 m and two of them coming in over a second behind the leader. It's remarkably difficult to find full reports of sprint times--including the losers--but given there's about a second between men's and women's times in the 100 m it seems unlikely that the slowest men are routinely that slow.
The dispersion of results after so many years of hard work remains extremely high. Thus the observation that most collaborations are not effective.
Basically prize systems benefit from people's inability to accurately assess their real chances of winning - or put another way, prize systems free ride off of people's self-delusion.
Pretty much. I had a look at the data early on, verified that by a tiny bit of cleverness I could hit the existing performance mark with far less iron than I'm sure NetFlix throws at the problem, recognized that getting improvements over that were going to take huge efforts in time and computing resources given the structure of the data, looked at what the other teams were doing--which was running hundreds of different algorithms and merging the results, validating my judgement on the difficulty of the problem--and decided the scope of the problem was far bigger than the resources I had available.
Anyone with a reasonable level of algorithmic experience on large numerical datasets would have made the same judgement, leaving only two kinds of people in the competition: the ones with huge corporate or university resources available to them, or the ones who had no real clue how hard the problem actually was. Sometimes the latter were able to collaborate with the former, which was probably useful. Every team needs its deluded optimists.
Also, I wonder how well these systems will handle contextual clues that people pick up on automatically?
"Contextual clues" like a dark-skinned guy in London rushing to catch the Tube wearing a ski jacket on a warmish day?
Those are the kind of "contextual clues" that people use all the time to make lethal misjudgements, and in the case at hand resulted in a completely innocent Brazilian who was legally in Britain going legally about his legal business being murdered by police.
Given how badly humans are known empirically to suck at making these kinds of judgments only an arrogant idiot would think of programming a machine to emulate us. But of course, arrogant idiots are incapable of adjusting their beliefs in response to empirical data, so they probably aren't even aware of how badly they suck at this.
Also according to the article, they ran it against 10 friends who they know to be gay but who aren't "out" on Facebook. It hit 100%.
Which it would do if it simply tagged every person as gay.
Seriously, this is the lamest claim I've ever seen. These guys clearly have zero clue as to how to validate unsupervised learning algorithms. The words "Matthews Coefficient" appears nowhere in the article, for a start.
Their claims are not implausible, but the economic value of their work is in their marketing, not in their statistical smarts. They haven't done even the most rudimentary validation, and as someone who has spent a lot of time professionally on classification problems I can say with fairly high reliability that they have no clue what they're doing.
Unfortunately, having a clue is hazardous to your success in this kind of enterprise, because the valid methods may not support the right stereotypes.
middle management will think twice about being the one to tell company executives, uhh, that person was fired last month.
Sorry, why do you believe that, exactly?
You must be assuming that people communicate with each other, or have memories longer than ten seconds, or something. It's true that some people do. Middle managers do not.
Nothing you can do will ever prevent you from being fired. Everyone should always be in the job market, with an up-to-date resume' and at least some awareness of where the good positions are, so when, not if, you get summarily fired/downsized/laid-off/outsourced you will be psychologically ready to hit the ground running.
The president of the company has personally told me on several occasions that he views me as a very valuable employee. That I have a bright future there and that he would rather not ever see me go.
Translation: we want to make you feel valued rather than pay you more, and are preparing to guilt the hell out of you when you realize how much you're worth and get a better offer somewhere else.
I absolutely hate it when the bosses tell me how valuable I am, because it is utterly meaningless bullshit unless it comes in the form of increased pay or increased vacation or other tangibles--being sent on a course I'm interested in, etc. Words from the mouth of a human being are worth nothing, and they'll still push you over the side in a moment when it happens to appear convenient for them to do so.
Great, now my manager knows I'm getting projects done and knows what I'm currently working on,
Why do you think that? I've rarely had a conversation with a manager that has actually changed their state of knowledge. Just because you've had a conversation with your manager doesn't mean your manager has had a conversation with you.
Furthermore, your manager's statement that he needs $otherModule is simply because he just got off the phone with someone who mentioned it, not because there is any actual business urgency.
You're touchingly naive about what is going on, and maybe in your small company you've got good people, but in any large organization you are necessarily dealing with mediocrities who have no interest in what you are doing and no clue what is important.
. Companies will retain workers that are valuable, regardless of where they're from.
Sure they will--just look at what Circuit City did. No company would ever lay off its most valuable, experienced workers in a vain attempt to shore up the bottom line.
Workers need to get with the program: all companies everywhere treat you like a resource that is disposable at the first whim of a PHB. Workers should therefore treat employment as nothing but a long-term consulting gig and always be on the lookout for the next one, and take it the moment there is a compelling reason to do so, regardless of any feelings of loyalty the PHBs might try to instill in their more manipulative moments.
So it's better to lift a lighter weight more often, than a heavier one just a couple of times.
People differ. I've had more gains from "one max rep" style workouts (where you start at the heaviest weight you can do a single rep with and work down) than anything else. Anyone who believes there is one single optimal workout for all people is ignorant of the real, empirical variation between individuals and not qualified to give workout advice.
Anyone know the scoop on muscle cells?
Like everything else, it probably varies with person. My strength has increased about 50% in the past nine months (check out the Big Five workout and the book "Body By Science"--best workout I've ever used.) but my bulk has hardly increased at all--I'm a hard gainer.
This is also true of the brain, as anyone who has studied anything about strokes in the past 20 years (since the advent of CT) has known: some people have highly plastic neurological function, so the destruction of some areas does not necessarily permanently decrease the function that those areas nominally supply.
Only idiots who believe their grade-school view of the brain implicitly are surprised by any of this.