I'm not a great coder but good enough to get done what clients want done. If I'm not sure or don't think I can do it, I tell them. I think they appreciate the honesty. I don't work in a tech-hub, startups or anything like that so I'm not under the same expectations and pressures that others may be.
Show me where people are staving in this country. And, no, not 'food challenged' or whatever they are calling it when you don't get three meals a day, every day.
Before you dismiss food insecurity, please read this research paper on its "particularly toxic" effects: https://jamanetwork.com/journa... This should make the connection between poverty and poor academic performance clear enough to you.
Don't most people just pay for their info to be anonymised? Companies, organisations, companies, etc. should have to declare who they are and usually do on their website anyway.
...because he's an IT billionaire, we're supposed to unquestioningly accept him as an authority in education? Corporations and schools are organisations that are about as different from each other as you can get. Corporate know-how will get you into deep trouble in education.
There's a long history of education reform and enhancement programmes that have failed. He could've asked about those and why they failed before trying to reinvent the wheel and do it all over again. He could've consulted with the latest research in the learning sciences and education to find out what interventions have been consistently successful.
Finally, Gates could've looked into how the US education system is actually one of the best in the world and that, if you control for poverty, performs as well as any of the other top countries. The problem is that education is uneven and variable mostly due to poverty, poor investment (e.g. spending billions on ICT infrastructure, classroom gadgets, and ubiquitous and inappropriate computer graded tests), and degrading and vilifying the teaching profession (ever since the Reagan era "Nation at Risk" report). Kids in middle-class neighbourhoods get great education, those in poorer ones get terrible education. When you consider that 40% of Americans live in poverty and the USA has the highest rates of child poverty in the developed world, it's not surprising that the overall performance of the US education system gets dragged down.
There's little room for improvement in middle-class schools. They're doing fine. If you want to push up national performance in education, it's more effective to target those living in poverty, because they have the most dramatic gains to be made. But that would mean helping poor people which isn't really a thing in US politics. They'd rather let poor people starve and fend for themselves (boot-straps mentality) and see their economy decline because of it: When people aren't earning good wages, they aren't spending it back into the economy or paying taxes to pay for things like healthcare and education.
Do electronic counter measures qualify as attacks, especially when the US military are flying war planes in sovereign Syrian airspace? Oh the US military are such poor, delicate victims of these evil Syrian radio waves. Why won't the Syrian military stop?
It's cheap and easy to run courses on theory: Large lectures, minimal formative assessment (feedback) if any, essay grading (by TAs, not tutors), and machine gradable tests. There's very little evidence of transfer of knowledge and skills acquired from this kind of education. In other words, students learn how to be students but not much else, e.g. student essays are typically unique genres of writing which aren't replicated anywhere else in professional or personal life. It's more like a right of passage than anything meaningful or useful.
Teaching/training students to actually be able to do more than write generically redundant essays and pass tests is more difficult and more involved. It also requires more individual attention from tutors/mentors, formative assessment, and assessments that call for involved expert judgement. Vocational training is typically more expensive and more highly skilled to provide and often higher quality than theoretical courses.
Also, not many people think of medicine, law, architecture, etc., as training. They may happen in universities and have all the prestige, but they're essentially advanced vocational training programmes.
...is to create a comprehensive network of electrically powered public transport infrastructure. Spain is already the country with the highest per capita number of high-speed rail Km's in the world, and most EU countries now have extensive electric rail networks. Diesel public transport, by comparison, is slow, heavy, unreliable, and expensive but even that's cheaper and cleaner than individuals driving themselves to work each day.
American-style suburbia, with its heavy reliance on individuals driving themselves to work, is one of the most inefficient and polluting urban planning models devised in recent history. It's also an obscene waste of people's time when they have to sit idling in traffic jams every day.
On the other hand, China is by far the most aggressive investor in renewable energy. India isn't dragging its feet either. The USA is getting left behind and falling even further behind with its current stable genius in the Whitehouse. Without a sensible, well-informed, coherent energy policy, guess who's heading for a 2nd world economy pretty soon?
A number of large universities, worldwide, have ploughed $millions into research on learning analytics in the past decade. The most cited paper, from Purdue University that reported a minor success in reducing the number of "at risk" student dropouts (Purdue Horizons project), turned out to be a simple statistical error. Nobody yet knows how to effectively predict what people are going to do based on their internet usage data, even when they spend an awful lot of time online studying, working, and socialising.
Claims of being able to manipulate individual people or specific groups of people online are pure marketing hype. Online advertising works the same as everywhere else: Emotive messages that appeal to our many basic cognitive biases. Since AI and algorithms have literally zero understanding of human psychology and therefore no theoretical or principled basis upon which to analyse data, they literally can't tell if a pattern or probability is significant, i.e. tells us something interesting and useful, or not.
I think they mean that they'll do more computer assisted analysis of surveillance data than currently. At the moment, a whole lotta people sit in windowless rooms going through piles of data that's been automatically flagged as interesting by current SIGINT algorithms. My bet is that computers will take over more of this mundane, tedious, soul-destroying work so that fewer analysts can go through more data more easily and be able to pick out patterns and interesting anomalies to report to the higher-ups.
They're also trawling through orders of magnitude more SIGINT data than in the last millennium so the only feasible way to go through it is computer-assisted.
You've listed a belief that has never been broad scientific consensus. A belief isn't scientific. One of the things science does is to examine our assumptions and beliefs and test whether they carry any objective, evidence-based weight; called "disproving the null hypothesis." There are still plenty of assumptions that we believe in and live by which haven't been tested yet.
The other two were supported by blatantly biased studies funded by vested interests and were controversial, not scientific consensus (We get news of consensus' from scientific journals, not popular media). We still know too little about diet and the causes of diet related ill-health partly because of political and other pressures on high-quality research by the food industry. BTW, did you know that Philip Morris bought Kraft Foods in 1988? Same people doing the same thing with unhealthy food as they did with tobacco.
Anthropogenic global warming has been pretty well tested over the past 40 or so years (ironically started by Exxon) and the evidence is conclusive. There are many minor details over which there's still some disagreement but the broad consensus remains unchanged. If anything, what appears to be coming to light in recent years is that scientists projections of the effects of climate change may be too conservative.
Possibly. But we should be able to agree that minimal regulation in this instance is still the most anything has ever been and likely ever will be regulated. The shear volume of regulation, of paperwork, of tests, of work to be done for a single drug could bury a medium sized town.
That's high-stakes science. If you don't get it right first time, you're gonna do a lot of harm to a lot of people. I can't think of anything that's higher-stakes than medicine.
What we really need is an AI that can identify the lizard people living among us. They're the ones responsible for everything that's going wrong these days and they're the ones blaming the world's problems on women, muslims, jews, immigrants, liberals, conservatives, etc.. Let's stop giving the lizard people our jobs!
In other industries where the government pays a lot for the product (military contracting) the vendors are subject to intense financial oversight to see where the money goes -- perhaps the pharma companies should get the same treatment.
In most other developed countries the government is the customer and can negotiate more reasonable prices. They can also buy generic drugs from elsewhere, where applicable. Some countries, e.g. the UK, their national health services also conduct trials of their own to calculate their drug procurement policies. Most of the cost of prescriptions in the UK is covered by a flat fee prescription charge, i.e. everyone pays the same small fee no matter how cheap or expensive their actual prescription is. It all evens out as everyone shares the burden. People on low incomes can have their prescription charges reduced or even waived: Socialism at its finest!;)
So hopefully you understand what a broad scientific consensus is. I'm not a climate scientist either so I have to rely on the considered opinions of experts in their fields, which is almost unanimous. It's easier to list those who dispute it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
joe_frisch has such a poor understanding of science that he doesn't realise just how dumb he sounds. Yet, another victim of the Dunning-Kruger effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
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I'm not a great coder but good enough to get done what clients want done. If I'm not sure or don't think I can do it, I tell them. I think they appreciate the honesty. I don't work in a tech-hub, startups or anything like that so I'm not under the same expectations and pressures that others may be.
Show me where people are staving in this country. And, no, not 'food challenged' or whatever they are calling it when you don't get three meals a day, every day.
Before you dismiss food insecurity, please read this research paper on its "particularly toxic" effects: https://jamanetwork.com/journa... This should make the connection between poverty and poor academic performance clear enough to you.
Don't most people just pay for their info to be anonymised? Companies, organisations, companies, etc. should have to declare who they are and usually do on their website anyway.
...because he's an IT billionaire, we're supposed to unquestioningly accept him as an authority in education? Corporations and schools are organisations that are about as different from each other as you can get. Corporate know-how will get you into deep trouble in education.
There's a long history of education reform and enhancement programmes that have failed. He could've asked about those and why they failed before trying to reinvent the wheel and do it all over again. He could've consulted with the latest research in the learning sciences and education to find out what interventions have been consistently successful.
Finally, Gates could've looked into how the US education system is actually one of the best in the world and that, if you control for poverty, performs as well as any of the other top countries. The problem is that education is uneven and variable mostly due to poverty, poor investment (e.g. spending billions on ICT infrastructure, classroom gadgets, and ubiquitous and inappropriate computer graded tests), and degrading and vilifying the teaching profession (ever since the Reagan era "Nation at Risk" report). Kids in middle-class neighbourhoods get great education, those in poorer ones get terrible education. When you consider that 40% of Americans live in poverty and the USA has the highest rates of child poverty in the developed world, it's not surprising that the overall performance of the US education system gets dragged down.
There's little room for improvement in middle-class schools. They're doing fine. If you want to push up national performance in education, it's more effective to target those living in poverty, because they have the most dramatic gains to be made. But that would mean helping poor people which isn't really a thing in US politics. They'd rather let poor people starve and fend for themselves (boot-straps mentality) and see their economy decline because of it: When people aren't earning good wages, they aren't spending it back into the economy or paying taxes to pay for things like healthcare and education.
Just like you have the best healthcare system that money can buy. If only more Americans could afford it!
Do electronic counter measures qualify as attacks, especially when the US military are flying war planes in sovereign Syrian airspace? Oh the US military are such poor, delicate victims of these evil Syrian radio waves. Why won't the Syrian military stop?
And there I was thinking that the Republican party were all about giving states more freedom and independence.
They're just a bunch of Koch suckers.
It's cheap and easy to run courses on theory: Large lectures, minimal formative assessment (feedback) if any, essay grading (by TAs, not tutors), and machine gradable tests. There's very little evidence of transfer of knowledge and skills acquired from this kind of education. In other words, students learn how to be students but not much else, e.g. student essays are typically unique genres of writing which aren't replicated anywhere else in professional or personal life. It's more like a right of passage than anything meaningful or useful.
Teaching/training students to actually be able to do more than write generically redundant essays and pass tests is more difficult and more involved. It also requires more individual attention from tutors/mentors, formative assessment, and assessments that call for involved expert judgement. Vocational training is typically more expensive and more highly skilled to provide and often higher quality than theoretical courses.
Also, not many people think of medicine, law, architecture, etc., as training. They may happen in universities and have all the prestige, but they're essentially advanced vocational training programmes.
"fake" Zuckerbergs and Sandbergs, yeah... right. Denying it, are they? I think the cops need to investigate those two more closely.
Gmail's changed something? I haven't noticed any differences in my email client.
Congratulations, you've just reinvented the post office!
The Netherlands.
Been there a few times and always used public transport, even down to Zeeland in the south.
...is to create a comprehensive network of electrically powered public transport infrastructure. Spain is already the country with the highest per capita number of high-speed rail Km's in the world, and most EU countries now have extensive electric rail networks. Diesel public transport, by comparison, is slow, heavy, unreliable, and expensive but even that's cheaper and cleaner than individuals driving themselves to work each day.
American-style suburbia, with its heavy reliance on individuals driving themselves to work, is one of the most inefficient and polluting urban planning models devised in recent history. It's also an obscene waste of people's time when they have to sit idling in traffic jams every day.
On the other hand, China is by far the most aggressive investor in renewable energy. India isn't dragging its feet either. The USA is getting left behind and falling even further behind with its current stable genius in the Whitehouse. Without a sensible, well-informed, coherent energy policy, guess who's heading for a 2nd world economy pretty soon?
A number of large universities, worldwide, have ploughed $millions into research on learning analytics in the past decade. The most cited paper, from Purdue University that reported a minor success in reducing the number of "at risk" student dropouts (Purdue Horizons project), turned out to be a simple statistical error. Nobody yet knows how to effectively predict what people are going to do based on their internet usage data, even when they spend an awful lot of time online studying, working, and socialising.
Claims of being able to manipulate individual people or specific groups of people online are pure marketing hype. Online advertising works the same as everywhere else: Emotive messages that appeal to our many basic cognitive biases. Since AI and algorithms have literally zero understanding of human psychology and therefore no theoretical or principled basis upon which to analyse data, they literally can't tell if a pattern or probability is significant, i.e. tells us something interesting and useful, or not.
I think they mean that they'll do more computer assisted analysis of surveillance data than currently. At the moment, a whole lotta people sit in windowless rooms going through piles of data that's been automatically flagged as interesting by current SIGINT algorithms. My bet is that computers will take over more of this mundane, tedious, soul-destroying work so that fewer analysts can go through more data more easily and be able to pick out patterns and interesting anomalies to report to the higher-ups.
They're also trawling through orders of magnitude more SIGINT data than in the last millennium so the only feasible way to go through it is computer-assisted.
You've listed a belief that has never been broad scientific consensus. A belief isn't scientific. One of the things science does is to examine our assumptions and beliefs and test whether they carry any objective, evidence-based weight; called "disproving the null hypothesis." There are still plenty of assumptions that we believe in and live by which haven't been tested yet.
The other two were supported by blatantly biased studies funded by vested interests and were controversial, not scientific consensus (We get news of consensus' from scientific journals, not popular media). We still know too little about diet and the causes of diet related ill-health partly because of political and other pressures on high-quality research by the food industry. BTW, did you know that Philip Morris bought Kraft Foods in 1988? Same people doing the same thing with unhealthy food as they did with tobacco.
Anthropogenic global warming has been pretty well tested over the past 40 or so years (ironically started by Exxon) and the evidence is conclusive. There are many minor details over which there's still some disagreement but the broad consensus remains unchanged. If anything, what appears to be coming to light in recent years is that scientists projections of the effects of climate change may be too conservative.
Possibly. But we should be able to agree that minimal regulation in this instance is still the most anything has ever been and likely ever will be regulated. The shear volume of regulation, of paperwork, of tests, of work to be done for a single drug could bury a medium sized town.
That's high-stakes science. If you don't get it right first time, you're gonna do a lot of harm to a lot of people. I can't think of anything that's higher-stakes than medicine.
> minimal regulation > Trying to get the FDA to approve a new drug
Pick one.
Not letting drug companies make people sicker or even kill them is minimal regulation.
"good for society" = good for those investors. At least, that's what I think they mean.
What we really need is an AI that can identify the lizard people living among us. They're the ones responsible for everything that's going wrong these days and they're the ones blaming the world's problems on women, muslims, jews, immigrants, liberals, conservatives, etc.. Let's stop giving the lizard people our jobs!
In other industries where the government pays a lot for the product (military contracting) the vendors are subject to intense financial oversight to see where the money goes -- perhaps the pharma companies should get the same treatment.
In most other developed countries the government is the customer and can negotiate more reasonable prices. They can also buy generic drugs from elsewhere, where applicable. Some countries, e.g. the UK, their national health services also conduct trials of their own to calculate their drug procurement policies. Most of the cost of prescriptions in the UK is covered by a flat fee prescription charge, i.e. everyone pays the same small fee no matter how cheap or expensive their actual prescription is. It all evens out as everyone shares the burden. People on low incomes can have their prescription charges reduced or even waived: Socialism at its finest! ;)
So hopefully you understand what a broad scientific consensus is. I'm not a climate scientist either so I have to rely on the considered opinions of experts in their fields, which is almost unanimous. It's easier to list those who dispute it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
joe_frisch has such a poor understanding of science that he doesn't realise just how dumb he sounds. Yet, another victim of the Dunning-Kruger effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
... are only about a decade away! For the foreseeable future, they'll always be about a decade away.
"One day, machines will exceed human intelligence." -- Ray Kurzweil
"Only if we meet them halfway." -- Dave Snowden