I know how ML works and you don't have to train the system forever.
That may work on complicated systems but not on complex adaptive systems. One of the characteristics of a CAS is extreme sensitivity to initial conditions. Any interventions to change patients' habits and behaviour will more than likely have profound and unforeseeable effects on the system (AKA "the butterfly effect") and which metrics are valid for detecting problems will change and so you end constantly looking for which metrics are valid proxies, especially if the interventions have been successful in enacting changes in habits and behaviour.
In other words, just like human managers are constantly becoming aware of aspects of their jobs and learning different strategies and techniques, so too would any AI system.
Let's try to come up with more likely explanations as to why Facebook, Google, et al. want our phone numbers so badly:
+ If they have your phone number they can identify your phone and track you more accurately (They also buy this data from the telcos)
+ They can also tie your account to your bank account (that you use to pay your phone bill) and tie that to your data that they bought from credit card companies.
...that most of the comments posted for this story are from people who haven't spent much time travelling in and between German towns and cities. Unless you live somewhere really small and remote, German public transport is comprehensive (synchronised trains, trams, buses, and metro), safe, clean, reliable, frequent, and convenient. Also, European cities were designed and built long before the car was a thing, so most things are within walking distance from each other. Town and city centres are also pleasant, green, lively places to be; to go to (pavement) cafes and bars, go shopping, buy groceries, the cinema, theatre, etc., or just hang out downtown and watch the people go by and maybe bump into someone you know. It's a very different way of living compared to the north American towns and cities I've been to.
BTW, I remember being stopped and asked by a couple of German students in Canada who wanted to know where the local supermarket was (in a town of over 100,000 residents). They were shocked when I told them there were no downtown supermarkets.
Sorry, should have been clearer -- I was commenting on using MS Office in a VM.
BTW, I've manged to burn through a couple of good laptops doing video editing and encoding (it slowly fries the GPU because laptops don't have very effective cooling) in plain Windows and not using a VM. I only do video editing and encoding on desktops now.
Good job I don't think that rainbows and unicorns have any measurable effect on C-diff infection rates then;)
Re: only upfront costs, the trouble with trawling the available data to look for significant patterns is that the available data may not be relevant or an effective proxy (metric) for what you're looking for: the so-called streetlight effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... Identifying and collecting data that is valid and reliable is a skilled, expensive, and on-going process, not a one off expense. There's also the danger of turning the metrics into targets and trying to manipulate conditions so that the metrics change in the way you'd like. Goodhart's law states that, "Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes." otherwise summarised as, once you turn a metric into a target, it ceases to be a good metric. In other words, your proxy for a success indicator loses its validity, reliability, or both.
Using more scientifically grounded methods for enacting changes and managing complex adaptive systems, like healthcare systems and people's dietary behaviour, is more likely to yield desirable results.
Recent development has indicated a popular "harmless" sugar additive as a likely culprit of causing two explosions in the occurrence of two nasty infections. Clostridium being one of them.
Start tackling that shit as prevention.
And yes, hand hygiene helps a lot, but is hard to do, as you would need to wash (with soap, not just alcohol) 100 times a day. That would cause a severe disturbance in the biotope on the nurses/doctors hands by itself!.
Yep, and not just sweeteners. 20% of C-diff conditions are caused by antibiotics. Anyone prescribed antibiotics should also be taking precautions to prevent C-diff taking hold.
Additionally, most people in he west don't get anywhere near enough fibre in their diet. Simply taking pre-biotic supplements (specific types of fibre) provides an environment in the intestines that encourage healthy bacteria to thrive and makes it extremely difficult for infections like C-diff to take hold.
Simply changing how doctors prescribe antibiotics and effectively encouraging pre-biotic consumption could make a bigger difference at less cost than buying in help from IT consultants who charge extortionate fees for doing stuff that more often than not gets mediocre results and creates more problems than it solves.
However, at this point in my life, the computer is the means, not the ends. When I just need to get work done, Linux just isn't the tool.
Rubbish. I use GNU/Linux daily for academic, professional, and personal use without ever needing to use Microsoft Windows. If an academic course requires Microsoft Windows it is a sure sign of an ill-conceive lesson plan and curriculum. That said, since I paid for a copy of Microsoft Windows when I bought my latest computer, I chose to replace it with Xubuntu Linux and install Microsoft Windows as a virtual machine instance via Oracle VirtualBox.
LibreOffice's support for MS Office file formats is pretty good. It's usually only when a new version of MS Office has just come out, you know, when they deliberately break backward compatibility, that problems arise. But those issues arise for MS Office users too.
BTW, Zotero https://www.zotero.org/, the FOSS academic bibliography and citations manager, works much better with LibreOffice than with MS Office:)
The government wants backdoors in all encryption achemea and a dedicated password for "just" the government to unlock all encryption.
Just because a company does it doesn't mean it is right and just because the government wants it doesn't make it right.
You need oversight without blindness. Regulations encourage and help businesses to flourish, and regulations binds government hands when they overstep too.
Personally, I don't count public, opportunistic, high-profile demands for back-doors by poorly informed politicians and admins after every incidence of terrorism "good" regulation. Those people are clearly wilfully ignorant of the implications of what they're asking for. A "good" regulator will consult with qualified experts to see what the feasible options are and what their implications may be.
On the flip side to that, we've had decades of road safety regulations that have saved millions of lives and prevented millions more permanent, life-destroying injuries. Then there's food safety regulations, aviation regulations, pharmaceutical regulations, environmental/pollution regulations, etc.. We only notice them when they become corrupted by regulatory capture (AKA revolving door politics) and the public starts suffering as a result.
The US also has its computer hardware, software, and other technologies being used in China. Microsoft, Google, Facebook, etc., also have extraordinarily close relationships with the US government, e.g. They all make a handsome profit selling surveillance data and analysis services to US security agencies and other allied countries. Meanwhile the NSA, CIA, and FBI are working tirelessly to make US software less secure and more vulnerable to malicious attacks more than ever before. If anything's a threat to national security, it's them, not the Chinese.
Actually this list is rather surprising that there isn't any really popular Linux App, that isn't widely used in other platforms. This list is mostly just rather basic tools for 2018, Web Browser, Video Player, Text editor, and Windows Managers.
Back in the days.
Macintosh had its Adobe Suits for desktop publishing
DOS had its word perfect and Lotus 123
Windows had its Office Suite
Amiga had its video tools
In general the other OS's seems to have a flagship tool that stands for how the product is primary meant to be used for.
Linux doesn't seem to have that. Probably mostly because it is heart it is a server OS. So what really probably should be on the list is Apache MySQL PHP Or whatever is more popular at the moment.
And Linux has LibreOffice. I've been using it for years for academic writing and creating learning and teaching resources (all my students have Windows or Mac). I haven't used MS Office for years and don't miss it one bit.
That said, Linux is sorely lacking in decent, productivity oriented multimedia editing software. Adobe still rules the roost in this department and doesn't support Linux and Wine doesn't work well enough with Adobe software. Unfortunately, I still have to dual boot Linux & Windows so that I can do multimedia editing when necessary.
BTW, I teach online and during webinars students often complain of dropouts, weak signals, etc.. When they buy a cheap LAN cable and plug it into their laptops, in almost all cases, the problems go away.
If you've ever turned on a microwave oven in the next room while you're listening to music via Bluetooth, you'll know that the interference is no audiophile thing. It stutters and pretty much stops working. The emissions from a microwave in the next room aren't all that strong. In practical terms, the more WiFi routers and Bluetooth devices you have running nearby, the higher the ambient radiation and the greater the packet loss (this is why the range of WiFi is much shorter in high density housing, like apartment buildings because everyone's routers are closer together). In moderate conditions, it simply shortens the effective range of WiFi and Bluetooth, with stronger radiation it stops working for things like streaming media altogether.
They'll keep making as much profit, gain as much market share, and reducing/externalising costs as much as they can until someone or something stops them. The only way they understand of avoiding government regulation is lobbying politicians to stop legislation and funding for regulators from going through. It's the government's responsibility to protect the people from abusive practices by corporations. It's time for government to do their job.
[ sarcasm ] And HDMI? Yeah, that's a useless, antiquated standard. Don't bother with that anymore. [/sarcasm ]
On a more immediate note, those of us who value high quality audio can now turn to Samsung to support our high quality headphones and earbuds, and not have all the disadvantages of Bluetooth batteries, charging, the higher price, that ambient microwave radiation degrades the signal, etc..
And, I've got a pair of earbuds I really like and they're probably gonna last a good few years more. There's no way I'm gonna buy a phone that doesn't let me plug them in.
Turns out I was wrong. The Chinese seem to be using this to identify political activists, religious minorities, and people with debts. That's going a lot further than probable cause or warrants. Seems China's just as bad with tech as every other government:(
To me this looks like an example of how these technologies should be used. Rather than for illegal dragnet surveillance and profiling that turns everyone into a suspect, they're using facial recognition to help cops do what they've always done: Look for criminal suspects for whom the police already have probable cause or an arrest warrant. It's probably a lot cheaper and easier to manage than the massive databases of innocent citizens that the NSA, CIA, FBI, DEA, etc., are collecting and is far less likely to suffer from false positives and negatives.
Math articles are also extremely well written and both subjects tend to be fairly immune to political or social vandalism.
Agreed. For the math/hard science stuff it's OK. For the soft science/social science/politics stuff it is terrible because one side of the argument will be more numerous initially. They will then completely purge any reference to the other side's arguments. At which point you know less about the subject than if you hadn't read the article, as some study once said about the viewers of a highly biased US cable news channel.
I'm a grad student in the social sciences (education) and I use Wikipedia a lot for precisely the purposes that the AC research scientist has named and it saves me a lot of time and almost always points me in the right direction to go on to find information from more academically accepted sources. I'd say yes, in the social sciences, you do have to be more thorough and careful but I'd also say the same is true of academic journals too. The quality of research in my field in particular is very poor and there tends to be a lot of polarisation (disagreements due to lack of high-quality evidence). In fact, I don't think much of it should be called "social sciences" at all: "social studies" would be more appropriate.
I don't study political science so perhaps someone can comment on whether this may be true of Wikipedia pages on political topics?
Bearing in mind that "fake news" is just another euphemism for public relations (PR) and propaganda:
Will Google also apply these algorithms of "truthfulness" and what they consider to be misleading to online advertising? And will they also censor "fake news" circulated by elected officials on topics such as climate change, evolution, and the "War against Christmas"?
Don't you find it ironic that the world's biggest and most powerful advertising and PR agencies, e.g. Google, Facebook, and Twitter, are claiming to be reliable arbiters of truth? I mean, it's not as if they get paid $billions for prioritising certain messages over others by their clients, is it?
It looks like we're going to have Silicon Valley executives deciding which is "good" fake news and which is "bad."
The Knowledge is not imposed on taxi drivers. You only have to take it if you want to be a black cab driver. London still has its medieval road layout (See this map: https://maproom.net/wp-content... ) which is difficult to navigate, to say the least. Inexperienced drivers can get lost for hours trying to navigate their way -- Take a wrong turn and you end up on a road out of central London and have to take a long route to get back in. Londoners know that if they get into a black cab, they'll get to their destination in the quickest time possible. In my experience of travelling around central London, black cabs usually turn out to be cheaper than other taxis because they're quicker which is why they're so successful. If I have to take a taxi, black cabs are the only choice as far as I'm concerned.
Yes, this means that the FDA has officially announced that kratom has similar therapeutic effects to other opioids. Anyone looking to reduce their prescription charges or kick an oxycodone or hydrocodone habit (apparently it's less addictive) now knows that this is a medically legitimate option rather than some pseudo-science scam.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't tell Apple Inc. or they'll be selling the next iPhone complete with artisinal batteries.
Great! I've been looking for something to store my enormous collection of monster pictures on :)
I know how ML works and you don't have to train the system forever.
That may work on complicated systems but not on complex adaptive systems. One of the characteristics of a CAS is extreme sensitivity to initial conditions. Any interventions to change patients' habits and behaviour will more than likely have profound and unforeseeable effects on the system (AKA "the butterfly effect") and which metrics are valid for detecting problems will change and so you end constantly looking for which metrics are valid proxies, especially if the interventions have been successful in enacting changes in habits and behaviour.
In other words, just like human managers are constantly becoming aware of aspects of their jobs and learning different strategies and techniques, so too would any AI system.
Let's try to come up with more likely explanations as to why Facebook, Google, et al. want our phone numbers so badly:
...that most of the comments posted for this story are from people who haven't spent much time travelling in and between German towns and cities. Unless you live somewhere really small and remote, German public transport is comprehensive (synchronised trains, trams, buses, and metro), safe, clean, reliable, frequent, and convenient. Also, European cities were designed and built long before the car was a thing, so most things are within walking distance from each other. Town and city centres are also pleasant, green, lively places to be; to go to (pavement) cafes and bars, go shopping, buy groceries, the cinema, theatre, etc., or just hang out downtown and watch the people go by and maybe bump into someone you know. It's a very different way of living compared to the north American towns and cities I've been to.
BTW, I remember being stopped and asked by a couple of German students in Canada who wanted to know where the local supermarket was (in a town of over 100,000 residents). They were shocked when I told them there were no downtown supermarkets.
Sorry, should have been clearer -- I was commenting on using MS Office in a VM.
BTW, I've manged to burn through a couple of good laptops doing video editing and encoding (it slowly fries the GPU because laptops don't have very effective cooling) in plain Windows and not using a VM. I only do video editing and encoding on desktops now.
Good job I don't think that rainbows and unicorns have any measurable effect on C-diff infection rates then ;)
Re: only upfront costs, the trouble with trawling the available data to look for significant patterns is that the available data may not be relevant or an effective proxy (metric) for what you're looking for: the so-called streetlight effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... Identifying and collecting data that is valid and reliable is a skilled, expensive, and on-going process, not a one off expense. There's also the danger of turning the metrics into targets and trying to manipulate conditions so that the metrics change in the way you'd like. Goodhart's law states that, "Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes." otherwise summarised as, once you turn a metric into a target, it ceases to be a good metric. In other words, your proxy for a success indicator loses its validity, reliability, or both.
Using more scientifically grounded methods for enacting changes and managing complex adaptive systems, like healthcare systems and people's dietary behaviour, is more likely to yield desirable results.
https://science.slashdot.org/s...
Recent development has indicated a popular "harmless" sugar additive as a likely culprit of causing two explosions in the occurrence of two nasty infections. Clostridium being one of them.
Start tackling that shit as prevention.
And yes, hand hygiene helps a lot, but is hard to do, as you would need to wash (with soap, not just alcohol) 100 times a day. That would cause a severe disturbance in the biotope on the nurses/doctors hands by itself!.
Yep, and not just sweeteners. 20% of C-diff conditions are caused by antibiotics. Anyone prescribed antibiotics should also be taking precautions to prevent C-diff taking hold.
Additionally, most people in he west don't get anywhere near enough fibre in their diet. Simply taking pre-biotic supplements (specific types of fibre) provides an environment in the intestines that encourage healthy bacteria to thrive and makes it extremely difficult for infections like C-diff to take hold.
Simply changing how doctors prescribe antibiotics and effectively encouraging pre-biotic consumption could make a bigger difference at less cost than buying in help from IT consultants who charge extortionate fees for doing stuff that more often than not gets mediocre results and creates more problems than it solves.
VMs are great if you've got a high-end or gaming rig laptop. My mid-range laptop's fan starts to sound like a hairdryer after a few minutes.
However, at this point in my life, the computer is the means, not the ends. When I just need to get work done, Linux just isn't the tool.
Rubbish. I use GNU/Linux daily for academic, professional, and personal use without ever needing to use Microsoft Windows. If an academic course requires Microsoft Windows it is a sure sign of an ill-conceive lesson plan and curriculum. That said, since I paid for a copy of Microsoft Windows when I bought my latest computer, I chose to replace it with Xubuntu Linux and install Microsoft Windows as a virtual machine instance via Oracle VirtualBox.
LibreOffice's support for MS Office file formats is pretty good. It's usually only when a new version of MS Office has just come out, you know, when they deliberately break backward compatibility, that problems arise. But those issues arise for MS Office users too.
BTW, Zotero https://www.zotero.org/, the FOSS academic bibliography and citations manager, works much better with LibreOffice than with MS Office :)
There is a flip side to that.
The government wants backdoors in all encryption achemea and a dedicated password for "just" the government to unlock all encryption.
Just because a company does it doesn't mean it is right and just because the government wants it doesn't make it right.
You need oversight without blindness. Regulations encourage and help businesses to flourish, and regulations binds government hands when they overstep too.
Personally, I don't count public, opportunistic, high-profile demands for back-doors by poorly informed politicians and admins after every incidence of terrorism "good" regulation. Those people are clearly wilfully ignorant of the implications of what they're asking for. A "good" regulator will consult with qualified experts to see what the feasible options are and what their implications may be.
On the flip side to that, we've had decades of road safety regulations that have saved millions of lives and prevented millions more permanent, life-destroying injuries. Then there's food safety regulations, aviation regulations, pharmaceutical regulations, environmental/pollution regulations, etc.. We only notice them when they become corrupted by regulatory capture (AKA revolving door politics) and the public starts suffering as a result.
The US also has its computer hardware, software, and other technologies being used in China. Microsoft, Google, Facebook, etc., also have extraordinarily close relationships with the US government, e.g. They all make a handsome profit selling surveillance data and analysis services to US security agencies and other allied countries. Meanwhile the NSA, CIA, and FBI are working tirelessly to make US software less secure and more vulnerable to malicious attacks more than ever before. If anything's a threat to national security, it's them, not the Chinese.
Actually this list is rather surprising that there isn't any really popular Linux App, that isn't widely used in other platforms. This list is mostly just rather basic tools for 2018, Web Browser, Video Player, Text editor, and Windows Managers.
Back in the days. Macintosh had its Adobe Suits for desktop publishing DOS had its word perfect and Lotus 123 Windows had its Office Suite Amiga had its video tools
In general the other OS's seems to have a flagship tool that stands for how the product is primary meant to be used for.
Linux doesn't seem to have that. Probably mostly because it is heart it is a server OS. So what really probably should be on the list is Apache MySQL PHP Or whatever is more popular at the moment.
And Linux has LibreOffice. I've been using it for years for academic writing and creating learning and teaching resources (all my students have Windows or Mac). I haven't used MS Office for years and don't miss it one bit.
That said, Linux is sorely lacking in decent, productivity oriented multimedia editing software. Adobe still rules the roost in this department and doesn't support Linux and Wine doesn't work well enough with Adobe software. Unfortunately, I still have to dual boot Linux & Windows so that I can do multimedia editing when necessary.
BTW, I teach online and during webinars students often complain of dropouts, weak signals, etc.. When they buy a cheap LAN cable and plug it into their laptops, in almost all cases, the problems go away.
If you've ever turned on a microwave oven in the next room while you're listening to music via Bluetooth, you'll know that the interference is no audiophile thing. It stutters and pretty much stops working. The emissions from a microwave in the next room aren't all that strong. In practical terms, the more WiFi routers and Bluetooth devices you have running nearby, the higher the ambient radiation and the greater the packet loss (this is why the range of WiFi is much shorter in high density housing, like apartment buildings because everyone's routers are closer together). In moderate conditions, it simply shortens the effective range of WiFi and Bluetooth, with stronger radiation it stops working for things like streaming media altogether.
They'll keep making as much profit, gain as much market share, and reducing/externalising costs as much as they can until someone or something stops them. The only way they understand of avoiding government regulation is lobbying politicians to stop legislation and funding for regulators from going through. It's the government's responsibility to protect the people from abusive practices by corporations. It's time for government to do their job.
[ sarcasm ] And HDMI? Yeah, that's a useless, antiquated standard. Don't bother with that anymore. [ /sarcasm ]
On a more immediate note, those of us who value high quality audio can now turn to Samsung to support our high quality headphones and earbuds, and not have all the disadvantages of Bluetooth batteries, charging, the higher price, that ambient microwave radiation degrades the signal, etc..
And, I've got a pair of earbuds I really like and they're probably gonna last a good few years more. There's no way I'm gonna buy a phone that doesn't let me plug them in.
No, not ironic. Chilling is closer to the mark.
Come to think of it... Yeah, you're right.
Turns out I was wrong. The Chinese seem to be using this to identify political activists, religious minorities, and people with debts. That's going a lot further than probable cause or warrants. Seems China's just as bad with tech as every other government :(
To me this looks like an example of how these technologies should be used. Rather than for illegal dragnet surveillance and profiling that turns everyone into a suspect, they're using facial recognition to help cops do what they've always done: Look for criminal suspects for whom the police already have probable cause or an arrest warrant. It's probably a lot cheaper and easier to manage than the massive databases of innocent citizens that the NSA, CIA, FBI, DEA, etc., are collecting and is far less likely to suffer from false positives and negatives.
Math articles are also extremely well written and both subjects tend to be fairly immune to political or social vandalism.
Agreed. For the math/hard science stuff it's OK. For the soft science/social science/politics stuff it is terrible because one side of the argument will be more numerous initially. They will then completely purge any reference to the other side's arguments. At which point you know less about the subject than if you hadn't read the article, as some study once said about the viewers of a highly biased US cable news channel.
I'm a grad student in the social sciences (education) and I use Wikipedia a lot for precisely the purposes that the AC research scientist has named and it saves me a lot of time and almost always points me in the right direction to go on to find information from more academically accepted sources. I'd say yes, in the social sciences, you do have to be more thorough and careful but I'd also say the same is true of academic journals too. The quality of research in my field in particular is very poor and there tends to be a lot of polarisation (disagreements due to lack of high-quality evidence). In fact, I don't think much of it should be called "social sciences" at all: "social studies" would be more appropriate.
I don't study political science so perhaps someone can comment on whether this may be true of Wikipedia pages on political topics?
Bearing in mind that "fake news" is just another euphemism for public relations (PR) and propaganda:
Will Google also apply these algorithms of "truthfulness" and what they consider to be misleading to online advertising? And will they also censor "fake news" circulated by elected officials on topics such as climate change, evolution, and the "War against Christmas"?
Don't you find it ironic that the world's biggest and most powerful advertising and PR agencies, e.g. Google, Facebook, and Twitter, are claiming to be reliable arbiters of truth? I mean, it's not as if they get paid $billions for prioritising certain messages over others by their clients, is it?
It looks like we're going to have Silicon Valley executives deciding which is "good" fake news and which is "bad."
The Knowledge is not imposed on taxi drivers. You only have to take it if you want to be a black cab driver. London still has its medieval road layout (See this map: https://maproom.net/wp-content... ) which is difficult to navigate, to say the least. Inexperienced drivers can get lost for hours trying to navigate their way -- Take a wrong turn and you end up on a road out of central London and have to take a long route to get back in. Londoners know that if they get into a black cab, they'll get to their destination in the quickest time possible. In my experience of travelling around central London, black cabs usually turn out to be cheaper than other taxis because they're quicker which is why they're so successful. If I have to take a taxi, black cabs are the only choice as far as I'm concerned.
Yes, this means that the FDA has officially announced that kratom has similar therapeutic effects to other opioids. Anyone looking to reduce their prescription charges or kick an oxycodone or hydrocodone habit (apparently it's less addictive) now knows that this is a medically legitimate option rather than some pseudo-science scam.
Here you go: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... Now tell me I'm over reacting.