I read Google News every day, sometimes multiple times per day. The new UI is horrible. Instant eyestrain. Fewer headlines per page, which means more scrolling (yuck), and the headlines don't pop out as well. And why put every article in a perfectly aligned box -- haven't they heard of banner blindness? Ugh!
That's a great philosophy if tax laws came from, say, God. But in reality, tax laws are strongly influenced by wealthy corporations to their advantage. You and I, the average individual, have virtually no chance of influencing a single tax law. So the breaks that we are "entitled to" are thrust on us, whereas corporations write their own breaks. Still think it's fair?
By itself, this study just shows that a machine learning algorithm can compute a statistical average (regarding mouse movements) that classifies a specific set of 40 people into two groups.
If the same statistical average also classifies other groups of people accurately, then you can make real claims about separating truth-tellers and liars.
All these approaches to "read" emotion from people's faces are going to fail because faces don't broadcast emotion. Recent research shows that emotions are constructed differently from person to person, from situation to situation.
I taught programming at a well-known university in the 1990s. To prevent cheating on exams, I created three different versions of the exam. Call them A, B, and C. They had the same questions, but with different numeric values (and therefore different answers). I distributed the exams in the order A, B, C, A, B, C,.... So no matter where a student was sitting, the other exams around him/her were different. I did not reveal this to the students.
Everyone who cheated from his/her neighbor got caught, because their exam (say, "A") would have exam "B" or "C" answers on it. Those students instantly failed the course.
For homework, my advice was: you can talk about assignments in general terms, but you cannot show each other your code, because you are being graded on your work. That was where I drew the line. Still, a half dozen students (out of 150) would get caught cheating on their homework each semester. It made me sad, because none of the cheaters had ever come to my office hours for help. If only they had....
In real life, people don't always scowl in anger or pout in sadness. These are stereotypes, not universal signals to be detected. People may smile in anger, cry in happiness, etc. There's tons of variety in emotion. Software that assumes stereotypes are the norm aren't going to work very well.
Here's a great article on so-called statistical recognition of emotion via software: "Pattern Classification Explained." The author is a well-known emotion researcher.
Neurons always fire faster than sensory input data can arrive. That's the root of intrinsic brain activity.
Everything you see, hear, feel, smell, and taste comes from predictions made from your past experience. These predictions are then compared to sensory input from the outside world and if they're wrong, the brain adjusts. This all happens outside of awareness. This is called the predictive coding model of brain activity.
Hallucination is just a special case in which sensory input is ignored in favor of predictions. Same thing for dreams and daydreaming.
>You're over thinking it. People in general are poor at risk assessment.
Sorry, I think you're under-thinking it.:-) "Risk" is a mental concept made up by people, not a basic part of biology, chemistry or physics. A better question is why people are bad at assessing risk. It's reasonable to argue that the reason, in part, is that we cannot mentally simulate the consequences of risky actions with any accuracy, because the human cortex is wired not to detect bodily signals finely.
>You don't need to feel agony of an accident to know you don't want to be in one.
True, but not really the point. If we could feel agony by imagining it, I suspect we'd be a lot more careful in the car.
People continue to use their cell phones while driving because of a limitation of our biology. Here's a quick demonstration.
Imagine right now that you're petting a dog. Can you see (in your mind's eye) the dog's face? Can you "feel" the fur against your fingers and the dog's breath against your face? Can you "hear" the dog panting in your head? Most people can, easily. Your brain is great at simulating these sensations through imagination.
Now, try to imagine agony. Imagine the physical feeling of crashing your car at high speed, because you were on your stupid cell phone. Can you actually experience the agony of your destroyed body in your mind? The answer (for almost everybody) is no. Your brain is very bad at imagining/simulating internal feeling. Our brains are wired that way. So we continue driving with cell phones, even though we know the risks.
These ideas were inspired by the book, "How Emotions are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain," by Lisa Feldman Barrett, chapter 4, "The Origin of Feeling." https://www.amazon.com/How-Emo...
"Another Earth" is not only a great SF movie, but IMHO was the best film of 2011. Great characters, intriguing story, thought-provoking ending. Anyone who hasn't seen it is missing a real treat.
>This has already happened with cell phones. They started as a niche device and now it's difficult to function in society without one.
I like your point and your analogy, but actually, it's not that hard to function in society without a cell phone. I've been doing it for years. The only downside is a slight delay in getting the information you need or communicating with someone. I find the trade-off totally worth it.
I work for a company that's reasonably large (8000+ people) and is consistently profitable, and we prize and celebrate innovation. People are encouraged to try out ideas quickly and if they fail, at least they failed fast. We have an intranet website where people post their successes and learnings. I personally know many coworkers who came up with ideas, implemented them, and made money for the company.
I am a technical manager of a team that specializes in automating manual processes and eliminating waste. I very intentionally leave room for my direct reports to innovate. If they come to me with an idea -- this is a critical point -- I treat my opinion as a HYPOTHESIS, not as absolute truth. After all, I am just guessing whether their idea will work or not. I'd rather have them build a minimum viable example to get some empirical evidence if their idea will work or not.
If I think their idea has no chance whatsoever of succeeding, I'll put forward my objections and see if they have good answers for them. This discussion is important. Sometimes they show me I am wrong, which is fine with me. (Nobody's perfect.) Other times my objections spur them to come up with a more robust idea.
Anyway, not all companies are pits of innovation death.
Whiteboard coding questions aren't bad in and of themselves. The real problem is bad interviewers who don't know what's realistic in an admittedly artificial interview situation. Questions that require rote memorization should be obsolete today. Common flaws include:
* Requiring perfect syntax off-the-cuff * Requiring exact names of library functions * Asking questions that have just one correct answer (because a wrong answer tells you very little)
A good interviewer can run a beautiful coding interview on a whiteboard, keeping the candidate engaged and displaying his/her skills. You run it like an ongoing conversation with the candidate. If they hit a wall or don't remember something, you simply give them a hint or even the missing answer so they can continue. The end goal is to make the determination: does this candidate know what the hell he/she is talking about, and do I want to work with him/her? The end goal is not to determine if the candidate can take the length of a string in Prolog.
I have personally trained hundreds of technical interviewers in these skills. The problem at many companies is that nobody evaluates people's interview skills and separates the good one from the bad ones.
15+ years ago, I sprung for an Omnirax desk (this one). I can't rave enough about it. The height is perfect, the surface big & durable, and plenty of rackmount space. It still looks as good as new. The company is well-known in the music industry but not so much outside.
Set up a few big monitors (with Ergotron monitor arms) and a beefy, silent rackmount PC from EndPCNoise.com, and you'll have an enviable work environment (speaking from experience).
Actually, people do math (and most everything else) with their entire brain. Visual cortex isn't just for vision either: it helps to process audio. Likewise auditory cortex helps to process vision. Both of them assist with other signals from body to brain (known as interoception). Just about every neuron in the brain participates in more than one function. (Note: This this is not the same thing as saying "all neurons are identical." That's false. But any given neuron participates in more than one kind of mental state.)
Neuroscientists have known for years that the brain has few "dedicated" areas for any particular function, such as math. Instead, many collections of neurons can accomplish the same function. This is called degeneracy. (Terrible name, I know... let the jokes about degenerate mathematicians begin....)
Also, the brain doesn't "light up" as if were sitting around idle and suddenly leaps into action. The whole brain is active all the time. This is called intrinsic brain activity.
Anyone who talks about brain areas "lighting up," or believes that each region of the brain has a dedicated function, is at least a decade behind modern neuroscience.
Emotion is not broadcast by the face. This has been known for a long time. Here's a clever study that shows people attend less to the face than the body when trying to guess someone's emotion.
About 15 years ago, a QA engineer in my office (a large Wall Street financial form) placed a fake trade for 1,000,000 shares of company stock in one of our test systems. The test order somehow got out to the New York Stock Exchange and actually moved the market. Backing out that trade was reportedly quite expensive.
The engineer didn't get fired, because he had done everything correctly. The system infrastructure had been set up wrong.. wasn't his fault.
Ads don't "fuel the web." They fuel particular businesses, and most of them I wouldn't be sad to see go. I remember the web before there were ads. It was fun and interesting and helpful anyway.
I've run a web site at my own expense (currently $250/year) for 20 years because it's fun to do so. I like sharing information, just like I enjoy writing open-source code. If the web were just enthusiast sites and shopping, that would be fine with me.
I've been at a "passionate programmer" e-commerce company for over 10 years. Their definition of "passionate" (of which apparently there are many) is a developer who doesn't simply convert a request into code, but who will also think intelligently about the larger (difficult) business problem and focus on it. When your client says "Build me a proprietary streaming video server," the ordinary programmer starts taking specs for it, whereas the passionate one asks to learn about the business problem being solved. Then you learn that the video server is for playing instructional/motivational videos for the salespeople. So the real business problem is an unmotivated sales force, and a "video server" is not necessarily the only solution. Now you can have a discussion about other solutions.
I'm sure some readers will immediately jump up with counterexamples and pessimism... how the other person won't want to hear about your alternatives because they're threatened, etc. but I have been living this life now for 10+ years at the same mid-sized company and it's real. And yes, I am paid well for it, and so are my direct reports. And no, I rarely need to work evenings or weekends, and neither do my direct reports. And we all get free food. And the company is consistently profitable.
From all the vitriol I've been reading here today, I get the impression my company is extremely rare. Guess I'll stay for another 10!
Slashdot Mirror
I read Google News every day, sometimes multiple times per day. The new UI is horrible. Instant eyestrain. Fewer headlines per page, which means more scrolling (yuck), and the headlines don't pop out as well. And why put every article in a perfectly aligned box -- haven't they heard of banner blindness? Ugh!
That's a great philosophy if tax laws came from, say, God. But in reality, tax laws are strongly influenced by wealthy corporations to their advantage. You and I, the average individual, have virtually no chance of influencing a single tax law. So the breaks that we are "entitled to" are thrust on us, whereas corporations write their own breaks. Still think it's fair?
By itself, this study just shows that a machine learning algorithm can compute a statistical average (regarding mouse movements) that classifies a specific set of 40 people into two groups.
If the same statistical average also classifies other groups of people accurately, then you can make real claims about separating truth-tellers and liars.
See this good explanation of pattern classification and its uses and misuses.
All these approaches to "read" emotion from people's faces are going to fail because faces don't broadcast emotion. Recent research shows that emotions are constructed differently from person to person, from situation to situation.
I taught programming at a well-known university in the 1990s. To prevent cheating on exams, I created three different versions of the exam. Call them A, B, and C. They had the same questions, but with different numeric values (and therefore different answers). I distributed the exams in the order A, B, C, A, B, C, .... So no matter where a student was sitting, the other exams around him/her were different. I did not reveal this to the students.
Everyone who cheated from his/her neighbor got caught, because their exam (say, "A") would have exam "B" or "C" answers on it. Those students instantly failed the course.
For homework, my advice was: you can talk about assignments in general terms, but you cannot show each other your code, because you are being graded on your work. That was where I drew the line. Still, a half dozen students (out of 150) would get caught cheating on their homework each semester. It made me sad, because none of the cheaters had ever come to my office hours for help. If only they had....
In real life, people don't always scowl in anger or pout in sadness. These are stereotypes, not universal signals to be detected. People may smile in anger, cry in happiness, etc. There's tons of variety in emotion. Software that assumes stereotypes are the norm aren't going to work very well.
Here's a great article on so-called statistical recognition of emotion via software: "Pattern Classification Explained." The author is a well-known emotion researcher.
Neurons always fire faster than sensory input data can arrive. That's the root of intrinsic brain activity.
Everything you see, hear, feel, smell, and taste comes from predictions made from your past experience. These predictions are then compared to sensory input from the outside world and if they're wrong, the brain adjusts. This all happens outside of awareness. This is called the predictive coding model of brain activity.
Hallucination is just a special case in which sensory input is ignored in favor of predictions. Same thing for dreams and daydreaming.
>You're over thinking it. People in general are poor at risk assessment.
Sorry, I think you're under-thinking it. :-) "Risk" is a mental concept made up by people, not a basic part of biology, chemistry or physics. A better question is why people are bad at assessing risk. It's reasonable to argue that the reason, in part, is that we cannot mentally simulate the consequences of risky actions with any accuracy, because the human cortex is wired not to detect bodily signals finely.
>You don't need to feel agony of an accident to know you don't want to be in one.
True, but not really the point. If we could feel agony by imagining it, I suspect we'd be a lot more careful in the car.
People continue to use their cell phones while driving because of a limitation of our biology. Here's a quick demonstration.
Imagine right now that you're petting a dog. Can you see (in your mind's eye) the dog's face? Can you "feel" the fur against your fingers and the dog's breath against your face? Can you "hear" the dog panting in your head? Most people can, easily. Your brain is great at simulating these sensations through imagination.
Now, try to imagine agony. Imagine the physical feeling of crashing your car at high speed, because you were on your stupid cell phone. Can you actually experience the agony of your destroyed body in your mind? The answer (for almost everybody) is no. Your brain is very bad at imagining/simulating internal feeling. Our brains are wired that way. So we continue driving with cell phones, even though we know the risks.
These ideas were inspired by the book, "How Emotions are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain," by Lisa Feldman Barrett, chapter 4, "The Origin of Feeling." https://www.amazon.com/How-Emo...
"Another Earth" is not only a great SF movie, but IMHO was the best film of 2011. Great characters, intriguing story, thought-provoking ending. Anyone who hasn't seen it is missing a real treat.
>This has already happened with cell phones. They started as a niche device and now it's difficult to function in society without one.
I like your point and your analogy, but actually, it's not that hard to function in society without a cell phone. I've been doing it for years. The only downside is a slight delay in getting the information you need or communicating with someone. I find the trade-off totally worth it.
I work for a company that's reasonably large (8000+ people) and is consistently profitable, and we prize and celebrate innovation. People are encouraged to try out ideas quickly and if they fail, at least they failed fast. We have an intranet website where people post their successes and learnings. I personally know many coworkers who came up with ideas, implemented them, and made money for the company.
I am a technical manager of a team that specializes in automating manual processes and eliminating waste. I very intentionally leave room for my direct reports to innovate. If they come to me with an idea -- this is a critical point -- I treat my opinion as a HYPOTHESIS, not as absolute truth. After all, I am just guessing whether their idea will work or not. I'd rather have them build a minimum viable example to get some empirical evidence if their idea will work or not.
If I think their idea has no chance whatsoever of succeeding, I'll put forward my objections and see if they have good answers for them. This discussion is important. Sometimes they show me I am wrong, which is fine with me. (Nobody's perfect.) Other times my objections spur them to come up with a more robust idea.
Anyway, not all companies are pits of innovation death.
Whiteboard coding questions aren't bad in and of themselves. The real problem is bad interviewers who don't know what's realistic in an admittedly artificial interview situation. Questions that require rote memorization should be obsolete today. Common flaws include:
* Requiring perfect syntax off-the-cuff
* Requiring exact names of library functions
* Asking questions that have just one correct answer (because a wrong answer tells you very little)
A good interviewer can run a beautiful coding interview on a whiteboard, keeping the candidate engaged and displaying his/her skills. You run it like an ongoing conversation with the candidate. If they hit a wall or don't remember something, you simply give them a hint or even the missing answer so they can continue. The end goal is to make the determination: does this candidate know what the hell he/she is talking about, and do I want to work with him/her? The end goal is not to determine if the candidate can take the length of a string in Prolog.
I have personally trained hundreds of technical interviewers in these skills. The problem at many companies is that nobody evaluates people's interview skills and separates the good one from the bad ones.
15+ years ago, I sprung for an Omnirax desk (this one). I can't rave enough about it. The height is perfect, the surface big & durable, and plenty of rackmount space. It still looks as good as new. The company is well-known in the music industry but not so much outside.
Set up a few big monitors (with Ergotron monitor arms) and a beefy, silent rackmount PC from EndPCNoise.com, and you'll have an enviable work environment (speaking from experience).
The real problem is that nearly 50% of the public has below-average intelligence.
(Anyone who sees the above statement as elitist, rather than an obvious statement about mathematics, is part of the problem.)
Therefore, whoever makes the most noise gets the most attention from people, regardless of the truth of the message.
Actually, people do math (and most everything else) with their entire brain. Visual cortex isn't just for vision either: it helps to process audio. Likewise auditory cortex helps to process vision. Both of them assist with other signals from body to brain (known as interoception). Just about every neuron in the brain participates in more than one function. (Note: This this is not the same thing as saying "all neurons are identical." That's false. But any given neuron participates in more than one kind of mental state.)
Neuroscientists have known for years that the brain has few "dedicated" areas for any particular function, such as math. Instead, many collections of neurons can accomplish the same function. This is called degeneracy. (Terrible name, I know... let the jokes about degenerate mathematicians begin....)
Also, the brain doesn't "light up" as if were sitting around idle and suddenly leaps into action. The whole brain is active all the time. This is called intrinsic brain activity.
Anyone who talks about brain areas "lighting up," or believes that each region of the brain has a dedicated function, is at least a decade behind modern neuroscience.
Apple: Aim Different.
Microsoft: Who Do You Want to Shoot Today?
The article draws its conclusions from reviews on GlassDoor.com. That's a very biased sample.
Emotion is not broadcast by the face. This has been known for a long time. Here's a clever study that shows people attend less to the face than the body when trying to guess someone's emotion.
http://www.npr.org/2012/11/30/...
Yeah, that'll work.
About 15 years ago, a QA engineer in my office (a large Wall Street financial form) placed a fake trade for 1,000,000 shares of company stock in one of our test systems. The test order somehow got out to the New York Stock Exchange and actually moved the market. Backing out that trade was reportedly quite expensive.
The engineer didn't get fired, because he had done everything correctly. The system infrastructure had been set up wrong.. wasn't his fault.
Congratulations for rediscovering classical conditioning.
Ads don't "fuel the web." They fuel particular businesses, and most of them I wouldn't be sad to see go. I remember the web before there were ads. It was fun and interesting and helpful anyway.
I've run a web site at my own expense (currently $250/year) for 20 years because it's fun to do so. I like sharing information, just like I enjoy writing open-source code. If the web were just enthusiast sites and shopping, that would be fine with me.
I've been at a "passionate programmer" e-commerce company for over 10 years. Their definition of "passionate" (of which apparently there are many) is a developer who doesn't simply convert a request into code, but who will also think intelligently about the larger (difficult) business problem and focus on it. When your client says "Build me a proprietary streaming video server," the ordinary programmer starts taking specs for it, whereas the passionate one asks to learn about the business problem being solved. Then you learn that the video server is for playing instructional/motivational videos for the salespeople. So the real business problem is an unmotivated sales force, and a "video server" is not necessarily the only solution. Now you can have a discussion about other solutions.
I'm sure some readers will immediately jump up with counterexamples and pessimism... how the other person won't want to hear about your alternatives because they're threatened, etc. but I have been living this life now for 10+ years at the same mid-sized company and it's real. And yes, I am paid well for it, and so are my direct reports. And no, I rarely need to work evenings or weekends, and neither do my direct reports. And we all get free food. And the company is consistently profitable.
From all the vitriol I've been reading here today, I get the impression my company is extremely rare. Guess I'll stay for another 10!