If this experiment were proposed by my master's student, I wouldn't allow them to proceed to perform it based upon the lack of control of the uncountably various factors unaccounted for in the methods. Based upon the limited nature of the experiment, the results are utterly ungeneralizable, and there's no suggestion that they're even repeatable. If sitting on a thesis committee hearing a defense of this paper, I would vote against the student based upon not only their failure to address these issues, but also their failure to enumerate and describe them, in addition to their failure to suggest ways of rectifying their experimental omissions. If peer-reviewing the paper for publication, I would vote to reject it upon the same grounds.
This paper, as it stands, is junk science. It's astonishing that the two lead authors are post-docs and the second two authors are professors. I would expect this level of work to be a mediocre master's thesis that the major professor insisted upon publishing to get a citation for himself and the student. The editor of the journal has had a distinguished career as a supramolecular chemist; it looks like he either didn't actually read the paper or doesn't care about the reputation of his journal. When I first read the paper, I had to look up the journal to make sure it wasn't a sham journal that exists solely to print bullshit.
All that said, I'm not sure I've made clear quite how poorly I evaluate this paper: it's one of the worst I've ever read outside the realm of pseudoscience fantasies about perpetual motion.
You and hey! are both right, and the AC is trolling you, and you should stop arguing with it. But there are still real questions about the validity of this study. The sample size of 80 may be appropriate, but the paper includes no power analysis or other explanation of how they came up with 80 participants. I'm not saying it's too small a sample; I'm just saying the paper offers no rationale for the sample size.
There's a fair amount of self-reporting on participant behavior. The subjects were all Australian university students about 21 years old. These represent potential problems with the randomness of the sample and the interpretation of the results. The songs they played were averaged in intensity and tempo. Are these changes adequate for isolating the differences between the two?
What if they included a "control" song with an equally ill-defined "neutral" themes--would there be significant differences from the control? What if they tried other "violent" and "happy" songs--would they maintain the same level of significance? The results show that people who listen to a lot of "violent" music were relatively cognitively unimpaired by hearing it in this experiment--what if you tried the same thing using complex Bach cantatas and audiences familiar/unfamiliar with them?
There's plenty to criticize about this experiment, but arbitrarily announcing that n=80 is "too small" a sample size is so silly that it's Not Even Wrong.
I worked in an office where we had a mini fridge with a coffee cup sitting on top. You threw a quarter in the cup and took a soda from the fridge. Most people were pretty honest about paying. At one point, I became the person in charge of collecting the quarters and buying soda to stock the fridge. I discovered that the whole system worked at a surprisingly large profit. At the time, a 12-pack cost about $2 at the local grocery store, but at $.25 per can, we were reselling the 12-pack for $3. I used the profits to expand the selection and make other small improvements.
It later occurred to me that all the people before me who had this job must have just been pocketing the profits, since they'd apparently just disappeared.
Slashdot has long been home to an odd species of luddite technocrats who love technology except if it's new. Especially if it seems to suggest the way they've been doing things is not the ultimate best way. Also, these people never actually RTFA, so their arguments are often against strawman versions of the technology that they made up after reading the headline and skimming the summary.
watching Blu Ray discs is becoming something that only "old people" do now - Good luck streaming 4K UHD HDR at anything even remotely close to an acceptable framerate.
Young people don't care about 4K UHD HDR. They watch movies on their 5 inch phone screen that has a big crack running across it from when they dropped it. They'll do this while sitting in a room with a 50" TV.
I've had a couple where the cords have failed. It usually fails at the point where it goes into the mouse. One of them (an MX518), I took apart, cut a couple inches of cord off, and rewired it in to the mouse. Delicate work, and a pain in the ass. I wish they'd make the thing properly removable, with some kind of connector, and then they could make money selling us new cords.
I also have a G500 where the left button often registers double-click when I click only once. It's related to a spring inside the microswitch for the left button that's even more delicate and fiddly to fix, so I haven't gotten around to it.
I like Logitech mouses while they work; I just wish they'd work for longer. I don't feel like I'm particularly abusive to them.
850,000 people lining up for $15/hour despite the repeated documentation of truly terrible, dehumanizing working conditions. Amazon employees urinate in bottles and trash cans in the warehouse because it's faster than going to the bathroom and they might face consequences for wasting that much time. They get various injuries as a result of proper industrial hygiene. They get fired for being ill. They're treated like disposable meat-bots. But I guess that's better than no job.
I have no facts to back up this feeling, but I'm suspicious that something has gone wrong with the way we measure unemployment and underemployment in the US. We're at about 4% unemployment, lowest in ~50 years. Unemployment that low should drive wages up, but they reportedly aren't even rising as fast as inflation. So, congratulations, here's some wage growth, but it comes at the cost of the boss' recognition of your humanity.
From 1965--2015, real median annual household income in the US increased by about 11%. In 2015 dollars, median household income in 1965 was about $50,000 per year... in 2015, it was about $56,500. Meanwhile, real GDP per capita increased by about 150%. Now, it's true that average household size decreased over that time, but not by nearly enough to explain this stagnation. It's also true that employees have had non-monetary benefits like health insurance, but employers have been gradually chipping away at those benefits.
Maybe these things aren't as important as I suspect they are, and maybe my intuition is just not good in this area. Like I say, I can't exactly explain what the core problem is, but the symptoms make me uneasy.
The H1 visa program was started to allow into the country aliens "having a residence in a foreign country which he has no intention of abandoning who is of distinguished merit and ability and who is coming temporarily to the United States to perform temporary services of an exceptional nature requiring such merit and ability." In the 90s, H1 was split into A and B, where A was for nurses and B was for others.
Go look at the text of the law. Here's an excerpt: we'll issue visas to an alien "having a residence in a foreign country which he has no intention of abandoning who is coming temporarily to the United States to perform other temporary service or labor if unemployed persons capable of performing such service or labor cannot be found in this country."
There's a subsection more directly related to academics: a visa for "an alien having a residence in a foreign country which he has no intention of abandoning who is a bona fide student, scholar, trainee, teacher, professor, research assistant, specialist, or leader in a field of specialized knowledge or skill, or other person of similar description, who is coming temporarily to the United States as a participant in a program designated by the Director of the United States Information Agency, for the purpose of teaching, instructing or lecturing, studying, observing, conducting research, consulting, demonstrating special skills, or receiving training..."
In every clause of this law, the word "temporary" features prominently. Every part of it starts with the same phrase about the person not abandoning their home. It's true that it's one of the few non-immigration visas that allows its holder to attempt to immigrate here. But for a law that you describe as having nothing to do with temporary jobs, the Congress sure included a lot of text about them.
H1Bs were never meant for bringing in most of the people companies are using them for today. The purpose was to be able to bring in high-skilled workers, temporarily, for the purpose of doing one job at one business and then going back home to their country. I support H1Bs used for such purposes, and I think the program should continue with a drastically reduced number of available visas and strict requirements for unique expertise and well-above average pay.
It seems like most businesses using the H1B program today want to bring in groups of foreign low-to-mid-level coders so they can treat them as indentured servants for a few years and then send them back when they're used up. I'm not sure we should even have a visa program to support that goal.
Why would you replace existing plates every 10 years? That seems incredibly wasteful!
Two reasons. First, the plate could deteriorate over time, so the state wants you to have new plates periodically so that they're always in good enough shape to be legible. Second, and perhaps more important, is that the state charges me a higher fee in years when they've decided I need a new plate, and I sincerely doubt that the added fee exactly offsets the cost of the plate--they get a little additional revenue. In the past, I have suggested that I would be willing to pay the additional fee while continuing to use my existing plates, which were perfectly serviceable, but it's not an option.
In the case of Flash, breaking your add-on is friendly because Flash is a security menace. And, in this case, you can still enable it on a per-site basis.
You're right about ads on the new tab page. That sucks. I don't use it for that reason.
I'm not saying there's no point to foldable devices... but what is the point? I hear about foldable phones. Why would I want to fold my phone? It's pocket-sized already. They could double the display area... so I could, what, watch a movie on a 5x4.5 screen instead of a 2.5x4.5 screen?
I guess what I'm asking is, what's the killer app that a foldable screen enables? Is it just bigger screen space that's more portable than a tablet?
This is a good step. It's great that browser makers are generally not beholden to people like advertisers for money, so they can make more user-friendly decisions. I'd like to see more, though.
I don't want autoplay anything in my browser. Especially audio and video. I use a plugin that aims to disable a lot of autoplay, but it doesn't always work. Why not have a browser flag that tells sites "I don't want autoplaying multimedia content"? I know crappy sites with video ads would ignore it, but more legitimate sites could respect it, potentially allowing them to save on bandwidth by not sending content to me that I don't want. I know I can stop it all by turning off JS entirely, but it's so integrated into so much of the web now that even simple sites barely work without it.
It's a little different from "do not track" in that even legitimate sites have monetary incentive to track me regardless of how I set that flag. What incentive do they have to stream videos to me that I don't want to watch?
Maybe I'm just in the minority in not wanting everything to be a video. Maybe the issue is that the sites have no motivation to obey "no autoplay" because it would cost developer time to satisfy a very small group of visitors.
Actually, I have no case at all, only a plastic film covering the screen. But it's been pointed out that my charging mat is an older one that doesn't provide as many watts to the phone, so that may be part of my dissatisfaction. It's a Samsung phone, charging back, and mat, so I assume it should all work well together. But maybe I just got in too early and they hadn't gotten it working that well, yet.
Yeah, that looks about like what I'd envisioned constructing. I have a hard time getting past ease with which you could just have the phone plug in while sitting on that cradle and make it much faster. I guess it would be a benefit if you had a number of wireless charge devices with incompatible input connections, but I don't have that, at the moment.
Mine is a Samsung that they say does 5W, so I guess it's in the middle of the range you describe. There's a newer model available that actually has kind of a cradle and does 7.5W. But, meh. For unrelated reasons, I think my phone is getting close to dying, so I'll just keep plugging it in until I figure out what I'm going to replace it with.
BTW, the manual for my mat says something about using the 'position guide' on the wireless charging back for the phone to place it on the mat correctly. I bought the charging back from Samsung, so it should be a genuine part, but if there's a position guide on the back, it's imperceptible to me.
I have a wireless charging mat for my Android phone. It has a few problems. One, the charging is a lot slower than by wire because the efficiency is so poor. Two, the phone has to be placed just right on the pad to consistently charge. A few degrees or centimeters from the ideal position, and the phone charges for a minute or so, then stops, then resumes, over and over again. This slows down the charge, and it probably isn't great for the battery to switch constantly between charging and discharging.
I had a thought to build the charging mat into a kind of stand for the phone that would hold both in the ideal position to charge, but I quickly realized that what I had invented was a charging cradle, and if it just hooked a wire into the charging port on the phone instead of incorporating the mat, it would do everything the wireless mat is doing, but faster and with better energy efficiency.
Maybe Apple's is better, but my experience is that there's not that much point to wireless charging. These days, I just plug my phone in.
developers "typically assume that most of the execution time is spent in compiled, optimized C/C++ or Fortran libraries (e.g. NumPy) which are called from Python..."
What developer assumes that most of the execution time is spent in compiled libraries when the program is written in an interpreted language? I mean, if I write a c++ library to call from my Python program, it's because I know it's gonna be fast...
I have a turntable and a box of vinyl records. I don't own these things because I have some delusion about sound quality, digital sampling, "warmer tone", or whatever. I just sometimes enjoy the physical ritual of putting a record on. There's a little light illuminating some bumps on the platter that show what speed it's running at. There's a light on the tone arm so you can see where the needle is. There's a little analog noise from dust and imperfections. It's fun.
I also have a catalog of music in mp3 format. It's easy, it's portable, and it works just fine. That's how I usually consume music.
My parents have a house with a modern forced-air heating system. It can keep the house at a pretty constant temperature automatically. But they still sometimes light a fire in the fireplace, just because it's fun.
Yeah, until goddamn the hillbillies beat the shit out of you and destroy your phone. Putting yourself into physical confrontation with that kind of person, and threatening them with the police, is a great way to find out just how stupid they are.
Getting into a gunfight with them is likely to result in either your death or felony charges.
I think I probably saw this here on Slashdot, but as the summary mentions Anchorhead, here is a web version of the game:
http://pr-if.org/play/anchorhe...
I spent most of an afternoon playing until I died without having saved.
Slashdot Mirror
If this experiment were proposed by my master's student, I wouldn't allow them to proceed to perform it based upon the lack of control of the uncountably various factors unaccounted for in the methods. Based upon the limited nature of the experiment, the results are utterly ungeneralizable, and there's no suggestion that they're even repeatable. If sitting on a thesis committee hearing a defense of this paper, I would vote against the student based upon not only their failure to address these issues, but also their failure to enumerate and describe them, in addition to their failure to suggest ways of rectifying their experimental omissions. If peer-reviewing the paper for publication, I would vote to reject it upon the same grounds.
This paper, as it stands, is junk science. It's astonishing that the two lead authors are post-docs and the second two authors are professors. I would expect this level of work to be a mediocre master's thesis that the major professor insisted upon publishing to get a citation for himself and the student. The editor of the journal has had a distinguished career as a supramolecular chemist; it looks like he either didn't actually read the paper or doesn't care about the reputation of his journal. When I first read the paper, I had to look up the journal to make sure it wasn't a sham journal that exists solely to print bullshit.
All that said, I'm not sure I've made clear quite how poorly I evaluate this paper: it's one of the worst I've ever read outside the realm of pseudoscience fantasies about perpetual motion.
You and hey! are both right, and the AC is trolling you, and you should stop arguing with it. But there are still real questions about the validity of this study. The sample size of 80 may be appropriate, but the paper includes no power analysis or other explanation of how they came up with 80 participants. I'm not saying it's too small a sample; I'm just saying the paper offers no rationale for the sample size.
There's a fair amount of self-reporting on participant behavior. The subjects were all Australian university students about 21 years old. These represent potential problems with the randomness of the sample and the interpretation of the results. The songs they played were averaged in intensity and tempo. Are these changes adequate for isolating the differences between the two?
What if they included a "control" song with an equally ill-defined "neutral" themes--would there be significant differences from the control? What if they tried other "violent" and "happy" songs--would they maintain the same level of significance? The results show that people who listen to a lot of "violent" music were relatively cognitively unimpaired by hearing it in this experiment--what if you tried the same thing using complex Bach cantatas and audiences familiar/unfamiliar with them?
There's plenty to criticize about this experiment, but arbitrarily announcing that n=80 is "too small" a sample size is so silly that it's Not Even Wrong.
I worked in an office where we had a mini fridge with a coffee cup sitting on top. You threw a quarter in the cup and took a soda from the fridge. Most people were pretty honest about paying. At one point, I became the person in charge of collecting the quarters and buying soda to stock the fridge. I discovered that the whole system worked at a surprisingly large profit. At the time, a 12-pack cost about $2 at the local grocery store, but at $.25 per can, we were reselling the 12-pack for $3. I used the profits to expand the selection and make other small improvements.
It later occurred to me that all the people before me who had this job must have just been pocketing the profits, since they'd apparently just disappeared.
Slashdot has long been home to an odd species of luddite technocrats who love technology except if it's new. Especially if it seems to suggest the way they've been doing things is not the ultimate best way. Also, these people never actually RTFA, so their arguments are often against strawman versions of the technology that they made up after reading the headline and skimming the summary.
Young people don't care about 4K UHD HDR. They watch movies on their 5 inch phone screen that has a big crack running across it from when they dropped it. They'll do this while sitting in a room with a 50" TV.
I've had a couple where the cords have failed. It usually fails at the point where it goes into the mouse. One of them (an MX518), I took apart, cut a couple inches of cord off, and rewired it in to the mouse. Delicate work, and a pain in the ass. I wish they'd make the thing properly removable, with some kind of connector, and then they could make money selling us new cords.
I also have a G500 where the left button often registers double-click when I click only once. It's related to a spring inside the microswitch for the left button that's even more delicate and fiddly to fix, so I haven't gotten around to it.
I like Logitech mouses while they work; I just wish they'd work for longer. I don't feel like I'm particularly abusive to them.
Cooper: What's your humor setting, TARS?
TARS: That's one hundred percent.
Cooper: Let's bring it on down to seventy-five, please.
Yeah, I'm sure it's secretly a utopian worker's paradise in there. How clever Amazon has been to keep it hidden for all this time.
Well, here. There are plenty more from plenty of various sources. https://www.cnbc.com/2018/11/2...
https://www.recode.net/2019/1/...
https://www.cbc.ca/news/busine...
https://www.newsweek.com/amazo...
https://www.kare11.com/article...
https://www.vox.com/2018/7/16/...
https://www.theguardian.com/te...
https://www.washingtonpost.com...
https://www.businessinsider.co...
https://www.wsj.com/articles/a...
850,000 people lining up for $15/hour despite the repeated documentation of truly terrible, dehumanizing working conditions. Amazon employees urinate in bottles and trash cans in the warehouse because it's faster than going to the bathroom and they might face consequences for wasting that much time. They get various injuries as a result of proper industrial hygiene. They get fired for being ill. They're treated like disposable meat-bots. But I guess that's better than no job.
I have no facts to back up this feeling, but I'm suspicious that something has gone wrong with the way we measure unemployment and underemployment in the US. We're at about 4% unemployment, lowest in ~50 years. Unemployment that low should drive wages up, but they reportedly aren't even rising as fast as inflation. So, congratulations, here's some wage growth, but it comes at the cost of the boss' recognition of your humanity.
From 1965--2015, real median annual household income in the US increased by about 11%. In 2015 dollars, median household income in 1965 was about $50,000 per year... in 2015, it was about $56,500. Meanwhile, real GDP per capita increased by about 150%. Now, it's true that average household size decreased over that time, but not by nearly enough to explain this stagnation. It's also true that employees have had non-monetary benefits like health insurance, but employers have been gradually chipping away at those benefits.
Maybe these things aren't as important as I suspect they are, and maybe my intuition is just not good in this area. Like I say, I can't exactly explain what the core problem is, but the symptoms make me uneasy.
The H1 visa program was started to allow into the country aliens "having a residence in a foreign country which he has no intention of abandoning who is of distinguished merit and ability and who is coming temporarily to the United States to perform temporary services of an exceptional nature requiring such merit and ability." In the 90s, H1 was split into A and B, where A was for nurses and B was for others.
Go look at the text of the law. Here's an excerpt: we'll issue visas to an alien "having a residence in a foreign country which he has no intention of abandoning who is coming temporarily to the United States to perform other temporary service or labor if unemployed persons capable of performing such service or labor cannot be found in this country."
There's a subsection more directly related to academics: a visa for "an alien having a residence in a foreign country which he has no intention of abandoning who is a bona fide student, scholar, trainee, teacher, professor, research assistant, specialist, or leader in a field of specialized knowledge or skill, or other person of similar description, who is coming temporarily to the United States as a participant in a program designated by the Director of the United States Information Agency, for the purpose of teaching, instructing or lecturing, studying, observing, conducting research, consulting, demonstrating special skills, or receiving training..."
In every clause of this law, the word "temporary" features prominently. Every part of it starts with the same phrase about the person not abandoning their home. It's true that it's one of the few non-immigration visas that allows its holder to attempt to immigrate here. But for a law that you describe as having nothing to do with temporary jobs, the Congress sure included a lot of text about them.
H1Bs were never meant for bringing in most of the people companies are using them for today. The purpose was to be able to bring in high-skilled workers, temporarily, for the purpose of doing one job at one business and then going back home to their country. I support H1Bs used for such purposes, and I think the program should continue with a drastically reduced number of available visas and strict requirements for unique expertise and well-above average pay.
It seems like most businesses using the H1B program today want to bring in groups of foreign low-to-mid-level coders so they can treat them as indentured servants for a few years and then send them back when they're used up. I'm not sure we should even have a visa program to support that goal.
Two reasons. First, the plate could deteriorate over time, so the state wants you to have new plates periodically so that they're always in good enough shape to be legible. Second, and perhaps more important, is that the state charges me a higher fee in years when they've decided I need a new plate, and I sincerely doubt that the added fee exactly offsets the cost of the plate--they get a little additional revenue. In the past, I have suggested that I would be willing to pay the additional fee while continuing to use my existing plates, which were perfectly serviceable, but it's not an option.
It plays all of them except for the first three. The plugin is "Disable HTML5 Autoplay Version 0.6.2".
In the case of Flash, breaking your add-on is friendly because Flash is a security menace. And, in this case, you can still enable it on a per-site basis.
You're right about ads on the new tab page. That sucks. I don't use it for that reason.
I'm not saying there's no point to foldable devices... but what is the point? I hear about foldable phones. Why would I want to fold my phone? It's pocket-sized already. They could double the display area... so I could, what, watch a movie on a 5x4.5 screen instead of a 2.5x4.5 screen?
I guess what I'm asking is, what's the killer app that a foldable screen enables? Is it just bigger screen space that's more portable than a tablet?
This is a good step. It's great that browser makers are generally not beholden to people like advertisers for money, so they can make more user-friendly decisions. I'd like to see more, though.
I don't want autoplay anything in my browser. Especially audio and video. I use a plugin that aims to disable a lot of autoplay, but it doesn't always work. Why not have a browser flag that tells sites "I don't want autoplaying multimedia content"? I know crappy sites with video ads would ignore it, but more legitimate sites could respect it, potentially allowing them to save on bandwidth by not sending content to me that I don't want. I know I can stop it all by turning off JS entirely, but it's so integrated into so much of the web now that even simple sites barely work without it.
It's a little different from "do not track" in that even legitimate sites have monetary incentive to track me regardless of how I set that flag. What incentive do they have to stream videos to me that I don't want to watch?
Maybe I'm just in the minority in not wanting everything to be a video. Maybe the issue is that the sites have no motivation to obey "no autoplay" because it would cost developer time to satisfy a very small group of visitors.
Actually, I have no case at all, only a plastic film covering the screen. But it's been pointed out that my charging mat is an older one that doesn't provide as many watts to the phone, so that may be part of my dissatisfaction. It's a Samsung phone, charging back, and mat, so I assume it should all work well together. But maybe I just got in too early and they hadn't gotten it working that well, yet.
Yeah, that looks about like what I'd envisioned constructing. I have a hard time getting past ease with which you could just have the phone plug in while sitting on that cradle and make it much faster. I guess it would be a benefit if you had a number of wireless charge devices with incompatible input connections, but I don't have that, at the moment.
Mine is a Samsung that they say does 5W, so I guess it's in the middle of the range you describe. There's a newer model available that actually has kind of a cradle and does 7.5W. But, meh. For unrelated reasons, I think my phone is getting close to dying, so I'll just keep plugging it in until I figure out what I'm going to replace it with.
BTW, the manual for my mat says something about using the 'position guide' on the wireless charging back for the phone to place it on the mat correctly. I bought the charging back from Samsung, so it should be a genuine part, but if there's a position guide on the back, it's imperceptible to me.
I have a wireless charging mat for my Android phone. It has a few problems. One, the charging is a lot slower than by wire because the efficiency is so poor. Two, the phone has to be placed just right on the pad to consistently charge. A few degrees or centimeters from the ideal position, and the phone charges for a minute or so, then stops, then resumes, over and over again. This slows down the charge, and it probably isn't great for the battery to switch constantly between charging and discharging.
I had a thought to build the charging mat into a kind of stand for the phone that would hold both in the ideal position to charge, but I quickly realized that what I had invented was a charging cradle, and if it just hooked a wire into the charging port on the phone instead of incorporating the mat, it would do everything the wireless mat is doing, but faster and with better energy efficiency.
Maybe Apple's is better, but my experience is that there's not that much point to wireless charging. These days, I just plug my phone in.
What developer assumes that most of the execution time is spent in compiled libraries when the program is written in an interpreted language? I mean, if I write a c++ library to call from my Python program, it's because I know it's gonna be fast...
I have a turntable and a box of vinyl records. I don't own these things because I have some delusion about sound quality, digital sampling, "warmer tone", or whatever. I just sometimes enjoy the physical ritual of putting a record on. There's a little light illuminating some bumps on the platter that show what speed it's running at. There's a light on the tone arm so you can see where the needle is. There's a little analog noise from dust and imperfections. It's fun.
I also have a catalog of music in mp3 format. It's easy, it's portable, and it works just fine. That's how I usually consume music.
My parents have a house with a modern forced-air heating system. It can keep the house at a pretty constant temperature automatically. But they still sometimes light a fire in the fireplace, just because it's fun.
Yeah, until goddamn the hillbillies beat the shit out of you and destroy your phone. Putting yourself into physical confrontation with that kind of person, and threatening them with the police, is a great way to find out just how stupid they are.
Getting into a gunfight with them is likely to result in either your death or felony charges.
I think I probably saw this here on Slashdot, but as the summary mentions Anchorhead, here is a web version of the game:
http://pr-if.org/play/anchorhe...
I spent most of an afternoon playing until I died without having saved.