The proposed rule itself is pretty inscrutable (as usual, I suppose), but the article's examples are all over the map. Some of the examples seem like the small-scale sort of thing that would indeed cause inconvenience to ban: individual electronic devices sent air-freight from NewEgg to a consumer, or spare batteries in checked luggage. But it also mentions that existing regulations exempt "a pallet containing thousands of lithium batteries" from hazardous-material reporting and packaging requirements... and in that case the change doesn't seem too unreasonable to me, because maybe a pallet with thousands of batteries really should be subjected to the packaging and reporting requirements?
Yeah, I think it really has to do with expectations. I have a friend who sells an app in the Android app store, and also provides it for free on his website--- both source and binary versions. Plenty of people still buy it from the app store, because that's what they're used to doing.
Hydrogen's actually about 0.9% of the earth's total mass, though you're right that it's only 0.0021% of the atmosphere (most of earth's hydrogen is locked up in water or ice).
I think he's a conservative in the older, pre-Reagan/Thatcher sense, which is more about maintaining the business status quo than promoting the "creative destruction" of free markets.
These new high-resolution views no doubt provide important new information about Pluto's seasons, but the fact that Pluto undergoes significant seasonal cycles has been known for quite a while. (Here's one randomly chosen mention.)
Wikipedia is the moral equivalent of an old-school hyperlinked body of text, though, not really a dynamic website. It happens to be served dynamically, and can be edited by users, but at any instant in time there is a static snapshot of hypertext. In fact, it could've been implemented that way--- as a bunch of static HTML files that get edited. That's in contrast to AJAXy webapps, which don't really make sense to think of as hypertext.
Yeah, I agree with that, though it's nice to have things recorded also. As far as informal communication goes, I'm actually increasingly finding blogs actually to be a good source for that. They're more informal (and timely) than journal or conference papers, but still written, sometimes at length, and usually remain online for a while. Not a permanent record, but more permanent than a chance hallway conversation at a conference.
In the social sciences and medicine, I think it's an even deeper problem than models. In complex interconnected systems like "human psychology" or "human societies" or "the cardiovascular system", there are very few variables that turn out to be either: 1) absolutely unrelated to each other; or 2) exactly identical. Everything is slightly related, and slightly different, so given large enough datasets, you can always show statistical significance, because it really is a real effect. That's one reason there's been a shift towards a view that some measure of "scientific significance" should be measured: proving a statistically significant but almost-zero effect should not be reported as "significant effect found!!".
There are certainly hard games I've enjoyed, but difficulty isn't really a single-axis thing, so I don't find it that useful to talk about in the abstract, and I certainly don't see any benefit to games that are "hard" just for the sake of it. A game might be hard because it has complex puzzles, or because it requires highly honed twitch skills, or because it requires non-obvious inferences, or because it requires acute observation, or any number of other things. Sometimes those are useful, sometimes not.
Plus, it's not even really something to set in opposition to casual games. It's really hard to get the kinds of low times on Minesweeper that aficionados get, and there are pretty hardcore communities based around such things.
I do agree that not every game has to be for a mass market. But surely, if you're given the luxury of designing a game that doesn't have to appeal to everyone, there are more interesting niches?
I agree (my first paper was a negative-results paper), but I think there are some kinds of negative results that are relatively hard to get published. Papers along the lines of: "here's an approach you might have thought would work, but it turned out that it didn't, and in retrospect we can see why, which this paper will explain". If you try to submit a paper like that, you often get push-back of, "oh well, yeah it's obvious why that wouldn't work, dunno why you didn't see it earlier". And of course it often is obvious once you've read why it doesn't work.
As you point out, it's quite a bit easier to get negative results published if someone else had already claimed them as positive results. In that case, you're not both proposing and shooting down the idea simultaneously, but shooting down (or failing to confirm) someone else's idea, which has the advantages that: 1) you have evidence that at least one presumably smart person really didn't think it was obviously a bad idea (in fact, they thought it was a good one, and even that it worked); and 2) you're positioned as correcting an error in the literature, rather than as introducing a correction for a hypothetical error nobody has yet made.
It's a bit tricky to fix, because some negative results really are obvious: it does nobody in the field any good to publish "we tried X on Y, and it didn't work", if genuinely nobody who was competent in the field would've thought X would work on Y, and the reason was exactly the reason you discovered.
Incidentally, here's one previous attempt to start such a journal that didn't really get off the ground. Their one published article, which is quite good, is of the form I mention: the authors of a system called Swordfish recounted an idea they had to produce an improvement, Swordfish2, that in the end turned out to do be better than the original Swordfish. It was hard to get published elsewhere, because it wasn't correcting an existing result---nobody had previously proposed that doing what they tried to Swordfish2 was actually a good idea---but it's interesting (to me, at least) because it really does seem like a plausible idea, and I feel I learned something in reading why it didn't work.
In some cases it's not clear that "linked with personality disorders" actually adds any information, because many personality disorders have no etiology or known mechanism and are simply defined clinically as the presence of a certain set of symptoms. So saying that the symptoms are associated with the disorder doesn't tell you anything, because the disorder is defined as having those symptoms. It's like saying being morbidly overweight is linked with clinical obesity.
I have no problem serving on a jury, even for an extended period of time. But I should be allowed to read my email and make some attempt at keeping up my affairs in the evenings, when not attending court. If the jury is so untrustworthy that you don't think it's possible for them to be impartial without being held incommunicado against their will, the institution has a fundamental problem.
Well, fortunately or unfortunately, merely being an academic of any sort (prof, researcher, postdoc, grad student, etc.) seems to be enough to get you excluded. I guess nobody wants eggheads on juries.
Yeah, I'm certainly not going to agree to being sentenced to weeks of solitary confinement without having myself been accused of a crime. Even prisoners get to receive visitors and make phone calls.
This article claims the opposite: that Macmillan isn't willing to sell at hardcover wholesale anymore, but is demanding a switch to the fixed-split model that lets Macmillan set the prices. Amazon wanted to stay with the hardcover-wholesale pricing model.
The latter is what they're doing. Macmillan previously sold ebooks wholesale to Amazon for $9.99, and Amazon chose to sell them with no markup to promote the Kindle platform. Macmillan demanded a move to "agency pricing", where Macmillan sets the price, and Macmillan and Amazon split the revenue according to a fixed percentage. It's not really about money per book for Macmillan---they'll get about the same $9.99 per book either way---but about control over pricing.
Indeed. I was replying to his more general claim that item prices shouldn't reflect marginal cost in virtually any market. In the special case of government-mandated monopolies, clearly free-market pricing doesn't happen.
That's true, but I suspect that substitution is actually better than you might think, and the root problem is collusion and a small group of dominant producers, rather than imperfect substitution. Macmillan can get away with this because they're huge and singlehandedly control a significant swathe of the book market (and a majority in some genres), but a publisher with 1% market share who faced competition in every genre segment would have a much harder time raising ebook prices and still maintaining sales.
You can take it as sarcasm if you prefer. The main point is that libertarians can't really have it both ways. If someone's arguing that it's fine for prices to be set at "whatever the market will bear" and this need have no relation to cost, then they can't really also argue that "the market works", with the usual invisible-hand arguments, because the idealized invisible-hand arguments imply that market prices should be closely connected to cost.
This kind of vertical price setting was illegal in the U.S. for about 100 years, considered a form of price-fixing under the Sherman Act. Macmillan was free to choose whatever wholesale price they wanted to sell books and ebooks to Amazon for, but once they sold them, they had no control over what retail price Amazon set. Unfortunately, that was overturned in 2007 in a 5-4 U.S. Supreme Court decision.
In the fields I'm familiar with at least, my impression is that large publishers like Macmillan filter for expected popularity rather than quality; they're in the book-selling business after all, not academics. As a result, an appalling proportion of Macmillan books on academic subjects contain factual errors, gross exaggerations, popular myths presented as fact, sloppy conflations, etc. It's one reason many academic departments give little career credit for publishing popular press books: if you got your history book placed with a respected academic press, people are willing to believe you made a contribution, but if you got it placed with Macmillan, who knows what nonsense history you wrote.
If the free market works, though, prevailing prices should relate to cost in the long run, since the equilibrium price of a competitive market is cost plus a reasonable profit ("reasonable profit" being the minimum profit needed to keep suppliers from exiting the business).
Sometimes that's true, but it can lead to a weird roundabout tone other times. Some scientists (in particular) try to avoid pronouns, which leads to a replacement of things like "we analyzed" with "analysis was performed", with the analysis-performer grammatically absent.
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The proposed rule itself is pretty inscrutable (as usual, I suppose), but the article's examples are all over the map. Some of the examples seem like the small-scale sort of thing that would indeed cause inconvenience to ban: individual electronic devices sent air-freight from NewEgg to a consumer, or spare batteries in checked luggage. But it also mentions that existing regulations exempt "a pallet containing thousands of lithium batteries" from hazardous-material reporting and packaging requirements... and in that case the change doesn't seem too unreasonable to me, because maybe a pallet with thousands of batteries really should be subjected to the packaging and reporting requirements?
Yeah, I think it really has to do with expectations. I have a friend who sells an app in the Android app store, and also provides it for free on his website--- both source and binary versions. Plenty of people still buy it from the app store, because that's what they're used to doing.
It shouldn't even need fair use, given that the State of California and its universities enjoy sovereign immunity from copyright and patent suits. I'm not quite sure why they capitulated in light of that.
Hydrogen's actually about 0.9% of the earth's total mass, though you're right that it's only 0.0021% of the atmosphere (most of earth's hydrogen is locked up in water or ice).
I think he's a conservative in the older, pre-Reagan/Thatcher sense, which is more about maintaining the business status quo than promoting the "creative destruction" of free markets.
It isn't, though. It's just a bunch of hypertext plus a text editor.
These new high-resolution views no doubt provide important new information about Pluto's seasons, but the fact that Pluto undergoes significant seasonal cycles has been known for quite a while. (Here's one randomly chosen mention.)
Wikipedia is the moral equivalent of an old-school hyperlinked body of text, though, not really a dynamic website. It happens to be served dynamically, and can be edited by users, but at any instant in time there is a static snapshot of hypertext. In fact, it could've been implemented that way--- as a bunch of static HTML files that get edited. That's in contrast to AJAXy webapps, which don't really make sense to think of as hypertext.
Yeah, I agree with that, though it's nice to have things recorded also. As far as informal communication goes, I'm actually increasingly finding blogs actually to be a good source for that. They're more informal (and timely) than journal or conference papers, but still written, sometimes at length, and usually remain online for a while. Not a permanent record, but more permanent than a chance hallway conversation at a conference.
In the social sciences and medicine, I think it's an even deeper problem than models. In complex interconnected systems like "human psychology" or "human societies" or "the cardiovascular system", there are very few variables that turn out to be either: 1) absolutely unrelated to each other; or 2) exactly identical. Everything is slightly related, and slightly different, so given large enough datasets, you can always show statistical significance, because it really is a real effect. That's one reason there's been a shift towards a view that some measure of "scientific significance" should be measured: proving a statistically significant but almost-zero effect should not be reported as "significant effect found!!".
There are certainly hard games I've enjoyed, but difficulty isn't really a single-axis thing, so I don't find it that useful to talk about in the abstract, and I certainly don't see any benefit to games that are "hard" just for the sake of it. A game might be hard because it has complex puzzles, or because it requires highly honed twitch skills, or because it requires non-obvious inferences, or because it requires acute observation, or any number of other things. Sometimes those are useful, sometimes not.
Plus, it's not even really something to set in opposition to casual games. It's really hard to get the kinds of low times on Minesweeper that aficionados get, and there are pretty hardcore communities based around such things.
I do agree that not every game has to be for a mass market. But surely, if you're given the luxury of designing a game that doesn't have to appeal to everyone, there are more interesting niches?
I agree (my first paper was a negative-results paper), but I think there are some kinds of negative results that are relatively hard to get published. Papers along the lines of: "here's an approach you might have thought would work, but it turned out that it didn't, and in retrospect we can see why, which this paper will explain". If you try to submit a paper like that, you often get push-back of, "oh well, yeah it's obvious why that wouldn't work, dunno why you didn't see it earlier". And of course it often is obvious once you've read why it doesn't work.
As you point out, it's quite a bit easier to get negative results published if someone else had already claimed them as positive results. In that case, you're not both proposing and shooting down the idea simultaneously, but shooting down (or failing to confirm) someone else's idea, which has the advantages that: 1) you have evidence that at least one presumably smart person really didn't think it was obviously a bad idea (in fact, they thought it was a good one, and even that it worked); and 2) you're positioned as correcting an error in the literature, rather than as introducing a correction for a hypothetical error nobody has yet made.
It's a bit tricky to fix, because some negative results really are obvious: it does nobody in the field any good to publish "we tried X on Y, and it didn't work", if genuinely nobody who was competent in the field would've thought X would work on Y, and the reason was exactly the reason you discovered.
Incidentally, here's one previous attempt to start such a journal that didn't really get off the ground. Their one published article, which is quite good, is of the form I mention: the authors of a system called Swordfish recounted an idea they had to produce an improvement, Swordfish2, that in the end turned out to do be better than the original Swordfish. It was hard to get published elsewhere, because it wasn't correcting an existing result---nobody had previously proposed that doing what they tried to Swordfish2 was actually a good idea---but it's interesting (to me, at least) because it really does seem like a plausible idea, and I feel I learned something in reading why it didn't work.
In some cases it's not clear that "linked with personality disorders" actually adds any information, because many personality disorders have no etiology or known mechanism and are simply defined clinically as the presence of a certain set of symptoms. So saying that the symptoms are associated with the disorder doesn't tell you anything, because the disorder is defined as having those symptoms. It's like saying being morbidly overweight is linked with clinical obesity.
I have no problem serving on a jury, even for an extended period of time. But I should be allowed to read my email and make some attempt at keeping up my affairs in the evenings, when not attending court. If the jury is so untrustworthy that you don't think it's possible for them to be impartial without being held incommunicado against their will, the institution has a fundamental problem.
Well, fortunately or unfortunately, merely being an academic of any sort (prof, researcher, postdoc, grad student, etc.) seems to be enough to get you excluded. I guess nobody wants eggheads on juries.
Yeah, I'm certainly not going to agree to being sentenced to weeks of solitary confinement without having myself been accused of a crime. Even prisoners get to receive visitors and make phone calls.
This article claims the opposite: that Macmillan isn't willing to sell at hardcover wholesale anymore, but is demanding a switch to the fixed-split model that lets Macmillan set the prices. Amazon wanted to stay with the hardcover-wholesale pricing model.
The latter is what they're doing. Macmillan previously sold ebooks wholesale to Amazon for $9.99, and Amazon chose to sell them with no markup to promote the Kindle platform. Macmillan demanded a move to "agency pricing", where Macmillan sets the price, and Macmillan and Amazon split the revenue according to a fixed percentage. It's not really about money per book for Macmillan---they'll get about the same $9.99 per book either way---but about control over pricing.
Indeed. I was replying to his more general claim that item prices shouldn't reflect marginal cost in virtually any market. In the special case of government-mandated monopolies, clearly free-market pricing doesn't happen.
That's true, but I suspect that substitution is actually better than you might think, and the root problem is collusion and a small group of dominant producers, rather than imperfect substitution. Macmillan can get away with this because they're huge and singlehandedly control a significant swathe of the book market (and a majority in some genres), but a publisher with 1% market share who faced competition in every genre segment would have a much harder time raising ebook prices and still maintaining sales.
You can take it as sarcasm if you prefer. The main point is that libertarians can't really have it both ways. If someone's arguing that it's fine for prices to be set at "whatever the market will bear" and this need have no relation to cost, then they can't really also argue that "the market works", with the usual invisible-hand arguments, because the idealized invisible-hand arguments imply that market prices should be closely connected to cost.
This kind of vertical price setting was illegal in the U.S. for about 100 years, considered a form of price-fixing under the Sherman Act. Macmillan was free to choose whatever wholesale price they wanted to sell books and ebooks to Amazon for, but once they sold them, they had no control over what retail price Amazon set. Unfortunately, that was overturned in 2007 in a 5-4 U.S. Supreme Court decision.
In the fields I'm familiar with at least, my impression is that large publishers like Macmillan filter for expected popularity rather than quality; they're in the book-selling business after all, not academics. As a result, an appalling proportion of Macmillan books on academic subjects contain factual errors, gross exaggerations, popular myths presented as fact, sloppy conflations, etc. It's one reason many academic departments give little career credit for publishing popular press books: if you got your history book placed with a respected academic press, people are willing to believe you made a contribution, but if you got it placed with Macmillan, who knows what nonsense history you wrote.
If the free market works, though, prevailing prices should relate to cost in the long run, since the equilibrium price of a competitive market is cost plus a reasonable profit ("reasonable profit" being the minimum profit needed to keep suppliers from exiting the business).
Sometimes that's true, but it can lead to a weird roundabout tone other times. Some scientists (in particular) try to avoid pronouns, which leads to a replacement of things like "we analyzed" with "analysis was performed", with the analysis-performer grammatically absent.