Absolutely. The Rats Ass(tm) is one of our principal metrics.
As an Australian marketing flack, I don't believe in targeted advertising anyway. You're supposed to make stuff attractive, not mess with people's heads. They resent it.
Yes - I was hoping we could come up with some decent repeatable measurements, other than standardised IQ tests. Something simple, perhaps, such as how wide open their eyes are, pupil dilation, number of questions in typical simple responses, vocal or written word count over time, whatever we think we can derive some dependable insights from. It may be a soft science, but that doesn't mean things can't be measured. It's just that there are so many questions, and so many metrics that need to be devised. Consistent metrics, yet adapted to the questions at hand. Metrics are always the difficult bit.
The problem is American popular culture, which exalts stupidity and is savagely anti-intellectual.
Thank you for that, Lucille Ball. Thank you, Desi Arnez. Thank you, Larry, Moe, Curly Joe, the Bowling for Dollars crew, Mr. Ed, Ronald Regan's mule "Francis" and the rest of your 1950's bloody Wheel-Of-Fish television industry. Thank you for teaching us that being stupid is the way to make people laugh, to win friends and influence people.
To misquote McLuhan, "the medium is the masses." I hope the number of Pontiacs you sold was worth it.
Yes, there is a bit of ineptitude being expressed at high levels, but at least they're talking about education as a means for lifting your game - a far cry from an administration where merely being in the right family was assumed to be the key to getting ahead.
Has anyone considered adding a bit of science to the discussion? Not as a curriculum subject (no doubt covered in other threads) but rather - applying a bit of science to the question of "what is the optimum schedule for learning?"
Think about it - there must be a series of attention "ramps" during the day, week and year, where the ability to absorb knowledge is better than at other times.
Do we do math better before or after gym class? Is there any point to having a math class at all immediately after lunch? Are business classes enhanced after physical competition?
Would a 6am start kick start the day or is 10am better? Note that we have evolved to have half our numbers awake and on guard at night [citation somewhere].
Should we survey people in some way to determine whether they're day learners or night learners (and teachers too, to match the learning profile).
There must be hundreds of questions and answers to this. I suspect we've refined our way into a low-energy orbit, and it isn't getting us anywhere very quickly. We need to learn smarter, not longer, from the stats in TFA.
You're quite right. Anything you do a lot of, you will refine and improve. If you're doing something marketable, it will become more attractive. Sometimes it all just starts as a way to pay for your hobby.
My wife sells her photographs via the art website deviantART. They have an interesting culture surrounding visual IP involving various resolutions and watermarks, with online purchase available through normal e-commerce paths. It's an interesting site with a good moderating scheme, attractive page composition and a fairly large following. Stuff actually gets sold, and for decent prices. A support culture of high quality printing and framing has grown around the static pieces. There are worse ways to archive your art, and I strongly recommend it.
Yes, I agree with you - win the lottery and I'd be out a'touring. But all the really rich people seem to say they got there by following their passions, not the dollar sign. So I guess the message is do what you really enjoy, money will follow. And if you're lucky, it'll all be irrelevant because you'll be full-time in your favorite recreation.
Just because you have a particular possession you won't magically become more attractive to the opposite sex.
Smile. Be yourself. And clean your fingernails. Stuff you buy in order to get laid just puts a layer of indifference between you and the person you want to be with. It makes the statement "I'm really more interested in these things than I am in you."
Of course, if that's the case - be honest, revel in it.
Is there a better way to bind a hardcopy book than the way we've done it for the last oh, eon or so? With so many different minds to tap, can't we come up with a better way to hold paper together than the common edge binding we're used to? Binding in signatures is elegant, but it's really only optimised for carrying the book - not reading (or scanning) it.
Can't you step up the voltage with a small transformer for RC use? Wind your own for performance - it's an exercise in designing the right laminated iron core and counting the number of winds in a couple of coils. Bound to be something you can do to get the voltage up. Hmmm... weight...
Hmm... giant inflatable flying wings. Perhaps they could be made semi-rigid, using a segmented construction method. With an intricate series of cables you could make the wings flap. Just the thing to protect your fleet of giant radio robots.
You can design it very nearly aerodynamically perfect, after all: no wings, less commercial constraints to build a long cylinder. Instead it can be a teardrop 5x as long as wide...
I vote we name the first one of these the "Dauntless".
The really funny thing is Aussie beer is quite decent IMO.
There was a convention of brewers held at the Revolting Restaurant at the top of the Wrest Point hotel. Naturally at such a corporate piss-up, there was a bit of posturing going on. The head of Heineken ordered a Heineken, the CEO of Carlsberg ordered an Elephant, the head of Fosters grimaced and ordered a Fosters Lager, the chief of Budweiser ordered a can of their sex in a canoe, the guy from Brew 102 hid behind a cardboard cutout of himself holding a black and white can, and so on down the line it went -- each exec wanted to be seen standing behind their product.
This went on down the line until it reached the CEO of Cascade, who ordered a Coke. Everybody turned to look at him.
"Nah, mate, if none of you are having a real beer then I won't either."
Make the airships large enough and paint them black; the daytime thermal loading should heat the interior enough to add significantly to the bouyancy. Might be enough to make hot air a viable alternative. Yes, you can run it on hydrogen, but burn the stuff to heat the air and spin the props. Wouldn't use as much H2 that way, I think - and making the H2 would be energy intensive.
Scheduling could be a problem, but if you think about it, the inability to keep to strict timetables wasn't a show-stopper in the 19th century (unless you ran out of drinking water or limes, anyhow).
Unless "yeah he'll with a huge cannon when that should I cheer force or hit back, it."
I hope it's not against Slashdot ethic to quote another blog's commentary, but -- damn. I salute Hilo over on Gizmodo for his better-than-Great-Justice comment. Or Racter; it could have been Racter. Go see it folks - sometimes you need a better source of pure noise than you get here.
They ended up rotating the Russian development team through residence in Melbourne, because the communications paths rather suckethed. Naturally this totally negated the value proposition of offshoring. They weren't any better than local people, and we got to see a premium to their unit costs just to get them to the meetings. They had no IP advantage, they were just as new to the product as we were. It turns out that inappropriate HR choices are inappropriate HR choices whether they be offshore or local.
Slashdot Mirror
Do you think the Marketers give a rats ass?
Absolutely. The Rats Ass(tm) is one of our principal metrics.
As an Australian marketing flack, I don't believe in targeted advertising anyway. You're supposed to make stuff attractive, not mess with people's heads. They resent it.
Yes - I was hoping we could come up with some decent repeatable measurements, other than standardised IQ tests. Something simple, perhaps, such as how wide open their eyes are, pupil dilation, number of questions in typical simple responses, vocal or written word count over time, whatever we think we can derive some dependable insights from. It may be a soft science, but that doesn't mean things can't be measured. It's just that there are so many questions, and so many metrics that need to be devised. Consistent metrics, yet adapted to the questions at hand. Metrics are always the difficult bit.
The problem is American popular culture, which exalts stupidity and is savagely anti-intellectual.
Thank you for that, Lucille Ball. Thank you, Desi Arnez. Thank you, Larry, Moe, Curly Joe, the Bowling for Dollars crew, Mr. Ed, Ronald Regan's mule "Francis" and the rest of your 1950's bloody Wheel-Of-Fish television industry. Thank you for teaching us that being stupid is the way to make people laugh, to win friends and influence people.
To misquote McLuhan, "the medium is the masses." I hope the number of Pontiacs you sold was worth it.
Yes, there is a bit of ineptitude being expressed at high levels, but at least they're talking about education as a means for lifting your game - a far cry from an administration where merely being in the right family was assumed to be the key to getting ahead.
"God made an idiot for practice, then he made the School Board." - Mark Twain
Has anyone considered adding a bit of science to the discussion? Not as a curriculum subject (no doubt covered in other threads) but rather - applying a bit of science to the question of "what is the optimum schedule for learning?"
Think about it - there must be a series of attention "ramps" during the day, week and year, where the ability to absorb knowledge is better than at other times.
Do we do math better before or after gym class? Is there any point to having a math class at all immediately after lunch? Are business classes enhanced after physical competition?
Would a 6am start kick start the day or is 10am better? Note that we have evolved to have half our numbers awake and on guard at night [citation somewhere].
Should we survey people in some way to determine whether they're day learners or night learners (and teachers too, to match the learning profile).
There must be hundreds of questions and answers to this. I suspect we've refined our way into a low-energy orbit, and it isn't getting us anywhere very quickly. We need to learn smarter, not longer, from the stats in TFA.
You're quite right. Anything you do a lot of, you will refine and improve. If you're doing something marketable, it will become more attractive. Sometimes it all just starts as a way to pay for your hobby.
My wife sells her photographs via the art website deviantART. They have an interesting culture surrounding visual IP involving various resolutions and watermarks, with online purchase available through normal e-commerce paths. It's an interesting site with a good moderating scheme, attractive page composition and a fairly large following. Stuff actually gets sold, and for decent prices. A support culture of high quality printing and framing has grown around the static pieces. There are worse ways to archive your art, and I strongly recommend it.
Yes, I agree with you - win the lottery and I'd be out a'touring. But all the really rich people seem to say they got there by following their passions, not the dollar sign. So I guess the message is do what you really enjoy, money will follow. And if you're lucky, it'll all be irrelevant because you'll be full-time in your favorite recreation.
If you're running a business and you want to safely crawl your own intranet, say to index your documents, there are other options.
Just because you have a particular possession you won't magically become more attractive to the opposite sex.
Smile. Be yourself. And clean your fingernails. Stuff you buy in order to get laid just puts a layer of indifference between you and the person you want to be with. It makes the statement "I'm really more interested in these things than I am in you."
Of course, if that's the case - be honest, revel in it.
Yes, but can it move freely through time and space, and run Linux?
I like paper books. Still.
Can't you step up the voltage with a small transformer for RC use? Wind your own for performance - it's an exercise in designing the right laminated iron core and counting the number of winds in a couple of coils. Bound to be something you can do to get the voltage up. Hmmm... weight...
Shhh! Don't tell him, or he'll plaster over that hole in his head and nice people will be taken in.
I thought it was first observed many millennia ago? What IS that bright yellow thing in the sky? ;)
Yes, that fusion source worshipped by the Pharaoh Ikhnaton and no doubt many other of our early ancestors.
So with fusion, what we are proposing to do is bottle God. I find that idea strangely compelling.
And mercury light switches! So essential one's safety when married gentlemen come to bed late.
However, I'm curious how effective traditional rocket motors will be in an atmosphere so less dense then Earth's.
obligatory Goddard reference
Good idea. Run it past Dexter, would ya?
You can design it very nearly aerodynamically perfect, after all: no wings, less commercial constraints to build a long cylinder. Instead it can be a teardrop 5x as long as wide...
I vote we name the first one of these the "Dauntless".
The really funny thing is Aussie beer is quite decent IMO.
There was a convention of brewers held at the Revolting Restaurant at the top of the Wrest Point hotel. Naturally at such a corporate piss-up, there was a bit of posturing going on. The head of Heineken ordered a Heineken, the CEO of Carlsberg ordered an Elephant, the head of Fosters grimaced and ordered a Fosters Lager, the chief of Budweiser ordered a can of their sex in a canoe, the guy from Brew 102 hid behind a cardboard cutout of himself holding a black and white can, and so on down the line it went -- each exec wanted to be seen standing behind their product.
This went on down the line until it reached the CEO of Cascade, who ordered a Coke. Everybody turned to look at him.
"Nah, mate, if none of you are having a real beer then I won't either."
What gas to use though?
Make the airships large enough and paint them black; the daytime thermal loading should heat the interior enough to add significantly to the bouyancy. Might be enough to make hot air a viable alternative. Yes, you can run it on hydrogen, but burn the stuff to heat the air and spin the props. Wouldn't use as much H2 that way, I think - and making the H2 would be energy intensive.
Scheduling could be a problem, but if you think about it, the inability to keep to strict timetables wasn't a show-stopper in the 19th century (unless you ran out of drinking water or limes, anyhow).
Unless "yeah he'll with a huge cannon when that should I cheer force or hit back, it."
I hope it's not against Slashdot ethic to quote another blog's commentary, but -- damn. I salute Hilo over on Gizmodo for his better-than-Great-Justice comment. Or Racter; it could have been Racter. Go see it folks - sometimes you need a better source of pure noise than you get here.
They ended up rotating the Russian development team through residence in Melbourne, because the communications paths rather suckethed. Naturally this totally negated the value proposition of offshoring. They weren't any better than local people, and we got to see a premium to their unit costs just to get them to the meetings. They had no IP advantage, they were just as new to the product as we were. It turns out that inappropriate HR choices are inappropriate HR choices whether they be offshore or local.
Only in modern terms. In the eldaire dae, spelling was a wie bet moore informale.