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User: dorpus

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  1. Will it work as well as their bobsleds? on Japan May Be First Country To Have Self-Driving Cars (theoutline.com) · · Score: 1

    For the Winter Olympics, the Japanese government decided to build the "world's best bobsled", paying millions of dollars in consulting fees to a consortium of 120 companies including Toyota, Nissan, etc. with no experience in making bobsleds. The government also paid children's textbook companies, TV shows to portray the heroic craftsmen who built the sled. The actual product was built by no-name subcontractors in snow-free Tokyo, with a shoestring budget and no experience in bobsleds. The resulting bobsled was uncomfortable, dangerous, and slow, so the Japanese bobsled team refused to ride it. The bobsled was loaned on contract to the Jamaican women's bobsled team, except they hated it too and ended up using an old Latvian bobsled that they borrowed from the German team.

    https://www.japantimes.co.jp/n...

  2. Not convinced on Facebook Knows Your Political Preferences (businessinsider.com) · · Score: 1

    Regardless of how many news stories, ads, or posts I tell it to hide, FB remains clueless about my tastes. It will suggest I join groups I just left, buy products I just bought, recommend befriending people I never heard of.

  3. What if she is in fact suspicious? on Citizenfour Director Sues To Find Out Why She Was Detained Every Time She Flew · · Score: 1

    It's well known that Putin funds both far-right and far-left extremists to increase social divisions in the West. Cuba has also funded or blackmailed American activists before. Anyone notice how Alex Jones hates the US military, for someone who calls himself a conservative patriot?

  4. But does it favor natural selection? on Short Sleepers Might Be Benefiting From a DNA Mutation · · Score: 1

    People who don't sleep much may annoy their partners and have fewer babies. Similarly, there is no selective pressure against Parkinsonism, diabetes, or heart disease, since people rarely die from them before having children.

  5. We count the many ISIS fighters who have studied at universities in the West and turned the knowledge against us.

  6. Confounding factors on What Happens To Our Musical Taste As We Age? · · Score: 2

    Retail music stores have disappeared, MTV has faded into irrelevance, so how does anybody know what the "top charts" are anymore? In all seriousness, where does one find these? There are a million web sites all claiming to have authoritative lists. Also, with the recent availability of unlimited streaming, I have experienced an explosion in diversity of musical tastes in my mid-40s. I no longer have to take chances on albums or individual tunes I might not like -- I can listen to a hundred different artists in one day.

  7. How is this new? on Scientists Create Permanently Slick Surface So Ketchup Won't Stay In Bottle · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I've seen these sorts of videos for at least 5 years now. Where are the commercial products?

  8. Non-Falsifiability on Strange Stars Pulse To the Golden Mean · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Similar claims have been made about how human anatomy allegedly conforms to mathematical constants. But when we make actual measurements of individuals, nobody fits the constants perfectly. What is the allowed margin of error? One can make just about any number be close to some "elegant" mathematical constant -- pi/2, pi^2, e/phi, whatever.

    Similarly, today I just judged a paper about childhood obesity submitted to a scientific journal. Childhood obesity is confounded with low socioeconomic status, so how do we separate the two? Of course, children of lower socioeconomic status have poorer outcomes in terms of health, occupation, and mortality. (Incidentally, the children with the worst outcomes in terms of future health, income, and mortality are the underweight kids who look like walking skeletons. Most scientific papers on obesity exclude that population.)

  9. Re:Narrowing the context on Test Shows Big Data Text Analysis Inconsistent, Inaccurate · · Score: 1

    Yes I did. There were a few thousand responses that fit on a single spreadsheet, and after an hour spent coming up with buckets and keywords for them, I couldn't find any exceptions from the above. I'll keep an eye out for future changes, though I doubt they will change much. I know the hospitals and their problems.

  10. Narrowing the context on Test Shows Big Data Text Analysis Inconsistent, Inaccurate · · Score: 2

    I analyzed the free-text field on hospital surveys. A simple keyword search gave me very reliable results on what the patients were complaining about -- they fell into the categories of bad food (food, cafeteria, diet, tasted, stale), dirty rooms (dirty, rat, blood, bathroom), rude staff (rude, ignore, curt), noise (noise, loud, echo, hallway), TV broken (TV, Television, "can't see"). So if the context is narrow enough, even simple searches work.

    I agree that more broadly worded questions require more sophistication. I've looked at word combinations and so forth, though I haven't really needed to use them yet in analyzing health care data. We would not trust a computer to parse a full doctor's report, no matter how sophisticated the software; that will require manual inspection, often by multiple people to agree on a consensus interpretation.

  11. Spontaneous Quitting on New Nicotine Vaccine May Succeed Where Others Have Failed · · Score: 1

    Substance addicts will often spontaneously quite their habit when the pain of continuing the habit becomes greater than the pain of quitting. A year ago, I had severe stomach pains and was hospitalized for 3 days. I figured the chewing tobacco was upsetting my stomach, so I went cold turkey. As it turned out, it had nothing to do with the tobacco -- it was intestinal colitis. Anyway, I'm off of nicotine permanently now.

  12. Except when scientists do it on Science By Democracy Doesn't Work · · Score: 1

    When mathematicians vote on whether to accept a new theorem, when psychiatrists vote on which diseases should be included in the latest version of DSM, when NIH panels vote on whether to fund a grant. No, science couldn't possibly be run by the tyranny of the mob that refuses to believe in ideas that are too new and radical.

  13. Rediscovering the 1950s on Analysis Suggests Solar System Contains Massive Trans-Neptunian Objects · · Score: 1

    They said back then that there is a massive "Planet X" that may orbit in the reverse direction from other planets.

    We know now that the universe is full of orphan planets, so it would hardly surprise me if there are many such planets randomly drifting toward stars.

  14. I was in the same boat on Ask Slashdot: How Should a Liberal Arts Major Get Into STEM? · · Score: 2

    I graduated at the end of the Cold War ('93), so an engineering degree was worthless -- all the companies were laying off their engineers as quickly as possible. Combined with the fact that the engineering jobs I interned for or heard about were not very interesting (managing a chemical factory?), I got a liberal arts degree. I went into IT for about 10 years, but in the long run I just didn't care that much about the mechanics of computers. I eventually got a PhD in biostatistics after taking the prerequisite courses. Statistics has let me get into various different research projects without having to overspecialize. I work for a hospital system now and do different research studies every day.

  15. Don't show ID? Heh. on Cops 101: NYC High School Teaches How To Behave During Stop-and-Frisk · · Score: 1

    I've witnessed people who got arrested BECAUSE they refused to show ID.

  16. Aren't we supposed to be dead already? on CERN Looking For Help Filling In the Gaps In Photo Archive · · Score: 1

    Growing up in the 1970s, there were many books by reputable scientists who were absolutely sure that the Earth will have mega-famines and enter an Ice Age by the year 2000. They were absolutely certain that no economic growth will ever occur in China or India, the Cold War will last a thousand years, and air pollution will require everyone to wear oxygen masks at all times.

  17. Bloatware on The Largest Ship In the World Is Being Built In Korea · · Score: 1

    At what point will they learn to downsize these vessels? Will there not be a linux of the shipping world, microscopic ships that deliver one molecule at a time from Asia to Europe?

  18. Added value? on 2 Mars Missions Set For Arrival, Both Prepare for Orbital Maneuvers · · Score: 1

    Do we need yet more headlines that say "Mars may have supported life one billion years ago"?

  19. Hospitals are the worst on Ask Slashdot: Why Are Online Job Applications So Badly Designed? · · Score: 1

    Invariably, hospital application forms make a big deal out of what high school you went to, what type of diploma it was, what your high school GPA was, and whether you can drive to work. It's inappropriate for people with advanced degrees.

  20. What if it will kill 100,000 people instead? on Larry Page: Healthcare Data Mining Could Save 100,000 Lives a Year · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I work as a statistician for a hospital chain. We already do data mining and have interventions for our sickest patients. Our experience, consistent with the medical literature, has shown that badgering patients with whatever "preventative" interventions increase hospitalizations and other costs. These programs persist because of a statistical illusion of regression to the mean -- people tend to be enrolled in such programs when their health is at a nadir, then they stabilize therafter. It makes it appear as if the intervention reduced utilization. In fact, a proper comparison shows that it actually increases utilization. Does Google think that spamming millions of people with robo-calls about eating apples will improve anything?

  21. The Creationist Poles on Creationism In Texas Public Schools · · Score: 1

    Santa Clause comes from the North Pole. The Easter Bunny comes from the East Pole. Uncle Sam comes from the South Pole on July 4th. And the Wicked Witch comes from the West Pole on Halloween. (That's what I tell my 4-yo son and I live in Texas.)

  22. Convergence by Probability on Why Birds Fly In a V Formation · · Score: 0

    Sooner or later, every cat I've owned has developed a habit of resting next to me while pushing their hindfoot against me. It seems to be their way of showing affection while still asserting dominance.

  23. So many promises on SpaceShipTwo Sets a New Altitude Record · · Score: 3, Interesting

    In 2024, will they still be selling tickets for space flights that will "start" next year?

  24. Does it do any good? on New Education Performance Data Published: Asia Dominates · · Score: 1, Interesting

    While Asian countries are often accused of taking jobs from the West, the President of South Korea's Hyundai Motors visited factories in Russia and the Czech Republic. He said he was impressed by the quality of workers who were far superior to South Korean workers -- they never staged strikes and had far lower wages. While a South Korean factory takes 30 hours to make a car, the Czech factory takes 16. The visiting Korean managers could not keep up with the pace of production, so they received help from local secretaries in their 20's to fill their checklists. South Korean industry has been crippled by constant labor strikes demanding ever more wages and shorter working hours.

    Do students who score high on achievement tests demand higher wages, cushy jobs, and become less internationally competitive?

    http://headlines.yahoo.co.jp/hl?a=20131203-00000030-xinhua-cn
    http://japanese.joins.com/article/999/178999.html?servcode=300&sectcode=300

  25. Re:Phases of Evolution on Elon Musk Talks About the Importance of Physics, Criticizes the MBA · · Score: 1

    So if physicists start mass-producing SpaceX rockets, are you saying they will somehow behave any better?