I actually did travel for work something like 80% at one time, and I do see the appeal in that sort of situation. Your comment about automatic electronic filing is intriguing. I'd just want to be careful not to do away with paper where it may actually be needed, for legal or other reasons.
I'm wondering about the age of the subjects of this experiment, and whether that might have affected the results.
When I was younger (in my thirties, say), I would probably have said that the conclusion of the study was obvious.
Now I'm in my fifties, and I get quite uncomfortable if I have to sit in a typical "reclined" position for more than a few minutes; I much prefer a straight-backed chair.
(There are some reclining seats that I'm comfortable in, but not many.)
I do have some arthritis in my lower back, probably aggravated by a cycling crash a few years ago.
Maybe that accounts for the difference, but I'm still curious.
Cooking, like development, requires a combination of knowledge, technical skill, and creativity. I've eaten at restaurants run by chefs, and at ones run by bean-counters. There's no prize for guessing where one gets the better dinner -- but the dinner is enough, if you're the one eating it.
From TFA: On average, the system was 80% accurate at identifying these activities correctly.
That figure is for "staged interactions", which are likely to be more exaggerated / less ambiguous than "real life", unless they were performed by accomplished actors (meaning someone that could convincingly portray the actions to a human audience).
They are also likely to have less irrelevant random "background noise".
Just because someone pushes or punches someone else, doesn't mean it isn't friendly.
Indeed. As it happens, I recently met a friend from college, who I haven't seen for a few years, in front of a cafe in town.
He ran up and gave me a huge bear hug.
I wouldn't be at all surprised if the system thought he was mugging me.
Good quality noise cancelling headphones are great for reducing low-frequency sounds, such as airplane engine rumble, but they are not as effective in the 2 to 8 kHz consonant range that conveys much of the speech intelligibility.
In a previous life, I had to travel a lot, and used a set of noise-cancelling headphones. They do work pretty well, as the FAQ says.
When they don't work too well, the issue isn't really frequency per se; in principle, they could perfectly cancel a constant-amplitude 10 kHz sine wave, for example.
The problem with speech is that the consonants (which, as they say, make speech intelligible) are
high-amplitude, effectively high frequency transients.
For similar reasons, noise cancellation wouldn't do much to mask the sound of a gunshot.
I use both Google and Wikipedia a lot, and which I use first depends on what I'm looking for; or, to put it another way, how well I understand what it is I'm looking for.
For example, if I want to find information about "Maxwell's Equations" or "Plate Tectonics", I'd probably go to Wikipedia first, because I'm pretty sure I know what I want. Even if the Wikipedia entry itself doesn't contain the information I'm seeking, it probably has a link to someplace that does. On the other hand, if I'm looking for information about something less clearly defined, of less general interest, or subject to frequent change, like "Linux printer drivers" perhaps, then Google is the way to go. (To complete the idea of a spectrum of resources: if I wanted a driver for an HP printer, I'd obviously go directly to HP's site.)
I don't think your observation portends any great shift away from Google, since I suspect that most queries made by most people fall into the second category.
This is actually extremely similar to the coin-flipping contest described in an appendix to one of my
favourite books about the stock market (and other financial markets), Fred Schwed's Where are the
Customers' Yachts?. Of the contestants who flip ten heads in a row, he writes, "they are the
true experts, the ones who can't miss. They have their biographies written."
Notice also the similarity to the fallacy underlying the articles one sees occasionally, along the lines of
"Man Wins Lottery Twice Against Astronomical Odds". (The odds against a particular person winning twice are not the same as the odds against anyone winning twice.)
There is a correct way to do this forecasting, combining multiple inputs.
One needs a measure of the track record of each forecaster, and a measure of the degree to which the input forecasts, and their accuracies, are correlated.
(The statistical method is formally similar to Generalized Least Squares.)
It's a useful technique, which I have seen used successfully in real financial markets.
But there are no fancy "experts" and no fawning newspaper articles.
The average person in government is not of the age of people who are using all this stuff...
While I mostly agree with Mr. Schmidt's basic point, the fundamental problem is, I think, quite a bit
more complicated than just the age of the participants.
I'm 54, and I've been working with computers since 1970, and I think I'd qualify as fairly sophisticated about technology (heaven knows my friends and family members with computer problems seem to think so).
Look at the backgrounds of most of our elected representatives: they are predominantly people from the law, graduates of local politics, and a scattering of other fields; people trained in science or engineering are not
exactly thick upon the ground.
They are often very good at constructing arguments, but that's not the same thing as discovering what's true.
There's also, historically, been a strong anti-intellectual undercurrent in US culture.
a workstation with built-on exercise bike that you have to peddle to run the computer.
If you have to peddle it door-to-door, that will definitely keep you fit, especially in rural areas.
It probably works in urban areas, too: the houses are closer together, but the people are
more resistant to peddlers.
But what do you do to keep fit after you make a sale ?
If I were a large Microsoft shareholder, I wouldn't be too happy about this. We all know that no software is free of bugs. How long do you reckon it will take, especially with such a juicy target, before the "anti-piracy" system is hacked, and used for a massive DoS attack?
Use genuine Microsoft Windows, and get Genuinely Hosed !
I really don't think it will make a dent in MS's real piracy problem, anyway, which is CD manufacturing operations in places like Russia and China, not penny-ante copying by Uncle Fred.
Yes, some corporates probably do make and use more installations than they pay for. If they put this in the corporate editions, though, the lawsuits when the first corporate customer is crippled by a "Genuine Advantage" malfunction should be entertaining. (Just think: Groklaw could become bigger than Google. [g])
I agree with almost everything that Sb1 says. When I read the original "Ask Slashdot" post, I took it that DJParadox was asking about becoming a trader in an institutional setting: "on the trading floor".
(Note that, in industry jargon, that doesn't necessarily mean on the floor of an exchange.
Any big space that is set up primarily for trading is called a "trading floor".)
In that situation, a decent firm will not let a new trader do anything that might cause a catastrophe -- for the firm.
They may cheerfully give you enough rope to hang yourself personally.
Here are a few books that are excellent sources for the theoretical side of finance:
Portfolio Selection: Efficient Diversification of Investments by Harry Markowitz
Investments, by William Sharpe, Gordon Alexander, and Jeffrey Bailey
Options Markets, by John Cox and Mark Rubenstein
There is also another very good book on options and derivative securities by Hull; unfortunately it's at home so I can't give you the exact reference.
Having a look at these books in the library will also give you a feel for the math level involved in derivatives.
I actually did a move somewhat similar to this -- quite a few years ago. I started out in the financial services industry as an applications developer, and eventually moved/grew into investment management.
Perhaps ironically, I am now back much more on the technology side of the business.
You suggested that you were considering an intermediate move into a more trading-oriented tech group.
I think that is a good idea.
You can learn a lot from reading, and from more-or-less formal education. I got an MBA in finance and am a CFA. But having day-to-day contact with what's actually done will really help your learning -- and there are some things about the nitty-gritty of trading that you won't learn from books.
Also, having more direct exposure will help you make sure this is what you want to do, and will let you see different niches in the market "ecosystem".
Being a successful institutional trader involves a number of skills and personal characteristics. The more you can learn about it going in, the better I think your chances will be.
As far as which market: focus on the area that you're most interested in. There is one caution: really understanding the process of valuing options and other derivative securities takes a non-trivial level of math understanding. (I was lucky there -- my undergrad degree is in physics.)
The reported IQ number, which (as the parent correctly says) is scaled to keep the median to ~100, is also fitted to a normal distribution. So the reported numbers are approximately normally distributed with mean 100. I've seen a few sets of raw scores, however, and the ones I've seen are decidedly not normally distributed (they're skewed, long-tailed to the right).
But look on the bright side: we can be around to annoy our kids a lot longer.
I think I might argue that the beginning of the development processs -- or, at least, what should be the beginning, namely the design, often gets too little attention.
My experience leads me to believe that most gnarly maintenance problems stem from poor design more than from low-level coding blunders.
Think of the well-publicized security issues that have bedeviled Microsoft.
I don't think they occur because Microsoft has bad programmers, but I do think that the "tightly coupled" design of Windows is a mistake, and makes problems much more difficult to resolve.
One reason these tools get a lot of attention is that using them produces a measurable effect.
It's the "bookkeeping fallacy": things that are easy to measure must be more important than things that are hard or impossible to measure.
I do think these rapid development tools can add a lot if they are used intelligently, which I think means using them to present concrete ideas and prototypes quickly, in order to gain understanding of the problem domain and to get user feedback.
But I still think Fred Brooks's advice in The Mythical Man-Month is correct: plan to build the first version to throw away. You will in any case, and it's better not to deliver the rubbish to the customer.
The curse of IT has always been, "There's never time to do it right, but there's always time to do it over."
Even our readers have had to endure more than one browser-crashing ad campaign from time to time.
The way to discourage this kind of nonsense is to make sure that the advertisers are identified and given a large public black eye.
Probably that's not appropriate if the ad just uncovered a bug in the Flash player, but I think it certainly is in the case where an ad installs spyware.
Did the advertiser know this was going to be done? Quite possibly not, but they are still the ones responsible for the ad: they want the good consequences (more sales), so they have to take the bad ones as well. If their bottom line is hurt, they'll start paying more attention to what their ad agencies and other agents are doing. (This is just an application of Murphy's Golden Rule: the guy who has the gold makes the rules.)
While your account information may be personal to you, these records constitute business records that are owned by AT&T.
This really summarizes the legal problems with privacy here in the US. Although the data that people collect on you is "personal to you", it almost always, legally, belongs to whoever collected it. The hodgepodge of Federal and state laws doesn't help. For example, here in Virginia, my medical records are the property of my doctor. It was only relatively recently that legislation was passed that gives me the statutory right to
see my own medical records.
This also relates directly to the more-or-less careless approach many firms take to protecting personal data. If the data belongs to them, they are that much more insulated from any legal consquences of losing it.
Bruce Schneier has discussed this in a number of his blog posts and essays.
The Techdirt article talks about some of the problems with the CAFC, which essentially boil down to having a government regulatory authority "captured" by the regulated industry. You can, of course, see this in the Patent Office itself, where there have been periodic pushes to define greater efficiency == more patents granted.
Any judge who practices within a court district... but who chooses not to sign up for the extra training would have the option of transferring patent cases to a program participant.
It isn't clear that this has been thought out very well. Suppose an "untrained" judge does not opt to transfer the case to a "trained" one. Will that be grounds for appeal? Can a litigant request a "trained" judge? I think one can safely assume that the parties with deep pockets will game the system if it's possible.
In all my experience as an engineer, the most important thing is to use active voice. For those unaware of what this means, here's an example:
Passive: The boy *is riding* his bike to the store.
Active: The boy *rides* his bike to the store.
Oh dear. I agree that using the active voice, rather than the passive, is almost always desirable. But your example doesn't use the passive voice. "The boy is riding..." uses the progressive form rather than the simple present tense, but it's still the active voice. The passive construction would be something like, "The bicycle is being ridden by the boy to the store." (This, incidentally, shows how the passive voice can be clumsy.)
The passive voice is most objectionable [IMHO] when it is used, in effect, to dodge responsibility for one's statements: "Mistakes were made," or "It was decided that..." It does, however, have good uses. "The injured man was taken away by ambulance" is an excellent use of the passive voice.
See The Elements of Style by W. Strunk and E.B. White for excellent guidance on this and many other topics.
Gee, this is really great -- but forget the subway. I'm a cyclist, and I have a "collection" of cool things I've seen people do to take their minds off the boredom of driving, including:
Shaving or putting on makeup
Reading the paper
Using a laptop placed in the passenger seat
Turning around to smack the kid in the back seat
But my personal favorite is the guy I saw playing the trumpet.
I can hardly wait to enjoy dodging the guy who's using these to watch, say, the fighter chase inside the Death Star from Star Wars.
Slashdot Mirror
I actually did travel for work something like 80% at one time, and I do see the appeal in that sort of situation. Your comment about automatic electronic filing is intriguing. I'd just want to be careful not to do away with paper where it may actually be needed, for legal or other reasons.
I do have some arthritis in my lower back, probably aggravated by a cycling crash a few years ago. Maybe that accounts for the difference, but I'm still curious.
- Get it from the mail box
- Open it
- Read it
With this service, I would:- Get it from the server
- Open it
- Read it
- Pay $20 per month
BRILLIANT ! Where do I sign?More seriously, I can see that this might appeal to people who travel a lot, but for everyone else ?
Cooking, like development, requires a combination of knowledge, technical skill, and creativity. I've eaten at restaurants run by chefs, and at ones run by bean-counters. There's no prize for guessing where one gets the better dinner -- but the dinner is enough, if you're the one eating it.
On average, the system was 80% accurate at identifying these activities correctly.
That figure is for "staged interactions", which are likely to be more exaggerated / less ambiguous than "real life", unless they were performed by accomplished actors (meaning someone that could convincingly portray the actions to a human audience). They are also likely to have less irrelevant random "background noise".
Just because someone pushes or punches someone else, doesn't mean it isn't friendly.
Indeed. As it happens, I recently met a friend from college, who I haven't seen for a few years, in front of a cafe in town. He ran up and gave me a huge bear hug. I wouldn't be at all surprised if the system thought he was mugging me.
In a previous life, I had to travel a lot, and used a set of noise-cancelling headphones. They do work pretty well, as the FAQ says. When they don't work too well, the issue isn't really frequency per se; in principle, they could perfectly cancel a constant-amplitude 10 kHz sine wave, for example. The problem with speech is that the consonants (which, as they say, make speech intelligible) are high-amplitude, effectively high frequency transients. For similar reasons, noise cancellation wouldn't do much to mask the sound of a gunshot.
For example, if I want to find information about "Maxwell's Equations" or "Plate Tectonics", I'd probably go to Wikipedia first, because I'm pretty sure I know what I want. Even if the Wikipedia entry itself doesn't contain the information I'm seeking, it probably has a link to someplace that does. On the other hand, if I'm looking for information about something less clearly defined, of less general interest, or subject to frequent change, like "Linux printer drivers" perhaps, then Google is the way to go. (To complete the idea of a spectrum of resources: if I wanted a driver for an HP printer, I'd obviously go directly to HP's site.)
I don't think your observation portends any great shift away from Google, since I suspect that most queries made by most people fall into the second category.
Notice also the similarity to the fallacy underlying the articles one sees occasionally, along the lines of "Man Wins Lottery Twice Against Astronomical Odds". (The odds against a particular person winning twice are not the same as the odds against anyone winning twice.)
There is a correct way to do this forecasting, combining multiple inputs. One needs a measure of the track record of each forecaster, and a measure of the degree to which the input forecasts, and their accuracies, are correlated. (The statistical method is formally similar to Generalized Least Squares.) It's a useful technique, which I have seen used successfully in real financial markets. But there are no fancy "experts" and no fawning newspaper articles.
While I mostly agree with Mr. Schmidt's basic point, the fundamental problem is, I think, quite a bit more complicated than just the age of the participants. I'm 54, and I've been working with computers since 1970, and I think I'd qualify as fairly sophisticated about technology (heaven knows my friends and family members with computer problems seem to think so).
Look at the backgrounds of most of our elected representatives: they are predominantly people from the law, graduates of local politics, and a scattering of other fields; people trained in science or engineering are not exactly thick upon the ground. They are often very good at constructing arguments, but that's not the same thing as discovering what's true. There's also, historically, been a strong anti-intellectual undercurrent in US culture.
If you have to peddle it door-to-door, that will definitely keep you fit, especially in rural areas. It probably works in urban areas, too: the houses are closer together, but the people are more resistant to peddlers. But what do you do to keep fit after you make a sale ?
I really don't think it will make a dent in MS's real piracy problem, anyway, which is CD manufacturing operations in places like Russia and China, not penny-ante copying by Uncle Fred. Yes, some corporates probably do make and use more installations than they pay for. If they put this in the corporate editions, though, the lawsuits when the first corporate customer is crippled by a "Genuine Advantage" malfunction should be entertaining. (Just think: Groklaw could become bigger than Google. [g])
Back in July, Bob Cringely at PBS had a column in which he talked about Skype and its use of super-nodes.
Brian Krebs, at the Washington Post, has some additional background information and comments in his "SecurityFix" blog.
I think the technical term for the estimation method used is "rectal extraction".
Here are a few books that are excellent sources for the theoretical side of finance:
- Portfolio Selection: Efficient Diversification of Investments by Harry Markowitz
- Investments, by William Sharpe, Gordon Alexander, and Jeffrey Bailey
- Options Markets, by John Cox and Mark Rubenstein
There is also another very good book on options and derivative securities by Hull; unfortunately it's at home so I can't give you the exact reference.Having a look at these books in the library will also give you a feel for the math level involved in derivatives.
You suggested that you were considering an intermediate move into a more trading-oriented tech group. I think that is a good idea. You can learn a lot from reading, and from more-or-less formal education. I got an MBA in finance and am a CFA. But having day-to-day contact with what's actually done will really help your learning -- and there are some things about the nitty-gritty of trading that you won't learn from books. Also, having more direct exposure will help you make sure this is what you want to do, and will let you see different niches in the market "ecosystem".
Being a successful institutional trader involves a number of skills and personal characteristics. The more you can learn about it going in, the better I think your chances will be. As far as which market: focus on the area that you're most interested in. There is one caution: really understanding the process of valuing options and other derivative securities takes a non-trivial level of math understanding. (I was lucky there -- my undergrad degree is in physics.)
But look on the bright side: we can be around to annoy our kids a lot longer.
One reason these tools get a lot of attention is that using them produces a measurable effect. It's the "bookkeeping fallacy": things that are easy to measure must be more important than things that are hard or impossible to measure.
I do think these rapid development tools can add a lot if they are used intelligently, which I think means using them to present concrete ideas and prototypes quickly, in order to gain understanding of the problem domain and to get user feedback. But I still think Fred Brooks's advice in The Mythical Man-Month is correct: plan to build the first version to throw away. You will in any case, and it's better not to deliver the rubbish to the customer.
The curse of IT has always been, "There's never time to do it right, but there's always time to do it over."
The way to discourage this kind of nonsense is to make sure that the advertisers are identified and given a large public black eye. Probably that's not appropriate if the ad just uncovered a bug in the Flash player, but I think it certainly is in the case where an ad installs spyware.
Did the advertiser know this was going to be done? Quite possibly not, but they are still the ones responsible for the ad: they want the good consequences (more sales), so they have to take the bad ones as well. If their bottom line is hurt, they'll start paying more attention to what their ad agencies and other agents are doing. (This is just an application of Murphy's Golden Rule: the guy who has the gold makes the rules.)
My grandfather used to say that there is one irreducible requirement for training a dog: you have to be smarter than the dog.
While your account information may be personal to you, these records constitute business records that are owned by AT&T.
This really summarizes the legal problems with privacy here in the US. Although the data that people collect on you is "personal to you", it almost always, legally, belongs to whoever collected it. The hodgepodge of Federal and state laws doesn't help. For example, here in Virginia, my medical records are the property of my doctor. It was only relatively recently that legislation was passed that gives me the statutory right to see my own medical records.
This also relates directly to the more-or-less careless approach many firms take to protecting personal data. If the data belongs to them, they are that much more insulated from any legal consquences of losing it.
Bruce Schneier has discussed this in a number of his blog posts and essays.
Any judge who practices within a court district ... but who chooses not to sign up for the extra training would have the option of transferring patent cases to a program participant.
It isn't clear that this has been thought out very well. Suppose an "untrained" judge does not opt to transfer the case to a "trained" one. Will that be grounds for appeal? Can a litigant request a "trained" judge? I think one can safely assume that the parties with deep pockets will game the system if it's possible.
Passive: The boy *is riding* his bike to the store.
Active: The boy *rides* his bike to the store.
Oh dear. I agree that using the active voice, rather than the passive, is almost always desirable. But your example doesn't use the passive voice. "The boy is riding ..." uses the progressive form rather than the simple present tense, but it's still the active voice. The passive construction would be something like, "The bicycle is being ridden by the boy to the store." (This, incidentally, shows how the passive voice can be clumsy.)
The passive voice is most objectionable [IMHO] when it is used, in effect, to dodge responsibility for one's statements: "Mistakes were made," or "It was decided that ..." It does, however, have good uses. "The injured man was taken away by ambulance" is an excellent use of the passive voice.
See The Elements of Style by W. Strunk and E.B. White for excellent guidance on this and many other topics.
- Shaving or putting on makeup
- Reading the paper
- Using a laptop placed in the passenger seat
- Turning around to smack the kid in the back seat
But my personal favorite is the guy I saw playing the trumpet.I can hardly wait to enjoy dodging the guy who's using these to watch, say, the fighter chase inside the Death Star from Star Wars.