People have been genetically modifying crops for ten thousand years.
That line of reasoning is self-contradictory - thousands of years for problems to shake out. Gene splicing gives us, at best, only years of testing on tiny populations - and often less than that under the flawed theory that genes which are benign in one organism will remain benign when spliced into a new organism.
Even with tens of thousands of years of experience, sometimes we still eat dangerous food, for example - fiddlehead fern is commonly eaten in Korea, even considered medicinal when eaten, but it is starting to look like consumption is related to the higher than normal rates of stomach cancer there.
So what's the difference between targeted and non-targeted advertising in that case?
I'd say it is a continuum where "targetting" can mean any attempt to get a better response than a purely scatter-shot approach. For example advertising paycheck-cashing services on the back of seats in public busses - not everyone riding the bus is going to be a potential customer, but it's probably a lot higher percentage than the population in general.
What I would like to believe is that "targetting" is subject to the law of diminishing returns. That after a point, the effort required to narrow down the group that receives an advertisment starts to exceed the improvement in response rate. I hope that point turns out to be somewhere less than the effort of Big Data cyberstalking the crap out of everyone facebook/google-style. However, I worry that Big Data will figure out that targetted advertising is not the only market for their databases and that the other revenue streams (like background checks for employers, landlords, the FBI, insurance companies, poltical incumbents, private investigators, etc) will be enough to make it profitable in the long run.
I'd be more willing to pay attention to this news if the history of "targeted advertising" hadn't been so wonderfully, idiotically, shit.
While I would totally like to believe that targetted marketing is useless, even harmful because of the waste of talent spent on it and the side-effects of creating massive tracking databases, I think your criticism is naive.
Most people confuse targetted marketing with showing them "ads for stuff they want." That's not true. Targetted marketing is no different from any other form of marketing - the goal is to increase sales, full stop. The problem with self-reporting the ineffectiveness of advertising is that everybody universally under-reports the effect advertising has on them.
Everybody likes to believe they are immune to the effects of advertising when they just don't understand how it works. It isn't necessarily about click-throughs, it is about planting the seed of an idea in your head. For example, you may not want an easy web site builder, but your knowledge of web servers may be enough for friends to come to you looking for advice on such things. And even if your instinct is to do some research before giving out any recommendations, that seed in your head could be enough to make you start your research by searching google for a phrase that was in the ad and will now bring up that product as the first hit. You can't research everything on the market, so chances are you are going to end up recommending one of the products on the first page of hits in google so that ad has done its job.
You turned it into hyperbole by simplifying it into black and white, throwing out all nuance and complexity. You only undermine your own position by characterizing those who disagree as having a grade-school attitude. Anyone with a reasonable level of critical thinking ability will read what you wrote and think to themselves, "If that's the level of his understanding of the opposition, then it's probably the level of his understanding of the entire debate."
That's why we need dirty-rectangle updates, instead of this retarded continually full-refresh holdover from CRTs. For games and movies, the monitor should do the full-screen scaling, thus not needing some uber-bandwidth sci-fi connector.
But we already do have the uber-bandwidth connectors, they aren't sci-fi. DisplayPort 1.2 can handle 3840x2160@60Hz with 30 bits-per-pixel. The spec was finalized at the end of 2009.
Now someone will bring up social messaging and cultural attitudes towards gender roles, and blame society for the way most American women feel. Because that is totally respectful of women and not patronizing towards them at all.
You know as well as I do that the FDA and a number of other watchdog groups keep their eyes on what you will actually find in a supermarket and that those pesticides and crap they do find are put through rigorous tests on other mammals to ascertain their safety.
Surprisingly enough, no. Ammendments to FIFRA in 1996 required "reregistration" of previously grandathered pesticides. But the process has been very slow. For example, malathion was only finally pulled at the end of 2008. I don't really know what grandfathered pesticides are still in use, I saw mention that in ~2004 140+ were still being evaluated for reregistration. One thing I feel pretty confident in assuming is that lots of industry (pesticide manufacturers and farmers) are surely doing everything they can to delay the process.
In other words, I got caught making up shit so I'm using any excuse to save face. It's a good thing we rude people love to give you plenty of opportunities to weasel out.
Nope. Sure, it is easy to accuse me of that. But mcgrew's google-fu must really suck-ass if he can't find the chart showing murder rates before, during and after prohibition.
You saw what mcgrew linked to right? A document behind a paywall, all he went on was the title, he didn't even read what he cited as proof that I was wrong. You sure you want to back that horse?
Tell you what, how about you prove that I am a weasel by finding the stats yourself and showing me up. You are so confident in my duplicity after all, should be a snap, right?
The only feature that I want that is long overdue is a setting wherein the browser will make HTTP GETs only to the original domain. So, if I go to slashdot.org, I want my browser to only fetch things from slashdot.org. Not scorecardresearch, not doubleclick, not gstatic, not google, not facebook, etc etc etc.
You want RequestPolicy - it does exactly what you want and lets you whitelist on a per-site basis. So, for example, you could let google pages also pull in stuff from gstatic.com but no other websites could pull in stuff from gstatic.com.
RequestPolicy is more powerful than adblock/noscript/ghostery because of the per-site control - all of those others don't care about what site the request is coming from, only the one it is going to. At best they let you whitelist the requests from an entire site, RequestPolicy is much more fine-grained. Those other add-ons are important too, they just have different strengths.
Yes, sometimes I'm an asshole, especially when responding to someone's bullshit that they refuse to back up.
Hey, does being an asshole make you a time traveller? Because the only reason I refused to give you what you wanted is because you were an asshole first. Bullshit may be free, but being an asshole has a price - yours today is to remain smugly ignorant.
I could find nothing to back up your assertion. Link, or I'm outing you as another anti-drug liar and likely a member of that pack of liars, the Partnership for a Drug Free America.
You know what? Fuck you. What part of "get better" do you think supports prohibition? Ordinarily I would help you out but your accusations have outted yourself as an asshole.
Only because the murder rate reached an extreme peak the year that prohibition was repealed. The year after the repeal, the murder rate was still significantly higher than any other year during prohibition.
Yep, it would put cartels and the mafia out of business overnight, leading to less crime and a marked improvement in living conditions and health for everyone,
No it wouldn't. You kill the drug market but leave the players behind, you end up with a ton of violent criminals looking for new profitable crimes to commit. That's what happened with prohibition - it basically created organized crime in the US and once liquor was relegalized they didn't just get regular 9-5 jobs, they branched out.
If drugs are legalized in the US, we should be prepapred for the violence to get worse before it gets better.
So the intent of ANPR is little different indeed from the motivations that first led to license plates.
What?
You just disproved your own claim. The guy wanted to catch people who had committed a crime, he didn't want to record all the people who were not committing crimes.
Any of the Gawker Media websites, some times you have to reload t hem 3 times to get the fricking hyperlinks to work.
A little tangent....
Gawker's websites suck in other ways that relate to usuability too. I use noscript religiously, there is nothing about the gawker websites that need javascript, but all you get is a nearly blank page if you don't enable javascript. UNLESS you change your brower's user agent to something Gawker doesn't recognize as supporting javascript (I change mine to an old version of googlebot). Then they send you pages that work perfectly well without javascript.
So clearly they can do non-javascript pages, but if they recognize your browser they won't give them to you and even worse, they won't even explain what's going on, it just silently fails with a blank page. They can't even be bothered to tell you to enable javascript, which is really just pathetic.
It's the DEA. Doing the same thing outside of California. Logging traffic to find patterns of drug runners across the border.
ANPR seems like a huge violation of both the right to travel freely and the right to be free of unreasonable searches. We've gone from a model where license plates were used after the fact of a crime to where they are used when there is absolutely no suspicion of wrong-doing. That's not the bargain we signed up for when license plates were first made mandatory.
I'm surprised no one has mentioned the classic, "FBI Mobile Surveillance Van." I bet that one will freak out a lot more people than "WeCanHereYouHavingSex."
In the interest of preserving Constitutional authority, I hope the SCOTUS decides in that manner regarding the individual mandate; however, given recent decisions by said court that blatantly flout the Constitutional rights of the People... I'm not holding my breath.
Yep. That bird flew the coop when the DEA got to do things administratively that previously required a full-blow constitutional ammendment (prohibition). As long as we're getting screwed over like that, I say at least lets get something useful out of the situation.
Being poor in America is definitely a weird thing...
Only because as a society we've decided that abject poverty is not acceptable. You hear lots of talk about government anti-poverty programs "failing" when in fact they are successes precisely because being poor in America rarely means the same thing it does in any 3rd world country when less than 100 years ago there was practically no difference.
What I want to know is how people deal with the cognitive dissonance of their (presumed) conviction that they're doing good, in the context of the methods that they're employing?
Same way those who support murdering doctors who perform abortions rationalize away "thou shalt not kill."
Facebook should improve its ad-serving algorithm and present users with one good ad at a time instead of a panoply of irrelevant ads.
I would like to believe that it is impossible for facebook to do that. I think targeted marketing is just snake oil being sold to snake oil salesmen. I think that whatever success facebook has had with "targeted" ads so far is nothing more than a manifestation of regression to the mean. In other words - facebook ads have worked reasonably well because facebook is new, not because all that of demographic information makes a substantial difference in the effectiveness of advertising. People like new stuff - including new forms of advertisements, but once the novelty wears off they just tune out and response rates fall back to near nominal levels.
It's wrong because it violates the fundamental assumption that all people are born (or created, if you're a deist/theist) equal.
And why is that fundamental assumption important?
The majority of discrimination in the US is the soft kind because it is so incredibly hard to prove.
Um, are you saying that we have not been successful in making discrimination significantly harder than it was, say, 60 years ago?
I'm saying overt discrimination has been significantly reduced while soft discrimination has not, it may even have increased as the bigots learned what they could get away with if they just keep their mouths shut in front of non-bigots.
However, when government takes those superficial societal divisions, and puts them into law (every U.S. govt form with personal info that I've seen includes a field regarding one's race - why? - and "hispanic" is one of the options - why???)
Why? Specifically to measure if discrimination is occuring. Like the way arrest reports are required to indicate race of the arrestee and that data has shown a disproportionate number of arrests of blacks vs whites.
The remaining "privileges" these days are not at all obvious.
Unearned privileges are rarely obvious to those who posses them, that's why they get so nasty when they lose them - they don't see it as no longer getting special treatment, they see it as others getting special treatment. Witness all of the pissing and moaning about gay marriage "destroying the sanctity of marriage." It doesn't matter how it happens, those losing their place at the top will always be unhappy about it, so coddling them is not a priority.
If you raise kids to believe that artificial divisions do not matter, they won't expect special treatment when they grow up.
Yeah, well, in the best of all possible worlds, that would actually be possible. In the world most of us live in, that's a pipe dream. Quotas - which, if you actually look into it in the USA are rarely actual quotas - don't carve out different groups, they just recognize that society in general already treats members of these groups differently.
Discrimination is evil, period. It doesn't matter if it's affordable or not, it's plain wrong - not just "imperfect", but fundamentally wrong.
Seems to me that you are avoiding the question of WHY discriminiation is wrong. Simply stating that it is fundamentally wrong without a rationalization for why it is wrong isn't particularly useful. Sure, it is nice and simple to say that and ignore the whys, but it isn't really all that helpful to getting us to a place that fixes the problems that discrimination causes.
So long as you make discrimination hard (not necessarily impossible - just requiring an effort, and shameful if you're discovered), it will be more and more marginal as time goes by, and so there will be less of it.
That there is the problem with your analysis, you think that it is feasible to make discrimination hard. That, I contend, is an unfounded assumption. So unfounded that we even have a name for discrimination that is not feasible to prevent - soft bigotry. The majority of discrimination in the US is the soft kind because it is so incredibly hard to prove.
The fundamental problem with affirmative action is that it emphasizes the existence of distinct groups separated by some objective factor.
Emphasizes or recognizes? Your position sounds a lot like "if we ignore it, it will go away." My experience has been that there is no one more bitter than someone facing the loss of unearned privilege. No matter how you do it, any attempt to take away that unearned privilege is going to provoke all kinds of nastiness.
The only business that government has here is to ensure that no-one is unfairly discriminated (i.e. people are turned down because of their race/sex/...).
And what if government is unable to ensure that? That the cost of documenting and enforcing penalties against unfair discrimination is too high to be practical. What then? Give up? Or go for an imperfect but affordable solution?
Slashdot Mirror
People have been genetically modifying crops for ten thousand years.
That line of reasoning is self-contradictory - thousands of years for problems to shake out. Gene splicing gives us, at best, only years of testing on tiny populations - and often less than that under the flawed theory that genes which are benign in one organism will remain benign when spliced into a new organism.
Even with tens of thousands of years of experience, sometimes we still eat dangerous food, for example - fiddlehead fern is commonly eaten in Korea, even considered medicinal when eaten, but it is starting to look like consumption is related to the higher than normal rates of stomach cancer there.
So what's the difference between targeted and non-targeted advertising in that case?
I'd say it is a continuum where "targetting" can mean any attempt to get a better response than a purely scatter-shot approach. For example advertising paycheck-cashing services on the back of seats in public busses - not everyone riding the bus is going to be a potential customer, but it's probably a lot higher percentage than the population in general.
What I would like to believe is that "targetting" is subject to the law of diminishing returns. That after a point, the effort required to narrow down the group that receives an advertisment starts to exceed the improvement in response rate. I hope that point turns out to be somewhere less than the effort of Big Data cyberstalking the crap out of everyone facebook/google-style. However, I worry that Big Data will figure out that targetted advertising is not the only market for their databases and that the other revenue streams (like background checks for employers, landlords, the FBI, insurance companies, poltical incumbents, private investigators, etc) will be enough to make it profitable in the long run.
I'd be more willing to pay attention to this news if the history of "targeted advertising" hadn't been so wonderfully, idiotically, shit.
While I would totally like to believe that targetted marketing is useless, even harmful because of the waste of talent spent on it and the side-effects of creating massive tracking databases, I think your criticism is naive.
Most people confuse targetted marketing with showing them "ads for stuff they want." That's not true. Targetted marketing is no different from any other form of marketing - the goal is to increase sales, full stop. The problem with self-reporting the ineffectiveness of advertising is that everybody universally under-reports the effect advertising has on them.
Everybody likes to believe they are immune to the effects of advertising when they just don't understand how it works. It isn't necessarily about click-throughs, it is about planting the seed of an idea in your head. For example, you may not want an easy web site builder, but your knowledge of web servers may be enough for friends to come to you looking for advice on such things. And even if your instinct is to do some research before giving out any recommendations, that seed in your head could be enough to make you start your research by searching google for a phrase that was in the ad and will now bring up that product as the first hit. You can't research everything on the market, so chances are you are going to end up recommending one of the products on the first page of hits in google so that ad has done its job.
You turned it into hyperbole by simplifying it into black and white, throwing out all nuance and complexity. You only undermine your own position by characterizing those who disagree as having a grade-school attitude. Anyone with a reasonable level of critical thinking ability will read what you wrote and think to themselves, "If that's the level of his understanding of the opposition, then it's probably the level of his understanding of the entire debate."
That's why we need dirty-rectangle updates, instead of this retarded continually full-refresh holdover from CRTs. For games and movies, the monitor should do the full-screen scaling, thus not needing some uber-bandwidth sci-fi connector.
But we already do have the uber-bandwidth connectors, they aren't sci-fi.
DisplayPort 1.2 can handle 3840x2160@60Hz with 30 bits-per-pixel. The spec was finalized at the end of 2009.
Now someone will bring up social messaging and cultural attitudes towards gender roles, and blame society for the way most American women feel. Because that is totally respectful of women and not patronizing towards them at all.
Hyperbole much?
You know as well as I do that the FDA and a number of other watchdog groups keep their eyes on what you will actually find in a supermarket and that those pesticides and crap they do find are put through rigorous tests on other mammals to ascertain their safety.
Surprisingly enough, no. Ammendments to FIFRA in 1996 required "reregistration" of previously grandathered pesticides. But the process has been very slow. For example, malathion was only finally pulled at the end of 2008. I don't really know what grandfathered pesticides are still in use, I saw mention that in ~2004 140+ were still being evaluated for reregistration. One thing I feel pretty confident in assuming is that lots of industry (pesticide manufacturers and farmers) are surely doing everything they can to delay the process.
Not my job. You're the one who made claims and failed to back them up.
Hypocrite. You accused me of "making up shit" but you haven't backed that up at all. You've provided zero proof that what I said was made up.
In other words, I got caught making up shit so I'm using any excuse to save face. It's a good thing we rude people love to give you plenty of opportunities to weasel out.
Nope. Sure, it is easy to accuse me of that. But mcgrew's google-fu must really suck-ass if he can't find the chart showing murder rates before, during and after prohibition.
You saw what mcgrew linked to right? A document behind a paywall, all he went on was the title, he didn't even read what he cited as proof that I was wrong. You sure you want to back that horse?
Tell you what, how about you prove that I am a weasel by finding the stats yourself and showing me up. You are so confident in my duplicity after all, should be a snap, right?
The only feature that I want that is long overdue is a setting wherein the browser will make HTTP GETs only to the original domain. So, if I go to slashdot.org, I want my browser to only fetch things from slashdot.org. Not scorecardresearch, not doubleclick, not gstatic, not google, not facebook, etc etc etc.
You want RequestPolicy - it does exactly what you want and lets you whitelist on a per-site basis. So, for example, you could let google pages also pull in stuff from gstatic.com but no other websites could pull in stuff from gstatic.com.
RequestPolicy is more powerful than adblock/noscript/ghostery because of the per-site control - all of those others don't care about what site the request is coming from, only the one it is going to. At best they let you whitelist the requests from an entire site, RequestPolicy is much more fine-grained. Those other add-ons are important too, they just have different strengths.
Yes, sometimes I'm an asshole, especially when responding to someone's bullshit that they refuse to back up.
Hey, does being an asshole make you a time traveller? Because the only reason I refused to give you what you wanted is because you were an asshole first. Bullshit may be free, but being an asshole has a price - yours today is to remain smugly ignorant.
I could find nothing to back up your assertion. Link, or I'm outing you as another anti-drug liar and likely a member of that pack of liars, the Partnership for a Drug Free America.
You know what? Fuck you. What part of "get better" do you think supports prohibition?
Ordinarily I would help you out but your accusations have outted yourself as an asshole.
Only because the murder rate reached an extreme peak the year that prohibition was repealed. The year after the repeal, the murder rate was still significantly higher than any other year during prohibition.
Yep, it would put cartels and the mafia out of business overnight, leading to less crime and a marked improvement in living conditions and health for everyone,
No it wouldn't. You kill the drug market but leave the players behind, you end up with a ton of violent criminals looking for new profitable crimes to commit. That's what happened with prohibition - it basically created organized crime in the US and once liquor was relegalized they didn't just get regular 9-5 jobs, they branched out.
If drugs are legalized in the US, we should be prepapred for the violence to get worse before it gets better.
So the intent of ANPR is little different indeed from the motivations that first led to license plates.
What?
You just disproved your own claim. The guy wanted to catch people who had committed a crime, he didn't want to record all the people who were not committing crimes.
Any of the Gawker Media websites, some times you have to reload t hem 3 times to get the fricking hyperlinks to work.
A little tangent....
Gawker's websites suck in other ways that relate to usuability too. I use noscript religiously, there is nothing about the gawker websites that need javascript, but all you get is a nearly blank page if you don't enable javascript. UNLESS you change your brower's user agent to something Gawker doesn't recognize as supporting javascript (I change mine to an old version of googlebot). Then they send you pages that work perfectly well without javascript.
So clearly they can do non-javascript pages, but if they recognize your browser they won't give them to you and even worse, they won't even explain what's going on, it just silently fails with a blank page. They can't even be bothered to tell you to enable javascript, which is really just pathetic.
It's the DEA. Doing the same thing outside of California. Logging traffic to find patterns of drug runners across the border.
ANPR seems like a huge violation of both the right to travel freely and the right to be free of unreasonable searches. We've gone from a model where license plates were used after the fact of a crime to where they are used when there is absolutely no suspicion of wrong-doing. That's not the bargain we signed up for when license plates were first made mandatory.
I'm surprised no one has mentioned the classic, "FBI Mobile Surveillance Van."
I bet that one will freak out a lot more people than "WeCanHereYouHavingSex."
In the interest of preserving Constitutional authority, I hope the SCOTUS decides in that manner regarding the individual mandate; however, given recent decisions by said court that blatantly flout the Constitutional rights of the People... I'm not holding my breath.
Yep. That bird flew the coop when the DEA got to do things administratively that previously required a full-blow constitutional ammendment (prohibition). As long as we're getting screwed over like that, I say at least lets get something useful out of the situation.
Being poor in America is definitely a weird thing...
Only because as a society we've decided that abject poverty is not acceptable. You hear lots of talk about government anti-poverty programs "failing" when in fact they are successes precisely because being poor in America rarely means the same thing it does in any 3rd world country when less than 100 years ago there was practically no difference.
What I want to know is how people deal with the cognitive dissonance of their (presumed) conviction that they're doing good, in the context of the methods that they're employing?
Same way those who support murdering doctors who perform abortions rationalize away "thou shalt not kill."
Facebook should improve its ad-serving algorithm and present users with one good ad at a time instead of a panoply of irrelevant ads.
I would like to believe that it is impossible for facebook to do that. I think targeted marketing is just snake oil being sold to snake oil salesmen. I think that whatever success facebook has had with "targeted" ads so far is nothing more than a manifestation of regression to the mean. In other words - facebook ads have worked reasonably well because facebook is new, not because all that of demographic information makes a substantial difference in the effectiveness of advertising. People like new stuff - including new forms of advertisements, but once the novelty wears off they just tune out and response rates fall back to near nominal levels.
It's wrong because it violates the fundamental assumption that all people are born (or created, if you're a deist/theist) equal.
And why is that fundamental assumption important?
The majority of discrimination in the US is the soft kind because it is so incredibly hard to prove.
Um, are you saying that we have not been successful in making discrimination significantly harder than it was, say, 60 years ago?
I'm saying overt discrimination has been significantly reduced while soft discrimination has not, it may even have increased as the bigots learned what they could get away with if they just keep their mouths shut in front of non-bigots.
However, when government takes those superficial societal divisions, and puts them into law (every U.S. govt form with personal info that I've seen includes a field regarding one's race - why? - and "hispanic" is one of the options - why???)
Why? Specifically to measure if discrimination is occuring. Like the way arrest reports are required to indicate race of the arrestee and that data has shown a disproportionate number of arrests of blacks vs whites.
The remaining "privileges" these days are not at all obvious.
Unearned privileges are rarely obvious to those who posses them, that's why they get so nasty when they lose them - they don't see it as no longer getting special treatment, they see it as others getting special treatment. Witness all of the pissing and moaning about gay marriage "destroying the sanctity of marriage." It doesn't matter how it happens, those losing their place at the top will always be unhappy about it, so coddling them is not a priority.
If you raise kids to believe that artificial divisions do not matter, they won't expect special treatment when they grow up.
Yeah, well, in the best of all possible worlds, that would actually be possible. In the world most of us live in, that's a pipe dream. Quotas - which, if you actually look into it in the USA are rarely actual quotas - don't carve out different groups, they just recognize that society in general already treats members of these groups differently.
Discrimination is evil, period. It doesn't matter if it's affordable or not, it's plain wrong - not just "imperfect", but fundamentally wrong.
Seems to me that you are avoiding the question of WHY discriminiation is wrong. Simply stating that it is fundamentally wrong without a rationalization for why it is wrong isn't particularly useful. Sure, it is nice and simple to say that and ignore the whys, but it isn't really all that helpful to getting us to a place that fixes the problems that discrimination causes.
So long as you make discrimination hard (not necessarily impossible - just requiring an effort, and shameful if you're discovered), it will be more and more marginal as time goes by, and so there will be less of it.
That there is the problem with your analysis, you think that it is feasible to make discrimination hard. That, I contend, is an unfounded assumption. So unfounded that we even have a name for discrimination that is not feasible to prevent - soft bigotry. The majority of discrimination in the US is the soft kind because it is so incredibly hard to prove.
The fundamental problem with affirmative action is that it emphasizes the existence of distinct groups separated by some objective factor.
Emphasizes or recognizes? Your position sounds a lot like "if we ignore it, it will go away." My experience has been that there is no one more bitter than someone facing the loss of unearned privilege. No matter how you do it, any attempt to take away that unearned privilege is going to provoke all kinds of nastiness.
The only business that government has here is to ensure that no-one is unfairly discriminated (i.e. people are turned down because of their race/sex/...).
And what if government is unable to ensure that? That the cost of documenting and enforcing penalties against unfair discrimination is too high to be practical. What then? Give up? Or go for an imperfect but affordable solution?