You forgot to say, "get off my lawn.":-) But I agree with you. I wish the entertainment industry would make new characters and franchises when they want something "fresh" and "edgy", instead of re-branding and re-purposing a perfectly good existing franchise into something completely different.
Or to put it another way, the procurement process selects contractors who thrive in the presence of bureaucracy, not those who actually deliver quality products on time and on budget. This is a well-known and long-standing problem.
since when have concerns over privacy prevented people from buying the next 'cool' device?
It seems to me, awareness about online privacy is growing. Just because the public has not made privacy a priority yet, does not mean they won't {wake,stand} up tomorrow.
The problem with blind faith in cryptography is that cryptographic protocols are bloody difficult to get right. In the case of Bitcoin, the anonymity weakness seems to have more to do with the marketplace than the coins themselves.
By the way, who is this guy that gets to editorialize on Slashdot?
Bennett Hasselton did something to advance Internet freedom back in the late 1990s -- he was involved with, maybe founded, peacefire, a movement against Internet filtering software in schools and libraries.
I am still puzzled how he got from being a teenage free-speech activist to being an adult denier of the rights of the accused and an outspoken apologist for the police state.
"Once tools get far enough out of the lab, they're no longer AI, just common computer science," says professor George Luger of the University of New Mexico. "AI just went to work."
I, for one, am looking forward to the payoff of this new, basic research 30 years from now.
That is a pretty weak argument in favor of the US taxpayer to prop up the Saudi royal family, in my opinion. If stabilizing the Mideast benefits China and Europe, why can't they pay for it with their own blood and treasure?
There are different dimensions to career happiness. I would say, for him, truck driving is high on the "lack of annoyance" axis but low on the "sense of fulfillment" and "upward mobility" axes.
My point, though, is that to take someone whose IQ is in the top.01% of the bell curve and put him to work driving a truck is a shocking waste of talent.
Since when is the idea of a teacher evaluating a student's abilities an Orwellian concept?
I agree with you that the particular example of the teacher checking the student's reading speed and accuracy in real time is not Orwellian.
What I am more uncomfortable with is the example of:
... a geometry teacher reassigning students' seating assignments based on their 'character strengths', moving a green-coded female student ('actively participates: 98%') next to a red-and-yellow coded boy ('shows enthusiasm: 67%').
Here we have a system where, early on, students are being sorted by behavior -- or more accurately, on the teacher's subjective impression of their behavior. Let's hope the teacher is totally fair and unbiased, because anyone who's too different from his/her preconceptions is going to get labeled with an official-looking percentage. My concern is that these numbers, which sound very arbitrary and subject to emotional judgments, will create a self-fulfilling prophecy.
In school, did you ever have a teacher you just didn't click with? I hated my sixth-grade math teacher's guts, and as far as I can tell that sentiment was totally mutual (I remember her body language.) But for me, it was no problem, because the seventh-grade math teacher didn't give a damn what Mrs. G. thought. With this system, Mrs. G. could have labelled me red (40%) in some "character" category and that data would stay with me into seventh grade. So the seventh grade teacher could say "oh, little Sir Garlon is an insubordinate slacker, I'd better not waste my limited time on him -- I'll concentrate on the yellow students because I need to end the year with 50% green to get tenure."
This is more or less what happened to my brother, whose IQ is 10 points higher than mine but who had a hearing disability that made the educational system sideline him. Now he's driving a truck instead of curing cancer or building space probes.
Just to put $30K in the perspective of education: it's approximately the cost of one year of tuition private school in my area (Boston), or 1.5 times the public expenditure for a year of public school.
I think you have asked an insightful question here. TFA says only:
...the new science of sentiment analysis... relies on the creation of vast databases in which words are marked as either positive or negative and associated with one of the eight fundamental emotions...
It's the content of that database that critically determines whether the findings of the textual analysis are any good. That database could be very carefully constructed by a transparent and rigorous process, with extensive validation against external sources. Or it could have been populated by a chimpanzee with a dart board. We don't know.
Data scientists -- and journalists reporting on their work -- would do well to remember the old programmer's adage: "Garbage in, garbage out."
No, how science works is that first you rigorously define what an introvert is, then you carefully design a test to determine if a person fits that definition, where "carefully" includes statistical analysis and peer review. Then you have someone take the test, and when the results come in, you classify the person accordingly.
I should have expected that mentioning Myers-Briggs would have opened the can of worms about its validity and the whole subject of psychometry. Since I'm not a psychologist, I cannot participate too deeply in that discussion. If you want to classify the Myers-Briggs (sorry, I misspelled it originally) as cargo cult science, I will not argue against you.
Even poor science can include accurate measurements, though. From Wikipedia:
In 1991, the National Academy of Sciences committee reviewed data from MBTI research studies and concluded that only the I-E scale has high correlations with comparable scales of other instruments and low correlations with instruments designed to assess different concepts, showing strong validity. In contrast, the S-N and T-F scales show relatively weak validity.
Since my remarks are restricted to the I-E scale, and that's the part of the Myers-Briggs that critics say holds up to a bit of scrutiny, I maintain that my Myers-Briggs results are the best available evidence that I am an introvert. If you're aware of a better diagnostic test, I'll take it.
Absolutely. My point is that a survey asking people to self-identify as introverts should not be considered conclusive because of the possibility the respondents are biased. That is, I think the survey would give the same result whether the stereotype of introverted programmers were true or not.
I submit the hypothesis that certain careers are attractive to introverts (and others are attractive to extraverts) so the distribution of introverts/extraverts in certain careers is likely to be different than that in the general population. To test that hypothesis, we need a better experiment than just asking people "are you an introvert." (Which, as h4rr4r pointed out, is basically all that the Meyers-Briggs does.)
They think of themselves, quite rightly, as being more logical than intuitive, but they also think of themselves as being moderately extroverted
I wonder how much of that is simply due to the stigma associated with the word "introvert."
I'm an introvert. Far to the introvert side on the Meyers-Briggs test: 18/20 if memory serves. When I tell acquaintances this, they're shocked. "Oh no!" they exclaim, "You're not like that at all!"
What that suggests to me is that mainstream society has a very poor understanding of what an introvert is. Extraverts don't understand introverts -- and they don't have to, since about 70% of the general population is extraverted -- so there's part of the problem. Because of the stereotype (or, as I say, "stigma"), asking people to self-identify as introverts is a fool's errand. No one wants to be *that.*
So "moderate extravert" could very well mean "introvert who does not know the technical definition and does not accept the stereotype."
Seriously, timothy thinks the future of Microsoft is "now in question?" That would be an accurate thing to say about Research In Motion, but Microsoft isn't in bankruptcy or anything. It's not even operating at a loss.
It's certainly true that Microsoft is past its halcyon days, and lacks either a coherent vision or any real popularity, but that doesn't mean it's on the brink of collapse.
Slashdot Mirror
And yet several of my family members eagerly bought Kindles in spite of me carefully explaining this concept. I'm afraid the battle is already lost.
You forgot to say, "get off my lawn." :-) But I agree with you. I wish the entertainment industry would make new characters and franchises when they want something "fresh" and "edgy", instead of re-branding and re-purposing a perfectly good existing franchise into something completely different.
Or to put it another way, the procurement process selects contractors who thrive in the presence of bureaucracy, not those who actually deliver quality products on time and on budget. This is a well-known and long-standing problem.
It seems to me, awareness about online privacy is growing. Just because the public has not made privacy a priority yet, does not mean they won't {wake,stand} up tomorrow.
The problem with blind faith in cryptography is that cryptographic protocols are bloody difficult to get right. In the case of Bitcoin, the anonymity weakness seems to have more to do with the marketplace than the coins themselves.
It sounds like the company has a pretty good idea of how and where to use backup systems, actually.
Bennett Hasselton did something to advance Internet freedom back in the late 1990s -- he was involved with, maybe founded, peacefire, a movement against Internet filtering software in schools and libraries.
I am still puzzled how he got from being a teenage free-speech activist to being an adult denier of the rights of the accused and an outspoken apologist for the police state.
According to this Computerworld article from 2008, a lot of that "steaming pile of 1980s-style AI" is in use every day.
I, for one, am looking forward to the payoff of this new, basic research 30 years from now.
Sometimes Slashdot editors troll. They know that lots of readers like to argue, and that some like to argue so much, they'll argue with Bennett.
That is a pretty weak argument in favor of the US taxpayer to prop up the Saudi royal family, in my opinion. If stabilizing the Mideast benefits China and Europe, why can't they pay for it with their own blood and treasure?
There are different dimensions to career happiness. I would say, for him, truck driving is high on the "lack of annoyance" axis but low on the "sense of fulfillment" and "upward mobility" axes.
The median salary for a postdoctoral cell biologist is slightly higher than the median for a truck driver, but not as much as I would expect.
My point, though, is that to take someone whose IQ is in the top .01% of the bell curve and put him to work driving a truck is a shocking waste of talent.
Thank you for your well-informed assessment of my brother's career choices. I wasn't aware you knew him!
I agree with you that the particular example of the teacher checking the student's reading speed and accuracy in real time is not Orwellian.
What I am more uncomfortable with is the example of:
Here we have a system where, early on, students are being sorted by behavior -- or more accurately, on the teacher's subjective impression of their behavior. Let's hope the teacher is totally fair and unbiased, because anyone who's too different from his/her preconceptions is going to get labeled with an official-looking percentage. My concern is that these numbers, which sound very arbitrary and subject to emotional judgments, will create a self-fulfilling prophecy.
In school, did you ever have a teacher you just didn't click with? I hated my sixth-grade math teacher's guts, and as far as I can tell that sentiment was totally mutual (I remember her body language.) But for me, it was no problem, because the seventh-grade math teacher didn't give a damn what Mrs. G. thought. With this system, Mrs. G. could have labelled me red (40%) in some "character" category and that data would stay with me into seventh grade. So the seventh grade teacher could say "oh, little Sir Garlon is an insubordinate slacker, I'd better not waste my limited time on him -- I'll concentrate on the yellow students because I need to end the year with 50% green to get tenure."
This is more or less what happened to my brother, whose IQ is 10 points higher than mine but who had a hearing disability that made the educational system sideline him. Now he's driving a truck instead of curing cancer or building space probes.
Just to put $30K in the perspective of education: it's approximately the cost of one year of tuition private school in my area (Boston), or 1.5 times the public expenditure for a year of public school.
I think you have asked an insightful question here. TFA says only:
It's the content of that database that critically determines whether the findings of the textual analysis are any good. That database could be very carefully constructed by a transparent and rigorous process, with extensive validation against external sources. Or it could have been populated by a chimpanzee with a dart board. We don't know.
Data scientists -- and journalists reporting on their work -- would do well to remember the old programmer's adage: "Garbage in, garbage out."
My diagnosis is that these are the desperate throes of a doomed regime.
Isn't that what TFA is all about?
This pretty much blows away the "trust the government - it would never abuse its power" argument the apologists like to trot out so readily.
No, how science works is that first you rigorously define what an introvert is, then you carefully design a test to determine if a person fits that definition, where "carefully" includes statistical analysis and peer review. Then you have someone take the test, and when the results come in, you classify the person accordingly.
How do you imagine I found out I'm an introvert?
I should have expected that mentioning Myers-Briggs would have opened the can of worms about its validity and the whole subject of psychometry. Since I'm not a psychologist, I cannot participate too deeply in that discussion. If you want to classify the Myers-Briggs (sorry, I misspelled it originally) as cargo cult science, I will not argue against you.
Even poor science can include accurate measurements, though. From Wikipedia:
Since my remarks are restricted to the I-E scale, and that's the part of the Myers-Briggs that critics say holds up to a bit of scrutiny, I maintain that my Myers-Briggs results are the best available evidence that I am an introvert. If you're aware of a better diagnostic test, I'll take it.
Absolutely. My point is that a survey asking people to self-identify as introverts should not be considered conclusive because of the possibility the respondents are biased. That is, I think the survey would give the same result whether the stereotype of introverted programmers were true or not.
I submit the hypothesis that certain careers are attractive to introverts (and others are attractive to extraverts) so the distribution of introverts/extraverts in certain careers is likely to be different than that in the general population. To test that hypothesis, we need a better experiment than just asking people "are you an introvert." (Which, as h4rr4r pointed out, is basically all that the Meyers-Briggs does.)
I wonder how much of that is simply due to the stigma associated with the word "introvert."
I'm an introvert. Far to the introvert side on the Meyers-Briggs test: 18/20 if memory serves. When I tell acquaintances this, they're shocked. "Oh no!" they exclaim, "You're not like that at all!"
What that suggests to me is that mainstream society has a very poor understanding of what an introvert is. Extraverts don't understand introverts -- and they don't have to, since about 70% of the general population is extraverted -- so there's part of the problem. Because of the stereotype (or, as I say, "stigma"), asking people to self-identify as introverts is a fool's errand. No one wants to be *that.*
So "moderate extravert" could very well mean "introvert who does not know the technical definition and does not accept the stereotype."
More males than females leaving the profession. I don't think that is what happening, but you asked what else could account for the shift.
Seriously, timothy thinks the future of Microsoft is "now in question?" That would be an accurate thing to say about Research In Motion, but Microsoft isn't in bankruptcy or anything. It's not even operating at a loss.
It's certainly true that Microsoft is past its halcyon days, and lacks either a coherent vision or any real popularity, but that doesn't mean it's on the brink of collapse.