Sure enough, unfamiliar music is a distraction. Unfamiliar anything is a distraction. OTOH familiar music doesn't demand your attention, but it does cover external noise and provides a rhythm to work by. Most everyone I know who listens to music at work uses familiar playlists. Even letting YouTube, etc. chose the music will play familiar music.
More booby-trapped packages in general might dissuade casual thieves. Ditto for law enforcement.
Meanwhile, thanks for doing the hard work and getting the publicity, Mark. Now, all I have to do to discourage theft is to put up a sign that says "Warning: packages may explode" with suitable graphic.
Seriously, what happened to the police's "broken windows" policy? I thought they were now supposed to investigate and prosecute small offenses like this to a) create a culture of obeying the law, and b) make citizens feel like the cops have their backs so they don't go vigilante. Which is what happened in this case.
Amdahl used to help its prospects pull the same maneuver on IBM, way back. They made IBM-compatible mainframes, back when mainframes were really expensive and IBM owned the market. Cheaper and faster drop-in replacements, but most IT execs didn't take them seriously.
An Amdahl sales team would worm their way into getting a meeting when they got wind that someone was eyeing a new mainframe, knowing they didn't stand a chance. They'd leave the IT manager an Amdahl-logo coffee mug worth a million dollars. "How can this be worth more than $10!?" he prospects would ask. "It's magic. Make sure it's on your desk the next time IBM comes around. Just watch what happens!" Sure enough, the IBM rep would come calling and notice the mug. He'd get nervous, excuse himself to make a phone call to HQ, and within minutes offer a $million discount on an IBM mainframe!
Seeing that, the customers would conclude that IBM clearly took Amdahl very seriously... and maybe they should too. Maybe Amdahl got that sale, maybe they didn't, but they definitely got invited to bid on the next one.
Junk science. The wording of the conclusion makes it obvious that this "study" is just blatant organic boosterism. In effect, the conclusion is saying "eat organic to reduce cancer risk big time," something not at all supported by the study.
"...a significant reduction in the risk of cancer was observed among high consumers of organic food."
"reduction" is a loaded word that hints at causality.
It also talks about risk, which is incorrect. The study studied incidence of cancer which is not by itself the same thing. Risk reduction is not at all demonstrated since that would require proving causality.
"Significant" (not statistically significant; here, it's used to mean "big") in a conclusion is also a red-flag judgemental adjective that has no place in a real paper's conclusion.
A more responsible wording would be "high consumers of organic food were observed to have a lower incidence of cancer [insert confidence interval here]."
Chastity is the only honest way to go. However, you'll notice that requirement seriously interferes with recruitment in the modern world.
All similar codes I've seen pretend to be something else by forbidding unwanted sexual advances. "Unwanted" sounds oh-so reasonable, but the problem is: how do you know if an advance is unwanted if you don't try your luck? Communication between people is fragile at best. If you advance is accepted, then it was desired. Otherwise, you're a posteriori guilty of an unwanted advance and are a creep because You Should Have Known Better.
Ergo, the only sane solution is to say that all advances are unwanted in that community, which is called chastity.
Either the community is a place where one of the side-benefits is the possibility of romance/sex and where related behavior is sanctioned, or sex and romance are 100% off the menu.
Looks like you don't "get" math. The examples chosen give airplanes the benefit of the doubt.
1 - "Cherry picking" an average auto speed of 50 mph actually favors airplanes. If one assumed 25 mph, it'd be 4M hours/fatality instead of 2M. 2 - Gulfstream isn't pertinent here since the original article was about 2-seat propeller airplanes. Also, notice there are a *lot* more Cessna-class planes out there than bizjets, and that's what the statistics reflect. Picking a Cessna 182 (4 places, 160 mph, very typical little plane) instead of a more-comparable Cessna 152 (2 places, 125 mph) likewise gives planes the benefit of the doubt. 3 - Even *if* all airplanes all did average 600 mph (actually, even jetliners typically fly rather slower than that), autos would still be 1.7x safer per hour.
100 mile trip in plane is much safer than car.
Citation needed. This is a forum for geeks, so numbers matter.
Entertainment, you know. Even if a lot of $ is involved, sports are fundamentally about humans performing, under performing, making errors, screwing up, cheating, etc. Let's just call the referee another yet another part of that.
If you have money riding on a game, that's on you. The outcome is always subject to the fickle finger of fate.
If it's corruption of the referee you're worried about, what about corrupt players, management, etc? Make them into robots, too?
As a business move, is government contracting really a good business for Google? They just got done (wisely) paring down distracting side ventures.How does this advance their core business?
Yes, government contracting can be profitable, but not the kind of profitable that Google's used to. Plus, government work comes with lots of cumbersome strings attached.
Remember that the accident rates typically quoted for airplanes is actually for commercial jets, which are indeed spectacularly safe. General aviation (i.e. small planes) is orders of magnitude more dangerous. To wit. zero people in the US died in commercial jets last year vs. something like 400 in little planes, despite the jets' obviously much, much higher passenger mileage.
I don't see how you're reading that article to come up with that, so I'll put some simple numbers on the table:
Something like a Cessna 182 cruises around 160mph, so 100K hours/fatality x 160 mph = 16M miles/fatality, ~6x worse than auto traffic's 100M.
Or, converting auto traffic miles into hours: 100M miles per fatality / 50 mph = 2M hours per fatality, 20x better than general aviation's 100K.
It's pointless to debate whether the 6x or 20x figure is the most applicable, but either way: flying small planes is much more dangerous than driving cars. Given over 35K US traffic deaths per year, that would multiply out to a lot of deaths if 2-seat planes were rolled out in a big way.
I stand corrected that general aviation death rate is 1 per 100K hours. I also got the traffic death rate 100x too high. It is actually roughly 1 death per 100M miles.
However, this article conveniently converts the traffic death rate into hours and still ends up with general aviation deaths 19x higher than traffic per hour. Ant that's very generously assuming that average traffic speed is 50 mph. Again, general aviation includes bizjets, etc, so the accident rate for tiny planes is surely higher than that. And the traffic accident rate is already pretty scary.
What could possibly go wrong with widespread deployment of that?
The US has around 1.1 - 1.3 fatal accidents per 100K miles for general aviation. For comparison, motor vehicles have about 1.2 deaths per MILLION miles.
General aviation includes larger planes like bizjets, basically everything except airliners & freightliners, so you can be sure the accident rates is much higher for tiny planes, e.g. several tens of thousands of miles per death. Even if automated control reduced the accident rate some, that's still crazy high.
People act like YouTube and Netflix don't already pay ludicrous amounts for their hosting. Any deals between them and an ISP is double dipping.
Seems to me that we, the consumer suckers, are the ones getting double-dipped. I was pretty clearly under the impression that I already pay for high-speed internet access, including YouTube, Netflix,...
If Comcast throttles YouTube, then Alphabet can propose launching in a critical (read: lucrative) Comcast market.
You mean like Google did to Microsoft Office with Google Docs? Years later, that's still costing MS big-time.. way more than they'll ever make from Bing. Didn't cost Google much, but it sure put MS on notice.
The story here is actually that some highly-skilled, white-collar jobs got automated out of existence.
Figuring out what the traffic will bear has been going on since forever. Used to be done by people, now software automates it and maybe takes more factors into account.
Advertisers that specifically buy space in those magazines are surely "filtering based on a protected class".
Pointless theoretical argument. Companies don't advertise jobs in those kinds of magazines. Period. They do advertise other things, but those are not protected against discrimination like jobs and real estate are.
And, yes, most HR and real estate people do indeed consider the mix of media buys when planning advertising campaigns. That's because back in the days when companies did advertise jobs in newspapers & magazines, there were discrimination lawsuits because a pattern of job advertising venue choices in effect discriminated against a protected class. You or I may personally take issue with outcome-based rulings and laws like that, but that is the law at this time.
Brill's article is a brilliant game of self-deception and self-aggrandizement. If you read the original article, his thesis is basically that: after the war, universities started admitting students based on intellectual merit instead of their parent's social or financial situation. This led to a large supply of brilliant and educated people like Brill who gave corporations the mental horsepower to overpower the system.
Ahem. Sounds more like the storyline of the crack epidemic as told by the government, i.e. cheap, plentiful drugs overpower societal controls, aided and abetted by misguided, high-powered individuals. Brill is suggesting that universities graduated mainly high-class idiots until he and his generation came along. According to Brill, this movement was caused by powerful, well-meaning people who forgot that My Fair Lady is fiction, thought that they could mold smart boys into gentlemen. (Not trying to exclude girls & women here, but the white-male privilege thing was still going strong at the time.)
BUT, maybe Brill is on to something: his new generation of non-old-boys-club graduates were not only smart, but free from the old-boy social restrictions on behavior. These were people who were not bound by--and probably scorned--the rules of gentlemanly behavior. They didn't have to worry about being shunned by "society" when they pulled nakedly sharp moves with bad societal consequences. Or at least they didn't have to worry so much about what people would say if they got exposed.
I wasn't there, but I get the impression that there was an unwritten code of behavior among the powerful until Brill's generation came along. It was unwritten, but it was a powerful force that limited government & business action as surely as the constitution. That's gone now.
In its place, we now have "greed is good." Except in jest, stating that in public would have gotten you kicked out of any respectable gentlemen's club (no, not a strip joint -- an upper-class, male-only social club) 60 years ago. Yes, greed is an energy that has power, but it ends up consuming everything, much like anger is an energy but only in small doses. And greed has indeed consumed us.
The constitution and the government built upon it are no substitute for basic social norms. I'll bet that guys who wrote the constitution just assumed a certain social code (we do know these were religious men) as a backdrop to a constitutional republic, didn't even think that "men of good will" could rise to prominence without it.
On the other hand, speech recognition was one of those notoriously "just around the corner" technologies for decades, but it finally made it to prime time. The same was true for speech synthesis, though less remarked-upon.
It's not perfect, but I have an easier time with Alexa than many humans. That goes double for the speech synthesis.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure enough, unfamiliar music is a distraction. Unfamiliar anything is a distraction.
OTOH familiar music doesn't demand your attention, but it does cover external noise and provides a rhythm to work by.
Most everyone I know who listens to music at work uses familiar playlists. Even letting YouTube, etc. chose the music will play familiar music.
More booby-trapped packages in general might dissuade casual thieves. Ditto for law enforcement.
Meanwhile, thanks for doing the hard work and getting the publicity, Mark. Now, all I have to do to discourage theft is to put up a sign that says "Warning: packages may explode" with suitable graphic.
Seriously, what happened to the police's "broken windows" policy? I thought they were now supposed to investigate and prosecute small offenses like this to a) create a culture of obeying the law, and b) make citizens feel like the cops have their backs so they don't go vigilante. Which is what happened in this case.
Big banks & financial firms develop tons of cutting-edge tech as a platform to support their core business. Not to mention governments.
Does that mean banks and the gov't are tech companies?
(Open sourcing is an unrelated matter. Note that plenty of true "tech" companies don't open source anything, but the US government does so big-time.)
Thanks for the design help, guys. 'Coz us engineers have no idea how to design computers.
Amdahl used to help its prospects pull the same maneuver on IBM, way back. They made IBM-compatible mainframes, back when mainframes were really expensive and IBM owned the market. Cheaper and faster drop-in replacements, but most IT execs didn't take them seriously.
An Amdahl sales team would worm their way into getting a meeting when they got wind that someone was eyeing a new mainframe, knowing they didn't stand a chance. They'd leave the IT manager an Amdahl-logo coffee mug worth a million dollars. "How can this be worth more than $10!?" he prospects would ask. "It's magic. Make sure it's on your desk the next time IBM comes around. Just watch what happens!" Sure enough, the IBM rep would come calling and notice the mug. He'd get nervous, excuse himself to make a phone call to HQ, and within minutes offer a $million discount on an IBM mainframe!
Seeing that, the customers would conclude that IBM clearly took Amdahl very seriously... and maybe they should too. Maybe Amdahl got that sale, maybe they didn't, but they definitely got invited to bid on the next one.
Junk science. The wording of the conclusion makes it obvious that this "study" is just blatant organic boosterism. In effect, the conclusion is saying "eat organic to reduce cancer risk big time," something not at all supported by the study.
"...a significant reduction in the risk of cancer was observed among high consumers of organic food."
"reduction" is a loaded word that hints at causality.
It also talks about risk, which is incorrect. The study studied incidence of cancer which is not by itself the same thing. Risk reduction is not at all demonstrated since that would require proving causality.
"Significant" (not statistically significant; here, it's used to mean "big") in a conclusion is also a red-flag judgemental adjective that has no place in a real paper's conclusion.
A more responsible wording would be "high consumers of organic food were observed to have a lower incidence of cancer [insert confidence interval here]."
Chastity is the only honest way to go. However, you'll notice that requirement seriously interferes with recruitment in the modern world.
All similar codes I've seen pretend to be something else by forbidding unwanted sexual advances. "Unwanted" sounds oh-so reasonable, but the problem is: how do you know if an advance is unwanted if you don't try your luck? Communication between people is fragile at best. If you advance is accepted, then it was desired. Otherwise, you're a posteriori guilty of an unwanted advance and are a creep because You Should Have Known Better.
Ergo, the only sane solution is to say that all advances are unwanted in that community, which is called chastity.
Either the community is a place where one of the side-benefits is the possibility of romance/sex and where related behavior is sanctioned, or sex and romance are 100% off the menu.
The app's name isn't mentioned, not even in original article!
In other words, it's a major platform that web developers have to consider.
Hear that folks? The article says Firefox isn't a 3rd-class netizen anymore. Party's over: No more testing on just Chrome!
Looks like you don't "get" math. The examples chosen give airplanes the benefit of the doubt.
1 - "Cherry picking" an average auto speed of 50 mph actually favors airplanes. If one assumed 25 mph, it'd be 4M hours/fatality instead of 2M.
2 - Gulfstream isn't pertinent here since the original article was about 2-seat propeller airplanes. Also, notice there are a *lot* more Cessna-class planes out there than bizjets, and that's what the statistics reflect. Picking a Cessna 182 (4 places, 160 mph, very typical little plane) instead of a more-comparable Cessna 152 (2 places, 125 mph) likewise gives planes the benefit of the doubt.
3 - Even *if* all airplanes all did average 600 mph (actually, even jetliners typically fly rather slower than that), autos would still be 1.7x safer per hour.
100 mile trip in plane is much safer than car.
Citation needed. This is a forum for geeks, so numbers matter.
Entertainment, you know. Even if a lot of $ is involved, sports are fundamentally about humans performing, under performing, making errors, screwing up, cheating, etc. Let's just call the referee another yet another part of that.
If you have money riding on a game, that's on you. The outcome is always subject to the fickle finger of fate.
If it's corruption of the referee you're worried about, what about corrupt players, management, etc? Make them into robots, too?
As a business move, is government contracting really a good business for Google? They just got done (wisely) paring down distracting side ventures.How does this advance their core business?
Yes, government contracting can be profitable, but not the kind of profitable that Google's used to. Plus, government work comes with lots of cumbersome strings attached.
See the above reply chain for corrected numbers.
Remember that the accident rates typically quoted for airplanes is actually for commercial jets, which are indeed spectacularly safe. General aviation (i.e. small planes) is orders of magnitude more dangerous. To wit. zero people in the US died in commercial jets last year vs. something like 400 in little planes, despite the jets' obviously much, much higher passenger mileage.
I don't see how you're reading that article to come up with that, so I'll put some simple numbers on the table:
Something like a Cessna 182 cruises around 160mph, so 100K hours/fatality x 160 mph = 16M miles/fatality, ~6x worse than auto traffic's 100M.
Or, converting auto traffic miles into hours: 100M miles per fatality / 50 mph = 2M hours per fatality, 20x better than general aviation's 100K.
It's pointless to debate whether the 6x or 20x figure is the most applicable, but either way: flying small planes is much more dangerous than driving cars. Given over 35K US traffic deaths per year, that would multiply out to a lot of deaths if 2-seat planes were rolled out in a big way.
I stand corrected that general aviation death rate is 1 per 100K hours. I also got the traffic death rate 100x too high. It is actually roughly 1 death per 100M miles.
However, this article conveniently converts the traffic death rate into hours and still ends up with general aviation deaths 19x higher than traffic per hour. Ant that's very generously assuming that average traffic speed is 50 mph. Again, general aviation includes bizjets, etc, so the accident rate for tiny planes is surely higher than that. And the traffic accident rate is already pretty scary.
Still, ~20x risk doesn't inspire confidence.
What could possibly go wrong with widespread deployment of that?
The US has around 1.1 - 1.3 fatal accidents per 100K miles for general aviation. For comparison, motor vehicles have about 1.2 deaths per MILLION miles.
General aviation includes larger planes like bizjets, basically everything except airliners & freightliners, so you can be sure the accident rates is much higher for tiny planes, e.g. several tens of thousands of miles per death. Even if automated control reduced the accident rate some, that's still crazy high.
I think I'll just stick to cliff diving.
hopes to use this wifi tracking to help passively monitor the elderly and automate any emergency alerts to EMTs and medical professionals
Emergency response: this is what researchers put on their grant proposals when the actual end-game is an unpalatable one.
Actual emergency responders would be technology-enabled supermen if the had even 1% of the tech that's supposedly developed for them.
People act like YouTube and Netflix don't already pay ludicrous amounts for their hosting. Any deals between them and an ISP is double dipping.
Seems to me that we, the consumer suckers, are the ones getting double-dipped. I was pretty clearly under the impression that I already pay for high-speed internet access, including YouTube, Netflix, ...
If Comcast throttles YouTube, then Alphabet can propose launching in a critical (read: lucrative) Comcast market.
You mean like Google did to Microsoft Office with Google Docs? Years later, that's still costing MS big-time.. way more than they'll ever make from Bing. Didn't cost Google much, but it sure put MS on notice.
There's lots more where that came from.
OP says " one percent of men ..., a leading cause of cancer deaths"
So the 1% is a "leading" cause?! What about the 99%?
The story here is actually that some highly-skilled, white-collar jobs got automated out of existence.
Figuring out what the traffic will bear has been going on since forever. Used to be done by people, now software automates it and maybe takes more factors into account.
Advertisers that specifically buy space in those magazines are surely "filtering based on a protected class".
Pointless theoretical argument. Companies don't advertise jobs in those kinds of magazines. Period. They do advertise other things, but those are not protected against discrimination like jobs and real estate are.
And, yes, most HR and real estate people do indeed consider the mix of media buys when planning advertising campaigns. That's because back in the days when companies did advertise jobs in newspapers & magazines, there were discrimination lawsuits because a pattern of job advertising venue choices in effect discriminated against a protected class. You or I may personally take issue with outcome-based rulings and laws like that, but that is the law at this time.
Somebody let the rabble in.
Brill's article is a brilliant game of self-deception and self-aggrandizement. If you read the original article, his thesis is basically that: after the war, universities started admitting students based on intellectual merit instead of their parent's social or financial situation. This led to a large supply of brilliant and educated people like Brill who gave corporations the mental horsepower to overpower the system.
Ahem. Sounds more like the storyline of the crack epidemic as told by the government, i.e. cheap, plentiful drugs overpower societal controls, aided and abetted by misguided, high-powered individuals. Brill is suggesting that universities graduated mainly high-class idiots until he and his generation came along. According to Brill, this movement was caused by powerful, well-meaning people who forgot that My Fair Lady is fiction, thought that they could mold smart boys into gentlemen. (Not trying to exclude girls & women here, but the white-male privilege thing was still going strong at the time.)
BUT, maybe Brill is on to something: his new generation of non-old-boys-club graduates were not only smart, but free from the old-boy social restrictions on behavior. These were people who were not bound by--and probably scorned--the rules of gentlemanly behavior. They didn't have to worry about being shunned by "society" when they pulled nakedly sharp moves with bad societal consequences. Or at least they didn't have to worry so much about what people would say if they got exposed.
I wasn't there, but I get the impression that there was an unwritten code of behavior among the powerful until Brill's generation came along. It was unwritten, but it was a powerful force that limited government & business action as surely as the constitution. That's gone now.
In its place, we now have "greed is good." Except in jest, stating that in public would have gotten you kicked out of any respectable gentlemen's club (no, not a strip joint -- an upper-class, male-only social club) 60 years ago. Yes, greed is an energy that has power, but it ends up consuming everything, much like anger is an energy but only in small doses. And greed has indeed consumed us.
The constitution and the government built upon it are no substitute for basic social norms. I'll bet that guys who wrote the constitution just assumed a certain social code (we do know these were religious men) as a backdrop to a constitutional republic, didn't even think that "men of good will" could rise to prominence without it.
Humans ... driving over 585,000 miles successfully per crash.
Doesn't pass the smell test. That's more than a lifetime of driving. How many drivers over 30 do you know who never had a fender bender?
On the other hand, speech recognition was one of those notoriously "just around the corner" technologies for decades, but it finally made it to prime time. The same was true for speech synthesis, though less remarked-upon.
It's not perfect, but I have an easier time with Alexa than many humans. That goes double for the speech synthesis.