Putting aside the other comments and objections, "ethics" is quite a broad field. While scientifically inclined people seem to be more sensitive towards judging "date rape", it would be interesting to see how sensitive they are in judging other "ethical" concepts, such as "pride", "greed", or even "tolerance".
I never trusted "cloud" backups but recently I looked into Amazon Glacier - and now my personal backups are stored with "eleven nines" reliability, encrypted, and with price roughly 10 times lower than services such as Dropbox or Google Drive. No affiliation with Amazon... but the question was "how do you do it" so this is my answer.
Call me skeptical, but I am not so sure that a) SWAT teams have round leather shields, b) all members of the team raise their shields int the very same moment, c) they all wear gas masks but no firearms, but hold batons in their hands although nobody is in sight, d) a camera from within the bunker is so nicely positioned to take a picture of the team. Could it be a nice publicity gimmick instead?
"Reflection upon these edge cases" is not necessarily a good way to reason about the basic assumption. It's wrong to kill others, but the edge case is defending your family. It's wrong to lie, but the edge case is when to tell a child he's been adopted. It's wrong to steal but what if you're dying of hunger? I am not sure about the letter of American law but I don't think the spirit of the idea that "marriage is to a member of opposite sex" is invalidated by a natural hermafrodite.
I know a lot of people from different churches who are connected to church "private networks" here in Europe. The idea is that the church gets a lot of SIMs for their employees, and also for people that the pastors trust and can vouch for - that work quite well in many smaller churches. The more SIMs you have the bigger discounts you have, so the plans that I know have free communication between all the members of the network, plus half price plans with double the free minutes and SMS than normal retail plans. The only issue is the one of trust - when someone ends up not paying their invoice the pastor has to deal with it:)
I wonder what was the cost of building the robot balanced against the scientific utility. If the main finding is that it can vomit up to 3 meters far, how certain can they be that the distance is simulated effectively? Perhaps by comparing to "live" vomiters, but that would defeat the purpose of building the robot in the first place...? Also, I would assume that there is some probability distribution for the distance the vomit flies from different mouths (writing this sentence, yes I can see the IG Nobel nomination). Other than that, I guess the most significant other finding from the robot may be a model of the exact shape of vomit on the floor but I cannot imagine how it would help with finding out more about the spread of the norovirus... Would anyone know more?
Or better yet - ask them about a mistake or accomplishment that you think might happen to you a year or two down the line. If/when it comes to that situation, if that person is your boss they will have a clear guideline for how to react... and probably one that you will like.
The poor hold money - dollars. Those only go one direction during inflation: down.
Not necessarily true. Many poor hold debt, not money. With inflation, their interest and principal payments stay constant, making their real debt lower.
"the Fed is [...] supressing interest rates and [...] punishing savers [...] who shun the stock markets"
Could that be because they want to motivate banks, companies and individuals to invest in stock markets instead of putting their money in term accounts, to create "more exits" that TFA is talking about?
That is not to say I disagree with most of what you say, but it's just to point out to some reasons that drive these decisions (although we may think they're dysfunctional).
When I read your post I realized that I would like to pay something between your suggested $1 and $10. And each time you give that choice to one of your customers they will pay less than what they're willing to, not more. If you're able to offer a "pay what you want" option (but require to pay at least $0.01) you can rest assured that many of your customers will go higher than the "pre-set" options you might offer them. Not a complete solution but at least my 2 cents.
I wonder what websites will do once almost everyone has Do Not Track enabled. If it's just a few nerds... let's stop tracking them if they insist. If it's everyone...?
"And when everyone is Super... no one will be!" ---The Incredibles
Gamification is an example of extrinsic motivation - the kind that gives you a substitute for the joy of work itself. It can be effective (in a similar way that money motivates people to do all kinds of jobs they hate) but it can be hardly a substitute for "intrinsic motivation" where you aim at making the actual work more interesting - in your example by making the training interesting and relevant to people, by avoiding all kinds of stress by submitting work in time, by giving people a greater variety of tasks, more responsibility - simply a more interesting job, not a more interesting badge.
The outcome may seem the same... until you remove the rewards - look for reference [11] in the Wikipedia entry. That's why intrinsically motivated people keep doing their jobs even though they are extremely badly paid (in my country, that would include e.g. pastors, teachers and even doctors).
In short - if you need "gamification" then in the first place you need to admit that the gamified job sucks.
I also think that companies these days are somewhat larger than they used to be. Just look at the likes of Apple, Exxon or the banking industry. So yes - I'd say one CEO today probably does the work of a couple of CEOs 30 years ago.
Playing well with others is not easy to test but it's possible - often tested in assessment centers, if you heard about exercises like "stranded on a deserted island" or "build a Lego bridge", plus being observed throughout a whole day of testing.
One question that no testing can answer, at least to my knowledge, is "is the candidate lazy"?:o)
Holding inventory has some costs that are not so obvious:
* Producing millions of units before you get the revenue from them costs a lot of money. Money is not free - it either comes with interest, or lost opportunities. * Paying for warehousing capacity that you only use when you launch new products (whether it's central warehouses, retail stores, or partners' facilities). * Production capacity and speed is limited. Not every supplier would be excited to get a contract for iPhone that uses tons of capacity over 3 months and leaves their production lines empty for the rest of the year.
I found ECDL (the European Computer Driver's License) certification to be more useful than I had thought before I looked at its syllabus. It is no good for programming or operation systems but very useful for the "non-CS" parts of your request:
It has been nicely fine-tuned over the years to cover the basics like turning off your computer or saving and archiving files. This helps you not to forget anything important (like backups:o) )
It has modules not only for the classic word processing / presentations / spreadsheets but also stuff like image processing, 2D CAD and databases
Learning resources are quite easy to obtain, whether online or hardcopy, whether free or paid
It is very practical, with the whole syllabus requiring knowledge of how to do stuff not "what is the definition of a cell in spreadsheets". It is also OS & tool agnostic so you can teach it e.g. on LibreOffice on Linux, although most learning materials are geared towards Windows + MS Office
The option to get certified in the end provides additional motivation for my homeschooled kids
It is approachable by a wide range of ages, from elementary school geeklings to pensioners
I always dreaded the day when I would have to teach things like copying files or word processing, spreadsheets or presentation software; I'd much rather stick with "proper" CS topics like Python or Unix shell, but I have to say I was pleasantly relieved by discovering ECDL.
Not only an undergraduate program is there to show people what had already been discovered.
In the Czech Republic, I had completed my undergrad and grad program, and when I enrolled in postgrad (Ph.D. in Information Technology) I was required to spend a full year on FINDING a topic that had not been researched before. Most people do not realize that their "brilliant new idea" may have been discovered 7 years ago, by a team of 8 people working on it full-time, and organizing annual conferences to share further developments in that "brilliant new idea".
I actually cannot see how the author made his point based on available browser usage data. TFA uses two sources:
1. Net Applications: "So please take the NetApplications data with a grain of salt, especially as far as the market share of Internet Explorer is concerned."
2. StatCounter: " IE is listed with 40.89%, Firefox with 39.47% (the trend indicates that Firefox may jump past IE next month)..."
I am sure that the development team would be glad if a lot of people started playing OpenTTD. However, as things stand you have to download the engine, then do a bit of reading, go to the source repositories and download graphics, sound and music separately (which means the downloader needs to distinguish between nightlies and release, ZIP, source.ZIP, MD5 files...).
Perhaps the next step after doing version 1.0.0 might be to put the game into a single installer file for the non-developer part of the world? But still - thanks for all those years, I will gladly return to my young days and share the joys of TTD with my kids:o)
Slashdot Mirror
Putting aside the other comments and objections, "ethics" is quite a broad field. While scientifically inclined people seem to be more sensitive towards judging "date rape", it would be interesting to see how sensitive they are in judging other "ethical" concepts, such as "pride", "greed", or even "tolerance".
I never trusted "cloud" backups but recently I looked into Amazon Glacier - and now my personal backups are stored with "eleven nines" reliability, encrypted, and with price roughly 10 times lower than services such as Dropbox or Google Drive. No affiliation with Amazon... but the question was "how do you do it" so this is my answer.
Call me skeptical, but I am not so sure that a) SWAT teams have round leather shields, b) all members of the team raise their shields int the very same moment, c) they all wear gas masks but no firearms, but hold batons in their hands although nobody is in sight, d) a camera from within the bunker is so nicely positioned to take a picture of the team. Could it be a nice publicity gimmick instead?
"Reflection upon these edge cases" is not necessarily a good way to reason about the basic assumption. It's wrong to kill others, but the edge case is defending your family. It's wrong to lie, but the edge case is when to tell a child he's been adopted. It's wrong to steal but what if you're dying of hunger? I am not sure about the letter of American law but I don't think the spirit of the idea that "marriage is to a member of opposite sex" is invalidated by a natural hermafrodite.
Yes, I really do not like to read advertisements disguised as stories.
I know a lot of people from different churches who are connected to church "private networks" here in Europe. The idea is that the church gets a lot of SIMs for their employees, and also for people that the pastors trust and can vouch for - that work quite well in many smaller churches. The more SIMs you have the bigger discounts you have, so the plans that I know have free communication between all the members of the network, plus half price plans with double the free minutes and SMS than normal retail plans. The only issue is the one of trust - when someone ends up not paying their invoice the pastor has to deal with it :)
I wonder what was the cost of building the robot balanced against the scientific utility. If the main finding is that it can vomit up to 3 meters far, how certain can they be that the distance is simulated effectively? Perhaps by comparing to "live" vomiters, but that would defeat the purpose of building the robot in the first place...? Also, I would assume that there is some probability distribution for the distance the vomit flies from different mouths (writing this sentence, yes I can see the IG Nobel nomination). Other than that, I guess the most significant other finding from the robot may be a model of the exact shape of vomit on the floor but I cannot imagine how it would help with finding out more about the spread of the norovirus... Would anyone know more?
Or better yet - ask them about a mistake or accomplishment that you think might happen to you a year or two down the line. If/when it comes to that situation, if that person is your boss they will have a clear guideline for how to react... and probably one that you will like.
I am thankful that being thankful makes me more thankful. Wait, could I get into an endless happy feedback loop?
The poor hold money - dollars. Those only go one direction during inflation: down.
Not necessarily true. Many poor hold debt, not money. With inflation, their interest and principal payments stay constant, making their real debt lower.
"the Fed is [...] supressing interest rates and [...] punishing savers [...] who shun the stock markets"
Could that be because they want to motivate banks, companies and individuals to invest in stock markets instead of putting their money in term accounts, to create "more exits" that TFA is talking about?
That is not to say I disagree with most of what you say, but it's just to point out to some reasons that drive these decisions (although we may think they're dysfunctional).
When I read your post I realized that I would like to pay something between your suggested $1 and $10. And each time you give that choice to one of your customers they will pay less than what they're willing to, not more. If you're able to offer a "pay what you want" option (but require to pay at least $0.01) you can rest assured that many of your customers will go higher than the "pre-set" options you might offer them. Not a complete solution but at least my 2 cents.
I wonder what websites will do once almost everyone has Do Not Track enabled. If it's just a few nerds... let's stop tracking them if they insist. If it's everyone...?
"And when everyone is Super... no one will be!" ---The Incredibles
Gamification is an example of extrinsic motivation - the kind that gives you a substitute for the joy of work itself. It can be effective (in a similar way that money motivates people to do all kinds of jobs they hate) but it can be hardly a substitute for "intrinsic motivation" where you aim at making the actual work more interesting - in your example by making the training interesting and relevant to people, by avoiding all kinds of stress by submitting work in time, by giving people a greater variety of tasks, more responsibility - simply a more interesting job, not a more interesting badge.
The outcome may seem the same... until you remove the rewards - look for reference [11] in the Wikipedia entry. That's why intrinsically motivated people keep doing their jobs even though they are extremely badly paid (in my country, that would include e.g. pastors, teachers and even doctors).
In short - if you need "gamification" then in the first place you need to admit that the gamified job sucks.
I also think that companies these days are somewhat larger than they used to be. Just look at the likes of Apple, Exxon or the banking industry. So yes - I'd say one CEO today probably does the work of a couple of CEOs 30 years ago.
Playing well with others is not easy to test but it's possible - often tested in assessment centers, if you heard about exercises like "stranded on a deserted island" or "build a Lego bridge", plus being observed throughout a whole day of testing.
One question that no testing can answer, at least to my knowledge, is "is the candidate lazy"? :o)
Holding inventory has some costs that are not so obvious:
* Producing millions of units before you get the revenue from them costs a lot of money. Money is not free - it either comes with interest, or lost opportunities.
* Paying for warehousing capacity that you only use when you launch new products (whether it's central warehouses, retail stores, or partners' facilities).
* Production capacity and speed is limited. Not every supplier would be excited to get a contract for iPhone that uses tons of capacity over 3 months and leaves their production lines empty for the rest of the year.
Focusing on inventory minimization is called Just in Time, only it's most often used in industries other than electronics: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_in_time_(business)
Let's see... something that reflects heat, and has other possible benefits against an abusive government... hmmmm...
Have you considered a tinfoil hat?
I found ECDL (the European Computer Driver's License) certification to be more useful than I had thought before I looked at its syllabus. It is no good for programming or operation systems but very useful for the "non-CS" parts of your request:
I always dreaded the day when I would have to teach things like copying files or word processing, spreadsheets or presentation software; I'd much rather stick with "proper" CS topics like Python or Unix shell, but I have to say I was pleasantly relieved by discovering ECDL.
Not only an undergraduate program is there to show people what had already been discovered. In the Czech Republic, I had completed my undergrad and grad program, and when I enrolled in postgrad (Ph.D. in Information Technology) I was required to spend a full year on FINDING a topic that had not been researched before. Most people do not realize that their "brilliant new idea" may have been discovered 7 years ago, by a team of 8 people working on it full-time, and organizing annual conferences to share further developments in that "brilliant new idea".
An identical story linking to the source of the analysis (Nanex) was posted in June: http://news.slashdot.org/story/10/06/24/1519257/Flash-Crash-Analysis-of-May-6-Stock-Market-Plunge?from=rss . This article is just based on picking bits and pieces from the Nanex analysis and linking back to it...
I actually cannot see how the author made his point based on available browser usage data. TFA uses two sources:
1. Net Applications: "So please take the NetApplications data with a grain of salt, especially as far as the market share of Internet Explorer is concerned."
2. StatCounter: " IE is listed with 40.89%, Firefox with 39.47% (the trend indicates that Firefox may jump past IE next month)..."
As much as I'd like, I cannot find the evidence on StatCounter for FF overtaking IE in Europe this month. Although the usage of FF jumps on weekends and FF may overtake IE for one day soon, it is not closer to that goal than several weeks ago: http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-eu-daily-20100701-20100803 . And the longer-term trend without weekends is even less exciting: http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-eu-weekly-200827-201031
Now, I didn't mean to disturb, please feel free to resume discussing this historical moment and its profound ramifications :o)
2. Make a "mistake"
3. Lose your bonus
4. Close all the short positions
5. PROFIT!
I am sure that the development team would be glad if a lot of people started playing OpenTTD. However, as things stand you have to download the engine, then do a bit of reading, go to the source repositories and download graphics, sound and music separately (which means the downloader needs to distinguish between nightlies and release, ZIP, source.ZIP, MD5 files...). Perhaps the next step after doing version 1.0.0 might be to put the game into a single installer file for the non-developer part of the world? But still - thanks for all those years, I will gladly return to my young days and share the joys of TTD with my kids :o)
So, as a person living in the EU - any ideas where I should go (preferably online) to complain and raise my voice against this?