Feels like what OP meant to say is, “you could rightly assume that a ball…” instead. Seems like a fair starting point if you’re just doubling things because if the height difference. I really liked cubic’s explanation overall.
> if companies like Apple really wanted to fund this work, I'm pretty sure they could figure something out.
Having spent the last ~6 years in big tech consistently frustrated by the rigidity of the processes and finding clever ways to navigate (see: wade through the bullshit), this isn’t as easy as you’d hope. The problem is that someone has to spend a non-trivial amount of time advocating internally for something like this (a “non-standard process”) which generally means asking pinging random people across finance, procurement, and legal how to deal with it and 99% of people will just throw up their hands (especially in this case because they don’t understand the importance of it). If things don’t fit a mold in these big companies, they fall into the event horizon and are stretched out to infinity.
Is there any research on consumer preferences and why, for example, people might PREFER to be alone vs. eating in a diner? It feels like socialization used to be a forced mechanism, regardless of whether that created positive feelings in both parties. People have such limited time now between caring for children and demanding careers that any time spent meeting new people generally feels wasted unless you have significant energy to invest in that relationship (which generally means less “me” time). I personally don’t feel like this is the fault of technology as much as it is the fault of rising costs and long, intense work hours to pay said costs.
The LLC isn't inactive, you just found the wrong one. EXPAND IT INC (4776106) is registered to the proper address. Guessing the website is down from traffic.
> If you doubt how much computers destroy productivity, then simply visit a hospital and you can see it with your own eyes. My mom was recently in the hospital so I got to see this myself. Mistake after mistake because of bad information either put into the computer, or codes being misinterpreted.
I would argue this isn’t necessarily because of computers but a byproduct of an antiquated system and process being codified into a computer. The reason for this seems to be that there are structural inefficiencies built into our healthcare system that create a ton of added complexity that is near impossible to unwind because of legal (contractual and privacy-related) risks. For example, any attempts at improving efficiency in patient care creates potential liabilities for medical professionals. People are scared to innovate in this space, so the programs are just digital translations of an existing process. This requires a time investment to learn the “new way” of doing the same thing, and builds inherit laziness because steps are still require that should have been automated away. Medical notes are a good example of this; it’s required to be documented in an extremely specific way and of a certain length because of insurance so it just ends up being copy and pasted, free text, by the physician to meet this requirement.
So true. This line was great, “And when you use Google Search or Google Play, we might have to give equal prominence to a raft of spammy and low-quality services.” I’ve had to help family members put locks on their credit report because of top-ranked, fake websites that offer global entry, DMV license and registration renewals, etc. Digging deeper, you can find troves of consumer complaints about these websites being scammy. If they can’t even prevent spam websites for critical government services from being recommended, I’m not sure how much worse it could get before people start dropping them faster than Ask Jeeves.
I like the author's analysis and appreciate the breakdown of his sources, but I think he took some shortcuts that makes me question his conclusion.
Some examples:
"With more money being saved, and investments yielding higher returns, the more there is to spend on homes."
I tried dig up more information about how exactly BEA calculations the Personal Savings Rate, but it seems to be an estimate based on aggregate consumption. This savings rate doesn't necessarily imply that this money is invested in the stock market. Even if it was and they bought and then sold investments to pay for their homes they still have to pay taxes on those short-term sales. An increasing savings rate by ~26% over < 12 months is interesting but doesn't seem to be a strong argument. I think we need to go deeper here to see if this is a median number and how it would break down by demographics.
"We are in a record low rate environment, we’ve experienced unprecedented support via fiscal stimulus, and mortgage underwriting standards are far stronger than in the oughts, which has lead to less leverage and reduced the likelihood that a pile of cards built on risky mortgages will collapse the economy."
Generally with more expensive homes people are left with fewer options with who underwrites large loans, driving them to jumbo mortgage lenders. People may have stretched themselves to be able to buy a home given the low rates and the need for more space.
"Older people are less likely to be tech-savvy, less likely to use ad-blockers, less likely to be able to understand the difference between legitimate news and lies, and they’re more likely to spend longer time on Facebook and share more information on Facebook."
While I would like to say I agree with this, it's due to confirmation bias and an availability heuristic. If you don't provide data to support these claims then you're assuming your readers are no better than the subject of your post.
I completely agree with this, and based on past research it seems it’s a highly cultural phenomenon. What it basically comes down to is that countries with strong public transportation infrastructure view public transportation as a basic human right, whereas the US views it as a social welfare program. It’s a bigger fight than just voting for better politicians, it’s deeply cultural.
This really isn't that outrageous, at most of the F500 companies I've consulted at they all have massive contractor workforces (including consultants) that don't have the same benefits as anyone else and are generally treated like second-class citizens. News like this that directs outrage at a specific company is just clickbait bullshit written by an amateur who doesn't understand how the broader workforce operates.
And actually understanding the context of what you're trying to use OCR on can work backward to determine what the text actually is, i.e. if it's a "Name" field then the probabilities of ambiguous letters may change (in the case of handwriting rec).
I'd have to agree with this; every news outlet tries to treat a lack of proper controls as a breaking story / massive conspiracy theory to get a buzz going around the topic. I think it's important to inform people but unfortunately, most people would rather buy into the idea that there was malicious intent rather than also evaluating the possibility that, like most evolving business areas, it takes time to build in the proper procedures to attain measurably objective results. This happens in every industry and isn't unique to science, however, in this case, the physicians recommending these drugs to their patients should have been able to read between the lines or at the very least have a managed treatment plan to evaluate the efficacy on those they're treating.
I really like the concept, and think that visual programming is a great way to help understand data flows (I'm a big Node RED fan).
I wouldn't make the claim that this is usable by business managers; if one of the goals of this tool is to make it business-focused then you might want to add an abstraction and front-end it with BPMN as that's the general language understood by most folks familiar with process mapping. Check out Camunda's modeler for an example (https://camunda.com/products/modeler/). I have quite a bit of experience in this space as working with business-focused modeling tools and then building the full solution has been my career for the last 5+ years.
This. The Pentagon buried a McKinsey study detailing out $125 billion in waste with almost no pushback from the public and then comes a proposal for an additional $300 billion budget increase with no effort to optimize existing processes. Going to the cloud and modernizing technology will only solve some of the problems, the rest are non-technical (bureaucratic).
100% this. Seems like there should at the very least be a product feature that automatically disables any outbound messaging by default (similarly to how you can block purchases without a PIN). This doesn't solve the problem of always listening, but at least prevents this particular situation from inadvertently happening. Additionally you should be able to set an automatic deletion of voice recording after a specified amount of time. I'm sure some of this has to be in the pipeline with GDPR.
The author argues against project-based learning but then states his "5-minute attempt to come up with an alternative way to teach these skills" which are, effectively, all projects or pieces of a project. Ultimately it doesn't boil down to project-based learning being ineffective, but lack of teaching for communication in engineering teams. If a student's goal is to learn network programming, then they should speak up that they want to focus on that aspect of the project. I took a few CS course post-grad after already beginning my programming journey and found the methods of teaching to be highly ineffective (the practice problems were too abstract and most students couldn't draw the connection to real-life problems - this is at a uni with a top CS program). Upper level courses should definitely keep focus on the complexities of theory, but entry-level CS courses would serve students better by fostering their interest in a topic and showing what it's like in the work force, and then if it's still something they want to pursue then teaching the theory makes sense as it's something they would end up trying to learn about on their own anyway.