I'm too lazy to look up the ref, but someone told me that the preference for average faces was actually an artifact of the averaging process. It turns out that averaging images of faces also makes the skin look a lot younger and smoother, and therefore more attractive.
Are you really sure about this? It sounds equally plausible to me that not knowing both the source and target languages would give one an advantage of not relying on ad-hoc, hard-to-model, human judgements. Being monolingual is more likely to enforce a discipline where one develops an algorithm which would work effectively on all natural languages.
IIRC the 'candide' group was (not intentionally) composed of scientists with no knowledge of both english and french.. http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~aberger/mt.html
Well the deactivation page did automatically say that the users "friends" would "miss" them. Did they actually check with these users to see if they would want their image and identity to be used in this way? If not, then it seems pretty disingenuous to me. How do they know that these users will actually miss them? Why is facebook assuming that my friends would not respect my decision to leave facebook if that was the case..
"my definition of a terrorist is somebody who uses stealth to deliberately target civilians in an effort to affect political change."
Shouldn't the definition of terrorism include the fact that they are violently targeting civilians? Economic or computer terrorism that doesn't actually hurt or kill anyone doesn't meet the definition in my view - and the publishing work or WL definitely doesn't either.
Yes but isn't the possibility that your communications will be disclosed to the public by an anonymous insider already a part of this game? I don't see the naivety or idealism here - It just looks like standard journalism to me. WL has done a lot to make the "game" more interesting by making the possibility of insider leaks more credible than before. There are many reasons why an insider with the story to tell would rather talk to WL than a newsmedia reporter.
why not take the simpler explanation that the reason families have broken up is that they actually weren't that happy?
Also why doesn't having multiple people in a family earning an income lead to an increase in security? i.e. the impact of a (e.g. job loss, illness) can be buffered by the other partner's income.
This confuses me. If it is impossible to time the market, then why does he think it is "pretty clear that the market is getting overheated"? [edit: in the comments he explains that he's looking at "revenues and cash flow and discounted cash
flow to get values", but if these are only weak predictors that don't enable one to time the market, why worry?]
Read "Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age" by Larry Bartels. He gives some evidence of the harmful political effects of income inequality. I don't know why it matters whether the scale is increasing - I think it's enough to show that it is harmful. It's honestly a pretty boring book, so more work needs to be done on this.
Money buys political influence. Income inequality thus leads to political inequality. The government is corrupted to serve the interests of the superrich.
The city I live in, Berlin has an area of ~821 km^2
Let's suppose that one city block is about 0.2 km x 0.2 km
This implies that there are on the order of 10 km of road per km^2 of area. Thus the length of road is O(10^4) km for one major city. Now if we drive 30 km/h, and there are ~25 intersections per km^2, and the average wait time to turn is 1 minute (I have no idea), then we need 20 + 25 ~ 45 minutes to cover 1 sq km - In reality we will not have a perfectly efficient travelling salesman route and will have to cross some streets more than once so let's say it takes 1 hour per km^2. Thus the entire city can be covered in about 821 hours per car, or about one month / car. If we only allow a 40 hour work week, then it takes about 5 months.
Thus with a modest fleet of 5 cars the city can be updated about once a month. Does this sound right? If so not bad.
Of course streetview isn't working here for legal reasons, but this logic should apply to other similar cities.
I think so. At any one point in time, at the frontier of human knowledge, there are many research proposals floating around for what direction we should next expand the frontier. Some of these proposals will lead to valuable gains in knowledge, and profitable technologies. Most will amount to nothing, or at most a footnote in a more important work. It becomes clear after the fact that the funding money should have been invested elsewhere.
So if you are a funding agency, you rank the proposals from best to worst. If you continuously added money to the agencies budget, the quality of the proposals would get lower and lower. I believe that is what one means by diminishing returns.
Another issue: perhaps the increase in happiness with income (I) reported for I < 75k is due to the fact that jobs with higher income have nicer work conditions and colleagues. If this is true it should be possible to make people happier without paying them more. Just arrange matters so that their jobs are more pleasant.
It was always puzzling to me as a child that the people doing the hardest work are paid the least money. (hard in the sense that it physically drains you, and your whole body aches)
I don't understand what you are saying. Who is marginalizing the ambitions of others? Why is it easy? I take it you think that the study is invalid because you called it "crap" and a "joke". I'm honestly not sure - why is it a joke or crap?
Did the poster in the classroom provide any of the many examples of fortunes that began with crime? To say that "every" great fortune began with a crime is false, but certainly many did.
I would Love it if referee reports were published with papers. Why waste all of the unpaid time and research of the referees by compressing their opinions into a yes/no/revise decision? This would improve the quality of the reports, and make the process of reading papers much easier. One of the most difficult parts of reading a paper is trying to decide for yourself if the methods or conclusions of the paper are flawed. The referee reports are a valuable counterpoint from people who probably know more about a topic than you do!