When You Win a Nobel and They Can't Reach You at Home
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“No! The committee is using a poorly designed auction system to disburse the awards and if we don’t both accept the award in the next 70 minutes it will go to Piketty!”
But why?
Why not wait?
And what if they were planning to refuse it?
My cynical side suggests it's done mostly to generate PR. See also: https://worldneurologyonline.com/article/receiving-the-call-... https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/10/04/science/where...
Most scientists joke they wouldn't mind receiving a 2:30AM call informing them they won the prize because then at least they could go to work in the morning, have some champagne and relax because getting grants was going to get a lot easier...
Also I tend to charge my phone during the daytime so at night I just put it in airplane mode to conserve batteries and make sure it can pull itself through the night to be able to sound the alarm in the morning. The charging port on my phone is busted and the cable needs to be jiggled every now and then, so it's not feasible to charge it reliably at night. Thanks, USB-C, for your horrible, non-rugged design that can't get through 3 years of use.
And if you place it on airplane mode and then turn on WiFi (assuming you have WiFi calling), then you both save battery and make radiation insignificant.
Unfortunately sound follows the inverse square law as well, and alarms don't wake me up when they are 6 feet away.
Even if you used the maximum band power of 1 watt, that isn't really enough to do anything. At rest your body will produce about 80 Watts of heat energy, which is a much higher frequency than what your phone gives off and hence has much more energy per quanta. Also keep in mind that 1 Watt is going in all directions, at best you cover half the hemisphere and even assuming phone manufacturers aren't optimizing for phones to radiate away because that gives better reception at lower power, you'd be getting half a watt of energy from a device going maximum transmit power. A standard phone will likely give you less than 5mW of energy dosage.
The most that your phone can do is warm up your ear a bit if you put it under your pillow. By an amount that is likely to be not measurable with modern equipment.
And before noting about ionizing radiation; phones aren't high enough frequency or power to really do that at any appreciable level. Only high frequencies are capable of ionizing since it requires an atom receiving a certain amount of energy per quantum, and the energy per quantum is only related to the frequency, not the transmit power.
You also cannot unplug all of your neighbours routers, TVs and other devices.
It is very easy to get paranoid about specific wireless technologies, it is almost impossible nowadays to avoid "electrosmog" or particularly wireless emitters entirely though.
My contacts go through, there's the call twice workaround, and honestly I'm from a period when you just couldn't always reach someone immediately and I'm fine with that.
Sure, me too, but that's exactly where I'm coming from when I ask. It's the same set of sensibilities that says that if there's going to be a call in the middle of the night, it's probably for a good reason. I would think we'd have to fast forward from there to reach the place that views regularly taking the phone off the hook as the natural solution, due to e.g. jadedness/cynicism/etc.
(If I ever did get an unimportant call in the middle of the night, the person on the other end would get an earful.)
I since just have my phone block all calls except those pre-made appointments on my Google calendar, and the number by which people can reach me changes depending on the scheduled hour, all programmed via Twilio.
I have a couple of whitelisted incoming numbers for family/SO and that's it. Everyone else has to make an appointment, or send me an email or instant message which I will usually see within a few hours. I generally tell people that email is the fastest and most reliable way to reach me.
Then there are occasional random scams calling in - most common recently is "your number has been randomly selected as a winner and you're eligible for ${insert useless reward that's just a bait for scam here}". But none of them, ever, tried to call late at night. If they did, I'd file a complaint.
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[0] - The most annoying spam call from a bank was an upsell that happened last year. I was doing the usual checkup on my account balances via their web page, and out of curiosity decided to check out what they have on the "offers" tab. I clicked to the tab, skimmed the list of loan and investment offers, and got back to managing my money. The next day, a marketer calls, trying to upsell me some credit. When pressed, he straight up admitted that I got flagged in the system because I clicked on the "offers" tab and didn't buy anything. As you can imagine, the next time the bank called to take a "quality of service" survey, I said a lot of words about what I don't like about their service.
[1] - I have a smartwatch that vibrates when I get a call, giving me an unobtrusive way to look at the number and reject it without taking the phone out.
Yeah no, these companies should NEVER be calling people, period. It's way to easy to phish people for information by calling them and claiming to be their bank. Too many people will fall for it:
"Hi, this is SomeDude from Bank of America, and we noticed some suspicious activity on your account. Before we go further I would just like to confirm your identity. Could you please provide your name? Your address? Your mother's maiden name? The last four digits of your SSN?"
Banks should adopt a policy of only interacting with customers physically, via their web interface with a login, official mobile app, or by the user calling the bank's official, publicized number. Never by calling the user.
That way they can post big signs saying "We will never call you, if someone calls you claiming to be us, it's fake" and people will get it.
Which is it?
Banks should adopt a policy of only interacting with customers physically, via their web interface with a login, official mobile app, or by the user calling the bank's official, publicized number. Never by calling the user.
You either don't travel, don't travel for very long, or don't travel anywhere interesting.
I've had several experiences over the years where using a credit card in a country I didn't expect to be in got a call from the bank to verify it was me.
You may tell your bank you're traveling in Germany, Italy, and Switzerland for a week, but on night three of your trip, when you get invited to a party in the Czech Republic by your friend's pretty sister, you get on the train and keep talking. You don't say, "Hold your hormones for a sec, I need to tell my bank I'm going out of bounds."
1 * 0 = 0
> You either don't travel, don't travel for very long, or don't travel anywhere interesting.
I would prefer you didn't make assumptions.
I travel to lots of interesting places, and I have had my credit card disabled several times. Once because my idiot geography-illiterate bank didn't know that Bulgaria was a part of Europe. Good thing I had a stack of cash with me. For less prepared travellers, the bank is doing nothing but stranding their own customers cashless in unfamiliar places.
In any case, my point still stands that they really shouldn't be calling to verify it is me when I don't even have my home country's SIM card in my phone.
They should be e-mailing me instead, which is the only reliable way to reach me while travelling and SIM swapping. Most people are more reachable easily by e-mail than by phone when travelling for the exact same reason.
Me too. My bank sent me a message telling me to call them using the number on the back of my card. That is an easy solution to the problem.
I've seen this proposed. I don't know if anyone is actually doing it.
I said: "I'd be happy to, but first can you prove your identity to me? After all, you're the one that called me"
What followed was a hilarious discussion where they were unable to prove anything to me (for example, telling me something about my account that only I would know) because they're not allowed to tell anything to me until I proved who I am.
Finally I told them that I'd be happy to call them back and I asked them where I can find the number to call. I was obviously not going call a number the person would give me. They didn't know how to find the number to the customer service, so I found it myself and called back.
When they answered, I explained the situation but obviously there was no way to actually get in touch with the person with whom I had spoken earlier, and the person that I did speak to didn't know what the topic was. I asked them to call me back.
Well, they did eventually called me back, but what was the fist thing they asked after they did? "We need you prove your identity, can you tell me XXXX?"
They've stopped doing this now, and the mest recent thing they called me to inform me about something they just went to the point right away. I wonder if I've been flagged as someone who doesn't need verification or if they changed their policy.
I imagine an attack where someone attempts to log in to your Internet bank account, and at the same time calls you and tells you that they are the bank and that they have sent you a notification on the phone to confirm this.
You accept the notification on the phone and all of a sudden they're not just logged in to your Internet bank, but also on the phone with you, with you trusting that they are indeed the bank.
The only way I see that this could be avoided is if they provide you with a verification code that will appear on your phone.
Basically in the app you see if the verification is for logging in, providing strong auth for some service, approving transfer of X euros from Y account to account Z, etc
In general we have had really well working online banking since the late 90s here in Finland (first versions are actually from the early 80s where you dialed directly to the bank instead of your ISP with your modem). Haven't really heard of any major security flaws ever so they do have a really good track record. This is also why the governments attempt at creating their own strong auth service failed. The banks already effectively provide that and everyone is used to using them.
They were definitely using a soundboard, they'd repeat phrases that were approximate answers to my questions.
I eventually got a Google voice number in a different area code than where I have ever lived, so it's just really easy to see them coming now.
Automatic call screening is another solution. Or the authentication protocols that are rolling out way too slowly. Or just using OTT services. We never fully fix any old communication systems we just make new ones anyway.
The GP or so was talking about airplane mode though. I assume nothing gets through in that case. Personally I'd use DND rather than airplane mode.
Further, you can schedule it or even trigger by certain calendar events. Very convenient if you have small children and don't want the random calls from grandparents or old friends checking in at inconvenient times (apparently if they don't have children but working a lot they don't consider 9pm to be "a bad time" - how should they?).
We used Airplane mode at nights before (even before we had kids), but were stressed about missed emergencies from relatives and stopped doing that.
Disclaimer: I get approx. 2 calls per week, and this is mostly businesses calling back, etc. I still don't want to miss emergencies though.
It keeps waking up Flanders and his wife. After, like, the third time he picks it up, his wife says, “why don’t you just unplug the phone!?”
And Flanders yells, “it could be my mother!!”
To which Homer shouts from next door, “would you shut up!? People are trying to sleep!”
Aeroplane mode has two advantages for me: I don't receive calls or notifications for the night, and I aren't tempted to immediately go to my cellphone to check whether I got a notification when I wake up.
Or have e-mail on your phone, making a sound whenever you receive an e-mail.
Or get an SMS from your cell provider when you run out of data, even if you somehow run out of data at 4am.
(Of course, I know I wouldn't be anyone's first phone call in an emergency)
Why on Earth would any sane person set their phone up to do this?
> If, like Saul Perlmutter (Physics, 2011), you live in California and the call comes, unanswered, in the middle of the night, then it could be the television news vans outside your house that alert you of your prize.
Why don't the Nobel people just wait until you've been successfully informed before telling anyone else? Where does this self-imposed deadline come from?
Maybe they shouldn't have done that before checking if the person was ok with being awarded the prize?
But they clearly want to tell them, so why are they trying to do it in the middle of the night in a hurry rather than doing it calmly?
Why this self-imposed rush?
They could pick a slot that's during the day in the US, but then it'd be night for someone else. What justifies the US importance to make such a change? Using the timezone of the committee as they do now seems as reasonable a compromise as any...
I don't think a Nobel recipient is going to spill the beans on the announcement.
I too had thought that this was the case, but it appears the press does get at least some advance notice. Last Wednesday Jennifer Doudna found that she had won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry in a phone call from a reporter. Ref: paragraph 7 of [1]:
> At a press briefing today, Doudna noted she was asleep and missed the initial calls from Sweden, only waking up to answer the phone finally when a Nature reporter called. "She wanted to know if I could comment on the Nobel and I said, Well, who won it? And she was shocked that she was the person to tell me."
[1] https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/10/crispr-revolutionary...
1. They fail to contact Doudna to inform her she's a winner
2. They publicly announce she's a winner
3. Journalist calls to ask her about it
I understand saying that's a problem, but realistically, that's a problem very few people would be unhappy to have. Yes, it could be horribly inconvenient to stumble through a bunch of congratulatory communications before you could confirm you've actually won, but compared to wining a Nobel, it's a trifle.
If you're a potential winner, you know to be reachable that night :)
The committee hadn't managed to contact her. I can't be sure, but I'd bet she would have preferred the call.
The #NobelPrize committee couldn't reach Paul Milgrom to share the news that he won, so his fellow winner and neighbor Robert Wilson knocked on his door in the middle of the night. When Robert Wilson rang Paul Milgrom's doorbell at 2:15 this morning, Milgrom's wife, who's in Stockholm, received a security-camera notification on her phone. She got to watch live as Wilson told Milgrom he'd won the #NobelPrize.
The most funny comment on it, in my opinion is:
- Knock, knock
- Who’s there?
- Nobel
- Nobel who?
- No bell - that’s why I knocked.
I also think it should be like little gems sprinkled here and there to break the pattern. Any more and it desensitizes me - this is why I don't like going to Reddit.
Maybe if it were to be spent on like adding notes about posts/comments or something purely fluff/sparkle. Different color schemes maybe?
Doesn't Google had the leaders in auction theory now?
Would someone please devise a way to run a stock market as a repeated clocked auction, so that prices change, say, once every 5 minutes and high frequency trading doesn't work.
The rich get richer. I remember filling out school and early job applications. I was struck by how my list of awards and recognitions was kind of a sham—most of them were each a consequence of some earlier achievement, and so on. It felt like getting a check and being able to cash it more than once.
Achievement and power are runaway positive feedback loops which means we need damping forces to have any reasonable level of fairness where "fair" means reward is proportional to the effort.
The results and outcomes alluded to in each comment, mine and the one you're responding to, are consequences of essentially begging the question. It's that part where the flaw lies—because it leads, as in your comment, to justifying things as rational and fit even when they are not equitable.
Scientist A and Scientist B both produce results X and Y respectively that are exactly equally valuable to the world. However, Scientist A happens to already be well-known for other work. What we observe is that A will get more accolades for X than B gets for Y. Not because X is more valuable, but solely because people assume that since famous scientist A did X, it must be worth more.
Assuming they work in the same building, now is Stanford's chance. The bigger flex is to have two or more adjacent parking spaces with signage that says "Reserved for Nobel Laureates" (plural).
Berkeley already has rows of NL parking.
I assumed there were so few that even world-class, elite universities would have in the low single digits, so that adding two would rocket Stanford (or any university) to near the top.
But there are some universities that have 50 or even over 100 depending how you count.
Why? Because they know that they can buy those shares at some reported price then trade them on their own books then sell them at a price sufficiently different from the reported price that they make a profit.
This means that HFT is explicitly getting "in front of retail" and is actually trading at a price different from what retail hears about. That difference goes where? Oh right. Right into the pockets of HFT and out of the pockets of retail investors.
But on a reasonable assumption what he is arguing is that the competition in the marketplace means that they are paying competitive prices for that order flow. They are making money but not much considering what they are doing. And it is massively better than what used to exist.
I know this and agree with it. But as I said above, "The fact that it is better than what existed before doesn't change the fact that we can do better yet."
The first point is that Robinhood is the one that they negotiate with. So the extra profits go there, and not directly to consumers. Secondly the HFT middlemen are still playing market makers, which means that they still are being paid for. There are cheaper ways to make a market work than HFT, and I outlined one above. Third, automated algorithms as market makers have the potential for some pretty dramatic events - such as the flash crash. Alternatives can avoid that.
Yes, HFT manages to do better than the old market makers that had humans doing the same job that HFT does now in the same way with bigger margins. But that doesn't change the fact that for retail investors, I believe that my suggestion in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24760841 would help them even more.
Whether you think that's a good or bad thing though I guess can be up for debate.
Those who can’t compete aren’t even going to try, nobody loses here.
Why would a flash crash never happen today?
Flash crashes still happen [3] and there were multiple rapid crashes triggering limit down circuit breakers in 2020. The circuit breakers stopped things from getting worse, but didn't stop the crash itself.
[0] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1691679
[1] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2573677
[2] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2573677
[3] https://www.cnbc.com/2015/09/25/what-happened-during-the-aug...
Sure. The cost is that trades are slower, and people selling a large block of shares will have to settle with many others. Oh, and also trading will stop when there is excessive market volatility.
Still interested? Here is the mechanism. There is a priority queue for open buys and one for open sells. The sizes of the buys and sells is 1 share. Both are ordered by time the order was received, with oldest first. And the market has a price.
Whenever both queues have entries that can match at that price, they do. At the end of every X time, if one queue is empty and the other is not, the price moves 1 cent.
If a large order is received, trading effectively stops and it can only move the price slowly. Because the price only moves slowly, there are no sudden price shifts for HFT to take advantage of.
Interestingly even if this market has low volume, it can still take large orders successfully. Because even though HFT traders can't make money by playing this market, they can make money off of arbitrage between this market and others. Therefore until a large order finishes settling on this market it serves as a ceiling or floor of what gets traded on other markets. Which means that the HFT traders do the hard work of trading this on other markets.
But for anyone who wishes to trade with each other on this market, HFT can't make money from them.
I thought the 'penalties' associated with trading aged shares were pretty clever. Among the rules for the LTSE [1] is that you get increased voting weight for your shares as they age (IIRC). I've no idea whether any of those will really help in practice. But it sounds like it's worth a try.
Pretty useful.
Try having children, sleeping till 2 will be a blessing!
The Nobel price in economics has much more prestige than two of the 'real' prices (Peace price and Literature price). Unlike committees for those prices, Riksbank pretty much always selects someone deserving the price.
It is the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences for the physics, chemistry, and economics prizes, the Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet for the medicine prize, the Swedish Academy for the literature prize, and a committee elected by the Norwegian Parliament for the peace prize.
Prestige is of course somewhat subjective (as is definitely the very last part of your comment) but I would strongly disagree. Those two prizes are highly regarded and their announcements are widely reported. I can for example tell you both laureates of those prizes for this year from the top of my head but I can't name any other prize holder from the other categories. I guess you are projecting your own biases here and there is no real pecking order.
There is one peace prize winner criticized by other peace prize peers for her role in genocide.
Then there is the nomination of President Obama less than two weeks in office. He received it after less than nine months in the office. The prize was seen more as criticism of Bush administration than awarding Obama.
I nominate Samatha Power (Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Multilateral Affairs and Human Rights under Obama, then 28th United States Ambassador to the United Nations) and Cass Sustein (United States Administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs) to judge Obama's Peace price.
Experts from the book: "The Education of an Idealist: A Memoir" by Samatha Power
>In October of 2009, I awoke to a very different form of bad news: Barack Obama had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Less than a year into his presidency, Obama was receiving an award previously bestowed on Nelson Mandela, Mother Teresa, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
>When I relayed the news to Cass, he looked stricken, as if I had told him someone we knew had fallen ill. The choice seemed wildly premature,
[...]
>Jon Favreau and Ben Rhodes, Obama’s two gifted speechwriters, took on the difficult task of drafting the Nobel address. I popped into Jon’s tiny office on the first floor of the West Wing, and he told me that the President had decided to directly confront the awkwardness of receiving the prize so early in his presidency.
I mean, 60% of American did not understand why Obama received the award. Obama himself was not happy and felt awkward. People he worked with felt it was not deserved.
Now you could argue that those "wrong" nominations in the last year's have tarnished the peace prize "brand" so much that is no longer valuable. I would say that is in itself somewhat premature and since it's the most political prize there will always be controversy attached.
If I knew someone had a Nobel prize in economics, I would think they were really smart, and really deep into economics. If I knew someone had a Nobel Peace prize, it's almost certain that they did something of extreme first hand importance to the lives of many.
Peace prize has been given people who don't deserve it. President Obama was nominated less than two weeks in office and received it after less than nine months in the office. The prize was seen more as criticism of Bush administration than awarding Obama.
Kissinger, Moniz, Briand, Obama, Mother Theresa, Kim Dae-jung.
Or, you can get a good nights sleep, wake up to good news, immediately tell people, celebrate with a nice breakfast, etc.
Technically, it's the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. Totally not the Nobel prize. Never forget that. (rolls eyes)
The other sad reality is that everyone looks like a criminal in these videos. Scum web sites and news media rely on this. Nextdoor, where you at?
Some people claim you can have the watermarked logo removed but you have to contact Google/Nest directly. I'm going to do that right now (I have 5 cameras... which I bought a week before Google announced they were locking-down the Nest ecosystem and web-service, so I now refuse to buy any more Nest products and I recommend Ubiqiti gear instead now - Ubiqiti have everything Nest does except a thermostat and smoke detector (but they do have a temperature sensor product ("mFI-THS") - and an adapter to bridge any RS-232 connected device ("mPort"), so you could attach an RS-232 controllable thermostat that way - it just wouldn't be as sexy as Nest's giant metal knob).
https://www.google.com/search?q=android+phone+shot+on+redmi+...
They want the watermark on in the same way people had "Sent from my iPhone" as an email footer for far too many years after the iPhone came out...
1. At 6% women—and, therefore, 94% men—I would say the winners' pool is egregiously sexist.
2. An "old boys' club" is an idiomatic expression referring to exclusive, undemocratic and even unmeritocratic social circles. Not, necessarily, literal "boys."
So, in light of those two premises, I don't feel your objections carry any legitimate weight.
Anyway, I don't recall using this one before. Maybe it happened once sometime. I honestly don't recall seeing this joke anywhere before, so it's kind of surprising that's so thoroughly played out.
After googling: apparently, it's a thing. Not really in my circles, but at least now I know.
Maybe they should start a female only Nobel prize kind of like they have female sports?
History is not over, yet.