MoosePlissken

That statement doesn't mention the Galaxy Nexus one way or the other. I imagine it's just a listing of the devices that Google has direct control over that they'll update in the near future. Since updates for the Galaxy Nexus have to go through the carriers, Google can't really say how soon the updates will go through, or if they ever will.

There are plenty of other artistic mediums that lack a performance aspect. Painting, drawing, literature, photography. Do these mediums also lack soul because they directly connect the composer to the audience, without a third party to interpret? Sure, if a piece of music was written with the intent that it be played by human hands, then it probably won't sound great when played by a computer. But if an artist creates an original piece of music using electronic tools, how is listening to that piece any different than viewing a photograph, a painting, or reading a book? Many people dislike audio books specifically BECAUSE the filter of the narrator colors their interpretation of the author's words. As with reading, one might argue that electronic music better communicates the author's soul to the audience.

Yeah, the study showing a correlation between a country's economic status and its gender differences is interesting, but all it really means is that economic factors might have an effect on gender equality IN ADDITION to cultural and biological factors. Besides her one caveat at the end of the article, the author seems to be making the case that this study implies that cultural factors are non-existent. I don't see how that makes any sense. One might also conclude from the study that in the absence of economic pressures, cultural forces have a much greater effect on gender inequality. Perhaps wealthy countries can spend more on luxuries like toy dolls and action figures that have a conditioning effect on young boys and girls?

Did you read to the end of the article? ScreenHero is a company that makes software for remote collaboration. They started by acknowledging the downsides of remote work, but ended by stating that they believe these disadvantages can be overcome.

From what I've read, Cooler Master and Filco use the same OEM (Costar) so there's almost no difference in quality between the two.

"What about medical students - if they know that the difference in diagnosis accuracy between a medium and a top student has been reduced to just 2-3%, why strive to learn more than the other?"

From what I've heard, med school is mostly about memorizing huge amounts of information without a whole lot of critical thinking. But that's a task that computers are infinitely better at than humans. Wouldn't it be a good thing if Watson could free med students from rote memorization, allowing them to instead focus on something that humans are actually good at, like research?

The book "Thinking, Fast and Slow" has a great chapter on human predictions versus those made by forumlas. The superiority of simple forumlas was being demonstrated way back in the 50s (see "Clinical Versus Statistical Prediction: A Theoretical Analysis And A Review Of The Evidence"). Since then the evidence for statistical rather than intuitive prediction has only become stronger.

From "Thinking, Fast and Slow":

"The number of studies reporting comparisons of clinical and statistical predictions has increased to roughly two hundred, but the score in the contest between algorithms and humans has not changed. About 60% of the studies have shown significantly better accuracy for the algorithms. The other comparisons scored a draw in accuracy, but a tie is tantamount to a win for the statistical rules, which are normally much less expensive to use than expert judgment. No exception has been convincingly documented."

Also interesting:

"Several studies have shown that human decision makers are inferior to a prediction formula even when they are given the score suggested by the formula! They feel that they can overrule the formula because they have additional information about the case, but they are wrong more often than not."

And yet it's primarily ideas from literature (from the "niche and isolated genre of science fiction") which Taleb rails against. But since he apparently doesn't like sci fi, I guess it doesn't count. I don't think Shakespeare helped put a rover on Mars though.

It's unfortunate that Taleb had to resort to name-calling and condescension. I like literature too, but that doesn't mean anyone who doesn't is an autistic neomaniac.

We recently started using Solr in a similar manner where I work. We don't go as far as to pack an index in with our code, but each page serving instance has an embedded Solr server that it uses to pull a lot of fairly static data. Those indexes are updated nightly from a master Solr server which imports its data from a normal relational database.

So far it has worked really well, but I don't think it really offers many advantages scalability wise over other NoSQL solutions. Like most other solutions it trades fast writes/consistent reads for fast reads, which is fine in many cases. Around the time we were adding Solr though, I heard about Datomic (http://www.datomic.com/). I haven't had time to really investigate it, but it seems to me that Datomic provides fast reads in a manner very similar to the Solr configuration you described. Live versions of the database's index are deployed to agents that live on your app servers, but unlike the Solr configuration these agents receive updates to the index in real time. At a glance at least, it seems to offer all of the advantages of the Solr solution while still allowing relatively fast updates to the data.

This is an interesting talk on the topic by Rich Hickey (who created Datomic): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cym4TZwTCNU. It's long but I thought it was worthwhile.