cwal37

To go on, they're a result of two competing philosophies regarding natural areas and conservation from the early 20th century. The two schools of thought were essentially embodied in John Muir[1] (National Parks) and Gifford Pinchot[2] (National Forest Service). It's a really interesting narrative if you're at all interested in these distinctions and protected areas in the United States. It's the sort of thing that can be traced all the way through to attitudes today, and provides a nice context for why these systems exist.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Muir#Activism_and_controve...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gifford_Pinchot#Forestry_policy...

I have 5 younger siblings (ranging from early teens to early 20s [8th grade on]), and everyone in my family has a smartphone so here are some scattered thoughts.

It's always interesting to see what apps they have pinned or what they use the most (snapchat, instagram, twitter). Generally with tech-related stuff I'm the most knowledgeable and up-to-date family member, but I completely miss the train when it comes to social apps sometimes. I think this is because I'm older, geographically isolated from young people, and grew up without a cellphone at all. I definitely had a phase where I was obsessed with joining things ASAP (remember Pownce?), but I feel like I've been done with that part of my connected life for a few years. I use instagram, but don't follow anyone except immediate family members or close friends, I have 0 exposure to the super popular "celebrity" accounts because I rarely use or search for hashtags. I still don't use Snapchat, and recently one of my brothers was shocked that I didn't use Venmo.

A particular thing that I've found really odd is that I have trouble getting a text response from my siblings, even though I know they have their phones on them and are constantly snapchatting, or whatever. I text a lot, but maybe get one response for every 5-10 texts I send.

I think the one extremely consistent app in my family is Spotify, although it's fairly rare for any of us to use its social functions. From my parents down through all the kids, everyone uses Spotify quite a bit.

The younger siblings don't seem to care about or understand data limits as much. To them, the internet is everywhere, what do you mean it's not free?

To get an idea of just how convoluted control of a single asset could get, here's a bit describing his Florida mansion.

"Mr. Bilzerian's wife, Ms. Steffen, made a deal in 2002, opposed by her husband, to spring him from jail. She agreed to have the partnership sell the mansion and split the proceeds with the receiver, plus turn over some securities and cash.

When the mansion sold in 2004, for $2.55 million, the buyer was another partnership. This one was controlled partly by the mother of a next-door neighbor. Mr. Bilzerian helped put together the deal.

Among the other partners was a corporation controlled by Mr. Bilzerian's wife's parents. Their involvement remained unknown to the SEC for at least two years.

The in-laws were majority partners, holding a 99% interest, at first through the corporation and then through a trust. Mr. Bilzerian's sons were named as trust beneficiaries.

In 2006, amid a dispute between the Bilzerians and the neighbor's mother, a state judge called the couple "at best…trespassers or squatters" and ordered them to leave the property. But they stayed after the partnership went into bankruptcy and the house was sold to a firm that was run by another Bilzerian acquaintance.

That firm made its purchase with financing help from a Bermuda charity, Puma Foundation Ltd., named for a Bilzerian family cat.

Just before the sale closed, a trust controlled by Mr. Bilzerian's mother-in-law acquired a majority interest in the purchasing firm. The firm paid his wife to manage the property. "

I don't think it's at the root, but I do think it's an important factor. I come from the world of environmental science and policy, and it's clearest there. Environmental law in particular, which was one of my favorite subjects in grad school (incidentally, it's really interesting to see how federal environmental protections started in the US then migrated to Europe and became stronger there).

I tried to couch my comment in fairly broad terms (with plenty of caveats) because I know it's not universally applicable. However, I do truly believe that it is an important idea to understand when parsing differences in policy reactions between the USA and Europe. Specific implementations may come down to pre-existing biases, but I think it's still crucial to know what the PP is and how it could be applied in a more black and white situation. To me, it's all about having some knowledge of the frameworks in play in a given situation.

One thing that I think people are unaware of with respect to America vs. Europe is the implementation of the precautionary principle[1]. While it is discussed most often in environmental circles (probably one of the key differentiators in international environmental policy/law), it really has become a pervasive cultural difference in governing perspectives. While it is not officially ingrained in all aspects of EU law, it is certainly present in quite a few decisions.

Personally, I think there needs to be a balance, and you can find examples on both sides of its implementation being heavy-handed (GMOs in Europe), or its absence devastating (some Superfund sites or adverse long-term health impacts in the USA). Of course, I'm speaking in general terms here, as you can find counterexamples in both cultural spheres, but that general policy distinction does exist.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precautionary_principle

Related in that it concerns the Senate, I thought this 2010 New Yorker piece[1](which I found via the currently-open archives) was extremely interesting, but also troubling. If you have even a passing interest in the ongoing legislative dysfunction, this article should provide you with plenty to think about.

[1] http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/08/09/the-empty-chamb...

EDIT: I also seem to have trouble getting titles right on submission to HN. In this case, the reason it's even news that this was released is because it had been a secret document in the past. I feel like the edited title removes a crucial piece of information about this story. Even if the content itself is not particularly revelatory, it speaks to a bigger picture (perhaps even more effectively due to its mundane nature) about the almost comical lack of transparency in certain aspects of the governing process.

EDIT2: In trying to think of other words to replace secret, I kind of hit nothing much because most of those words (such as: mysterious, covert, classified, etc.) evoke the same linkbait-y feeling. Not sure if there is really a good replacement choice.

No talk of water resistance or battery life is pretty disappointing. Those two things are key for something I would like to keep on my wrist for as long as possible.

Right, I should have noted that, thanks!

STATS is the company behind SportVU, and one of the fastest growing sports analytics outfits out there. Despite knowing this, it still surprised me to see them grab Bloomberg sports, particularly since Bloomberg only created that business four years ago. I see this as a kind of acquiescence. They couldn't see themselves challenging STATS, so they may as well may a few bucks off of what they had created.

I think this also speaks to the network effects of entering into contracts with a large number of sports franchises. At a certain point, if a number of teams are benefiting from your analytics, everyone else is going to want them as well. When it comes to sports statistics, the last teams to adopt are often the most tradition bound and least advanced in terms of metrics. They're also the last teams who would try an up-and-comer without having had major upheaval in their ownership or front office situation. Rather, they'll run with what seems to be working elsewhere, and probably half-ass the implementation.

As someone who uses Python and R at work, used Matlab in the past, and used SAS, STATA, and SPSS briefly in grad school I found this really interesting. However, and I realize this might be difficult to account for, a lot of analytics actually just happens in Excel. For quick and dirty statistics or basic linear regressions, Excel represents a widely known quantity. In particular, I've been stuck using Excel in the past just because the final product is heading off to an individual or group for whom anything else is "too technical".

I realize Python didn't make the cut-off to break out its academic research standing, but I would be curious to see its growth.

In terms of my personal impressions (could be wrong of course, just my feeling/experience) of each that I've used:

SAS - Arcane and annoying. I am happy to be in a position where my group has no interest in using it. I assume it made sense when other packages couldn't handle enormous datasets, but there are plenty now that can. Assume institutional inertia is keeping it in place, particularly at the federal level.

STATA - For fields that previously relied on SAS, seems to be replacing it to some extent. Younger econometrics people in particular. I didn't use it much beyond the basics, but my healthcare economics PhD candidate roommate swore by it. Purpose-driven software.

SPSS - I once had an economics professor refer to it as "a toy for kindergarteners." I kind of view it as a more statistically-focused Excel for people who need a bit more power but can't be bothered to learn any coding. Too in-between for my uses. Seems to be thoroughly entrenched in the social sciences, psychology in particular.

MATLAB - My first introduction to non-excel graphing solutions, and totally blew my mind in that regard. I don't have an engineering background, and I didn't used it for those specific functions. The first programming-type thing I stuck with consistently in my life, and I honestly enjoyed it. I found working through data and statistics in MATLAB to be an utter joy compared to slogging through Excel. Specifically, the customization available in quickly manipulating data and figures.

Python - Transitioned into Python (mostly scipy, numpy, statsmodels, pandas, matplotlib) when I got my current job as we need to quickly iterate and be able to test a bunch of different things. Used the Python(X,Y) suite as a crutch for a while, but now I enjoy trying to find ways to slim things down with "stock" Python. I'm certainly not a great (or even good) programmer, but it's nice to be able to execute any random idea I have over the course of a single Saturday. Seems to have the most flexibility and power out of everything I've used due to its nature as an actual general programming language. Sometimes library support can be spotty for specific statistical operations. I love Spyder, as having a simple variable explorer is something I was really going to miss coming from MATLAB.

R - First thought, "Wow, everything's been done before!" In a day (my first day ever using R) I had a bunch of annoying regressions and analysis up and running, which had taken me more than a week in Python. There seems to be examples for everything, and the basic R package includes a tremendous amount of statistical capability. I prefer Python, as I feel I'm getting more general personal development out of it, but I use R to quickly spot-check any results from Python or Excel.

This is really a fantastic, in-depth article, and highlights a lot of pieces about Motorola's history of which I was totally unaware. The breadth of their innovations was far greater than I realized, and the early decision to set up a world class shop in China seems to be very visible today in that area of the world.

That the internal competitions eventually led to internal war between different "tribes" doesn't totally surprise me. It seems you always read about that eventually happening in the post-mortem of any company with that type of structure. I wonder if there's a good way to balance internal competition. I imagine you would have to keep close watch on the overall silo-ing of each department.

I'm from the Chicago area, and I remember driving by their campus many times over the years as a kid, only really having an idea that they were somehow involved in phones. I was in high school when the Razr came out, and based on how popular it was I thought Motorola was an absolutely world-dominating company, not a business on the rebound from extremely heady heights.

And here's the paper describing their findings:

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/341/6151/1254

Of course as soon as I submit I think of a better title, mechanical-style gear is probably more appropriate.

You can find some data of mixed completeness/usefulness here[1]. Data.gov has gotten much better in terms of usability over the past few years, but it's still a crapshoot, and it's generally more effective to go directly to the agency/organization that you want data from/about. I think it's a great idea though, and I hope it's not the sort of thing that will get neglected or die if there's a party change at the White House level (although I suspect that could easily happen).

[1] http://catalog.data.gov/dataset?q=police&sort=score+desc%2C+...

Based on your wall of text I have to assume that you're serious. I'm also going to venture a guess that you haven't looked into the literature on ozone depletion at all, or you're not well versed in the science and you don't understand it. Not only are there a plethora of papers out there from a variety of different sources, with different funding, spread over decades, (here's a simple search[1]), but this was actually a problem that garnered international collaboration. That is phenomenally rare on environmental topics, particularly those where local emissions collectively lead to global impacts.

Here's a straight review[2] for you to read through and perhaps understand this issue a little better.

[1] http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=ozone+depletion&bt...

[2] http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/1999RG900008/full

I can't tell if you're serious. Do you really not see the distinction between bullets and portals in a phallic vs, non-phallic context? You are literally shooting phallus-shaped objects with the intent to penetrate your target. On the other hand, you are shooting oval openings into which things enter.

This isn't very complicated or contentious from any angle I can imagine. Unless you're coming in with an agenda, and take offense to the idea that certain types of games might be traditionally male-oriented.

Way to take a quote out of context (literally cutting off part of a word). Here's the surrounding sentence:

"Some of the most original games in recent years have been made by women. Kim Swift was the lead designer for Portal, which one game critic called the first nonphallic first-person shooter."

Oh look, the full quote is appreciating a female game pioneer, and your mangled phrase was from a singular game critic. Also, it makes sense. Instead of shooting bullets, you're shooting portals. Seems pretty non-phallic to me.

From the Article[1]: "The Times is now posting the raw data to GitHub here. With this data, which is being posted as it was received,"

The data they got was bad in general. Their original article[2] also discusses the lack of information out there.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/20/upshot/data-on-transfer-of...

[2] http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/09/us/war-gear-flows-to-polic...

"Another aspect of this massive population outflow hasn't yet drawn much attention. Whatever their motives and wherever they go, those who depart will be shadowed by the organs of the Leninist state they've left behind. A sprawling bureaucracy—the Overseas Chinese Affairs Office of the State Council—exists to ensure that distance from the motherland doesn't dull their patriotism. Its goal is to safeguard loyalty to the Communist Party."

That quote reminded me of this[1] New Yorker article on the first case of "economic espionage." It's an interesting read and a look into a different kind of "spying."

[1] http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/05/05/a-new-kind-of-s...

I was trying to be nice. I'm a strong environmentalist via academics (BS/MS in environmental science), and currently a research analyst in renewable energy economics, so I have very strong feelings (and I like to think a well-grounded sense) about how fucked the environment and incentives around it are.

I was giving a (very) charitable reading of the occasional claim that Uber will change the way everything works via its framework. A more tempered tone normally does better on HN, but to be totally honest, I don't think any of those companies I mentioned could even come near what Helion would achieve if successful.

Thanks!

Forgive me if this is forward, but are you guys hiring? I'm in no way a physicist, but I do know a few with strong experimental backgrounds (mostly in nuclear), and I try to keep my ear to the ground for intriguing job opportunities for my friends.

Nature had a fun article a few weeks back on the current trickle of VC into fusion startups.

http://www.nature.com/news/plasma-physics-the-fusion-upstart...

It's certainly interesting, and I wish these companies all the best. The consternation I see occasionally over a company like this getting a (relatively) small amount of funding confuses me. There are so many software startups that receive equivalent or greater funding that eventually die or pivot into something else. Here, you have physical cutting edge engineering with potential implications that blow something like Slack, or Square, or even Uber away. Personally, I love seeing companies in the physical space get in on today's Silicon Valley high.

Semi-related, but I've been to NIF (National Ignition Facility), since I spent a summer at LLNL, and the inside of that facility is like the dream vision of every little kid that was into science and science fiction. Unfortunately (as my physicist significant other who was not working there found out) the public tours are far more restricted and you don't get to see the cool stuff.

Wait, what? No statistical data-compelling pieces? You would have to completely ignore a bunch of articles by Zach Lowe/Kirk Goldsberry (basketball), Bill Barnwell(football), or Rany/Jonah Keri(baseball, I don't follow that as much.)

Rany was one of the baseball prospectus guys, and Barnwell ran with football ousiders, both groups that developed a bunch of the advanced stats used in the sports now. It's not always the most advanced stuff, but they certainly bring compelling data to the table (Barnwell in particular), they just don't hit you over the head with it as it tends to be more embedded in the text rather than presented in a graph (except Goldsberry, he's a graphical dude by profession/professorship).

There is no evidence that it is air-transmissible. That is straight up fear-mongering. It is spread through bodily fluids. As the sickness progresses you are losing bodily fluids in a number of different ways in conditions that are not always sanitary.

Health workers get infected because they are physically dealing with patients in areas with some of the lowest healthcare standards in the world. Throw in some local wariness of foreign workers, and resistance to treatment until it's too late and it is totally understandable why 170 health-care workers have been infected.

If you're interested in the current state of the US hydropower generation, potential resource out there, and really most everything around hydropower in the USA, check out the NHAAP website.

http://nhaap.ornl.gov/

NHAAP is the National Hydropower Asset Assessment Program, and it's put together a large chunk of the groundwork for the DOE's hydropower vision project.

http://energy.gov/eere/water/new-vision-united-states-hydrop...

Since it was promoted as something similar to Grantland under ESPN's umbrella (semi-autonomous site run by an individual with strong creative control) I thought it would be able to cherrypick individuals who were not just competent with data, but also writing. After the first couple months, I kind of gave up. Even when a piece is interesting, the quality of the writing has been disappointing.

It also irks me a bit that one of the guiding principles in Nate Silver's manifesto was that they would not chase the news, but would take their time to provide different insights than other outlets. Instead, it feels like they're constantly chasing the story of the day or yesterday.

Finally, a disappointing number of articles feel half-finished. As if one of their staff writers had an idea, ran with it for a while, then got tired and stopped at their first set of results. Sometimes I take that as a challenge and go scrounge up more data to try and pull together what else is going on, but most of the time I just end up not caring.

They still have a handful of lengthy and interesting pieces, but they're rare enough that I only check the site maybe once a week. Conversely, I check Grantland 10+ times a day, because their writers are engaging whether it's basketball stats or pop culture junk.

Second for the mason jar train. I prefer the wide mouth 1.5 pint variety. You can safely freeze, bake, and nuke these suckers, and I do.

I bring my coffee into work every day in one, then I rinse it and drink water or tea out of it until I go home. I have a few in the freezer full of curry right now, and a couple in the fridge pickling some daikon and carrots for bahn mi.

As long as you don't constantly drop them (I have yet to break one, and I've been using them for years) you can get a ton of use without ever worrying about what they might be doing to your food.

(edit: this is not a referral link, just showing the variety I prefer.) http://www.amazon.com/Ball-Jar-Wide-Mouth-Bands/dp/B00B80TJL...

I took a class which had a short quiz/test at the beginning of each meeting. It was just a handful of questions that covered the assigned reading for that date. The reading in question wasn't out of a book, but was always a single review article, or 2-4 smaller academic papers. Together these quizzes represented a significant chunk of your grade.

I learned more, and more quickly, in that class than probably any other I've ever taken. It was mixed between grad/undergrad (I was undergrad at the time), but because everyone "had" to do the reading for each class everyone was on a more or less equal footing, and the discussion was fantastic.

If I recall correctly (and it's been a few years since my oceanography seminar), it has to do with the ratio of component elements in the shells of benthic fauna. They're pulling those elements in as a part of the growth of those structures, and the ratio of different gases changes based on the temperature.

EDIT: Looked it up, I had the gist of it I guess. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleothermometer#Mg.2FCa_and_Sr...

I imagine the techniques now are more refined than what is exactly mentioned there.

Semi-related, I got to take sediment cores from a Ramsar wetland while in South Africa in order to pick them apart for pollen to try and indirectly measure early-Holocene temperatures using the ecology as a proxy. Interesting stuff, and fun to be in the field.

I'm a researcher I guess. I'm doing my Post-Master's in renewable energy economics and market analysis at a DOE lab. I use Python pretty much every day, so there are plenty of things here that are relevant to my working life. I've just always loved tech, and have a few app and game ideas (like most people) whose many skeletons, design docs, and outlines litter my harddrives and commonplace book. Although I also do spend a fair amount of time reading and writing policy analysis.

I wouldn't consider myself 100% not a hacker though. My weekend list is to get some webscraping done to support a future project, and check out Home Depot for materials to build a cold-brewing setup.