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educationdata

443 karma · joined March 16, 2017

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educationdata··on 8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_free_speech_exce...

> The Supreme Court has held that "advocacy of the use of force" is unprotected when it is "directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action" and is "likely to incite or produce such action".[2][3] In Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969), the Supreme Court unanimously reversed the conviction of a Ku Klux Klan group for "advocating ... violence ... as a means of accomplishing political reform" because their statements at a rally did not express an immediate, or imminent intent, to do violence.[4] This decision overruled Schenck v. United States (1919), which held that a "clear and present danger" could justify a law limiting speech. The primary distinction is that the latter test does not criminalize "mere advocacy".[5]

educationdata··on 8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service
So refusing to provide service is "intolerant"? Does this only works on "protected groups", or does it work in general? How about the baker is willing to provide service to the gay couple, but just not the gay wedding? Now, please elaborate how you define "intolerant".
educationdata··on Saving the World from Spreadsheets [video]
I actually think you are more possibly to make mistakes in R than in Excel. Because in Excel you always see the results directly, and you can even easily catch an anomaly in a single cell. But in R it takes one more step to see the results, and you probably won't see results of all the rows directly.
educationdata··on Google's Project Dragonfly 'Terminated' in China
So you think all Google needs to do is just filtering out websites blocked by the Chinese government? Really?

You have a underlying lack of understanding how censorship works. They don't just block websites. The Chinese government wants to filtering out results they don't like on accessible websites.

educationdata··on Google's Project Dragonfly 'Terminated' in China
Imagine this is an online discussion board for doctors, and now we are having a discussion on this topic in the news: "China is harvesting organs from detainees, tribunal concludes" https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jun/17/china-is-harve...

And now imagine this comment goes on the top:

> Our best surgeons in the U.S. should fly to China to help them with organ transportation. Without us, they will do organ transportation using those organs anyway. But we have better technology and higher successful rate. So why don't we just go there to help them save more lives?

educationdata··on Google's Project Dragonfly 'Terminated' in China
This is definitely not enough. There still need to be an thorough investigation into the history of the project, at least include but not limited to:

1) the internal decision making process involving this project

2) personnel who are responsible for initiating / approving the project

3) how many resources have been put into this project

4) the exact content (data sources, roadmap, goals, etc.) of this project

5) how far this project went

6) where the product / data is stored, how will they be handled when the project is terminated

7) how many of the project outputs have being provided to the Chinese government

8) the details of Chinese government involvement into this project

Also, not limited to Google, any U.S. company helps any authoritarian government doing censorship needs to be investigated.

BTW, I got lots of downvotes from comments criticizing China.

educationdata··on China's rising tech scene threatens US brain drain as ‘sea turtles’ return home
This number does not mean much. In the old days, more Chinese students rely on full scholarship to study in the US. Now, more and more rich Chinese kids (mostly come with very poor academic background) can study in the US.

So the overall number does not reflect "brain drain", because not all international students can be counted in "global talent". A more meaningful number should only count those graduated from good universities, or having scholarship etc.

educationdata··on 81% of 'suspects' flagged by Met's police facial recognition technology innocent
I don't follow. Do they match faces to crimes or match faces to faces of criminals?
educationdata··on 81% of 'suspects' flagged by Met's police facial recognition technology innocent
"if 1 in a million are criminals"?

NYC population is 8.6 million in 2017, so there are only 8~9 criminals in NYC? Wow.

Come on, you should give a much better estimate.

educationdata··on An opinionated view of the Tidyverse “dialect” of the R language
data.table can handle millions of rows easily, as long as the data can fit in the memory.
educationdata··on An opinionated view of the Tidyverse “dialect” of the R language
The second example should be written like this:

  diamondsDT[cut != "Fair", .(AvgPrice = mean(price),
                              MedianPrice = as.numeric(median(price)),
                              Count = .N), cut][order(-Count)]
There is no need to break it to 10 lines.
educationdata··on An opinionated view of the Tidyverse “dialect” of the R language
> If you're better at writing/composing dplyr, you can often make up the speed difference between the two in terms of the savings in time spent writing and reading code.

dplyr syntax is definitely more concise and readable than base R, but comparing to data.table I don't think it has any advantage in terms of saving time writing or reading code.

educationdata··on An opinionated view of the Tidyverse “dialect” of the R language
"cherry picked"? There is no doubt that data.table is generally way faster than dplyr, unless you cherry pick a few use cases.

The problem is that dplyr is much slower than data.table and RStudio is promoting tidyverse too much to make the slower choice a default for many users.

The article is 100% correct on this issue.

educationdata··on Mass Surveillance in the United States
"cows the population into authoritarian submission" ? I don't see this happening at all. There have been countless protests against the Trump administration, and the main stream media has being criticizing the Trump administration every single day. Please give me an example supports your projection.
educationdata··on Mass Surveillance in the United States
When I say another 911 I didn't mean another exact repetition, I meant another terrorist attack on large scale.
educationdata··on Mass Surveillance in the United States
30 hypothetical death is for 1 terrorist attack. Why would terrorists only attack once?
educationdata··on Mass Surveillance in the United States
How many are arrested because of mass surveillance captures the person criticizing Trump / Obama, Or the Republican / Democratic party?
educationdata··on Mass Surveillance in the United States
This is a silly comparison. Terrorist can kill 30 people in one attack or even break down a whole building with a bomb. When did 30 people choke by one piece of food?

And we don't have another 911 may because of mass surveillance. Shall we try removing the surveillance to see whether terrorist attack increases?

educationdata··on Waymo gets green light in California to pick up passengers in self-driving cars
Your assumption that AI should be compared to average human driver is simply wrong. There are all sorts of human drivers, some of them drive under influence, some have slow reaction, some have terrible cars. Why should AI be compared to any of those?

When we use automatic vehicle, we assume it to be a reliable driver, not a random person who could be a bad driver.

So please stop comparing to average human drivers.

educationdata··on Chinese authorities install app on phones of people entering Xinjiang
It's a bs comparison. The Chinese government surveillance is purely for dictatorship, and they do put political opponents and human rights lawyers in jail at a massive scale. The NSA surveillance is mostly for legitimate security reasons and is under restrict scrutiny.
educationdata··on Chinese authorities install app on phones of people entering Xinjiang
If the US government started doing this, there definitely will be lawsuit and most probably the government will be defeated in the court. But in China, things do not work this way. The supreme court of China must follow the demand of the communist party, see: https://www.ft.com/content/60dddd46-dc74-11e6-9d7c-be108f1c1...

It's just pathetic to see this kind of whataboutism keeps coming up on this website. The US and China have very different political systems, the former is democratic republic, the later is authoritarian. It is not a close comparison.

educationdata··on America needs to see Amazon’s tax returns
It's simply misleading. You try make it sounds like the value a company contributed to the society is the tax they paid, in reality it's just not.
educationdata··on Google’s Rivals Gear Up to Make Antitrust Case
> That's not what she said, she said "Trump situation", and by situation, one would assume, the massive abuse of social platforms to spread false and misleading data about Clinton, which we know from scientific studies, that false stories were reshared far more by Trump supporters than vice versa, and that a non-trivial chunk of these fake gifs came from overseas.

1) Can you please cite those "scientific studies"?

2) Even if what you said is true. I am not sure how much it has anything to do with Google. Most of influences happened on Facebook or other social media platforms. How can Google prevent things from happening again on Facebook?

educationdata··on Bernie Sanders to unveil plan to cancel all $1.6T of student loan debt
No. It's also not fair to raise taxes (on rich and middle class) to pay college for poor kids.

It is fine to have certain amount of transfer from the rich and middle class to the poor to pay for basic things, but pay for college should not be part of it. College is not crucial for living a good life.

I would agree with proposal to support pay for vocational / professional training. But college? No.

educationdata··on Open Source Could Be a Casualty of the Trade War
The fact of whether an official "consciously lying to people" is extremely hard to know, because it is a measure of someone's status of mind in the past. The real world is much more complicated than what you could imagine.

Take Obama's: 'If you like your health care plan, you'll be able to keep your health care plan' as an example. He repeated this message for many many times: https://www.politifact.com/obama-like-health-care-keep/

How do you objectively decide:

1) Is this statement true?

2) Did he lie about it?

Also, how do you handle "if there is something I should not know, do not tell me"?

educationdata··on The Chalk Market: Where Mathematicians Go to Get the Good Stuf
Very good point, but only half the story. Marker has another problem: eraser. Most of the time the eraser is already too dirty to use.
educationdata··on America has never gone this long without hiking the federal minimum wage
> Our economy is exploding, and our current problems are far more social, so maybe we should be listening to the sociologists and put the economy on the back burner for right now?

You seem to have misunderstanding about economics and sociology. It seems you think (I am guessing) economists only care about economy growth, and sociologists know how to make social improvement. This thought appears also embedded in other comments.

It is wrong in many levels: 1) economists care about social improvement in general, not just in economics indies. However, many times economics indies are the best measure of general social improvement.

2) sociology is not supposed to be a discipline about making social improvement, before it's taking over by far left scholars.

3) sociologists usually do not know how to make social improvement in general. sociologists seem to understand the problem facing specific group of people, and they seem to know specific methods to make specific improvement, but they usually do not know how to make social improvement in general, because their social change program also never include cost analysis, and also never address side effects, unintended consequences, etc. They may know how to improve the life of a few people, but all their analyses do not care what cost to the rest of the world.

4) our economy is "exploding" in America

educationdata··on Why Hong Kong Is Still Marching
OK. I didn't know the "NO" is that a big deal.
educationdata··on Walmart Grocery is now offering a $98 per year ‘Delivery Unlimited’ subscription
I enjoy the time walking inside the Grocery store (my neighborhood Walmart), looking around and picking stuff. I feel it's part of good life. Am I an outlier?
educationdata··on Why Hong Kong Is Still Marching
> Being lack of information, most citizens support gov’s standpoint.

NO, because of the censorship, we do not know how many people actually support gov’s standpoint. Your statement is pure speculation and does not have any factual basis.

The Chinese government will not allow any professional organization to conduct and publish a survey like: "Do you support the censorship?", or "Do you support protest in HK?", or "Do you support shooting students in the Tianman Square", or "Do you support Xi to be the Chairman forever?"

Even the Chinese government itself does not know how many people support it and they fear the number is in fact not small, that is exactly why they need censorship in the first place.

One of the most commonly used words in their propaganda is "一小撮" [1, 2]. They always claim the people against them is only a few bad people. I never bought this even when I was in middle school. The reason is so obvious: if it is truly only a few people against you, why don't you just allow people to vote? Why don't you just allow people to speak up? The only reason you are so afraid is that you know maybe it is not just a few, and you know there is a good reason for people to stand against you.

1. https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E4%B8%80%E5%B0%8F%E6%92%AE

2. https://www.linguee.com/chinese-english/translation/%E4%B8%8...

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