shas3

You are on to something. But a similar company in say, Ames, Iowa would also command similar attention, I think. Like Ames, the median education of people of Udupi and the region around it are actually much better than national medians. Seen in light of this, it is hardly surprising. Just down the highway 10 miles is the birthplace and HQ of an international private university chain of some repute. Several now-nationalized banks also started around Udupi and the town 30 miles away, Mangalore. There is also an unusually dense cluster of good universities in and around Udupi. Udupi also ranks at the top in school performance in the state of Karnataka.

You are comparing across industries. Apple is a mix of software and manufacturing. As is Samsung. VW is a car company. Further, a better metric is to look at % of revenue spent on R&D.

All the classic mistakes of forecasting (like Jim Cramer on TV): 0. Doesn't assign probabilities to the prediction. 1. Doesn't consider alternative scenarios. 2. Doesn't allow for the possibility that he could be wrong.

It makes one suspicious, to the say the least, to see someone from a politically well-connected family like Shriver interview someone similarly well-connected like Holmes. The odds are high that they know each other and have reasons to scratch each others' backs.

I've seen many of his interviews (e.g. with Arsenio Hall, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LYK4o6o1YFo), in real life he seems like the opposite of his stage personality: humble and dedicated to his art.

Ok, second most successful after 2015.

While on the topic of girls at Olympiads, one should also add Lisa Sauermann of Germany who is the most successful participant of all time at the International Math Olympiad. http://www.maa.org/news/math-news/germanys-lisa-sauermann-wi...

For all the EPA fights that plague larger older companies (and many new ones, too), industrial safety and adherence to regulations is very deeply ingrained in their cultures. Heads roll pretty quickly for violations at lower levels. Even higher level executives are often quite responsible about staying within the bounds of laws and regulations (though they are less so in doing layoffs and such). This obviously leads to slower innovation and more red-tape, but I have come to believe that slower innovation is an acceptable price to pay for the rest of the stuff being legit.

If you are challenging the old order in old industries, and have to move fast and break (the right) things, do it like Tesla and Space X, not Theranos.

It would probably be counter to their revenue model if they had a separate domain for serious journalism.

> I just find it odd that WSJ seems to get access to government documents, internal information, and competitor benchmarks over and over again.

Umm, what's odd? FOIA? Perseverance in reporting? High quality investigative journalism from someone (John Carreyrou) with a track record?

Strange comment about Pittsburgh's diversity and strangeness! In my experience, outside Oakland, Shadyside, Squirrel Hill, perhaps Monroeville, and some working class neighborhoods, Pittsburgh is a fairly conservative South-US-ish city.

Shouldn't we all hold US to higher standards than MENA, etc.?

People underestimate the importance of culture change. I hate this word, but there has to be a company-wide re-education if any company is serious about becoming more high-tech. Often, measures like opening a new R&D lab or pumping more money here or there gets wasted since it rarely has a wider effect. When the effect isn't wider, there is a lack of critical mass for high-impact high-tech projects to get out of the door. The internal friction is generally high in big old companies, and most people causing the friction tend to be old-school "company-persons" who have fixed mindsets about where the company should be. Many of these people aren't necessarily tech savvy and some even pride themselves on not understanding computers as though the ignorance burnishes their skills in science/mechanics/biochem or whatever is the core of their company.

Eh? There are a lot of legit medical uses in automation of senior care, etc. There are products out there based on beacons.

Not taking anything away from this very novel work, but MIT definitely has a well oiled PR apparatus to publicize their research. This is a good thing from the perspective of science advocacy and outreach. But it is less good from the perspective of other researchers working in similar areas whose work can get eclipsed this way.

The OP uses the term "accounting" but really talks about just bookkeeping.

Did you even read the article? He quotes multiple philosophers and also only selectively quotes Confucius. His authoritarian ideas don't invalidate his other, good insights.

That's begging the question.

The argument for PLOS and Scientific Reports is that in an age where there are no constraints on size of journals, number of papers in a journal, effort required to sift through papers, etc. selecting for impact is less important than before.

Then again, this is not a certain conclusion and there is a lot of room for debate. With extensive searching on Scholar, etc. I Find lesser and lesser need for the stamp of Nature/Science/etc. to certify a paper as high impact.

I didn't claim anything about the peer reviewers' credentials! I said that if a person is from a big shot pedigree or from a top school, it certainly helps in a situation where a paper or proposal is as good. It is a common flaw in academia to pay too much attention to one's pedigree or affiliations. In my experience it is quite common to hear people say admiringly, "XYZ is Big_Shot's student" and so on. It is sometimes justified to attach importance to pedigree, sometimes it's not.

1995 http://www.nature.com/news/scientific-publishing-the-inside-...

I have hovered in EE, CS, and math circles. I find CS and math to be made up of more genuinely curious folks than EE. But this comment and my parent comment are just a few points of observations, too few to generalize from.

But, once you get into the grants and peer review game, connections and credentials, unfortunately, matter a lot. It is not explicit in that no one says "hey you are from XYZ university, hence I am rejecting your paper." What happens commonly is that for peer-reviewers opinions are colored by your credentials. My hypothesis is this: if one were to control for quality of paper, a credentialed or pedigreed author's paper is likelier to get accepted than the non-credentialed ones.

There are many exceptions and there are deliberate programs like EPSCOR (for grants) to prevent such things from happening, but the inequality exists nonetheless. The inequality is sometimes justified, sometimes not.

That is a common misconception. http://www.pnas.org/site/misc/reviewprocess.pdf

Academia has the most severe hierarchical system out there. There is also an insane amount of unjustified credentialism. Unjustified because so much depends on luck that things like "swoon that researcher published in PNAS" are misguided. I actually heard someone doing basic science in an elite school say this, "That guy's research is garbage, he publishes in Nature Scientific Reports, which is a junk journal compared to Nature and Science where we publish."

Then there's basic science people shitting on engineering, which is probably one of the dumbest forms of elitism I've encountered.

And, there is the most significant hierarchy of all: which university you are affiliated with. Academics who hit it big in the tenure track job hunt quickly forget the role of luck in deciding which university hires them and shit on folks from lower ranked universities.

Frankly, the capitalist structure of industry discourages these kinds of hierarchies with egalitarian targets like revenue (and schmoozing) deciding your worth than other things.

Websites with reviews are doing a disservice to users by not giving us tabulated reviews and tools to view detailed statistics. I'm reminded of 538's impressive interactive data exploration pages.

I wonder, earnestly, on a tangent: how do you ensure the authenticity of Glassdoor reviews? What's the guarantee that people are not faking good reviews? They should probably implement a system of employment verification.

I don't see the point of this article. The analogies presented are only true to a very vague extent. It needlessly jargon-ifies simple concepts. It reminds me of Feynman's criticism of too much jargon being used to teach math [1]:

>> Pure mathematics is just such an abstraction from the real world, and pure mathematics does have a special precise language for dealing with its own special and technical subjects. But this precise language is not precise in any sense if you deal with real objects of the world, and it is only pedantic and quite confusing to use it unless there are some special subtleties which have to be carefully distinguished.

It also overstates the importance of projective geometry.

It is a dubious claim that Mughal-era artists didn't understand 3D perspective. A culture capable of building the Taj Mahal didn't understand perspectives and basic geometry? You really don't need advanced math to get perspective right. It can be easily learned from practicing art. In fact, often the lack of a consistent perspective is deliberate and artistic. Realism is only one approach to art.

[1] http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/2362/1/feynman.pdf

IMHO, it would be fair to criticize this piece for poor editing. The writing feels a bit rough in places. There are sentences and paragraphs which can be considerably abbreviated to be more readable. Further, the article's flow is a bit off. Overall great narrative, though.

Can we un-capitalize "Nuance"? For a second I thought it refers to the speech technologies company.

I can think of few large companies that don't strategize that way, yet there is usually room for widgets.

Heh I didn't say that. Automation just means available jobs will get increasingly higher skilled.