2,148 karma · joined April 12, 2009
PDF: http://journal.sjdm.org/15/15923a/jdm15923a.pdf
And there's some followups...
Dalton 2016 - http://journal.sjdm.org/15/15923ac/jdm15923ac.pdf
Reply from Pennycook et al. - http://journal.sjdm.org/15/15923ac/jdm15923acr.pdf
Really? Because the amount of money put into researching how to cure life-threatening diseases, as well as prevent and vaccinate against them, seems pretty high.
Pharmaceutical companies spend billions trying to research drugs to cure diseases, and so do governments, universities, private research funders, and charities.
There are people who dedicate huge portions of their lives to raising money and resources for charities trying to research cures for diseases that kill millions of people.
And we've had some success. Just the other day, there was an article published about the men who thought they were going to die of AIDS in the 80s, but whose lives are now in their 60s and approaching retirement age because of the provision of highly active anti-retroviral therapy. (And now they face issues because they never thought they'd survive and so didn't plan to have a career or a retirement etc.)
http://projects.sfchronicle.com/2016/living-with-aids/story/
I just don't see how anyone can claim that society isn't "doing serious focused R&D" on life-threatening diseases.
It's intended to make it so that the relatives of someone who travelled abroad for assisted dying are less likely to be prosecuted under the Suicide Act 1961.
See http://www.theguardian.com/society/2010/feb/25/assisted-suic...
Pretty much all attempts at legal change (whether through legislation or through court action) in the UK have been a failure. It pops up every few years in Parliament and is then roundly voted down.
One example: WhatsApp is one of the primary messaging services used in Brazil, with something like half the population using it. The vast majority of which don't speak any languages other than Portuguese.
When the courts in Brazil shut down WhatsApp for 48 hours, there was a huge outcry because it is THE primary means of communication for people, especially to talk to family who have gone abroad.
Hacker News does this all the time: take something that's on a person's personal website/blog that might be intended for a limited or self-selecting audience, or meant as a joke or off-the-cuff remark and blow it way out of proportion.
The main reason I got a credit card initially was because when I visited the US, nobody understood what a Maestro card was.
Funnily enough, I recently outlined the reasons here (applicable specifically to those with hearing loss as well as everybody else), with reference to a whole range of scientific studies. https://tommorris.org/posts/9403
You can have an environment that is driven by good engineering (testing assumptions, measuring etc.) without people being outright insulting to one another. All it requires is, oh, minimal human empathy and a willingness to spend 10-15 minutes every so often explaining unfamiliar concepts to fellow team members who haven't fully grasped it.
Photography isn't really proper art, especially if done using a smartphone, right?
It's dry British humour: "I'm a terrible programmer, but that's okay, because programming is terrible, the whole industry is terrible, and pretty much everyone is terrible at programming, especially if they are lecturing you about how to do it because they are probably full of quite a large amount of shit; now let's try and do better".
If you are used to chest-thumping evangelical "rah rah, everything is awesome" sermons, the British cynical attitude of "no, this is all shit, and I'm awful too, but maybe, if we make a nice big cup of tea, and thought about it a bit more, we might be able to be a bit less rubbish" sounds grating. The opposite certainly is true.
"stems from another way of thinking about metadata"? Nope. It was a clumsy hack because they actually just wanted to put the <rdf:RDF> tags in the HTML but people would complain about HTML validation so they put it in a comment tag.
It is virtually never parsed as RDF. RDF-in-HTML-comments is a horrible antipattern that has no use in the RDF community outside of the weird legacy use case of Trackback.
It is hidden metadata (which can and does break) and violates the DRY principle.
W3C isn't just HTML: they also publish the specifications for CSS, ARIA, XML, XSLT, XQuery, XProc, RDF, SVG, WOFF and so on. Some of which (like the XML-related stuff) have no real bearing on the browser or front-end tech.
I can imagine using this as a way to get users to build simple prototypes. They can chuck data at it for a few weeks, then hand the data off to developers to build a first cut of a web app. If said developers could easily click a button and get a gzipped SQL file compatible with, say, Postgres, that'd be a really useful feature.
Nope, it has value because it can be used by people who aren't massive nerds.
Because it isn't a ponzi scheme at all.
You scan a contactless card and they do a £1 authorisation the first time you use it (on Amex at least, I've heard it is different on other card networks). They then total up the amount you use it and start settling it when you reach a certain point. This is because there are quite complex rules:
1. If you don't "tap out" of a tube/train journey, they charge you the maximum fare.
2. They don't know at authentication time where you are going. You could be doing a journey within an outer zone which would only cost £1.50 or you could be doing a journey all the way from zone 6 into zone 1 which would be, say, £5.60
3. Different fares apply peak and off-peak
4. There's a "price cap" that applies - so you can't go spend more in one day than the cost of an unlimited use one day travelcard that covers all the journeys, and you can't spend more in one week than the cost of an unlimited one week travelcard.
In practice what happens is you just keep using contactless and the system settles the payments up right pretty much all of the time. They've done some clever thinking to make it work.
The downside: now that people have the same card in multiple 'forms' (e.g. as an actual card, and as a virtual card on Apple Pay or whatever), you can't switch between then without breaking this complex set of rules in some ways. You can register an online account and all your contactless cards to it, but you can't then keep switching between cards (or between cards and virtual cards) without things breaking. You pretty much have to just choose one payment method (either a card or Apple Pay) and stick with it.