wanderfowl

To be fair, this is very person-specific, and this distinction of preferred learning methods is a common topic in pedagogy. Some folks, myself included, are auditory learners, and will tend to retain more from a spoken lecture than a reading assignment. Some folks just can't retain audio as well as reading something, or need to take notes to retain (even if the notes are not consulted again).

This is why being a good teacher requires not just presenting the data in a good way for your learning modality of choice, but for all of them.

In other news, $2100+ for a small unit is viewed as 'affordable' for grad students to UC Berkeley administrators. I know there's a rent crisis out that neck of the woods, but that's some quality lack of perspective.

Just a quick note: 'Dual Affiliation' is being used here differently than in most academic contexts, so the headline's a bit odd.

Normally, it means having a joint appointment in two academic departments (e.g. Linguistics and Cognitive Science at State U, or in the Department of Linguistics at State U, with an appointment at the Head-and-Neck surgery program at the local med school). This is a well-known and common practice, and although it can be tricky (particularly with even splits, where there's not one true home), it's not a 'harmful' thing.

As the author explains in the article per se, he's talking about an industry/academic split. This is much harder, for the reasons he's outlined, and as an academic, I too am skeptical. It could be a nice idea in moderation, and it'd be great to have more bridges between Academia and industry, particularly given the brutality of the Academic Job Market.

But I can easily see that a professional administrator somewhere deciding that it's cheaper to stock departments with 20% appointees than to actually hire career professors and educators. And as any adjunct-heavy institution will tell you, a department full of moonlighters is no place to make a life. Perhaps more damning, 20% of anybody's life isn't enough to support all but the weakest of teaching, even for a single course, so over-reliance on this will just further damage the instructional core of universities.

So, one or two in a department could be nice, but I don't think it's a great model for the future.

I understand that a central respository of work and the need to make the busywork scale cleanly and linearly makes it tough to be decentralized, but I regularly wish that a dominant cryptocurrency could find a way to do proof of (real) work with these cycles. There are so many projects which just lack for computing power (e.g. folding, prime hunting, etc), so it feels like even more of a waste to turning real power into arbitrary hashes.

But in what universe would an individual ad need that? This seems like precisely the sort of thing that a third party ad would be prevented from doing.

Dearest Ad Industry,

This is why we run ad blockers. Since you won't regulate your industry, we're fixing the problem for you.

Love,

The Rest of the World.

This is excellent, and these sorts of projects are wonderful to see, as they're nice reminders that although our modern computing tools are more powerful, there's much to be learned from studying the past.

It feels like we're heading into the Hype Cycle [1] with cannabis-derived treatments/products/cures, with waves of legalization serving as the classical 'technology trigger'.

I say that mostly because, although this is a solid study with interesting conclusions, 'Cannabis does [amazing thing!]' articles are getting more and more common and mainstream, and I think people are primed to accept them, for want of cures and treatments, for desire to justify existing habits (c.f. the now discredited red wine health studies [2]), and because 'medicine with all these great effects was kept down by the powers!' is a great narrative.

Mostly, I'm finding myself mostly curious what, in 15 years, we'll know these compounds are actually good for, and steeling myself for a lot of bullshit and bad science in the meantime.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hype_cycle [2]: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/red-wine-research...

Variations in pressure, which form the basis of sound, are linear, and thus, are measured in a linear unit (Pascal, Pa ). These (or a similar unit derived from electrical changes associated with pressure changes near a mic) are what are used for sound capture. It's awkward because we're dealing with a range from ~20 Micropascal to 100,000,000+ Micropascal in the world.

Rescaling to dB, a logarithmic unit, both better mirrors how humans hear, and brings the numbers under control, 0-135dB is nicer.

But at least for me, I like capturing and storing in a Pascal-ish unit, because I'd rather capture pressure linearly and convert to human-interpretable log units where needed. If nothing else, because things like waveform addition are a bit more straightforward mentally on linear scales. Folks have made other decisions in some formats, but I've never found it compelling.

Normalizing temporal expressions, that is, putting human language onto a strict timeline, is a hard problem in natural language processing. There's some literature on it, which may or may not be helpful, at least in establishing the most likely intent.

What are you passionate about? Start there.

I'd rather see an article describing, in detail and with passion, your particular [esoteric computer configuration], than the most requested topic in this thread. If you don't want to write about X, then no matter how desired or profitable it would be to do so, it's probably not going to be a great article.

My advice would be to write what enthuses and interests you. And if nothing in that domain is something you feel should be written, then maybe consider finding a different outlet for your creative energy. Nobody's forcing you to start a tech blog :)

Agreed. That was my first thought, too. Part of the reason that these silly vaccine/autism conspiracy theories are hard to shut down is the fact that Autism is harder to detect pre-vaccination, so there's confirmation bias here among parents of Autistic children.

If this study provides nice evidence to the Anti-Vax crowd that Autism can be measured and detected well before vaccination age, this might help take some of the wind out of the sails of the movement.

Of course, for many, science won't help, much like usable retroreflectors will only break down the fantasy for a subset of moon landing conspiracy theorists, but if it gets brought up even once in a Whole Foods somewhere, they've done a good thing.

I'm having a [Poe's law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law) moment here. You've just applied Abstinence Only Sex Education 'logic' to infectious disease. This is either brilliant satire of the odd arguments against harm reduction in general, or... you're serious, and I agree, it's a crying shame nobody taught all those poor smallpox victims how to modify their behavior.

This makes me very sad, but I've also gotta highlight her skill at perfectly nailing the tone of that video. Humor, sadness, gratitude, and fear, in excellent measure.

Plus, I'm thrilled to see somebody else with a nice sense of gallows humor. Sometimes, we have to laugh so we don't have to cry.

Agreed. As pointless as railing against language change is, it bothers me a bit that 'crypto' has come to be synonymous with a very small (yet very loud) area of the application of Cryptography. But this too shall pass.

Absolutely. I'm sort of hoping to see Python/Pandas eclipse R at some point in my career. But for now, my field is only reluctantly in R, and advising colleagues and students into Python is... non-trivial.

For me, often, it's just a bandwidth issue. If a colleague has a 12 GB movie they'd like to transmute, a local app might be a possibility, but an hour long upload followed by a 20 minute long download won't be.

But just think, for the price of this app, you could buy a nice dinner for two and an infinite number of copies of R.

Agreed. It's odd to charge money for this at all, given that there are such robust statistical tools for free (read: R). But on top of what you said, the fact that trial versions can't export p-values is tacit endorsement of the "p < 0.0x is all that matters" camp, further promoting toxic statistical thinking.

Promoting ease of use of tools and simplification of harder problems is great, but this is a really, really dangerous thing to make easy and oversimplified.

Nope nope nope nope nope.

Wait:

- Curb Weight: 1100lbs

- Max Takeoff Weight: 1500lbs

So... you, your passenger, and any cargo combined can't weigh more than 400 pounds? That's a pretty serious limit for people hoping to transport multiple adults. And "precision agriculture" or the sorts of practical uses they discuss all go right out the window.

I use Prime95 to test for usage-related recording lags for sound and video recording in our lab equipment. If we're not getting signal de-synchronization with that slamming the CPU(s), we can worry a bit less.

We're usually there, but helpless. When you watch somebody slipping, even into dangerous territory, you're left with a limited set of options. Unless the family can prove "Imminent Danger to Self and others" or the person in question consents to treatment, we're just as helpless as the doctor here, even in concert with the person's care provider. So, much like the recent Michigan "poisoning" case (http://www.mlive.com/news/ann-arbor/index.ssf/2016/07/man_ac...), you just have to watch until the person crosses a line where they can be legally held. And often, that's after somebody's hurt.

I suspect that in many of these situations, particularly where a person has lost touch with reality, but not quite at the "I am the angel of death" level, the family is in the background and well aware, but simply out of legal options to help.

This is a great idea, and I'm thrilled to know it exists. Thanks much for your hard work here :)

I started in SPSS. This is so much better. And although it drives me nuts, I still spend the other half of the time working in R feeling like a goddamned wizard. So even if it takes an hour and a half some days to figure out how to turn a list of unique factors into a list for lapplying (or something else stupid), it's not bad enough.

Also, remember that I'm the R geek around. Whether it's the best tool for the job or not, in my field, R is the lingua franca for stats. I could swear off R and move to Python Stats, but I'd still be supporting R among colleagues and friends. It's hard enough to convince folks who grew up in SAS to move to R, let alone to learn Python.

Finally, I'll have a hard time convincing editors that some weird-ass python implementation of GAMs or LMER is kosher when they're barely OK with the idea of GAMs. Reviewer two is, shall we say, technologically conservative.

I'm a Post-Doc in a small social sciences department in a major university, and am probably the department's ranking R-geek. I did my dissertation, and much of my current work, doing modeling, analysis, and even machine learning in R.

In many ways, I owe much of my success to the power that R has allowed me to wield. Multicore lapplys and ggplot2 are my life these days. But even with this, R drives me absolutely batty, and the documentation, even battier.

I may be competent relative to most, but R feels so taped-together and idiosyncratic that even on my best days, I just feel like a newbie who's built up an army of ugly hacks.

Someday, I'll learn more about the python stats tools and do my stats there. But for now, R it is. Troll on, you crazy bastard.

Brings to mind the old saying, which is extra applicable to e-commerce for hard-to-find items: "If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is."

Your post advocates a

( ) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante (X) Physics-based

approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)

(X) The amount of energy involved would likely destroy the planet.

(X) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers

Specifically, your plan fails to account for

(X) The relative sparseness of non-dark energy in our vicinity

(X) Huge existing software investment in SMTP

and the following philosophical objections may also apply:

(X) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses

(X) I don't want the government reading my email

Furthermore, this is what I think about you:

(X) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.

(I'm sorry, but I couldn't resist)

Yes, but there's a huge subjective difference between saying "You're an asshole, stop smoking up in a shared-wall-dwelling" and "You're a criminal, go to jail". Most managers are happy to address nuisance issues, but would rather reduce the number of police calls to the property.

Same thing with public smoking laws. People smoking up in a park upwind of people deserve a small ticket, an age check, and a harshed mellow. They do not deserve arrest and prosecution on drug laws.

Enforcement of disproportionate punishment is less attractive to sane humans.

This is a big issue, I think. Concerts are really, really bad in Colorado these days.

My hope is that widespread legality and availability of tinctures and edibiles and non-plant-containing vaporizing juice, there will be an increased number of ways for people to get high without being inconsiderate to the people around them.

In Colorado, many communities have started to actually enforce this, in the same way that repeated noise violations can lead to eviction or non-renewal. Now that it's no longer a police issue, and just an "inconsiderate prick" issue, property managers can address it in house.