the arXiv paper presenting the results was authored by five people all with Chinese names. at least one of them is fresh from Beijing; i didn't bother tracking down the rest.

i'm sure a lot of research goes on there, by all sorts of people. Andrew Ng seems like a good guy. none of this is directly relevant to the submissions. (though neither is any of this that important, really.)

it's not called cheating there. the ideograms translate roughly to "auspicious cooperation with jade dragon of opportunity."

yes, they are complete opposites.

for one, crony capitalism actually exists.

You post like a pregnant yak!!!

perhaps correctly, but also vacuously. your "counter-example" only applies if the connection is perfect, which is not implied by a correlation.

Uh, you are "some millennial with a [communications] degree".

It used to annoy me that the Chinese applicants to my program had a separate admissions group comprising exclusively Chinese professors.

It still annoys me, but I realized that it's necessary since every single one has perfect test scores (including the TOEFL as you point out, which is just hirarious), glowing carbon-copy letters of recommendation, and a near-identical statement of interest. There's very little information to make a decision on a formal level, so you need to make best guesses based on province and other culture-specific cues.

And apparently you don't understand what "correlate" means, either.

this is an old tactic.

a long time ago, i picked up a random book in the library about the Aktion T4 program and read it while i should have been writing my thesis. it was interesting enough, until the last two chapters which ranted about how, obviously, pro-choicers were pushing America down the same path. it was annoying, but a nice reminder; i had to fact-check everything i read. i did, and the facts about T4 checked out, which suggests that they just took some legitimate research and bolted their drivel to it.

not much i didn't already know. care to elaborate a bit?

Does anyone remember how a Power Mac used to be a power house of computing?

uh. no?

hasn't Apple been a 1%-ish company for decades? it's just that raw compute power is kind of meaningless now (if i need cycles, i'll ssh into something), so the innovations are almost exclusively on hardware aesthetics and user interface. what's wrong with that?

unless you've vacuum-sealed those mason jars or have a dedicated fridge with redundant power (lol), the humidity is probably doing more harm than the (semi-)controlled temperature is helping. a merely closed jar is not "sealed," even with one of those rubber rings.

also i'm imagining your jar of thumb drives sitting in the fridge. what the fuck? do you ever use them? or is this long-term storage? if you do use them, you are of course letting the jar come to ambient temperature in a dry location each time you take them out of the fridge, right? otherwise it's all kind of pointless.

you'd best watch out, you only have 4226 hours left on that drive! ;-)

all media lost data. it's just a matter of managing the loss rate.

That's all too true, and this is described in The Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright (who later wrote Going Clear about Scientology). The big Q paid a decent wage with health benefits and a hefty compensation package to your family, especially upon "martyrdom." The fanatics were in the top-middle of the organization; the rank-and-file were mostly just desperate young males with a lot of social/familial obligations and nothing to lose. Depressing, really.