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Education

Interviews: Ask Dr. Temple Grandin About Animals and Autism 131

Posted by samzenpus from the go-ahead-and-ask dept.
Being listed in the "Time 100" of the most influential people in the world in the "Heroes" category, is just one of the many awards received by Temple Grandin. Diagnosed with autism at the age of two, Temple overcame many obstacles and earned a doctoral degree in animal science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and is a professor at Colorado State University. Dr, Grandin is recognized as an expert in animal behavior and one of the leading advocates for the rights of autistic persons. She lectures, and has written numerous books on animals and autism, and was the subject of the award-winning, biographical film, Temple Grandin . Dr. Grandin has agreed to take some time out of her schedule to answer any questions you may have. As usual, ask as many as you'd like, but please, one per post.

Submission + - New Unicode bug discovered for common Japanese character "no"

Submitted by AmiMoJo
AmiMoJo writes: Some users have noticed that the Japanese character "no", which is extremely common in the Japanese language (forming parts of many words, or meaning something similar to the English word "of" on its own). The Unicode standard has apparently marked the character as sometimes being used in mathematical formulae, causing it to be rendering in a different font to the surrounding text in certain applications. Similar but more widespread issues have plagued Unicode for decades due to the decision to unify dissimilar characters in Chinese, Japanese and Korean.

Comment Re:It's based on a faulty premise... (Score 2) 191

by denzacar (#50095443) Attached to: Barney Frank Defends Political Hypocrisy, Game Theory Explains It

No, the thing that matters is to execute those actions which keep the machine of government moving along

Sometimes you work against your immediate interests in order to promote your long-term interests

No, that's what the career politicians tell themselves to validate their own hypocrisy.

And if the Tea Partiers were the only issue, and compromise and cooperation really are "currency", then rest of the Republicans would be closing deals hand over fist and legislation would be passing like shit through a goose.
Tea Partiers not knowing how the "cooperation currency" works, just sitting on their "currency" and making no use of it, and thus raising it's value - it would be prime time to both cash in AND to make big deals for the future.

Cooperation earned earlier is now worth more cause there is none to get on the market.
Same for the cooperation made now, which can be bargained for more future deals than usual.

Same goes for the other side.
Democrats would be banning gayness and abortion, making guns mandatory for anyone older than 3 and bringing both death penalty and torture across the nation.

Nope...
Just an old white guy trying to rationalize all those times he had no balls or integrity with bullshit from game theory.
Which works only with perfectly rational actors.
Which no human (other than a psycho here and there) ever is and no group of humans can ever be.
E.g. Tea Partiers and "killing the ACA, which at this point is little more than an old campaign platform that has little bearing on the current issues that the country faces".

Comment It's based on a faulty premise... (Score 1) 191

by denzacar (#50094733) Attached to: Barney Frank Defends Political Hypocrisy, Game Theory Explains It

...that essentially, when you get down to it, all political decisions are the same.
Voting in slavery or declaring a war or a rehaul of a transportation system... same shit.
It's all just the stuff politicians do.

They act in concert with other legislators, even at the expense of their own beliefs, in order to bank capital or settle accounts.

Ergo, it is perfectly fine to give up one's own principles and voters in order to curry favor with one's peers and accumulate personal political prestige, which can then be further traded.
So, giving up one's principles to accumulate prestige, and giving up one's voters to accumulate even more...
Clearly, the only thing that matters is the prestige itself - i.e. staying in the game by keeping your seat.
Thus, political system exists solely to supply politicians with jobs and entertainment.

As for voters...
It's politics, stupid. Don't you people know that it is all the same?
Raising taxes, lowering taxes, gay marriage, voting rights, prohibition, segregation, no guns, guns for everyone, free abortions, 1 child per family, mass sterilization of men and women, secular state and a theocracy, war on this or that, war here or there, death camps and summer camps...
You just keep votin like your daddy did, ok? Good.
Democrats

Barney Frank Defends Political Hypocrisy, Game Theory Explains It 191

Posted by timothy from the consider-the-tsa dept.
HughPickens.com writes with a link to Steven I. Weiss's Atlantic article which says game theory can shed light both on what is happening in Washington and on how the bargaining power of its negotiating parties may evolve over time and comes to the conclusion that hypocrisy is essential to the functioning of Congress -- in fact, it's the only tool legislators have after they've rooted out real corruption. "Legislators do not pay each other for votes, and every member of a parliament in a democratic society is legally equal to every member," writes Congressman Barney Frank in his new memoir, Frank: A Life in Politics From the Great Society to Same-Sex Marriage. For legislators, cooperation is a form of political currency. They act in concert with other legislators, even at the expense of their own beliefs, in order to bank capital or settle accounts."

Game theory sets out conditions under which negotiating parties end up cooperating, and why they sometimes fail to do so. It does so based on analyzing what drives individuals in the majority of bargaining situations: incentives, access to information, initial power conditions, the extent of mutual trust, and accountability enforcement. Instead of seeing political flip-flopping as a necessary evil, Frank suggests it is inherent to democracy and according to Frank if there's any blame to be doled out in connection with political hypocrisy, it's to be placed on the heads of voters who criticize legislators for it, instead of accepting it as a necessary part of democratic politics.
Government

The Uber Economy Needs a New Category of Worker 273

Posted by Soulskill from the slave-kings-of-roadistan dept.
An anonymous reader writes: Uber headlines a new group of companies building out the so-called "sharing economy," in which people can easily hop in and out of employment modes. Somebody can suddenly start hiring out his driving services to others, taking breaks and setting hours as he prefers, and then just as quickly stop participating forever. An article at NY Magazine says we need to define a new class of worker to fit Uber drivers and similar at-will employees. "According to American employment law, though, our driver must be one or the other, a 1099 contractor or a W2 employee. And the gulf between the two in terms of mandated government protections and benefits is as wide as the line between them is blurry. As such, thousands of on-demand-economy employees and scads of lawyers are at war in court to determine what camp our average driver should fall into. ... It might be time for a new standard that splits the difference between the two — a 'dependent contractor,' as some labor experts call it — that would be better for businesses, consumers, and all those workers themselves."

Comment Bullshit! (Score 4, Informative) 364

by denzacar (#50069307) Attached to: China's Stock Crash: $3.5 Trillion Wiped Out, $2.6 Trillion Frozen

They literally have whole cities just lying around idle. I mean, Spain's got one, sure, but they have several. The economy never developed sufficiently to employ people in jobs that would permit them to live in developed cities in a capitalist society... so the places rot.

You are quoting gloating "China is fallin - see?" populist Daily Mail-grade articles which have little to no relevance to reality.

I.e. OMG LOOK AT THIS GHOST CITY! Silly Chinese peoples. Don't they know any thing? Their stupid, stupid brains.

Meanwhile, in reality...
It's a case of combined schadenfreude over someone's perceived failure and a situation akin to when a small turnip farmer from Lower Bumfuck comes to a BigCityTM and starts despairing at the sight of a construction yard which will surely fail cause there is no chance that 50-storey building could ever be filled with people.
He could have planted turnips there.

Ordos is actually an entire prefecture. Slightly bigger than South Carolina or Austria (86,752 km2).
Population: ~1.9 million.
Urban population: ~582,544, living in the Dongsheng District.
That region has 16% of all coal reserves in China. And a 2nd highest income-per-capita in China.
It has a textile, petrochemical, car, electricity generating and a building industry - all built on the back of all that coal.
And they are using it to rapidly urbanize the prefecture - pooling all those 1.9 million people in one place.
http://www.theatlantic.com/chi...
http://www.vagabondjourney.com...
http://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes...

China is urbanizing RAPIDLY. At the rate of about 1% per year.
How much is 1% out of 1.35 billion people, yearly? About an entire Los Angeles of people looking for home, food, work, running water, electricity... and generally better living conditions than back in their village.
Year after year after year...

So, China is building entire cities from scratch and half coaxing half forcing people to move there.
Not just dropping apartment buildings or giant towers and sand islands that "someone will surely buy into" either.
Those are planned cities with built-in infrastructure (including all those "empty" parks and highways) to support hundreds of thousands of people with tens of thousands pouring yearly into Ordos alone, on a 20-year urbanization plan.
Many of those people coming in quite literally from the fields.

I asked the men where they had lived before moving to their apartments in Kangbashi. One of them, a 56-year-old man named Li Yonh Xiang, spoke up. "I lived here," he said.

Li had been born and raised just steps from the bench where he was sitting. About half of the 90-acre park had belonged to his family; the government bought the land in 2000. "When we were peasants, we lived according to the weather," Li said. "Now I live in a heated building with six floors. The city is very nice. There are many cars and buildings, but the air is very clean."

By stick and by carrot both.
http://europe.chinadaily.com.c...

China's urbanization program has been forced into motion by a fiscal policy that all but demands local cities expand to remain economically solvent. According to the World Bank, China's cities must fend for 80 percent of their expenses while only receiving 40 percent of the country's tax revenue, so land sales are often used to make up the difference.

Land is bought by cities at the low rural rate, rezoned as urban, and then sold to developers at the high urban construction land rate. The profits are huge.
...
One of the main ways that large-scale new areas are stimulated is through the building of university towns
...
Another strategy in bigger cities is to build a central business district and then force its occupation by movement of the headquarters and offices of state-owned banks and other businesses...
...
A third strategy for sparking a population in a new area is to move in government offices and offer housing subsides and incentives to the officials and workers to get them to follow their job. Move the feeding trough to get the cows to follow.

And it works.

Some of China's most notorious ghost cities have been attracting considerable numbers of residents, according to a report by Standard Chartered. From 2012 to 2014, they found that Zhengdong New District's occupancy rate doubled, while the population of Zhenjiang's Dantu quadrupled, and houses in Changzhou's Wujin district grew from 20 percent to 50 percent inhabited.

These are not ghost or idle or rotting cities.
This is centralized government foreseeing urbanization.
Cause it's not like hundreds of millions of Chinese will suddenly decide to give up on moving towards a better life in a city and fuck off to live in a forest or in a hut in the desert.
Humans gravitate towards cities. Period.

Foreseeing HUGE urbanization one way or another they are choosing to control how and where to urbanize.
Preemptively guiding it towards sustainable areas by forcing local governments to forgo on profit from gambling on land value while waiting to sell living and commercial space to the highest bidder.
Thus avoiding future overcrowded cities, built on unsustainable resources, with overpriced housing, high crime rates, inadequate health and education resources etc. etc.
Television

Harry Shearer Returns To the Simpsons 100

Posted by Soulskill from the indeedily-doodily dept.
jones_supa writes: Fans of The Simpsons will find this turn of events nothing short of excellent: seven weeks after saying he was done with Fox's endless animated comedy, Harry Shearer has agreed to rejoin the show. Shearer has now signed the same four-season contract as the other five primary voice actors. He previously tweeted, "I wanted what we've always had: the freedom to do other work." Executive producer Al Jean found that tweet confusing, saying, "Everybody on the show does lots of outside projects. He actually gets to record on the phone and do the [table] reads on the phone. So we've never kept him from doing that stuff."
Medicine

Ask Slashdot: Have You Tried a Standing Desk? 340

Posted by Soulskill from the can't-stand-sitting dept.
An anonymous reader writes: Evidence is piling up that sitting down all day is really bad for you. I work primarily from home, and as I grow older, I'm starting to worry about long term consequences to riding a desk full-time. We talked about this a few years ago, but the science has come a long way since then, and so have the options for standing desks. My questions: do you use a standing desk? What kind of setup do you have? There are a lot of options, and a lot of manufacturers. Further studies have questioned the wisdom of standing all day, so I've been thinking about a standing/sitting combo, and just switching every so often. If you do this, do you have time limits or a particular frequency with which you change from sitting to standing?

I'm also curious about under-desk treadmills — I could manage slowly walking during parts of my work, and the health benefits are easy to measure. Also, any ergonomic tips? A lot of places seem to recommend: forearms parallel to the ground, top of monitor at eye level, and a pad for under your feet. Has your experience been the same? Those of you who have gone all-out on a motorized setup, was it worth the cost? The desks are dropping in price, but I can still see myself dropping upward of $1k on this, easily.

Comment ...MORE prevalent than assumed. Maybe... (Score 2) 184

by denzacar (#50032085) Attached to: Depression: The Secret Struggle Startup Founders Won't Talk About

From TFA:

A recent study by Dr. Michael Freeman, a clinical professor at UCSF and an entrepreneur as well, was one of the first of its kind to link higher rates of mental health issues to entrepreneurship.

Of the 242 entrepreneurs surveyed, 49% reported having a mental-health condition. Depression was the No. 1 reported condition among them and was present in 30% of all entrepreneurs, followed by ADHD (29%) and anxiety problems (27%). That's a much higher percentage than the US population at large, where only about 7% identify as depressed.

More surprising was the incidence of mental health in the families of entrepreneurs: 72% said they either had mental-health problems themselves or in their immediate family.

A founder who has no history of mental illness from a family with no history either "is the exception, not the rule," Freeman said.

Also, from the study mentioned:
http://www.michaelafreemanmd.c...

Little is known about mental health conditions among the families of entrepreneurs. Of some relevance, though, is the fact that previous research has shown that first and second-degree family members of bipolar probands are high achievers across several domains that are important for entrepreneurship. Higier and her colleagues found that when compared to bipolar probands and normal controls, the unaffected identical twins of people with bipolar disorder demonstrate superior cognitive and interpersonal traits that would seem highly important for entrepreneurship, including enhanced social ease, confidence, assertiveness, intelligence, verbal learning, verbal fluency, extraversion, sociability, optimism, and resilience [89].

Coryell et al. found that the first-degree relatives of bipolar probands, including relatives with bipolar spectrum conditions, had significantly higher educational and occupational achievement than the close family members of people with other mental health conditions [72]. Other studies conducted over the last 100 years have reached similar conclusions [73, 74, 76, 90-92].
Creativity and innovativeness are foundational aptitudes of entrepreneurs. The close family members of bipolar probands have been shown to have high levels of creativity [23, 68]. First-degree relatives of people with bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, anorexia nervosa, and autism have been shown to be overrepresented in the scientific and artistic occupations [66]. Male relatives of people with schizophrenia were shown to be overrepresented in a listing of prominent people [93].

Also, ALSO, from the study:

Reviewed in conjunction with the results displayed Figure 1, 72% of the entrepreneurs in this sample either reported a personal mental health history (49%) or were asymptomatic yet reported a family mental health history (23%). By contrast, 48% of the comparison participants in this sample reported a personal mental health history (32%) or were asymptomatic yet reported a family mental health history (16%).

There IS also a PRETTY BIG issue with it being a self-reporting study and with the composition and the design of the control group.

Control was created by surveying "76 MBA student and faculty pool participants, and 149 psychology students", then mixing those participants with self-reported "entrepreneurs".
Then, out of the total sum of 335 participants (meaning that 110 were actually pooled from "actual entrepreneurs") - 93 participants were declared as control because they answered "no" to the following question: "Have you ever been self-employed, a business founder, or a business co-founder (including non-profit businesses)?"

There are more psych and MBA students (132) among the "entrepreneurs" then "actual entrepreneurs" (110).
So all those mental health numbers may be coming from self-diagnosing psych students.
Which would kinda explain the fact that HALF OF THE CONTROL HAS A HISTORY OF MENTAL ISSUES AS WELL.
Crime

Uber France Leaders Arrested For Running Illegal Taxi Company 334

Posted by samzenpus from the go-directly-to-jail dept.
An anonymous reader writes: Two Uber executives were arrested by French authorities for running an illegal taxi company and concealing illegal documents. This is not the first time Uber has run into trouble in France. Recently, taxi drivers started a nation-wide protest, blocking access to Roissy airport and the nation's interior minister issued a ban on UberPop. A statement from an Uber spokesperson to TechCrunch reads: "Our CEO for France and General Manager for Western Europe were invited to a police hearing this afternoon; following this interview, they were taken into custody. We are always available to answer all the questions on our service, and available to the authorities to solve any problem that could come up. Talks are in progress. In the meantime, we keep working in order to make sure that both our customers and drivers are safe following last week’s turmoils."

Comment Yeah? How hospitable were Tunisians? (Score 2) 359

by denzacar (#50012649) Attached to: Greek Financial Crisis Is an Opportunity For Bitcoin

Whether Greece makes a "little" money on tourism or a "lot" of money on tourism is a function of how hospitable it is to visitors. If the country as a whole makes it a priority to be very nice and welcoming to foreigners, they stand to reap a lot more in tourist spending than if they take tourism for granted or, worse, go out of their way to make tourists feel unwelcome.

You can make the country hospitable up the wazoo, all it takes is ONE dickhead with an AK to fuck it all up.
Or one missing child.
Or a drowned one.
Or a rainy season.
Or a global economic crisis.
Or simply a fashion trend.

Tourism is a nice bonus and a source of foreign currency, but you can't run a country on tertiary sector alone - unless you are willing to be permanently in debt or permanently poor OR to end up exactly where Greece is now. Both poor and in debt.
Cause there is hardly a more literal way of signing off one's own economic security on "hope and prayer" than resting it on good graces of fickle foreigners bored with their everyday existence back home.

On top of it, to a small country, tourism is toxic.
It artificially raises the property value to unrealistic levels, prices skyrocket and it overflows the local services with people who don't pay for those services.
And you can't just tax them cause you don't want to scare them off or simply cause you can't properly charge for things like an increased burden on the environment or water supply.
Or police - which will inevitably become corrupt first time that either local or governmental coffers go empty and they either get told to "skin" the foreigners or to let them slide.
And corruption is again something that spreads across the entire society.

On top of that, it creates conditions where country's youth will spend their most productive years SERVING instead of studying.
And since the prices are up, when they age out of serving drinks to fat tourists, they won't have a home of their own, they won't have an education - so they end up unemployed.

Which is where Greece was going with their long term unemployment rising (with youth unemployment always staying lower while following a more jagged, seasonal, curve) until the introduction of the Euro brought it down - through heavy borrowing which provided money for make-work jobs.
People who were unemployed for decades got jobs. Yay!
Just before the shit hit the fan they were running the lowest long term unemployment in last two decades, while the wages kept going up.

As the debt kept climbing up as well.
Bitcoin

Greek Financial Crisis Is an Opportunity For Bitcoin 359

Posted by Soulskill from the all-about-the-bitjamins dept.
An anonymous reader writes: Greece's economy has been in trouble for several years, now, and a major vote next weekend will shake it up even further. The country can't pay its debts, and the upcoming referendum will decide whether they face increased austerity measures or start the process of exiting the Euro. One side effect of the crisis is that alternative currencies like Bitcoin suddenly look much more attractive as the "normal" currencies become unstable. "Tony Gallippi, the co-founder of bitcoin payment processor Bitpay, tweeted on Sunday night that he expected the price of bitcoin to rise to between $610 and $1,250 if Greece exits the Euro. The currency is currently worth $250. Part of the reason why the crisis is so tempting for proponents of the cryptocurrency is the echoes of a previous crisis in the Eurozone: the banking collapse in Cyprus in 2013, which saw that nation also impose capital controls to prevent massive outflows of currency from the panicking country. That collapse came at the same time as the first major boom in the price of bitcoin, which began the year at less than $20 and peaked at ten times that by early April – before it all came crashing down."

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