Comment Re:Soap Box time! (Score 1) 271
In this case, "annual" means year-over-year - it's a standard usage in (at least) American English.
As I ask in my revisited post: If this is not done to be manipulative why is the adjective "exponential" only used when discussing profits, growth, etc.. and not done for costs, losses, or anything negative?
What you aren't getting is that whether or not terms like "exponential" have marketing value is a completely different question from whether or not a particular curve matches an exponential model.
Yes, fancy terms invoking rapid, continued growth have marketing value (i.e. are manipulative). If they were claiming, say, factorial growth then it would be obvious that they were lying or performing some kind of trickery to get that result. Instead they're claiming exponential growth, which has the virtue of being a correct model for past growth and good marketing copy.
Now, you're going to point out that firms report annually. Yes, they report annually. If you take those annual figures and graph them you get an exponential curve.
I don't think the article stated it correctly. The 20% "growth" number is volume, where dollar per click has been steadily decreasing. In other words, Google is having to sell more ads to make the same dollars. This is the trend that is scary for investors because Google's competition is doing better here.
+5 Informative, seriously. If this is true, it completely explains why investors would have been worried (since continued 20% revenue growth would actually be awesome).
If you believe this is not to be manipulative,
Whether or not it's manipulative is totally orthogonal to whether or not growth at a fixed percentage over any time period is "exponential" (it is, period).
The parent posted a graph of Google and Facebook revenues over 5 years. Irrespective of any marketing value of the term "exponential," the curves drawn in the graph are (mathematically) exponential in character. If you're going to keep arguing that these specific curves are not exponential - despite the evidence of your own eyes - then I don't know what to tell you.
So by your strange view, anything with a positive yield could be called "exponential".
Anything with a positive yield which is a proportion of the current value. In other words, growth is "exponential" if it is proportional to t^n. For a 1% rate savings account, the value is proportional to t^1.01.
It's an extremely unfavorable variation, with no hope of competition against regular fertile mosquitoes. If only 0.001 of of these mosquitoes can breed, and only 0.001 of their offspring can breed...well you see how long that gives the variation.
anti-GMOers' grasp on reality is approximately equal to Scientologists.
The difference is that at a certain level of their 'church' hierarchy, the Scientologists know exactly what is going on - and who they're taking from.
I'm going to assume this will end somewhere between a net effect of zero and a problem that's 1,000 times worse than what they're trying to solve.
Why assume? This particular version of the sterile insect technique has already been applied to great success in Brazil and the Cayman Islands.
to infect humans
With male mosquitoes? (Hint: they can't bite).
In experiments conducted by Oxitec in Brazil and the Cayman Islands, millions of modified mosquitoes were released over a period of several months, and they ended up decimating over 95 percent of the targeted insect population. Both countries were so impressed by this result that they’re now hoping for larger-scale operations.
He has not acquired a fortune; the fortune has acquired him. -- Bion
