Comment Re:Duh. (Score 0) 190
That's what we have moderation for. Also, fuck Bennett.
Why Didn't Sidecar's Flex Pricing Work? 190
Bennett Haselton writes Sidecar is a little-known alternative to Lyft and Uber, deployed in only ten cities so far,
which lets drivers set their own prices to undercut other ride-sharing services.
Given that most amateur drivers would be willing to give someone a ride for far
less than the rider would be willing to pay, why didn't the flex-pricing option take off? Keep reading to see what Bennet has to say.
Comment Re:Birthday paradox? (Score 1) 334
The inter-arrival times of a Poisson process are exponential.
Comment Re:Birthday paradox? (Score 1) 334
It's far too early to do the maths on the three dimensional case, but uniformly distributed points on the real line have nearest neighbour distances that are exponentially distributed. It should be pretty obvious that with a big enough number of points some will be close.
Twitter Should Use Random Sample Voting For Abuse Reports 132
Bennett Haselton writes: Twitter
has announced
new protocols for filing and handling abuse reports,
making it easier to flag specific types of content (e.g. violence or suicide
threats). But with the volume of abusive tweets being reported to the company
every day, the internal review process will always be a bottleneck. The
company could handle more abuse reports properly by recruiting public volunteers. Read what Bennett thinks below.
Comment Re:So close, so far (Score 1) 561
There are colleges where men are just assumed guilty of any charge of sexual assault, and cannot even question their accusers in the adjudication process
I might have more of a problem with that if it didn't lead, on average, to more cases getting decided correctly.
Equality of outcome, equality of opportunity. Neither is perfect. Enjoy your male tears.
Comment Re:I agree (Score 1) 111
They are not illegal per se. However, there are plenty regulations around how these things are used. Try depositing £20k cash in a UK account and see how anonymous the source of that cash becomes.
Comment Re:Raining on the parade (Score 1) 172
Yeah, we mostly call that prostate cancer. Most (old) men die with a prostate cancer in situ.
Comment Re:Almost made it ... (Score 1) 48
I challenge any one of those moaning fuckers to so much as hit a comet with a rock, never mind come close to doing science out there :p
Comment Re:Pretty cool (Score 1) 147
AAAARGH vi
I think this should be a meme.
Comment As far as building a team goes... (Score 1) 176
...I would strongly recommend just getting the best people you can. In my experience good, experienced people in a small team do not mind picking up the grunt work if the team is pulling together and being productive.
Comment Re:Distilled water has no salts (Score 1) 167
You're wrong. This seems to be a common pop-sci fact, but it's nonsense. If you drank only distilled water, you would die slightly quicker than someone who drank only water, but that's it. Drink distilled water and eat normally, you would observe no effects.
Comment Re:Doesn't distilled water taste horrible though? (Score 1) 167
Yes, but also rather more worryingly there is the minor issue that after using it for a few weeks it will become contaminated with Legionnaire's.
Comment Re:reflexes? (Score 1) 114
Requirements vary quite a lot between country. The UK is one of the strictest - corrected vision must be a certain standard in both eyes. In the US, some states allow people the UK would class as legally blind to drive. Some of these folk use miniature telescopes strapped to their eyes to see with - needless to see, field of view with these things is pretty small.
Big Talk About Small Samples 246
Bennett Haselton writes: My last article garnered some objections from readers saying that the sample sizes were too
small to draw meaningful conclusions. (36 out of 47 survey-takers, or 77%, said that a picture
of a black woman breast-feeding was inappropriate; while in a different group,
38 out of 54 survey-takers, or 70%, said
that a picture of a white woman breast-feeding was inappropriate in the same context.)
My conclusion was that, even on the basis of a relatively small sample, the evidence was
strongly against a "huge" gap in the rates at which the surveyed population would consider
the two pictures to be inappropriate. I stand by that, but it's worth presenting
the math to support that conclusion, because I think the surveys are valuable tools when
you understand what you can and cannot demonstrate with a small sample. (Basically,
a small sample can present only weak evidence as to what the population average is,
but you can confidently demonstrate what it is not.)
Keep reading to see what Bennett has to say.
