Every time you buy something at the grocery store, you are negotiating that item's price. If you refuse to buy an item because it's overpriced, the company that manufactures that item has the choice to either lower the price, try to market to a demographic that's willing to pay a higher price, or to attempt to keep selling an item at a price point at which the item won't sell.

By buying or not buying an item, you help determine demand for that item, thereby, setting its price. Basic stuff. Same set of principles applies to the labor market.

A few things about the reddit situation:

- reddit's staff will become less talented over time, as long as this policy persists, until they find some talent-price equilibrium that reflects reddit's salary policy.

- the CEO that implemented this policy will not suffer financially for doing so. However, it is likely that the talent of reddit's staff will decrease over time, and may result in her premature dismissal, possibly with an overly generous golden parachute.

- this salary policy has only a tenuous connection, if any, to the issue of women and men receiving an equal salary for equal labor. If reddit's CEO is not an absolute fool, the gender equality explanation is a rationalization intended to make an ill-conceived cost-cutting measure more palatable. If reddit's CEO is sincere in her explanation for this move, the board should remove her (and other companies should avoid her), because she does not understand certain fundamental labor market principles.

Here's another prediction: reddit will not save as much money as they think they will, because their HR department will be forced to dedicate more time to efforts to acquire adequate talent.

Have you met some of the MBAs who teach business courses? For a shock, try asking a few of them some fundamental stats questions that a person who has taken some grad-level stats courses (a prerequisite for many scientific/quantitative fields) should be able to answer. I can tell you about MBA profs who use statistical analysis allegedly on a regular basis without knowing the term "R^2".

Ballmer's probably a step up from quite a few people career academics in the business field.

Biz 101: How to ingratiate yourself with the right people
Biz 324: Managing technical staff for the non-technical (focus on developers)
Biz 412: Diversifying your product offerings, and what to do when you fail at it

Agree with a notion that extends what you said there. Children have less ideas/concepts/mental schemas on which to draw, so much of what is presented to them in school appears arbitrary. One of the paths towards more effective education is to associate new knowledge with concepts that are present in a student's mind. This is pretty basic stuff that William James was saying in the 19th century, and which has a more modern instantiation in our understanding of artificial and biological neural networks. In a nutshell, when teachers present ideas, if it seems that the idea appeared out of a vacuum, or is arbitrary, the student will either be skeptical about the idea, or will have a hard time integrating it (i.e. may have to take the idea on faith and rotely memorize it, and retention will be difficult due to a lack of association with other concepts). The process of relating new ideas to ideas that have already been integrated by a person is crucial to the process of learning.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I've read that many teachers who move to private schools from public institutions take a pay cut to do so, and they do it because they find the environment more comfortable and more conducive to doing their job. The students tend to be more classwork-oriented, and they have less disciplinary issues, so although there's less financial incentive to work in private schools (including no prospect of a nice pension upon retirement), the experience itself is more gratifying. Teachers in some urban areas, such as Chicago, for example, can make six figure salaries, along with some very nice perks; I'm not sure how that has worked out for them in terms of educational outcomes.

It seems that every aspect of the education experience feeds into every other aspect. Indifferent parents (as you've pointed out) produce indifferent or downright hostile kids, who, in turn, make many of the best teachers run for the hills, which leaves the parents and kids to deal with the less well-equipped teachers, and this process propagates through the generations. Most of the fix to education should will probably come with a cultural shift, rather than by throwing more technology into the classroom. People were learning trigonometry and calculus just fine before they had computers in the classroom, and there's no reason they can't do so now. Use computers when necessary (i.e. working with complex regression equations in a Stats course), and leave them out of the classroom when they're simply expedient or a hindrance. Things such as kindles, which present a great variety of books to students, can be extremely useful. Things like iPads are attention hogs, and wire young brains in ways that may not help them in their future endeavors. Use technology as appropriate, but don't pretend that it will be a panacea.

The unsupervised algorithm discussed in the article seems to code some sort of visual input and, I'd infer, to perform clustering, which permits it to assign labels (i.e. let's say, 'tree', 'human', etc.) to objects it has encountered. It can use this schema which it has constructed to assign objects it hasn't seen before to a cluster - that is, it labels novel inputs in accordance with its schema. Thus, the algorithm 'recognizes' classes of objects. I'd imagine if you granularize the detail level of detail to which the algorithm pays attention, it can recognize (categories of one object)/particular instances of a general object category/a particular object.

That goes way beyond the task of 'classifying objects', which is what the algorithm is intended to do. It's like expecting a mechanic to drive your vehicle for you once he has repaired it.

Sure, the algorithm doesn't entail a neurological equivalent of what humans to classify objects, but the effect is the same, no? Is not the task of accurately classifying objects useful in and of itself? For example, how would you build said robot that can manipulate objects in a useful fashion if it cannot recognize the objects in its vicinity?

First of all, is this the right paper?

It seems that the topic of the linked article is a new unsupervised algorithm that categorizes images. The linked article says that 'the Evolution-Constructed Features algorithm is notable in that it decides for itself what features of an object are significant for identifying the object', which unsupervised algorithms do implicitly, no? It is also stated that the algorithm 'is able to learn new objects without human intervention' - so if I'm interpreting this and the article's abstract correctly, the algorithm uses a novel approach to coding some sort of more or less raw image data which it receives as input? Otherwise, it appears that what makes the approach newsworthy is its extremely high accuracy, which was 95 to 100% on some measures. That sounds very good if the tests were representative of a real-world environment.

Is this the one? It doesn't appear that the researchers have posted a manuscript, and I'm not sure that Elsevier would take kindly to it if they posted the published draft (although many researchers do so anyway). That, along with a lack of public interest in reading articles upon which pop science articles (like the one in the link) are based, probably explains the lack of a link or reference to the original article. If you have access to a library that subscribes to Pattern Recognition, you can get the article.

Anaxagoras, Socrates, Aristotle. In ancient Greece (or Athens, specifically), the charge of impiety was sometimes used for political reasons (i.e. to dispose of people that the public, or at least a few influential individuals, found to be a nuisance or an menace). Sounds like there was a political angle to the modern case as well. The more things change... Here's a link to an article about the history of this practice. That said, what was this guy trying to accomplish by mocking a dead monk? Not a cool thing to do, whatever your religious views.

A person's response to the gaming experience is not determined on a rational basis.

If a game is stimulating enough, a person will experience physiological responses that some describe as reactions to stressors - this includes a central and peripheral nervous response mediated by catecholamines (dopamine, adrenaline/norepinephrine, noradrenaline/norepinephrine) (sympathetic nervous system-adrenal-medullary arousal), and possibly pituitary-adrenal-cortical arousal, which results in a release of ACTH, and thus, cortisol. Such responses may be associated with a number of physiological effects, and influence the body's use of energy. Maladaptive psychological states, such as that of increased hostility, are sometimes associated with these changes. Here is an article which offers a pretty good introduction on the topic.

If you're prone to maladaptive responses to stressful situations, to some extent, this can be mitigated by training (hence, the biofeedback article). However, I'd be willing to guess that a lot of hardcore gamers (not all) who suffer the most severe stress effects may notice some hitches with the idea of trying to manage their stress response while gaming. Some will not be able to mitigate their stress response to a meaningful extent. Some will be able to mitigate their stress response, but it will hit eventually as they keep gaming (possibly manifesting itself pretty quickly and powerfully). Some will find that mitigating their stress response compromises or interferes with their gaming experience or their level of play, and will drop the idea altogether. Still, it's a worthwhile effort, because it has the potential to help some people.

Cold, and not cool. A bit ironic...

Anyone else more concerned about the frivolous power consumption to which the "internet of things" will contribute?

Spam is a nuisance, but it can be mitigated by simple technological measures, such as spam filters (I won't get into the other security implications, which can be way more serious than spam). However, the effects arising from excessive, needless power consumption, are likely to be much more difficult to mitigate.

Gotta agree, to a large extent, with the AC above. US universities often seem to be a much more serious proposition at the grad level than at the undergrad level, although this can vary quite a bit from university to another, and from one concentration/major to another. US universities' reputations have more to do with their ability to provide a heavy duty grad (i.e. professionalizing) education and with their research output than they do with their undergrad offerings (which is often a hand-holding jog, buffeted by rampant grade inflation (lest someone not get his tenure due to somebody being upset about their grade)). Having spoken to people from Eastern Europe, I get the impression that their schools have less tolerance for sub-par performance and less grade inflation, and come exam time, you are expected to know your stuff exceptionally well.

However, as mentioned elsewhere in this thread, E. European professors tend to be underpaid (something they share with their colleagues in other countries, but it's obviously quite a bit less harsh here), which results in high levels of bribery - you can either really earn your diploma, or you can buy your diploma. Amazingly, even med schools and engineering schools seem to be susceptible to this problem.

I read the entire comment. On which "word" am I overly focused? Is it this "word":

Am I taking that statement, which was presented in its own paragraph, out of context? Or are you arguing that you went on to contradict that statement later in your post? You understand the difference between developing a thought and contradicting it, don't you?

I've repeatedly given you the opportunity for discussion. So far, you haven't demonstrated the intellectual capacity for that. Instead, you've offered unsubstantiated assertions, accusations, and ad-hominem attacks. My post was on topic, and you're doing everything you can to avoid staying on topic, focusing instead on the fact that I reiterated a sentiment that you expressed. Instead of admitting that your post was poorly articulated or potentially self-contradictory, you offer unsubstantiated assertions that you're correct.

So far, along with slinging mud, your level of discourse has been precisely this:

So I'll give you another chance to prove that you have the intellectual capacity for something other than repeating dogma that you haven't quite integrated or understood, and for personal attacks: go ahead and respond to the points I made in my post. Stop pretending that stuff which directly addresses what you said is off-topic. Otherwise, go ahead and keep perpetuating the impression of yourself (thick, argumentative, and with a superficial understanding of things; a fraud) that you created in this thread. Otherwise, if you maintain your present course, and continue to contribute nothing of meaning or value, you can go ahead and fuck off.

An exact quote from your post: "I'm happily surprised to learn I am not the only one who thinks the whole 'gaussian' should be banished".

You had no problem justifying your time typing a reply to a post that you deem unworthy of your time, so I call bullshit. So far, you've put forth the impression (and I'm sure I'm not alone in this) that you've put forth a dogmatic point of view, and that you are unable to defend that point of view. My post raised a number of valid points, none of which you've attempted to address. I understand that that it's much easier to dismiss a post as a troll without basis than to engage in rational discussion, and others who read this thread will understand that as well.

So far, I've offered a rebuttal to your anti-Gaussian point of view, and you've posted nothing of any substance. If it makes you happy, omit that phrase which you find contentious from my above post, and post your response. At this point, you're the one giving the impression of trolling (i.e. trolling those who have an understanding of the Gaussian distribution's utility in statistics and the sciences).