The first independent claim is not really about the UI, but about (ultimately) querying (and getting a response from) a subset of a tree constructed from a relational database based on some attributes of some of the objects at the "child nodes" of that tree. In patent law, if you do not practice ALL of the elements of such a claim, you are NOT infringing.

Notably, one of the steps in this first claim is: "determining ... partial results based on .. characteristics of the ... visited child objects, wherein the ... partial results are aggregated and stored in an intermediate table". So, this is a very particular implementation detail that presumably is used to improve query efficiency. In my reading, that is what they are counting on as the patentable subject matter.

Note that this is really easy to work around: You could store those partial results in any old data structure in memory and NOT be infringing this claim. You could then workaround using SQL to query that data structure, e.g. by making it a hash of queries (or important parts of queries) which would be used to look up these results. Also, the description (which I did not read) will give you more details about how they store it in the table. If their description is not general enough, it would be plausible to work around this even with a temp table, but with a "very different from what they describe" structure. They might try to sue you, but you could take your chances in court.

So, I don't know if this should be patentable, but THIS is what people who are skilled in the art should grapple with to answer this question.

Are you using a dictation program, where every word matters? Or, are your basing your impression of accuracy on a voice assistant like Siri or Alexa? In the latter case, you could say "Play me some tunes by the Allman Brothers Band", and the system could recognize "Play the Allmans", and you wouldn't know the difference, even though the word error rate was 77%.

I have been doing ASR R&D for about 30 years, and 15%, on average, for the speaker-independent error rate on real world (not laboratory) tasks is close enough to state of the art. There is of course a huge variation, based on speaking style, topic, noise conditions, microphone transfer function, etc. I would estimate the cross-speaker variance at about 10% (so 90% of speakers will experience somewhere between 5% and 25% word error rate). That a particular sub-population is out on the high end of that distribution is not surprising at all, particularly if you understand the weaknesses (and, yes, biases) of the model-building (both acoustic and language) algorithms.

Speaker adaptation to the rescue!

"The northward movement of fish around the world is disrupting some fishing grounds and revitalizing others -- and fishing businesses are trying to adapt their operations. "

Sometime change costs some people money (and risk), and sometimes the exact same change reduces peoples' costs (and risks). Imagine that. The human mind is capable of reasoning about and understanding patterns that will allow us to adjust to changes in our environment. Perhaps we're not all going to die (at least all at once).

The fact that this ridiculous "graph" was used to present the data, instead of a simple table, tells you all that you need to know about the mathematical/statistical knowledge of the presenter. The visual format adds literally 0 information. Other commenters cover the details of the myriad fallacies. I want my 5 minutes back.

The cost of compliance with information disclosure regulations is also part of the issue, here. Sarbanes-Oxley is estimated to cost more than $500K/year. That is no small sum for companies with a few million in profit, so the bar for going public is concomitantly raised. A good rule of thumb is that you need to be at $100M+ of revenue to even consider this. Lots of very good, profitable companies do not make that threshold.

Duh - I was submitting the OP to its own test. If we're not at equilibrium, then how can the OP claim the "model" in the cited paper accurately predicted the temperature? The experiment isn't over yet, by that standard.

As for the "knock-on" affects, well those are completely speculative. Some could be good, some could be bad. We have plenty of time to adapt, if we leave people alone to innovate. Oh, and being rich and having lots of reliable energy will help a great deal with innovation. For that, we have lots of supporting data.

The only quantitative _predictive_ statement in the Medium article is that a doubling of CO2 concentration will cause a 2degreesC increase is temperature (at fixed relative humidity). This is a strictly log-linear prediction. Let's submit it to a real _prospective_ experiment:

We are currently at ~400 ppm CO2. According to the IPCC, the prediction of CO2 concentration in 2100 is about 600 ppm. So, according to the cited model, we will have about another 1degreeC in global mean temperature by 2100. (This, by the way, is well below the 2-5degreesC range predicted in the last IPCC assessment report (AR5). At the very high end of the CO2 predictions above, we have 800 ppm, meaning 2degreesC warming according to the model.

So, they're predicting 1-2degreesC increase with business as usual! I can live with that. Let's see if it's right.

Let's see how long it takes for the government to start shutting down access to those that are accessing the "wrong" type of information. The Chinese government has a good model for how this oppression can work.

... in writing this piece is merely to express a personal preference.

I support Emanuel's absolute right to purchase or refuse any medical treatment he wants at any time. Indeed, I support his right to suicide. It is his life, and he can do what he will with it. Moreover, I whole-heartedly support his first amendment right to speak and try to convince others to adopt similar values. For all that I care, he can start a movement of medical care refuseniks - as long as the care they are refusing is their own.

Would he support my rights equally? Does he believe that I have the absolute right to purchase, at any age, with my own wealth, any medical treatments that I judge to be valuable in pursuit of my own happiness? Somehow, given his crucial contributions to the largest government encroachment on personal medical decision-making since Medicare, I doubt it.

Are you able to do all of the following at your dinner conversation?:

1) Provide everyone with a decent close-talking directional microphone.
2) Require each person to take turns speaking, so there is very little overlap.
3) Have no pre-adolescents speaking.
4) Eliminate noticeable background noises.
5) Have no one with a strong non-native dialect speaking.
6) Require everyone to speak in full, grammatical sentences.

To the extent you say no to any of the above, you will get increasingly poor output. They are listed approximately in order of importance (1 being the most important). If you can say yes to all of those, you can probably get in the vicinity of 90% accuracy. This might be usable, depending on your ultimate purpose. If you were to additionally train acoustic and language models for all of the speakers, and then tell the software which user was speaking (i.e. switch the user on the fly during the conversation), you could probably get 95% accuracy and that would be quite usable.

So, in other words ... nope.

Perhaps I should RTFA, but looking at the Wikipedia page on Energy_in_Germany, that looks to be about 10% of monthly electricity consumption, (generously, given that it's summer), and less than 2% of total energy consumption.

That's a helpful response, but begs the question: If the later filer had already manufactured the invention, doesn't that make it "existing practice" and therefore prior art? Even if they hadn't manufactured it, but only designed it, if they produce the design in court with a provable date prior to the earlier filing, doesn't that at least make it "obvious" if not "prior art"?

What am I missing here?

George W. Bush.

... is NOT that "because some government regulations are unfounded, all of their regulations will be so.". The argument against regulations in general is that they punish innocent people (by restricting their liberty) without proof that the regulated activity will harm anyone. This is distinguished from objectively-defined law, where:

a) the restricted activity (in the case of good law) is a violation of someone's rights.
b) the violation must be proved in court (including civil court).

So, to choose an example I know will piss off many slashdotters, regulation of "air pollutants" is not a valid exercise of government power, since this punishes people that might emit a certain quantity of some substance, without proof that such emissions will actually harm someone. We already have laws against polluting other people's property - if someone can be proved to be doing so, they should be punished. And, if someone believes that they are going to be harmed by emissions that have yet to occur, they can even go to civil court and present merely a preponderance of evidence that this harm will ensue in order to receive relief, including injunctive relieve to prevent the activity, That is the valid operation of coercive government power - to prevent objectively definable rights violations, not to pander to people's imagined fears.

In the case of the FAA device regulations, the issue is even more clear cut - the FAA should have nothing to say at all about what devices a private airline allows to be used on its planes. That should be the decision of the airline, and they can base this decision on what they consider to be the appropriate tradeoff between safety and passenger convenience. Then, passengers could decide how they feel about a given airline's policy, and this could be factored into their patronage decision. True, this requires that passengers would need to exercise some adult judgment in their choice of airlines. Oh, the horror. Such is part of the price of liberty.

I've been through Ben-Gurion ~10 times, and have not had similar experiences. Indeed, from what I know of the Israeli security techniques, the goal is not really to make you sweat, but simply to observe your behavior in reacting to mundane, but rapid fire, questions. In effect, it's a lie detector test, where the detectors are well trained (and intelligent) humans. The US could have a similar system - with similar success - if we reallocated resources away from security theater and toward hiring and training good people to do this kind of pattern recognition. Unfortunately, since the TSA is viewed as a job-creation program, and since it *is* security theater (not actual security) that is the goal of the program, we are unlikely to get there.