That was a summer project after my last semester of undergrad, posted at the beginning of my first semester in a PhD program in AI (lucky timing there). Graduated in 2017 and have been working in the field since.
1,068 karma · joined January 27, 2010
Right, my point is that those costs are essentially fixed w.r.t miles driven, not that you wouldn't need those things. If you drive 36000 miles a year as a Lyft driver your car payment is still the same as someone who drives 12000 miles a year, whereas the author's model assumes the payment would be 3x as much. And re insurance, I know insurance companies take mileage into account in determining insurance premium, but it's certainly not the only thing in the formula.
Doesn't that $9100 a year median include a bunch of fixed costs (or at least costs that wouldn't grow linearly with the mileage driven)? e.g., the lease/cost of car itself, insurance, etc. I'm not saying this would take the profitability of being a Lyft driver from pretty terrible to great, but it does seem like a pretty significant oversight.
In matlab/octave you can write an empty range as a(i:i-1). Not to say that that's at all elegant or aesthetically appealing, but it does work. But I 100% agree with the sentiment; one of my favorite things about using NumPy rather than matlab in my research code is the vastly superior indexing, in large part due to the fact that it's 0-based. matlab's indexing really is painful and off-by-one-error prone for doing anything other than a(1:n).
Scenario B: The setup is (1) lose $100 (current state is -$100, 0 tickets). The choices are the same as above.
The final 'state' at the end of each setup is the same, and the choices are the same, so the argument is that a rational actor would make the same choice in both situations. Maybe there's an argument that the state should include more than just $ and tickets though?
Based on the bot's code [1], it looks like all they ask for is a phone number and an email address. It might be a good idea to at least require a captcha, if not a credit card deposit of a few bucks.
I've never felt compelled to be more careless after taking a vaccine (I'm not even sure what I'd do differently if I did); I just get vaccines to minimize the expected number of times I get a disease in my lifetime.
[1] http://www.webmd.com/vaccines/how-effective-is-flu-vaccine
I would have expected it would be quite minimal compared to the work involved in developing the game itself, but I guess I must be wrong if there are "many" Windows-only OpenGL games.
Maybe they're not effective punishment or rehabilitation, but I would certainly say they're an effective deterrent. They might not be a punishment for anyone in there, but they could still be (and at least in my case, certainly are) seen as a punishment for some people who aren't in there. I would bet that a prison sentence is a much better deterrent than, say, volunteer hours or a fine. Whether deterring bank robberies is a valuable enough goal is a matter of opinion I suppose.
Obviously this is all conjecture, if someone can pull up a study showing that prison sentences don't have any deterrent effect over other forms of punishment then I'd accept that I'm wrong... But I'd be somewhat shocked if that were the case.
Under this theory, polls/predictions can't actually skew the result in either direction [1], they can only increase or decrease the total turnout (highest turnout when polls say 50%, lowest turnout when they say 0%/100%). In reality this probably isn't actually true, but we can't say for sure whether or not polls do affect election outcomes, and in which direction, unless there's empirical evidence. I don't even have a guess for which direction it would go (whether you want your supporters to be "concerned" or "optimistic") - I could see either being true.
[1] Edit: I should note that this assumes that each poll/prediction is listened to and taken seriously equally by both sides of the electorate, which almost certainly isn't true. Which actually brings up something kind of interesting - it could be that with all of its "Romney will win in a landslide" talk, Fox News actually hurt Romney's chances because most Fox News viewers are Romney supporters (but they could have done the same amount of damage to Romney's chances by saying "Obama will win in a landslide" - the best way for them to help Romney might be to say that the election is exactly tied). And I suppose it would also lead to a justification for the idea that Nate Silver has a liberal bias, using his relatively "wishy-washy" predictions to energize his mostly young and liberal audience to get out and vote. It seems that I've gone too far with this and started arguing against myself...
I think my point still stands though: this doesn't showcase NPR's neutrality - perhaps they are in fact biased toward Obama and just lie more strategically than most Republican pundits. (Certainly not accusing them of that, only saying that I don't think we can glean much from the fact that they gave Romney higher numbers than he deserves.)
Is there actually evidence that higher poll numbers in favor of X lead to higher voter turnout from supporters of X? It seems like everyone takes that for granted but I've never seen any evidence that it's true.
Anecdotally, whenever I've checked Southwest prices multiple days in a row they usually stay the same. So I'd imagine it would still be a valuable enough resource if there were someone who did this manually at the granularity of a day, even if when you clicked through to buy the tickets they occasionally wouldn't match the price the search engine told you. You could even have a "report this price as incorrect" button.
I imagine it would be a big competitive advantage for whichever one did it first - it's pretty annoying how every time I want to search for flights I have to first search on Kayak/Hipmunk/GoogleFlightSearch and then separately go to southwest.com and wade through their slow, awful search interface.
But I would say that "thinking inside of the box" is actually an incredibly important skill in practical situations. Probably 99+% of any functioning adult's thinking is "inside-the-box" (I realize that this is sort of a nebulous/meaningless statement, sorry). Things that we don't even think about, like looking both ways before crossing the street or watching our step as we get off the bus are all examples of inside-the-box thinking. But maybe a more interesting example of inside-the-box thinking (in the context of something you might want to actually test) is communicating effectively with other humans of a similar cultural background to your own.
So to get back to the portion of the article I quoted and maybe refine my point a bit, maybe it really isn't fair to say that any answer to questions like the farm animal one is more "natural" than another, but rather only seems more natural due to the biases of our own mental models that our evolution has optimized for survival rather than to achieve any measure of fundamental truth or purity. That's perfectly okay to me, as long as the test makes no claim to measure intelligence in any "fundamental" sense, but rather in a particular sense of intelligence that arises only as a human being living on earth. It's entirely a matter of opinion whether such a sense of intelligence is of any interest or relevance, though. Personally I think it is.
> Cow, hen, pig, sheep.
> The standard answer is supposed to be hen, as it is the only bird. But that is not the only possible correct answer. For example, pig is the only one whose meat is not kosher. And, look, sheep has five letters while the rest have three.
These types of questions irritate the theoretician in me as well, but to play devil's advocate a bit, are they really illegitimate questions? I would guess that your ability to correctly answer an "ambiguous" question like that measures your ability to effectively communicate with other humans, who regularly speak in ways that require the listener to resolve ambiguities that are at LEAST as severe as the farm animal question. If you think hard enough about it, sure, you can come up with a justification for any of the four answers (trivially, a cow is a cow and the other three choices are non-cows), but I would say that if you truly can't come up with the answer to that question that they "want" (barring any possible cultural reasons for not being able to do so), your intuition for pattern recognition could probably use some work.
This is not to defend IQ tests in general; I'm only arguing that ambiguous questions may measure something meaningful about your ability to learn or process information.