derstander

>> The rankings themselves are based on expert perceptions

> No, they aren't.

I literally pulled those quotes from the Transparency Institute’s page on the corruption index…

So yes, they are.

But I got hung up on your wording. Check out the Transparency Institute’s rankings. Notwithstanding what I said about the softness of the ranking systems, the Nordic countries rank fairly well as being uncorrupt so it is not immediately obvious that the Randian / Libertarian model is being held up as more virtuous.

I always see this line trotted out and I always wondered how corruption is quantified. And luckily your link points to the source in a snippet in an otherwise human interest story about a mismanaged Ukrainian hospital: Transparency International’s “Corruption Perceptions Index”.

That said, I don’t think either the link or TI’s index support the claim that Ukraine was “the most corrupt country in Europe before the current situation”.

First, regarding the corruption index — “each country’s score is a combination of at least 3 data sources data sources drawn from 13 different corruption surveys and assessments”. And “the sources and surveys which make up the CPI are based on carefully designed and calibrated questionnaires, answered by experts and businesspeople”. So fundamentally perceptions (as per the title) instead of hard data — and probably different sources across different countries calibrated in some way (it might be sourced somewhere but one only has so much time).

Second, and I think more damning to the statement about Ukraine being the most corrupt in Europe prior to the current events by the referenced corruption index itself. Russia and Ukraine trade places on which is perceived to be more corrupt up until 2017 when Ukraine is clearly less corrupt than Russia. I spent my lunch graphing the data and only feel like it was mostly a waste of my time.

My bottom line based on the data: Russia and Ukraine were roughly the same amount of corrupt until 2017 when Russia distances itself as clearly more corrupt. The rankings themselves are based on expert perceptions rather than hard data. The statement about Ukraine being the most corrupt state in Europe before the current events is only true if you consider Ukraine in Europe and Russia not. Which one could certainly do but considered their shared past during the USSR seems a fundamentally flawed way of treating them.

You've covered the FFRDCs well, but another potential avenue of interest are the University Affiliated Research Centers (UARCs) -- APL is actually one of these as opposed to an FFRDC. Another well-known UARC is GTRI. It is my understanding that UARCs are more flexible in how they can compete for contracts. FFRDCs are prevented from competing against private industry and the amount of work they have is directly controlled by congress through allocation of an annual ceiling of staff years of technical effort (STE) [0].

[0] https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-22-105278.pdf

Notwithstanding both degree inflation and the notion that "the exception proves the rule" -- a system that would rule out someone like Freeman Dyson would seem flawed.

> OP is talking about a full grown adult. Not a child.

This is an interesting tangent to me. What makes a full grown adult? Is it being able to drive a car? Being able to serve in the military? Being able to drink? Vote? In the state where I grew up, these were all different ages.

And then there’s the scientific notion of when the brain is “finished” developing and maturing in the mid- to late-20s.

That’s a great heads up, thanks. I did a little additional digging re: what is and is not included and this [0] is the best that I could come up with. It’s a bummer but if one were thinking of signing up for Coursera Plus, one would probably want to list all of the courses of interest for a year and check them to see if they’re included.

[0] https://www.coursera.support/s/article/360036151932-Courses-...

Coursera has an offering, Coursera Plus, that costs $399/year. If I understand correctly, it gives you access to the various certificates and graded projects that you often don't get with the free tier of some courses. I have considered subscribing to it in the past but have not. If I were given an education allowance e.g. by work, I would probably do so.

Garrity’s “All the Mathematics You Missed: But Need to Know for Graduate School” may be of interest. It’s not comprehensive but it does touch on the main ideas that one should know for each topic. It also points out relevant books for each topic, which I found useful.

The linked article mentions a BU response via email. There’s also one via the web [0]. The preprint is way outside of my field of expertise so I can’t confidently evaluate the news stories against the preprint. But if journalists misinterpreted scientific research it would certainly not be the first time.

[0] https://www.bu.edu/articles/2022/neidl-researchers-refute-uk...

I don’t have the necessary expertise to evaluate the preprint. But here’s a response by BU about what they consider to be a mischaracterization of the research.

https://www.bu.edu/articles/2022/neidl-researchers-refute-uk...

> But it doesn’t actually demonstrate that his anecdote is fabricated. How does this portion of the article make it past the editor? It’s entirely possible that his story is completely made up. It is also possible that it’s not made up.

It seems to me that, if such a claim is made, that it’s much easier for the people making the claim to back up their claim with evidence. In this case, if one is claiming that a school is putting in litter boxes for children who identify as cats, then provide evidence. For example: what school, specifically? Sorry, saying a “friend’s wife” is insufficient.

How would you even demonstrate that the anecdote is fabricated? Isn’t that like proving a negative? Wouldn’t one, for example, need to do an exhaustive search of every school to disprove it? Or, identify all of Joe Rogan’s friends who are married with wives working in schools and contact those schools.

I’m somewhat partial to the line of thinking wherein if you make a claim (particularly one that’s unexpected), that it’s your responsibility for providing evidence to support your claim.

It is envisioned that this will replace HDF5, at least for astronomy — based on this 2015 paper.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221313371...

I’ve used HDF5 before but not ASDF so I can’t fully evaluate their points one way or the other.

I’m surprised the article doesn’t mention Zimmer’s “Parasite Rex”, a book released a bit ago that was nightmare fuel for me when I read it.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasite_Rex

I wonder if the difference in results between the IEEE and Stackoverflow surveys might be due primarily to the different demographics.

You would expect working electrical engineers to more heavily favor languages like MATLAB or R, which shows in the IEEE rankings. But that doesn’t explain Julia being more popular in Stackoverflow, though — unless some working engineers still consider it too experimental for production use?

> for an early NES game

My minor quibble is that I don't consider Crystalis to be an early NES game. We're talking about an early 1990 Japanese release for Crystalis; the Super Famicom came out in Japan in late 1990.

That's 4 years after Legend of Zelda was released in Japan (1986). A lot can change in 4 years -- especially back then! Though to be fair, I don't really think of Legend of Zelda as an early NES release either. I usually reserve that definition for things like Donkey Kong or the original (pre-Super) Mario Bros.

But I agree otherwise: I thought Crystalis was fantastic -- especially for its time!

> - Slack lets people subdivide the chat space into "virtual rooms" or "channels" as a 1st-class concept.

In my opinion this is very much a double-edged sword. At my organization we have one person (maybe self-appointed) who, when seeing a question asked on a more general channel, invariably responds with something along the lines of “have you checked #super-niche-channel-probably-only-useful-in-this-exact-case?” When I see one of those questions pop up, I usually try to guess the particular sub channel that he’ll try to redirect the asker to but am rarely successful.

But my org may just be using slack wrong. We do have thousands of channels and the same order of magnitude employees. Maybe guidelines about the granularity of channels would be helpful.

Or maybe Slack is just not for me: e-mail is my preferred method for asynchronous comms and I prefer phone calls for synchronous comms because I think the slight friction in having to pick up a phone to make a call helps limit throughout and improves quality of requests. And for info repositories I prefer a curated wiki page to discussion threads for both search and comprehension.

I think the dressing nicely implies that they’ve had a job interview somewhere else.

I usually only dress formally when I’m presenting outside of my company and people usually joke about my having interviewed somewhere else that day.

I have a little web app that holds user-defined labels and text snippets. You can associate a variable amount of labels with a snippet. So I would put e.g. the name of the restaurant along with maybe who recommended it and add a couple tags like “to check out” and “restaurants”.

It was fairly easy to put together and I can access it from whatever computer or smart phone I’m using at any given time.

One potentially useful search term is “cozy games”. Alternatively, “wholesome games”. [0][1]

With that said, this thread has been a treasure trove for me because my friend group often defaults to co-op FPS games so it’ll be nice to have some alternatives to mix things up a bit.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedesign/comments/tmlmp8/what_are... [1] https://store.steampowered.com/curator/35411526-Wholesome-Ga...

I think Milo Aukerman (of Descendents fame) earned his PhD before Greg Graffin. And before Milo, Gregg Turner (of the Angry Samoans). Though certainly Bad Religion are more well-known.

The article does mention each of them in varying level of detail.

The Harvard Book Store (the independent one, not the Coop) has just such a machine! Though I haven’t used it.

https://www.harvard.com/clubs_services/books_on_demand/

> The number of powerful people (including people who would normally give lip service to free markets) who, when confronted by this consensus among economists, basically don't give a shit is... disheartening.

Domain experts reach consensus and their recommendations aren’t followed in a lot of disciplines. I agree in this case it makes economic sense to stop farm subsidies — which could result in lower domestic food production and greater imports from abroad. And when the world economy is humming along smoothly that’s great. But if there’s a hiccup in the world economy —- e.g., in the case of war in a place where it makes economic sense to grow a lot of wheat or a problem in the logistics network shuttling things from where they’re produced to where they’re consumed then it’s not as clear-cut.

My naive view of politics, when they’re running well, is to navigate conflicting priorities from groups, including domain experts, the populace, etc.

And I think the farm subsidies could be interpreted to involve national security concerns on top of then economic concerns. If a world war breaks out and we’re on the opposite side from places we normally source our food then they have leverage over us.

TL/DR I think there’s more at play than just the economic concern.

Residents of MA and NY: you are eligible for Boston Public Library and New York Public Library cards, respectively. Even though you may not be anywhere near a branch location, they have an excellent selection of ebooks.

Other states may be similar but I am familiar with MA and NY due to friends and family.

Not quite as unrestricted as every teen in America, but still a useful perk (or taxpayer benefit) for MA and NY residents that they may not be aware of.

“Disney World straddles two counties, Orange and Osceola, which would be required under state law to step in and provide a version of the services currently handled by Reedy Creek, almost certainly leading to increased taxes for their residents. Orange County’s tax collector, Scott Randolph, has estimated that residents would see property taxes climb as much as 20 percent. Reedy Creek has an annual budget of $355 million, according to public records. It carries $977 million in debt, which would also be transferred to the counties.”

Seems like a Pyrrhic victory for DeSantis and crew.

I certainly don’t think so — at least not for me. Anything with a voice (even in a language that I don’t understand) seems to chip away at my concentration.

Tangent: this thought experiment reminds me a bit of Dennett’s “Where Am I?”.

https://www.lehigh.edu/~mhb0/Dennett-WhereAmI.pdf

I’m not a great talker; I try to show my gratitude by bringing in snacks. I especially try to remember birthdays (if they’ve mentioned them) and either make or bring in something special that they enjoy.

If it’s just you developing, you could use whatever version control system you’re comfortable with and when you commit files have them automatically saved to an internal website that your colleagues know the location of.

If you don’t already know a version control system I would just bite the bullet and learn git. Nowadays it seems to be the most popular so odds are people you collaborate with in the future will use it.

You mention that the code is constantly updated and must be shared with colleagues.

Are you the only person modifying the code? Or do your colleagues modify it, too?

If the latter, distributed version control is why git was created.

Git isn’t the only way — certainly distributed projects existed before it. But you’re going to need to use version control and I don’t think you’re going to have an easier time convincing or teaching hesitant colleagues mercurial or svn instead.

For reference, I am also a (non-software) engineer working with code. We have an internal GitLab instance. There were definitely growing pains getting folks to use it. But it’s certainly been better than asking Joe for his version of this code and Bill for his version of that code and getting them to play nicely together. It helps to have your leadership on board. So a department chair in your case, perhaps?

> (Welcome to the plague so severe most halfway healthy adults don’t even know they’ve had it.)

That line could have just as easily been written about polio. [1] It’ll be interesting for historians to compare and contrast US reaction to the two in a few decades.

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/polio/what-is-polio/index.htm