This was a fun little project I did last weekend to familiarize myself with Google App Engine and jQuery.
1,373 karma · joined March 29, 2008
If marijuana were legal I might use it. Conversely, I don't think I know anyone who uses marijuana/heroin but would stop using it if it were legal.
I haven't seen the evidence either way; I just made the point in my original post as something to consider.
Source: http://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/healt...
For perspective: http://www.meh.ro/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/meh.ro5415.jpg
The chart with the ranking is on the 4th page.
I can't find the most recent Lancet article mentioned in the article.
My concern with these rankings is that they don't seem to control for the number of people using the drug. Alcohol kills more people and has higher social costs largely because it's used by more people. However, for an individual user, crack or heroin is far more harmful than alcohol. So saying "alcohol is more harmful than heroin" might confuse some people. Also, if those drugs were legalized, their use might go up, thereby moving them higher up according to Nutt's rubric.
I would like to see a ranking that compares the damage these drugs do to an individual person. For instance, is it worse for your health to get intoxicated on a weekly basis with alcohol, or marijuana?
Twitter's beauty resides in its 140-char limit: authors of Tweets don't feel burdened to write long messages, and readers know the messages will always be short and sweet. Sure, authors can circumvent this limit by linking to blog posts, but followers hate clicking on links so there's a disincentive to do so.
With these new changes, Twitter is making it easier for readers to visit linked content, but they're also making it easier for Tweet authors to be more verbose. Before, I had to painstakingly craft my 140-char message; but now if I'm having trouble doing that, I can just use the Tweet as a title and write my full message in an embedded text box. But isn't this just reinventing the blog?
My assumptions: (1) It's graded on a simple "percentage right" basis, so 24/40 questions necessary right to pass, (2) 4 options for each question
Her score on an individual test is a random variable X following a binomial distribution with 40 trials and chance of 0.25 for each trial. Her chance of passing by guessing randomly, P(X >= 24), is an infinitesimally small 2.826E-6.
The probability that she fails all of the 960 tests, assuming independence of tests, is (1-p)^960. So the probability that she will pass at least one test is:
1 - (1 - p)^960
However, under the above assumptions, she could practically guarantee her success by combining this guessing strategy with a simple test-taking strategy like eliminating 1 or 2 obviously wrong answers per question, or just remembering the answers to several of the same questions that are probably being recycled from test to test.
The job of a responsible economist is to look at how the implications of a change are distributed across everyone in the population, over the long run. This change would hurt those rural folks visibly, but as outlined in the article, many more people would benefit, often in less directly visible ways.
Currently, those people's parking fees are coming out of someone else's wallet. Make the drivers pay the cost and externalities of their own decisions. If the market determines that these people are producing economic value, then they will be ok. (Maybe their employer will recognize that the employee needs a parking spot and subsidize it.) If not, then sooner or later people need to figure out a way of living that is economically sustainable.
Most common tricks used in "The Real Hustle":
1. Fake an appearance of authority (wear a uniform, get a sign, etc.)
2. Get a shill/accomplice.
3. Get people to make exceptions to routine security measures based on extenuating circumstances.
4. Get people distracted or nervous
5. Use social conditioning to prevent people from speaking out (e.g. taboos against making a scene in public)
6. Appear to concede something of your own (give someone fake collateral)
7. Give the mark a motive to be surreptitious (e.g. get the mark to commit a crime)
8. Make people think there's an information asymmetry to their advantage (e.g. pretend not to know how much Euros are worth, thus making the person think they're ripping YOU off)
9. Put the mark under time pressure.
10. Use easily obtainable information for authentication. (e.g. eavesdrop on the person)
11. Do a verification of authenticity, but then cause an interruption that lets you swap back to counterfeit. (e.g. show someone the laptop you're selling them, but at the last moment swap it out of the bag for a block of wood)
12. Cause a plausible emergency situation that voids the usual authentication mechanisms. For example, put an "out of order" sign on a bank deposit box and stand to collect people's money.
13. Fake credible signals. For example, people are willing to believe what they overhear while eavesdropping on you, since they don't realize they've been set up, and therefore don't think you have any reason to be dishonest.
14. To increase trust, give the mark a token sign that you're following security guidelines: "sorry, I'm not allowed to accept money from you. Please call this number instead."
15. Make an offer you know they'll refuse, but that enhances your credibility nonetheless. (e.g. offer to authenticate yourself in a way that would inconvenience them, such as having them call a number and wait on the line.)
16. Stores/restaurants don't let you leave without paying, but they're more comfortable if someone in your party sticks around. Befriend an innocent bystander and make them complicit by giving the business the impression that you know the person.
Protecting against scams:
1. Always keep your valuables in a hard-to-reach location
2. Require credible authentication! If someone calls, ask for a number to call them back.
3. If you can't get credible authentication, take a picture. Get the conman's identity. They should be happy to give you more info. Or put them in a surprise situation that will throw their scam off guard.
4. For a game or proposition bet: ask "Is there a trick?"
5. If an out-of-the-ordinary event happens and you get your attention drawn to something, keep in mind that it could be a scam.
6. Bargains rarely come looking for you, unless there's a catch.
7. Remember: Situations that look like coincidences are easy for conmen to set up!!!
`this too`
code
d should not be code
Most information workers are not developers and have never heard of the above technology. Keep in mind that developers are more receptive to change than most computer workers, which is part of the reason MSFT evolves dev technology more rapidly.
They already do relearn lots of stuff.
Switching to the new version of Windows/Office is not the same as switching to Linux/OpenOffice. To keep things in perspective, the switch to the Ribbon was the biggest change to Office in many releases. Most releases (e.g. Office 2010) require little relearning.
And if you have a developer who is not willing to learn, fire him.
Long term productivity hit meaning these workers cannot learn new things?
It isn't black and white like that. This isn't about not being willing to learn or not being able to learn new things. Many computer workers -- lawyers, managers, schoolteachers, administrative assistants, my parents -- hate having to learn new technology. They'll learn eventually, but it might be slow and costly, and might not result in any productivity boost in the end.
Come on...How many people within Microsoft really stress Words feature-set? 1%? The average "information worker" would be perfectly fine with WordStar and Visicalc.
It's not about feature set. It's about familiarity, muscle memory, ease of use, efficiency, stability, performance, interoperability, accessibility, backwards compatibility, ubiquity (Office is installed on most PCs), documentation, supportability, and visual polish.
Alternate response: why are so few organizations switching to WordStar & Visicalc?
Beware: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protectionism
In my mind, the two most important things to consider are:
1) How will worker productivity be affected by the transition? Retraining and relearning can be extremely expensive, especially for information workers who are set in their ways. Not to mention the cost of migrating all a company's documents, scripts, programs, assets, etc. over to the new formats.
2) How is worker productivity affected in the long run? OpenOffice is still far behind Office in usability for the average information worker. The savings in license costs is probably outweighed by the long-term productivity hit.
In the grand scheme of things, software is pretty cheap. Wasted man-hours are very expensive. I haven't seen evidence that these transitions to open source actually save money.
Perhaps the "4" confuses Google.
See this example: http://i.imgur.com/ADXtF.png
The research was done by Pawan Sinha at MIT.
It's a Python scraping framework based on Twisted. It lets you use some of Mechanize's API to describe the scraping jobs.