Yep the article title is NOT 100% clear for those who have not worked with stochastics before. They mean that while the world is stochastic (randomly distributed) we think of it deterministically. In their example of pharmaceutical trials, the FDA requires a "hard" (deterministic) answer, while even the most thorough results remain stochastic (i.e. some distribution).
The purpose of university is to weed out the mentally weak and the incompetent. I don't grasp how they kick this kid out of school but provide lighter course loads to problem students. Should it not be the other way around, help the suicidal and remove the loafers?
"The purpose of university is to weed out the mentally weak and the incompetent." What universe do you live in? The purpose of universities is to educate the populace and to improve all aspects of society by providing an environment for academics to pool their collective talents for research while educating future generations of professionals.
I actually really like the concept of relating your happiness in a binary fashion on a day to day basis relative to the previous day. With each previous day forming a control the results can be dynamic and very in a range far greater than 1 to 10.
I think you could take this further. There are multiple components to happiness that could generally be viewed as on or off.
Are you feeling energized or tired?
Do you feel like you are doing something useful with your life?
Are you achieving your goals?
Do people appreciate you for who you are?
Do you have enough time in the day to do what you need?
Are you angry with anyone close to you?
etc...
The system could then total up your responses to come up with the final score for the day.
Taking things further, the system can then analyze your results over time. Say once a month or so you do a deeper analysis. If you rarely feel energized, it could perhaps drill down into this further with questions about your diet, sleep patterns etc... Once it has worked out that you are not getting enough sleep it could make recommendations to boost this area and then track it's effectiveness.
Now of course to do all this would require some experts to work out what components make up happiness and create the questions. Alternatively this could be crowd sourced. If everyone entered what they felt made them happy, this could then be kept in a database. The various components could be sent at random to each user to answer and the effectiveness tracked. Various machine learning algorithms could then be used to tailor each component to the individual to come up with their personalized happiness plan.
Those extra features might be enough to satisfy Apple..
I agree. When you have to rate something from 1-10, the results will probably be skewed. Better/Worse than yesterday makes it extremely easy to get a "real" value.
