Came here to reference Deming myself. One thing I've noticed in Deming's work (especially 14 points, sicknesses) is that by contextualizing and properly understanding the use of statistics he humanizes people in an organization. We must look at metrics/statistics correctly, in a way that humanizes and enriches people, not in a way that turns them into numbers in a spreadsheet.
I agree that many of your points present legitimate difficulties with the use of public transit in the US as it currently exists. However, I think that the first two points are just as true for ride share as they are for public transit. Ride share also has crime (see sexual assault scandals https://money.cnn.com/2018/04/30/technology/uber-driver-sexu...) and ride sharing (particularly pool-style) also "forces you too come into contact with people you would not normally choose to associate with"; some people (including myself) see this as a benefit of public/shared transit, not a drawback.
Part of the problem is that public transit scales differently from ride share. The more riders public transit has, the better it gets. The more riders ride share has (beyond a certain point) the worse it gets.
"Assault and related offenses were also frequent, with 1,243 reports within the subway in 2017, as was harassment, which accounted for 1,003 crimes."
Data for assaults against passengers in ride hailing (taxi/uber/lyft) services seems hard to come by, but there were 103 reported incidents of rape nationwide in ubers from the years 2014-2018.
Am I the only one who thinks standing for shorter flights of < 3 hours would be healthier and more comfortable? I work regularly at a standing desk, sitting for too long makes me feel lethargic and often causes headaches for me (it's much easier to have good posture, neck and back alignment when standing). For longer flights, people need a seat, but for shorter flights I would gladly pay the same price to be able to stand instead.
I haven't read all the comments in this thread, but I'm surprised at the outrage over a one-nickel tax. This seems like a fairly simple, straightforward rule. Is anyone going to decide not to Lyft/Uber over 5 cents? I don't think so.
Let's also not forget that these ride hailing services are MASSIVELY subsidizing the cost of rides in order to attract drivers/users. That hurts business for taxis. In my mind, this is a sort of protection that ensures taxis stay in business as another, publicly regulated option. What happens in other areas of Uber/Lyft kill all the taxis and then decide doing business isn't profitable and leave (or all their drivers leave I've subsidies end)? This might seem like a farfetched scenario, but remember that Uber is still sitting in a large cash reserves. What will change when they need to turn a profit every quarter? If they have established a monopoly (even locally), they can charge users as much as they want. If they've established a monopsony on drivers, they can lower wages. In my opinion, subsidizing a long-standing industry from a monopolistic competitor with gobs of money to throw at the market looks like a good move.
It's relevant for at least two reasons, in my opinion. The first is that video games, like novels, are stories told through the the protagonist/s. If this character is always male, you miss out on a whole class of stories which are women's stories. Just as literature rarely told women's stories upon a time, video games up to the present time rarely tell women's stories.
The second reason is that having a female protagonist changes the entire meaning of the story. Consider Pierre Menard, author of Quixote (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Menard,_Author_of_the...), which discusses how the particular context of the author effects the meaning of the work.
> 60% of girls but only 39% of boys preferred to play a character of their own gender, and 28% of girls as opposed to 20% of boys said that they were more likely to play a game based on the character's gender.
So it may not matter to some people, but it matters greatly to others.
Agreed, but it also kind of assumes stories are actually important and integral to the video game. Most stories in the current dominant video games follow the John Carmack mantra of "Story in a game is like a story in a porn movie. It's expected to be there, but it's not that important."
To go deeper into the problems of story telling in games, see Jonathan Blow's Conflicts in Game Design Talk.
But as for actual story telling games with female protagonists, go back to King's Quest IV: The Perils of Rosella. Designer Roberta Williams said a lot of interesting things about it, like how it was more uncomfortable designing deaths for her, and how she was worried there would be a fan backlash to playing a female character (but never happened).
Hell, since I mentioned both Jonathan Blow and King's Quest, somebody just did a big ass Sierra retrospective applying Blow's talk to Sierra games, examining both why Sierra was able to successfully do story telling games for 20 years and how they differ from modern adventure games. Highly recommended.
The question that needs to be asked here is how to get all installers using MSI. MSI is a secure, declarative format which runs off MS code in known directory. Because it's declarative, it can also be queried and tracked. I recently packaged an installer using it and it worked really well. WiX has terrific documentation and it was straightforward.
If this can be made practical at any scale, I think the most exciting applications will be in long-range space drives. Although it sounds as though immense amounts of energy are needed, not needing to take along matter to eject in order to move is a game changer for space exploration.
No, for the same reason that burning fuel in a cylinder to turn a crankshaft is more efficient than using fuel to make fertilizer to grow feed to feed horses to pull your cart.
It's ironic that an article about the awfulness of js on the modern web is rendered unreadable by javascript and/or flash: http://imgur.com/8Iikyd7. The page literally crashed my browser on first view.
The difference between what happens when I turn off all my blockers(http://imgur.com/yNnP3km) and when I just turn off JS(http://imgur.com/cPSi5qq) is pretty dramatic. It looks like most of the load is advertising according to Disconnect.
How much of this could be avoided if the application didn't use mongo? Needing to run a three-nice cluster out of the gate seems like a big part of the problem. Sure, you want backups and redundancy for any database, but there are situations where a MySQL or pg slave that can be switched on makes more sense financially, especially if load doesn't require a three-node cluster.
I wonder if anyone has run the data using body fat percentage instead of BMI. BMI is a very coarse metric that will sometimes label short and/or muscular people as overweight/obese when they are quite healthy (think football players or weight lifters).
BMI seems to only be a useful metric if you're interested in estimating the general health of, say, the entire human population of the state of Wisconsin.
For assessing individuals (or even small groups), I can't imagine it being very helpful.
I came to post more or less this exact same comment. BMI does not take muscle mass into account at all. The Rock has a BMI of 31 (260lbs at 6'5") which is classified as obese. Hafþór Björnsson has a BMI of 41 (419lb at 6'9").
I agree with some of the other commenters too in that a full nutritional/lifestyle analysis over a long period of time is next to impossible because it relies on self-reporting which is known to be flawed [1][2]. People under-report their intake and overreport their exercise frequency and duration.
Uf you don't fit into any of the categories of people that would normally measure their own Body fat percentages (athlete of some description, normally), your BMI is probably a good estimate of your "shape". Sure it's not perfect, but it's a perfectly good estimate for a large number of people.
I wouldn't call it perfectly good. It assumes that weight should increase as the square of height when really you should be using something like the 2.6th power. That means that taller people will have a systematically higher BMI than they ought to which can be misleading when populations get taller due to better nutrition, say.
Speaking as someone who is a tad over 6ft tall, and not a body builder, it fits me quite well. My bmi when I started paying attention was roughly 26, which I was shocked at, and I got defensive about very quickly saying "it's incorrect for tall people" but the fact of the matter was I was about 20 pounds (10kg) overweight. It also quite well describes my partner, who is about 5ft5-6
That there are people like The Rock, Hafþór Björnsson who have a high BMI but are otherwise healthy* does not take anything away from the fact that a high BMI is a pretty good indicator that you're overweight or obese. It's an imperfect measure but realistically if you're at those Obese or above levels you're either overweight and you know it, or an outlier and you know it.
* = I suspect that a good number of guys like this are taking substances that would damage them in other ways that could lead you to describe them as unhealthy, but as another commenter said that's maybe not for BMI to measure.
Yes. As are you. Put it this way, BMI is used to calculate that 35% of people in the USA are obese and 34% are overweight. Is that because there are lots of people who are borderline ripped and BMI is flawed, or is it because there are lots of overweight people? Which do you see more of when you walk down your average street. If it's the former then I will concede that I am incorrect and that you're statistically normal, but we both know it's the latter and it's to your credit that you're likely to be very healthy.
Note: I'm making an assumption you're in a western country like the USA or the UK
> The Rock has a BMI of 31 (260lbs at 6'5") which is classified as obese
Why shouldn't he be classified as obese? If he was that heavy because he was working out then that would be one thing, but the reason he's that heavy is due to using steroids to put on low quality muscle mass. I don't see why that would be any less unhealthy than just sitting around eating doughnuts or whatever.
If it were as unhealthy as eating donuts (which you would need to prove), it would most likely be unhealthy by a different mechanism. So it would make sense to distinguish this if you want to find out what causes illnesses.
I also don't understand what you mean by "low quality muscle mass".
> I also don't understand what you mean by "low quality muscle mass".
Muscle with a low weight to power ratio, and/or with an unfavorable type I to type IIa/b ratio. E.g. you can quickly bulk up by lifting 3 x 3 at a high weight (or whatever Starting Strength recommends), but you're going to develop much lower quality muscle than if you just do 6 x 10 or whatever in terms of power. And similarly if you're not doing cardio in at least 90 minute increments then on a regular basis then your type II muscles aren't going to be able to properly utilize fat, because they'll never get past the point of just relying on stored glycogen or whatever.
Would you mind explaining "low quality muscle mass"? That doesn't seem like a real thing. Do you know how steroids typically work? They allow you to work out more and recover quicker. You're putting on "real" muscle, just faster than you could un-aided.
> They allow you to work out more and recover quicker.
They also act as anabolics, so you could argue that the muscle mass gained due to their anabolic effect is "low quality" (that's not what I'm doing, though).
