NFC can be used for more things than just payments. You could get your monthly bus card sent to your phone instead of needing to carry a separate card. When entering the subway/bus/traingates, put your phone near the reader.
Since it works offline, it can also be of value to businesses. For instance, if you have a secure service station, you could send the rights to open the door lock to a technicians phone over the air, and set the credentials to be valid for a limited time (say a day).
No, but a lot of things with regards to our current expected behaviour of genders is in fact social, not biological. A lot of 18th century male behaviour would today be regarded as effeminate. Red was once the color of choice for baby boys, and blue for girls.
>Artificially boosting the career success of women just causes misery on the long run for men
Hang on, did anyone propose affirmative action here or something? All the blog talked about was trying to praise girls for their smarts rather than their looks. If this is enough to cause misery for you, I think you have self-esteem issues. (Edit: Oops, that was needlessly confrontational and personal. Apologies for last sentence.)
>I thought that the girl in your story was very smart, and even if people had treated her like a pretty doll for her entire life she would still be the same. Intelligent, critical and capable.
Perhaps, but as mentioned in the article, some girls as young as 5 think they are "too fat" and try to go on a diet. It is clearly an issue for some.
Hang on, did anyone propose affirmative action here or something? All the blog talked about was trying to praise girls for their smarts rather than their looks. If this is enough to cause misery for you, I think you have self-esteem issues.
Sorry the blog talked silently about a lot of things, which squarely put the blame on people for a lot of mistakes which girls make personally.
I appreciate my nephew all the time when he wins a running race or plays cricket well. But that is never taken as something that can be used to be bad at academics nor does not speaking about he being good at studies permanently deter him from being good at studies.
If girls aren't good looking, how does that stop them from picking up a book and studying hard for an entrance exam. Or burning the midnight oil meeting a tough deadline? None of that has anything to do with beauty. That's something which has to come from within. Willingness to work hard and go to tough times is what brings success and that is irrespective of gender.
Somehow I find it difficult to accept that argument that saying somebody that they look good suddenly becomes the reason to be never good at anything else ever after.
It's not about the attribute itself, but affirmation along that attribute.
It's the same conundrum facing parents of gifted kids, praising innate ability vs. hard work backfires in a spectacular way sooner or later and the child stops taking risks because they are afraid of being dumb.
>Hang on, did anyone propose affirmative action here or something? All the blog talked about was trying to praise girls for their smarts rather than their looks. If this is enough to cause misery for you, I think you have self-esteem issues.
As the pool of eligible husbands diminishes, the pool of men who simply can't get a wife grows and the disparity between the lucky and unlucky men increases. I'm sure you can see how this can generate social friction inside a nation?
I'm not making a moral statement either way here, just observing some forces that I believe do affect our lives.
Wait, are you saying that we need to encourage women to be less capable because the career market is zero sum, and men need careers more than women?
I'm very open to the idea that I misunderstood your statement, but if I have characterized it correctly, then the flaw in it is that careers are not zero sum, and having additional capable, productive people in a society creates more wealth for the society as a whole than would otherwise have existed. This creates more opportunities for men as well as women.
I certainly believe that marriages can be more harmonious when the men is in a economically leading role. Do I believe that women should suppressed in order to achieve this? No. Do I believe that if a woman wants a successful marriage, pursuing a high-status career can be harmful to this? Yes.
So in a gay or lesbian marriage, which partner should voluntarily subordinate themselves to the other?
Which I guess is my way of saying that any particular marriage happens between two individuals with their own strengths, weakenesses, and interests, not between two archtypes or statistical distributions. A successful marriage is only possible between two happy partners, and if a person will be unhappy without pursuing their other life goals along with their marriage, giving those life goals up for the sake of the marriage is still a losing strategy.
Personally, I think overgeneralization from the statistical majority is one of the signal problems of trying to talk about gender rules and guidelines -- though, admittedly, the opposite problem is nearly as common, which is refusing to acknowledge that there are such things as common tendencies and statistical majorities.
It's a blog post, not a research paper. If course it will use anecdotes. Do you have any counter examples to show an exceptional bias in their "hand-picking"?
> Yet when talking to boys, people generally don't say - "Oh, what a handsome boy you are, and how nicely you dress!"
I agree it's not symmetrical, but I do hear this kind of thing directed at male children pretty frequently, especially in the relatives/family-friends type setting. "Oh what a handsome young man you have!" isn't uncommon at all. Though I do tend to associate it with older women, for some reason; at least as a young lad myself, I think it's a comment I heard mostly from older aunts.
Boys generally only hear that sort of statement from family members at family gatherings.
Young girls hear how pretty their dress or hair or smile is from just about anyone upon introduction. They are put into ballet classes where they learn to act pretty, into girl scouts where they do traditional arts and crafts rather than the camping and leadership that boy scouts focuses on, and are given play makeup until around ten or so when they are encouraged to learn how to put real makeup on. Many young girls know what dieting is, and start doing so in intermediate school- before they have even stopped growing. Young girls are supposed to behave appropriately as such, while loud, rude, and overly rambunctious behavior from boys are tolerated as "boys will be boys". All of this is anecdotal from my own experiences, but I believe to be true in many areas of the US.
The extent to which young girls are raised to be pretty is on a completely different level of young boys.
It is at a different level, but only because it's simply more practical in society for a girl to be pretty than it is for a boy.
You'd have to make everyone ignore beauty to disincentivize being pretty for girls and that is going to be pretty impossible.
As more girls start to realize their independence from men (because of education now opened up fully for women) the emphasis on beauty will naturally start eroding away as they realize they can do other things to support themselves and get what they want in life.
I'm in my late 20s and still get that if I visit relatives with my parents! But Greek relatives seem to consider any unmarried children to be kids, regardless of age.
Ditto in my culture. Talking about how handsome you are (you share my genes, how can you not be handsome?) and how surprising it is that you haven't found a wife yet continues long into your 20s.
To be honest, I think this whole debate is a generalization based on a post-victorian western culture where all the frivolities concerning male appearance have died. Previously, men--at least the aristocratic sort--used to wear make up, tights, wigs and high heels all at once but now only women do.
I'm sure if it were a little boy in pajamas the author would have had the same urge to say how cute he was.
> Again, something we only do for girls.
It's not as if all men let themselves go. It takes work, even for a man, to not become fat, smelly, and overly hairy.
I think the underlying cause for women to focus too much on appearances is because it is much easier for women, in current society, to marry into wealth and/or depend on a man. I think this has a much larger influence on women focusing more on their appearances than behavioral conditioning through constant complimenting.
The compliment is a signal. If the person is pretty and you say that, then it's a proper signal. If you tell a child they are smart because they did some random thing, it's not necessarily a proper signal. Sending a wrong signal is bad. In the case of telling a child s/he's smart when s/he's not, the child may not try as hard anymore because s/he may wrongfully think s/he's smart enough already... In the case of telling someone s/he's pretty, as long as it's true, there's nothing wrong with it because being pretty can actually have practical advantages. It is then up to the person to choose whether to leverage his/her physical assets or his/her mental assets to get what s/he wants in life.
Yes, Even I don't understand how giving a good complement can do any harm and that too to an extent this article points. In fact the opposite is true, if you call a kid stupid or ugly it can be him/her very discouraging.
Also the point on women seeking beauty to ensure the get the alpha male from the pack is very true.
>"So, when Clojure calls a function, it either
already has the instance in its entirety (a lambda) or it finds it by dereferencing a binding. Since all functions are instances that implement IFn, the implementation can then call invokeinterface, which is very efficient. "
Perhaps, but from my understanding with InvokeDynamic, for a function that ends up with for instance adding two numbers, we can guarantee the types even though the code is dynamic. This means the JVM can perform optimizations like inlining. This invokeinterface call could then be replaced with an "iadd" bytecode at the call site, which in turn can get JITed, and so on.
I'd like to know more about this. My understanding is that every method in Clojure has this sort of signature: Object F(Object, Object,.. Object)
So Add looks like this: Object Add(Object, Object)
Now if Clojure recognizes that this is often called with longs, then it would make sense to produce what is C++ would be a template specialization: long Add(long, long). As you pointed out, that could then be inlined.
As long as we can specialize all the way up the call chain, we don't need any JVM magic. But that would be a lucky case, and I believe invokedynamic can help with our problem case: an argument-dependent transition from non-specialized code to specialized code. i.e., call Add(long, long) iff both args are Longs, otherwise call Add(Object, Object).
So, Clojure would profit from invokedynamic if it (transparently) introduced specialized methods for optimization. Of course, this is not exactly a trivial optimization to implement - it may be that the most practical way to implement it is to look at the runtime behaviour (sort of like what the JIT compiler does). Ideally the JVM would be able to do all this magic specialization for us (given the parallels to JIT compilation), but I doubt that it can do that at present.
Anyone know if I'm off the mark here, or whether Clojure would benefit if it did what I've termed "specialization"?
>if [a JVM thread] reads a field of an object, and another thread writes to the same field of the same object, then the program will see either the old value, or the new value, but not something else entirely
Nitpick: unless the field in questions is a "long" or "double". In those cases the operation becomes two bytecodes and you can in fact see something else entirely if you are unlucky. At least it used to be like that.
An interesting read is "Remembering Satan", about a small community torn apart by accusations of sexual abuse and satanic rituals. Many people confessed, some were convicted, no evidence was ever produced.
Wow, very creepy stories that both of you posted. Thanks for linking to them.
> They are lucky because their case has a high-profile because of the film - but there must be many, many other innocent people in prisons because of false confessions.
This is exactly what concerns me–so much effort and attention went into these few cases that achieved a high profile, but I'm certain that many just like it–with inconclusive or completely unmatched DNA and police hasty to close an investigation–exist, and it worries and saddens me to think how many other people are innocently sitting in prison or on death row as a result.
On one hand, other Android based phone manufacturers are clearly going to face an uphill struggle if Google are going to release new versions of the OS on their own devices first.
On the other hand, it will hopefully provide some protection against being sued by Apple+Microsoft.
It doesn't help against Oracle though. If the OS goes what does it matter? Not that I think that will happen. More likely Google will be force to shell out some cash to Oracle.
It was in a rented apartment, so it could soon be someone else's kitchen. Currently he had small amounts of radioactive matter, but what what if had gotten hold of more? Radiation goes through walls, no matter who owns them.
Some radiation goes through walls. That said, I don't know what kind of radiation his experiments would have produced, so your statement may still be correct in the specific case.
