Newmark's Door

"Duke Engineering student's bright idea could save university millions".

Follow up.

Long piece by noted doctor/author Atul Gawande. More interesting in the first half than the second.

I don't think Gawande details adequately what I see as an important problem. There are two cultures: one lived in by the trainers and tech support folks, and the other, the users. At least some of the time the support people have done little, or even no, work that the users are doing. When their enthusiasms that the users don't share--IBM JCL is neat! DOS is wonderful! (No, they weren't.)--are combined with a lack of understanding of the users' interests, abilities, and time constraints, the support people can become frustrated, even cynical, about users. ("Most of the users aren't paying attention, or worse, they're simply morons!") The users, for their part, have almost no experience working in tech support. That can lead them to fail to recognize than many users are not, in fact, paying attention, and a few of them may even be morons. 

Part of a solution that would be nice, but is probably too costly for most situations would be for the two groups to switch jobs for a little while. Ask the support people to try to do, at a scaled-down level, the work of the users. (Related: hire for support positions people who actually did the work but are now, for some benign reason, switching careers.) Ask the users to answer support questions. At the least, this might well increase patience and tolerance.

I seem to remember 20+ years ago when Deep Blue beat Kasparov, a number of folks predicted that almost no one would want to play chess anymore. Oops. Is this a metaphor for the much-feared AI takeover of society?

Yeah, yeah. Get me one that grades writing assignments and then I'll be impressed.

Note to the haters--you know who you are--the "Brains" referred to are four professional economists.

Also there's this:

. . . led by Pat Bajari, Amazon has hired more than 150 Ph.D. economists in the past five years, making them the largest employer of tech economists.  In fact, Amazon now has several times more full time economists than the largest academic economics department, and continues to grow at a rapid pace.

(That's Tyler Cowen, quoting a recent paper by Susan Athey and Michael Luca.)

"I see no way around it: either Bloomberg’s report is significantly wrong, at least as pertains to Amazon and Apple, or Apple and Amazon have issued blatantly false denials."

Related: "Apple Insiders Say Nobody Internally Knows What’s Going On With Bloomberg’s China Hack Story".

When they get it fully worked out this will be one very cool app.

How can you not applaud this?

Maybe. I've seen promises like this before. But . . . maybe this time will be different.

Verizon says that customers of the new service, Verizon 5G Home, "should expect typical network speeds around 300 Mbps and, depending on location, peak speeds of nearly 1 Gbps, with no data caps." In short, Verizon 5G Ha 1 GB file in 28 seconds.ome customers should typically expect extremely fast internet speeds.

1 Gbps translates to 1,000 Mbps, which would let you download a 1 GB file in eight seconds, which is incredibly fast. Even the 300 Mbps speeds that customers should typically expect is fast, allowing customers to download 

Nooooooooo!!

But wait . . . isn't hand size just a "social construct"??