dingfeng_quek

Cars are optional and aren't even the fastest way to get around (public transport + taxicabs + bicycle/e-bicycle is fastest). Rent can be low as well, depending on where and how big.

Low crime stable environment with strong regulations for food, water, housing, industrial safety, etc, means that necessities tend to be cheap and accessible even to the poorer part of society.

Status goods like cars, luxury cars, fine dining, strata housing, are as expensive as you want it to be. If your status referent group is based on the people around you, it will be as expensive as their income, and many Singaporeans have a lot of income.

According to the paper, there's a decrease in demand by the primary home device for activities trackable by comscore. This is the data used (not technically an assmption). I do not see the paper claiming more than this.

The conclusions do not apply to aggregate demand from all device types. Only certain types of activities are tracked.

My personal opinion is that the inferiority of online time is due to the increase in use of and substitution to additional devices and apps that were not tracked in the dataset - and a higher income better affords such alternative devices, apps, and their data plans.

It does not. Dataset is from comscore, see the comscore website, and comscore is unable to track the click-stream of native apps. If it did, that would raise many security issues.

The study measured primary home device use based on click-stream data from comscore. This requires interpretation with the following considerations:

- The dataset they used is from a commercial entity with its own vested interests

- Secondary home device and non-home device use is not included; An increase in substitutes to the primary home-device should lead to lower primary home-device use

- Only click-stream data that can be gathered by comscore can be included

- Sampling bias of comscore (paper does not describe correction for this)

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Western diet is associated with poorer inhibition of wanting for palatable snack foods when sated T.N. ATTUQUAYEFIO1, R.J. STEVENSON1, R.A. BOAKES2, M.J. OATEN3, M.R. YEOMANS4, M MAHMUT1, H.M. FRANCIS1 1Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia/2University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia/3Griffith University, Gold Coast, Australia/4University of Sussex, Sussex, United Kingdom Animal data indicate that hippocampal function is impaired by the increased consumption of a Western-style diet, with potential consequences for energy regulation. Based on such data, it has been argued that consumption of a Western-style diet impairs the ability of the hippocampus to inhibit retrieval of pleasant-food related memories in the presence of food cues, when sated. We tested this in healthy human participants (N = 94, Mage = 20.3, MBMI = 22.3) who varied in their habitual consumption of a Western-style diet .Verbal paired associate (VPA) learning, a known hippocampal-dependent process, liking and wanting ratings of snack foods were assessed first when participants were hungry, then when sated. Stepwise multiple regression analyses evaluated found that Western-style diet was associated with a slower VPA learning rate and a smaller reduction in wanting for snacks from before to after lunch. The latter was also strongly related to VPA learning rate, suggesting that wanting for foods has a memory-related component and would therefore likely involve the hippocampus. Further, it shows that greater consumption of a Western-style diet is associated with poorer inhibition of memories for highly palatable food when sated. This is the one of the first translational pieces of evidence from animal data showing the impact of a Western-style diet on both hippocampal-related memory and inhibition in humans.

Supported By: Macquarie University

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Above is what I found on the conference site. I was also unable to find the paper. I agree that sciencebulletin didn't do a good job reporting on this.

On the other hand, this is not novel in any way, and there is already substantial literature on this topic that suggests the same thing. If the topic is of interest to others, perhaps the older papers, or a list of them, should be posted instead.

While there are other plausibilities, this agrees with a food addiction model of overeating.

Couldn't figure out a way to solve them reasonably (and within schedule) using RethinkDB, so I did a "master-slave" with the RethinkDB as the master and PostgreSQL as a slave replica. Then did all the queries and analytics on the PostgreSQL database. I think this is far from ideal in terms of server costs, but scope creep is never ideal.

I suppose using computed property indexes in RethinkDB might work as well, or generating indexes, sort order, and doing query optimisation outside of the DB, but I couldn't figure it out in time, and it also seemed way more complicated than replicating the data to PostgreSQL.

EDIT: Above is for the OLAP use cases. OLAP of some types just don't go well with document databases. For the Decimal type, I stored it as a string, and had a computed property that transformed the string to a float. The float can then be indexed and queried like a number. It was good, until all the other OLAP use-cases creeped in.

Having said that, I found that custom replicas with RethinkDB is easy because it emits data change events. Never expected that feature to be an escape hatch.

The capabilities and performance of graph databases do differ, and many aren't cheap, nor well known, so if you need one, you'll need to shop around.

Btw, Neo4J is definitely a graph database, although it might not be what you need.

Besides multi-document transactions, I've encountered these problematic use-cases (something I discovered after scope creep of projects):

2. When I needed "more exotic" data types (e.g. but not limited to Decimals) where you want query/analytics logic to happen on the database rather than the app.

3. OLAP types of use cases. I really wanted collation, sort order, query optimizers, ability to "explore" the data in relational ways, and so on.

The most common and relevant difference is that a graph database has a storage engine that is optimized for graph traversal. For example, in a RDBMS, another row is referenced via a foreign key which involves a lookup to an indexed column, while in a graph database, a node is often referenced by its storage location. This makes graph traversals much cheaper, and is also something that an RDBMS is unable to optimise for because of conflicts with the relational model.

Similarly, the query language is optimised for graph traversal types of queries, in a way that would not be possible in an RDBMS due to the relational model constraints, and also because some of the query operations would be extremely inefficient in an RDBMS storage engine.

That sounds like graphs but Rethink is not a graph database (compared to Neo4j, GUN, Orient, Arango, etc).

With regards to the listed databases, some are, but the rest are not (and do not claim to be) graph databases.

Note: It's different people replying to you.

Here's a partial answer: You gain some, you lose some, but in different things. There's a tradeoff, e.g. automatons can do things a lot faster/cheaper, at the expense of "creativity". The nature of society changes in a multi-dimensional way, so it's hard to say whether it has become more or less "mindless".

It could be depressing as well, since the described effects correspond to the erosion of many important public institutions (like democratic governance).

Seems like this decade is a good time for an update on this issue, now that entertainment technologies are ubiquitous and totally attention grabbing, and cognitive psychology gives it good scientific grounding.

I read the book (Amusing Ourselves to Death), and I would recommend it for these reasons:

- It explores a contemporary topic of significance. Relevance will depend on your interests. I do think it's an essential perspective for analysing the impact of media on society, and since the impact has been huge and is still increasing, it's relevant to all kinds of public and policy decisions.

- I haven't read any other works that discusses the topic in a similar perspective and in comparable or greater detail. I've come across few works on this topic. * Postman's later books and essays aren't anywhere close to this either.

- It is dated, and talks about last century's media - however, it is even more applicable to this century's computers, games, and internet, which are much more "addictive".

the license also undermines the legitimacy of the ruling party without reducing the spread of information and propaganda that goes against the ruling party - these tend to arise from smaller (individual) publications which are not governed by the license.

the motive of free speech restriction just doesn't fit the consequence (grant originators the benefit of intelligence).

You ask: 1. Is X good? How is it good? 2. Is it entirely separate from reality?

While you might think of it as a simple question, you asked it in the general sense, without any context. In the general sense, these are two central questions in 2 separate domains of philosophy. 1. Ethics/Moral Philosophy 2. Dualism (philosophy of mind). Neither has a simple answer, although you could start form Wikipedia or the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Furthermore, the idea and enterprise of science and math is complex. It's not familiar to the layman. Instead, try approaching the question with more familiar ideas:

Think of a person who doesn't use Facebook at all. 1. What does Facebook add to his life? 2. As far as he can see, Facebook is a purely virtual social network, isn't it? 3. Why is it worth everyone's time to check/use Facebook?

Think about it from the perspective of a non-Facebook user. Perhaps one of the tribesmen in Africa should you know any.

Covers the same thing with more technical jargon, but much more accurate and insightful:

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=time-crysta...

EDIT: A lot of comments appear confused about stuff in the article from Wired. That's due to the journalism. The Scientific American article addresses many of issues raised here.

On the other hand, the investment in [Startup X] is partly justified by the idea that spending money on "10x" talent is a chance for "100x" returns.

I wouldn't generalize this way. P( Y | X ) != P( Y ).

X: Hired by google, good grades, good school.

In fact, it doesn't test the difference between institutionalized tertiary education vs a lack of it, only differing academic performance among those who are already relatively successful in it.

There are many sources of competitive advantage, which includes but is not limited to good hiring practices and the development and retention of talent.

Companies which were not dependent on cheap/competitive talents were able to get away with many inefficient work practices. Companies which are not dependent can and will still do that. Introspection is stressful and costly, change even more so.

"This is why great designers, salesmen or computer programmers are still highly valued": A very narrow selection of professions where productivity is very sensitive to variations in ability.

why should desires just before death take precedence over desires during the prime of life?

I used to use Racket in production and prototyping (few years ago), as a "glue language" and "business-logic" for a web-app, for the parts that are not IO, memory, compute intensive, etc. My metrics for language choice are:

1. Simple to learn and remember (they tend to correspond)

2. Module System; Support for modularization of complexity

3. Simplicity of coding and maintaining simple modules

4. Simplicity of coding and maintaining complex modules

5. Available libraries and their quality

In comparison to (I can only code efficiently in) Java, Python, Javascript/CoffeeScript/Node, Common Lisp, Scheme, and Haskell

- Racket is best for 2. (especially if you add a bit of meta-data to a module) and 4.

- Racket is much better than Haskell, Java, and Common Lisp for all 5 metrics Except for Haskell, which happens to be very nice for certain things that benefit from its type and class system

- For 3., Racket is overly complex, especially with the macro facility and huge number of types and structures. Node/Javascript/Coffee is better by far; Python is a little better than Racket because of less language features

- Racket is weak in 5. - Racket has many libraries of dubious quality, and I've hit undocumented issues a few times; Only Java was worse; However glue/business-logic doesn't require many libraries I now use NodeJS because I've been dealing with simpler stuff.

I once did an Ant to Maven conversion job on around 10 mature projects I didn't code. So that a large enterprise can move over to Maven and reap the productivity benefits.

Various Maven modules were restricted, including Antrun. Because the projects are old and tied to their directory structure of resources, it was more practical to script in Maven rather than follow conventions. Scripting in Maven was quite... challenging.

In this case, the problems arising from Maven also stems from the organization's context.

Perhaps your economy won't recover to its former glory, like the way Japan's didn't. Then you'll have at least one first-hand empirical data point, even if you're unable to learn from observing others.

I'm pretty sure that for anything you can cook with a rice maker, I can cook something else, to an equivalent quality/pleasantness/enjoyment-when-consumed, in a microwave. And vice versa.

* I assume you are not a professional food scientist or chef, which will make it hard for me to compete with you.

Because much of people's preference for certain types of food are acquired and not necessary (or even beneficial). During times of poverty, there are often pressures to change preferences, leading to a much higher rate of innovation. (Special case of general mechanism in creative destruction / evolution)

Once a preference is established, it can stay for a long time because there's a physiological tendency to like food you've eaten (without ill effects) before. There are few social forces strong enough to override that.

Must point out that the rice is different too. Bryani is not as nice with other rice shapes and textures.

It's not changing.

There's a lot of evidence that ordinary healthy humans need a particular amount of salt each day (adjusted for activity, age, etc), with not much variation. There's some epidemiological studies that show that most humans do end up consuming that amount of salt - i.e. the physiological->psychological feedback loop that triggers the impulse to eat salty things is well-controlled.

Eating both too little and too much salt can lead to very major health problems.

Popular fads on salt in diet changes all the time though; luckily that can't stop our bodies (unlike problems with anorexics; junk food; sugars; etc)

Temperature:

- Rice cooker: Cooks until water evaporates/absorbs, then warms - Crock pot: Cooks at a steady temperature, usually for items immersed in a liquid (for water, that's generally around boiling temperature), without evaporating the liquid. In general, more convenient to keep the liquid at a fixed temperature. - Crock pot (Expensive ones): Can set specific temperature (instead of just boiling or low/high)

Evaporation:

- Crock pot: Tends to minimize it, for long periods of cooking items in liquid

- Rice cooker: Minimizing evaporation not a concern/engineering-constraint

Insulation (insulation of heat in total; not about ergonomics):

- Crock pot: Generally better insulation/less-heat-loss, as it is used for long periods of cooking

- Rice cooker: Insulation a much lesser concern as expected period of use is smaller

- Insulation affects energy consumption

Pot material:

- Crock pot: offers a variety of pot material

- Rice cooker: generally metal (sometimes with coating)

- Affects what leeches into the food

- Insulation characteristics can be better or worse (energy consumption)

- Cleaning costs (weight, handling, sticking)

- Heat distribution across the food (fine detail that isn't relevant to someone who asks this)

- Retention of flavours/substances on pot surface and in pot (probably fine detail as well)

- Reactions with food (fine detail)

Cost:

- About the same cost for the same size and quality (similar components: thermostat + feedback circuit + heating element + pot + insulation)

- Rice cookers are a bit simpler because it has only 1 temperature setting (something set a bit above boiling point of water) => simpler = cheaper

- Rice cookers are simpler because they do not need to minimize evaporation => simpler = cheaper

- Rice cookers are simpler because they have lower priorities on insulation => simpler = cheaper

If you cook soup/stew overnight with a rice cooker, you'll need to start with a lot of excess water, and end up with much higher electricity bills.

Boxed stock is different - read the ingredients/constituents and use it appropriately (it is very different from actual stock, if you understand what stock consists of). Boxed stock is generally not a substitute for stock, like how sugar is not a substitute for salt.

Possible to use together though.

Do you like curry? Chicken curry? Beef curry? Mutton curry?

Thai style, the various China styles? Indian?

Green red yellow?