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Ivy League classes usually aren't as large as their state school counterparts. At most you might get around a hundred students in a large lecture course; this is rare by design.

You can crunch the numbers on this to verify for yourself – most of these have a population of 6000 undergrads or so. 1/6 of all of the undergraduates need to take a single course for your "up to a thousand" to be true.

I agree that a citation would be nice, but the number of students is indeed large for Ivy League courses (as per the article, in this econ course, he had 86 students for a class that usually only has 30).

Check out the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation of BK. P&L try to really bridge the contextual gap with a lot of footnotes/endnotes.

Ha! That's amazing! Well I take it back for shower curtains (congrats to your aunt!). I do think the point still stands for Amazon sellers and Zara, but maybe I'm not giving Walmart enough credit.

What's interesting is that you don't realize how much of that stuff from Walmart had artistic processes embedded into it along the production line.

Did those shower curtains have a design? Did your sweater have a color and style? Probably so, but you never pay attention to how the world of "fine art" refracts into your daily life.

If the products were cheap, it's likely someone unpaid is responsible for the design. See, for example, the lawsuit against Zara over theft of ideas from small-time designers [1].

In any case, cheap Chinese brands do the same thing as Zara en masse (copying designs – note the "external suppliers" bit in its defense PR), and those products then end up in Walmart/on Amazon. The artists starve but you have your shower curtains and are happy with the price.

[1] https://www.grossmanllp.com/independent-artists-on-the-offen...

The same experience happened to me, but it was even better – I was told I had a "little paronychia" and lanced without anesthetic. Her scalpel rubbing against two nerves in the nailbed of my thumb, the ER doctor lanced and scraped without so much as lidocaine (or even tylenol!)

The next day I almost lost my thumb, because this sadist that enjoyed cutting me open without any painkillers didn't bother to check whether the infection spread to my bone. I was also misdiagnosed by her, and would have lost it had my PC not found a hand surgeon in the nick of time.

Meanwhile, to curtains on either side of me at this hospital were people who were clearly homeless and had come in with some fentanyl withdrawal symptomps, but mostly so that they could sleep on a bed. When my partner tried to intervene and say that he's never seen me in this much pain, the doctor looked at me like I was a junkie, telling me that "it wouldn't hurt if I wasn't acting up."

I understand the "next, next" that happens from burnout, but this was next level sadism. No empathy; she actually seemed to enjoy my pain. No legal action was possible since this was an "emergency room environment" and she was only there "part time."

This was UCSF Saint Francis/ Dignity Health in Nob Hill. Please avoid this hospital if you're in San Francisco.

artist

technically, it was the supervising technical director.

The only reason this happened (I don't think "working from home" was very common in 1999) was because she just had a baby! I love this story because it feels like good karma – management providing special accommodations for a new mom saves the show.

Articles like this [1] (re: Rochdale gang) are contributing to the impression of a link in the UK. There's also the Rotherham child sexual exploitation scandal [2] which affected an estimated 1,400 girls specifically in Rotherham. Population of Rotherham is 265,800, for reference. In both these cases, girls were charged and the offenders are Pakistani.

There is also a recent video of a girl wielding an ax and knife to protect her and her sister in Scotland [3]. She has been charged with brandishing weapons. Interestingly, the BBC has issued an article [4] claiming that it was a "Bulgarian couple" that the girls approached, and to not "spread misinformation." I am a researcher of Slavic languages, so I can tell you from watching the video in [3] that the accents featured in this video are not Bulgarian. I am not willing to stake a claim in what they actually are (someone else is welcome to comment).

Actually, I'm quite alarmed that the BBC is claiming this, as I generally consider the BBC reputable.

1 – https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cdd2rld9mj2o

2 – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotherham_child_sexual_exploit...

3 – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OVfpSbLgiBc

4 – https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c3r40gylxpwo

In my experience, ChatGPT, at least, seems to have had multiple languages used to train its corpus. I am guessing this based on its interaction with me in a different language, where it changed English idioms like "short and sweet" to analogous versions in that language that were not direct translations.

But my guess is that the data sets used from the other languages are smaller (and actually, even if it had perfect access to every single piece of data on the internet, that would still be true, due to the astonishing quantity of English-language data out there compared to the rest. Your comment validates that). With less data, one would expect a poorer performance in all metrics for any non-Anglophone place, including the "cultural world view" metric.

ChatGPT is worse in Russian. Example: after accurately noting that a name appeared in a particular Russian book, it asked if I wanted the direct quote in Russian. I said yes. At this point it switched to Russian output but could no longer find the name in that book, and then apologized for having used what seemed to have been "approximations" about the book before.

(I did then go and check the book myself; ChatGPT in English was right, the name is there)

Seconding Meowwolf! The one I went to in Santa Fe was very hands on and physical, requiring lots of object manipulation as well as crawling through very tight spaces. Absolute delight.

Less so for the one in Colorado, which had more of an interactive back story done through an app; but I understand the Colorado one was also meant to be more ADA-friendly, and it was still pretty good.

I know of one that "doesn't explain" the exhibits (except through an app/website where you match things hanging on walls with diagrams) – the Isabella Gardner museum in Boston; this is specifically due to the wishes of Isabella Gardner herself, who was opposed to plaques.

There is one room that breaks this rule – I'm guessing it got damaged and then at that point they didn't have to follow her will.

Still worth a visit for the garden, the Titian, lots besides.

But I'm pointing out that just because NYC fails the claim does not mean that the claim is wrong.

I think there's a goldilocks zone of walkable, at least for the purposes of this "urbanist-I-know-everyone-utopia" feeling – you could have perfectly walkable places that aren't dense enough (people wise), so they won't work. I'm thinking of Gorham's Bluff, Alabama, which is an attempted New Urbanist project. Or, you could have Manhattan, which is also walkable but frankly mind-boggling in its density.

No offense to New York. I sometimes find myself in wordless awe of its sheer power.

Backing up a sister comment on this thread: I've lived in SF and Chicago, both also as walkable as it gets for the US, and in both had relationships as a "regular," whether at a corner store, cafe, or the grocer. I remember our Albanian corner store guy in particular, who would comment on me gaining or losing weight. Our neighborhoods felt like a small town where we all knew each other (including the homeless!).

I live near New York now, and while I hear from friends that they find that kind of community in some faraway boroughs of NYC, everyone in Manhattan reports your profound and deep sense of alienation from their fellow man, though some with a positive spin.

I have not seen this alienating anonymity in any other part of the country, though I have felt it whenever I'm there. As there is no other place in this country even remotely as dense or with faster turnover (not even SF), I'm fairly confident Manhattan is unique (in this country).

I am not an expert on children's stories, but I wondered about the vocabulary – "magnificent," or "newfound confidence." I'm imagining one might want to tailor the difficulty of the vocab based on the age of the child.

Interestingly this changed somewhat with the clickbait-based model – now, I would disagree that advertisers "want, more generally, to avoid programs with serious complexities and disturbing controversies."

I think this does describe legacy advertisers (and TikTok, for different reasons) – we might remember Tumblr's hyper-specific LGBTQ-friendly (often NSFW) communities being completely liquidated in the transfer of Tumblr to Verizon, arguably killing Tumblr on that date. Verizon's handling of Tumblr validates Chomsky.

But ad-fueled journalism seems to operate from exactly the opposite principle, so long as the controversies that drive engagement do not threaten the sensibility of specific large funders. I've seen a few times in recent memory where an article from the New York Times aired something quite sensational, only to quietly update later that what was initially reported didn't quite occur as depicted. But by that point it is too late, and profit was made.

The overall point still stands – that ad-based always results in a conflict of interest.

FWIW Turnitin does treat things like quotes and footnotes a little differently on the academic side – on the instructor end, it simply gives you an estimation of the amount of text it found that has appeared somewhere else. Citations usually account for about 5-10% "potentially plagiarized" but anything below 10% is treated as fine by the software. You can always go check each of the sections and see if it's a quote or not; if you have a paper that consists of more than 10% quotes it's not a good paper anyway and should be revised.

I did have a very interesting case once of a student who copied and pasted someone's Master's thesis for sections of her paper, but also listed that thesis in the citations... it remains up to the jury (not me) to decide whether she just didn't understand what plagiarism was. I would not have known if Turnitin didn't mark it as 30% plagiarized.

Disclaimer: Someone more senior than I was in charge of the decision to use this software, but it was interesting to see it in action

In addition to the vibrissae explanation, I also wonder if their eyes (vertical pupils) just see better when it comes to height and not width, necessitating greater hesitation when it comes to judging things at their height and not high in the air. I am thinking they might need to move their head or eyes a bit side to side, though it may still be too fast to be readily apparent to the researcher. Relevant article [1]:

"If you have a vertical slit, you're very likely to be an ambush predator," says Banks. That's the kind of animal who lies in wait and then leaps out to kill. He says these predators need to accurately judge the distance to their prey, and the vertical slit has optical features that make it ideal for that.

But that rule only holds if the animal is short, so its eyes aren't too high off the ground, Sprague says."

Ergo, cats have vertical pupils but tigers have round pupils. The tiger can probably judge horizontal distances better than the cat.

1 - https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2015/08/07/4301496...

There is such a cool puppet culture there. If you ever get the chance and are interested, you should check out a production by Obraztsov [1] – a lot of the concerts are on YouTube.

When I was in Russia in 2018 I was shocked at how big puppet theatres are there, still, and perhaps even more so. They're a vibrant part of life, very sophisticated, no doubt due to the popularity of Obraztsov and his ilk. It made me realize how neglected this part of theatre is in the US (not to mention circuses and clowns, which by now have just been thoroughly associated with horror or terrible birthday parties. Only Cirque du Soleil gets a mild pass).

I kept wishing one of my colleagues (in grad school currently) would make a dissertation about the rise of puppetry in the USSR and beyond, but alas, she abandoned her work with Russian theatre, though the probable reasons are obvious.

1 - https://youtu.be/SuR174hMr_Q?t=1208

'“It’s a shock when you see it,” said the woman from Almendralejo. “The image is completely realistic … If I didn’t know my daughter’s body, I would have thought that image was real.”'

Several reasons:

1) time – a fraction of the time per victim means exponentially many more

2) skill – no photorealistic drawing skill required

3) a live referent – a genuine (here, shockingly genuine seeming) nude photograph implies that someone undressed and let themselves be photographed

4) even in the presence of a referent, a drawing is not a carbon copy ("freeze frame") of a moment in real life, and is proof of nothing

Came here to say something similar: I didn't realize how rare this was until this thread, but as I kid I knew not only four of my great-grandparents, but even a great-great-grandmother. She died at 96 years old, but I was old enough to hang out with her a few times, and remember her.

My great-grandfather is still alive and turned 100 last year. Since I'm already much older than any of my progenitors when they had their children, even if I live to his age it is unlikely I'll get to spend time with my own great-great-grandchildren.

I am also a native speaker. The context I hear it is when, for example, someone wins a game or finds loot within one – "Эх, какой счастливый!...." or "Счастливый человек!" Another example: "у него счастливая рука" (he has a lucky hand [at cards]) [1].

Most dictionaries will offer both happy and lucky side by side (with "happy" being the first definition, "lucky" the second). See the links for some textual examples.

In other households it could very well be that you use "везучий" or "удачливый" more often, but mine (grant it, very far from Moscow) never has.

1 - https://dictionary.reverso.net/russian-english/счастливый 2 - https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english-russian/...

It will certainly eventually blow up in someone's face. The strategy is to not be the one holding the hot potato.

So, pocket the bonuses and retire, boasting of you growing profits quarter-to-quarter by eliminating "redudancies" like proper quality assurance and safety checks, and then act shocked when the next person is held accountable for the deaths that began to accrue as a result of your changes. Those deaths won't be noticed for awhile and that's what you're counting on.

In support of this: in Russian, the adjective for "lucky" and "happy" is the same – schastlivyi.

Though a more precise variant that specifically means "lucky" exists (udachlivyi, meaning possessing greater chances), schastlivyi is more often used to describe a person, with the semantic content being that they are both happy and lucky.

For example, the famous Tolstoy quote about unhappy families being different and happy families all looking alike uses schastlivyi.

The intro about imagining "half of the engineers boarding a plane telling you there is a 10% chance it will crash" is unintentionally prescient (the article was written in 2023), given the recent Boeing situation.

Because he repeatedly ignored fellow researchers pointing out that the seismic activity he attributed to interstellar impact did not differ from seismic activity recorded at that location whenever a heavy truck drove on the main road near the detector.

Although I agree with you that "humiliating" might be too loaded a word (but it drives clicks, so here we are).

This was addressed in the article:

The relationship between the theoretical computer scientists in mathematics and the applied ones in engineers is a little like the relationship between biologists and doctors, or physicists and bridge builders. Keeping applied and pure versions of a discipline separate allows each to focus on its expertise, but limits the degree to which one can learn from the other.

It's a bit like the difference between writing about film and making a film. Unless noted otherwise, a person writing about film has little to no filmmaking experience... Hence, I am always surprised when people are surprised that someone who majored in computer science can't program.

The upshot is that the writer agrees with you (and expands that agreement into a larger theory about what college education should be for).

It seems Mead and Freeman experienced a slice of life from different parts of Samoa, which was summed up for me in this part of the wikipedia article:

"Samoan culture had been changed by the integration of Christianity in the decades between Mead's and Freeman's fieldwork periods" ... "Leacock pointed out that Mead's famous Samoan fieldwork was undertaken on an outer island that had not been colonialized. While Freeman had undertaken fieldwork in an urban slum plagued by drug abuse, structural unemployment, and gang violence." [1]

Note that doesn't necessarily mean that Freeman's island perfectly resembled Mead's island prior to its urbanization – I'd wager, rather, that Samoan society was diverse!

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Mead#Criticism_by_Der...

This depends on the region, I think. My own experience: most people I know on the East Coast have cats (including entrepreneurs), significantly higher preference for dogs on the West Coast. In Eastern Europe and Japan, I also noticed people tend to have cats much more than dogs (both places with vibrant entrepreneurial scenes)

I see many possibilities for commercials, demos... not to mention kids' animations, of course.

Actually, thinking of this from the perspective of a start-up, it could be cool to instantly demonstrate a use-case of a product (with just a little light editing of a phone screen in post). We spent a lot of money on our product demo videos and now this would basically be free.

I have not found Duolingo valuable for learning a language from scratch – my experience with German, in particular, was terrible. Then I tried to do Japanese with it, and trying to use it to learn Japanese from scratch was also terrible.

However, after I took a couple of years of real (institutional) coursework in Japanese, and needed to just get a little better at recognizing proper grammar constructions, it actually proved very useful – at the paid level, anyway, where one can "skip"/place into higher levels – and it seems their Japanese module in particular has drastically improved in the last couple of years.

So my two cents are that used for language learning alone it's pretty useless. But used as a reminder aide for concepts already learned it can be a good app, especially to just hear how one might phrase a sentence more "naturally" (for a Japanese ear).

For Kanji, though, WaniKani is king.