How am I not surprised that in an article about US espionage the American state media makes sure to remind yet again us how bad, bad, bad the Russians are.

Added: https://www.amazon.com/Blind-Mans-Bluff-Submarine-Espionage/...

The author then goes on to give 6 semi-abstract reasons as to why abstract reasoning matters. Since this question is most likely to be asked by a child it is code for "how can math-skills make me money or get me a job." Upon hearing the author's answers, 13 year old me would conclude, "it doesn't, and math is useless much like poetry (which I now value BTW)". A child who isn't thinking in this practical way is already academic minded and doesn't need an answer. "When will I ever use this?". It obvious! "In next year's math class".

It is sad that a student can leave high-school with almost no classes that ever makes math less abstract. The most beautiful moment in my life was my freshman college physics class. It first filled me with joy and followed by anger. Because I almost didn't go to college and there was no reason I wouldn't have understood this course at 13. Same goes for finance.

So answers should focus on applications like modeling simple Newtonian physics of a satellite in orbit or predicting the RPM when a 4-stroke engine red-lines based on max-stress specs. Or show them useful short cuts like the Rule of 72 and if they are curious show a derivation. Show examples of ratios/percentages, how fractals can simulate a landscape, or examples of the Fibonacci series in nature, etc.

This is one I have a tough time explaining to students who are so focused on the task at hand they don't feel there's time to sit back and reason in generality.

my RO has kinda low efficiency. 4 units of water in, i get 1 unit of clean drinkable water. 3 units are 'waste' (don't believe what socmed says, it's not dirty). the waste water is used for laundry, aquarium and gardening. my fishes and vegs are thriving.

to test purity, just plunge the ohm meter probes into a cup of ro water. if the resistence is in 1MOhm, it's pretty pure. mountain/mineral water bought from store is about 150kOhm. after drinking ro water for a while, store-bought water tastes slightly salty.

my house pumps water from ground (well-pump). for a family of 6, i need 1m3 of water. that's about half hour of 500W pump. an ro unit (40W) runs about 3 hours for 5gal bottle. so give or take, 1/2kWH or about 15KW per month. that's about $1 or $2 for my water need per month.

if i must buy raw water (such as living in an apartment), it's about $1 per m3, so about $30 per month; however, i get drinkable water too. ro units are portable. i saved $28/mo in water expense after moving from apartment.

flashing back from memory, i used to lug around 3 5gal water-cooler bottle from stores to my apartment every 3 days (i had 3 bottles). it was not pleasant and wasted time (go to store, queue, lug heavy bottles back)

ro unit has relay so you don't have to sit and wait for it to fill. it automatically cuts power to the pump when its internal clean-water-tank is full.

How much of that price drop is due to lower energy prices? How sustainable is the power source?

Even with significant efficiency improvements (3X), shifting from local freshwater sources to desalination would have a massive energy requirements.[1] For such a bold claim ("the Desalination Era is Here"), this article has a rather lightweight examination of the environmental impacts.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desalination#Energy_consumptio...

This article mentions the brine "is just pumped back into the Mediterranean", but don't they need to be concerned about killing fisheries?

Average rainfall in Tel Aviv - 528mm/year, that's about 50mm less than Jerusalem - and London. Now, a lot of the country is a desert, but even Beersheba gets an average of 400mm. Only the far south is really dry.

Not that Israel didn't need its desalination system, it might be the only good and/or competent thing our government has done in recent years, but it's not a very dry country in its inhabited areas.

"Desalination used to be an expensive energy hog, but the kind of advanced technologies being employed at Sorek have been a game changer. Water produced by desalination costs just a third of what it did in the 1990s. Sorek can produce a thousand liters of drinking water for 58 cents. Israeli households pay about US$30 a month for their water similar to households in most U.S. cities, and far less than Las Vegas (US$47) or Los Angeles (US$58)."

But I saw nothing about where the energy comes from, the type of source, the scale. I'd like to compare this with local proposals, etc.

One of the biggest DeSal issues is cost of conversion and source, proximity of source, etc. play a huge factor.

To what extent the current situation in Syria influenced by environmental changes, I wonder?

Unemployed farmers -> Social instability -> Civil Unrest -> War?

Most countries have leaky water around pipes. UK lose around 20%, US is a little above 10%. Are the any innovation that we can shrink this number? I dont see why this cant be within 98%+ region. What is stopping it?

The Tampa Bay Desalination Plant produces 25 million gallons per day of drinking water to provide 10% of the region's needs. [1]

Americas largest seawater desalination plant provides 50 million gallons (189 million liters) of drinking water for the San Diego area each day - 8% of needs

[1] http://www.tampabaywater.org/tampa-bay-seawater-desalination...

[2] http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2015/11/02/world/florida-fl...

China female/male ratio is heavily unbalanced. There is a LOT men on market for women to choose. Also almost no foreign woman marry chinese man, on the contrary to the chinese women marrying a lot of foreigners.

1+2 means china is a market where men are at bad position and women has plenty of fish to choose from. Opposite situation which would create such services as described in the article.

Source:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_women_of_China

According to 2012 figures from the National Bureau of Statistics, Chinas sex ratio at birth (the number of boys born for every 100 girls) was as high as 118.

This may seem horrifying but it is often a result when women are brought up to be good obeying wives, be great mothers and religiously do household duties.

I mean they do not resolve the problems in the marriage that led to the situation. Do these women believe it's a one time thing? or that that specific mistress is special?

The stigma isn't as strong here as it is in China, either. And he ended up paying for the divorce.

On the other hand, she's not as well off financially as she had been. It was emotionally difficult for her as well, but the root of that problem was deeper than the symptom.

Not sure that this service would work here.

I found this fix, which made quick uses of GIMP less painful for me: http://shallowsky.com/software/gimp-save/

I'm assuming the new save behavior persists in Gimp 2.9.x, but I don't know.

I'd have really liked Ubuntu's HUD menu-search to have become a standard on the Linux desktop; adding search-across-menus would become much easier for softwares, most wouldn't need any addition of code.

However, yes, GIMP is quite rarely an acceptable replacement for PS, and I find this unlikely to change any time soon.

Also, GAP is really, REALLY, REALLY awkward and unwieldy to use. I would reccomend Synfig Studio for animation instead.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Tools/Scratchpad

That said, something missing from both is an easy way to import and export the code.

Such a great point and perhaps one of the biggest challenges as languages allow increasingly reusable and powerful abstractions. I would love to have GHC tell me something like "this piece of code here has a signature that is familiar, you could probably make this fit into {list of abstractions}".

I feel those would be the two libraries that I would probably miss the most when switching to Haskell for a project.

Hope core.typed will be that!

We astronomers in Northern Ireland were excited a couple of years ago when there was the prospect of lights being turned-off for five hours in the wee hours due to budget cuts, but unfortunately a new cheaper power contract was agreed with the suppliers.

Good job guys! You made a fantastic product. I will always favor native apps over Electron hacks. I can't count how many times I've CMD+Tabbed to Chrome and hit CMD+W to close a tab, only to see Postman disappear. It disrupts my flow.

One thing though. I'm a developer, I know what I'm doing. Please make JSON Text the default option. Formatted JSON doesn't hurt or threaten me :) I expect to see my responses exactly as they are.

Edit:Unfortunately I have to edit this comment to give additional feedback about Paw. I'm using the 30 day trial, i.e. I am evaluating the product. Paw is running in the background, I'm not interacting with it in any way, but it jumps to foreground, just to show me a pop-up window informing me, that I have 29 days left of trial and should upgrade. No, thank you, I installed the app just an hour ago. I'm aware of the 30 day trial. No need to nag about it every 20 minutes, that will not prompt me to upgrade any sooner. If anything, it does quite the opposite.

Secondly, there are indeed many similar tools, but I've found that Paw in particular has well-thought-out implementations of a number of useful features (cookies, JSON parsing, auth methods, history) as well as a neat way of managing requests across environments e.g. dev machine vs test server vs production API.

Paw isn't the only tool I use when testing/developing API endpoints, but I find it to be the most featureful while also playing nice as a Mac app, with a decent UI and the expected things like remembering my previous window positions/states the next time I launch it.

I also got familiar with Stoplight.io - which I have found to be a little bit harder to use but has a large array of features that I think could inspire a lot of developers to build and grow the API dev community

aaand I don't work for either companies!

Regarding the app, Paw is friggin amazing. I was lucky to get it back when it was much cheaper, but it's definitely still worth the $49 even now. The team stuff is interesting too, as me and my guys share our exports all the time.

The Mac App Store is absolutely horrible (lots of bugs, slow, inconsistent, almost unusable, absurd certificate expiration issues that are completely embarrassing for a company like Apple, etc.) and Apple has completely ignored all developers who use it... but this is exactly why I always prefer buying from it. I dont want some nobody developer harvesting my information, and selling/renting it off to some who knows who either now or some years down the line when the company folds.

Please have respect for your potential paying customers and drop these kinds of practices. Other than recovering a potentially lost license key, there is absolutely nothing I need from you, including any and all news or updates, after I have purchased the app. Therefore you should only really need some unique value (like the hash of an email address) for that.

- fetch huge json

- collapse first level fields

- leave node/subnode of interest open

- change backend

- refresh paw, and see changes way faster, coz it will show only open subtree

really useful for large json responses! (Postman dies on those)

The application hijacks mouse events for custom widgets that don't function as expected. It takes far too much pointer precision to manage the request list and the groups. Half the time the drag-and-drop glitches so that you are highlighting rows without actually having the item with the cursor. You also cannot drop a group to the end of the list. Similar problem in the environments config window: add a second environment for a variable; the column widths are too short to see the variable's value, so you try to resize the columns and it doesn't work even though the resize icon appears on hover.

The "JSON" response format is hideous and for some reason the default. The "JSON Text" format is what I want and switch to, but this fact is not remembered and every single new response resets back to the ugly xml-tree-like format.

By the way, trying to click the help icon for dynamic values opens the documentation to a page[1] that doesn't load due to an encoded '#' symbol (%23). Again, a sign of a final product with very little QA, being sold at a fairly premium price for which one expects quality.

The UI and interactions are far from seamless. The constant harassment of a popup trying to get me to upgrade is the last straw. When a user is on trial, you don't interrupt their workflow every few minutes.

[1] https://paw.cloud/docs/dynamic-values/response%23Response_Bo...

Paw looks really good. I'll definitely give that a try, especially if the team sharing features are good.

Paw definitely looks promising. The pricing seems a little steep though.

I don't even think this is about access to decentralized alternatives, after all if you devote years of content to a platform you can probably manage to go through some technical setup pain. Gmail, Blogger, Youtube, Twitter, Facebook - there are self-hosted alternatives out there to all of them, but the big trade-off is that content creators have to shoot themselves in the foot on discoverability if they opt out of the big platforms.

Either at some point we will collectively wise up and re-decentralize or we'll go further down the path we're already on. Our lives ruled arbitrarily by DRM and ToS. I do recognize that I'm personally part of the problem, it's really hard to opt out.

maybe one of those 'ads' were underage or something

Google is notoriously Orwellian and Kafkaesque in their TOS so I think he's out of luck. It would be a nice guesture if they just gave him back his data though. I don't think that's too much to ask

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12099757

[1]: http://fusion.net/story/325231/google-deletes-dennis-cooper-...

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=public+access+plan&ia=web

This was started government-wide from a memo by John Holdren.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/microsites/os...

Each agency comes up with their own plan, but they have to make access to the research possible without charge.

Many agencies provide access to submitted manuscripts.

Another good avenue to address access would be to get states to adopt similar policies based on research by state employees.

It is often easier to get states to pass laws than it is to deal at the federal level.

Is anyone interested in writing up some legislation?

"You may access this article for 1 day for US$40.00."

Great deal.

This is something that punk and hard core music has done, pretty much since the beginning. Most punk rock discographies are filled with repetitive overlaps of the same songs, and re-recorded versions, or versions of songs performed at live shows.

For a while, I had just assumed it was part of the whole small budget, DIY, low fidelity aspect of the genre. Bands might have tracks on EP's and 7 inches, that go out of print and become rarites, or the band might just be disorganized, or have extra space on a disc, and pile in a few more tracks, because what the hell?

But after a while, collections become bloated with all kinds of pointless cruft, and you look through some catalogs, and it's pretty obvious that some bands would just get desperate to make sure they have something in the new releases section every six months, to stay visible, and they'd obviously record one new track, bundle it with four or five other tracks, and dump it into their catalog to indicate signs of life.

It's not unlike like baseball cards, where doubles are a known factor, and concentrations of rare desirable items are controlled and designed, to fuel collector's habits.

I guess the difference with scientific journals is that the fanbase doesn't have the same sort of emotional investment in their collectables.

I'm almost desensitized to it at this point. Despite the fact that these problems are potentially Web-breaking.

Edit - I blogged about the basics of my setup - https://stacktoheap.com/blog/2016/01/04/running-webdriverio-...

Here are some things that in my opinion make this one of the worst places to live:

- Filth, Garbage, lack of sanitation. Most of Delhi is filled with garbage. There is Garbage lying everywhere. People throw in out of their cars on roads while driving. People dump plastic bags filled with garbage to nearby streets on a daily basis.

- Pollution. Its monsoon season here in Delhi right now and for the first time in a year, I was able to spot a few stars in the sky last night. The rest of the year, the air is filled with a haze of noxious gases. I have seen vehicles emitting large plume of white smoke and no traffic policeman cares to stop them and ask for their pollution certificate. Garbage dumps mentioned by the OP are literally like mountains with smoke emanating from various parts all the time.

- Lack of space. Ok. There is no space in Delhi. For one to walk or jog.

- Angry culture. I am sad to say that I have never seen more road rage incidents anywhere else. People have very little patience and respect for fellow individuals seems to be missing more often than not.

Anyone know why?

I've heard people say "too many people", but too many people means a huge labor force that is low cost.

I would think that building a sewer system would be pretty straightforward. Massive countries like China have pretty good wastewater treatment (relatively speaking) in the cities. So do other developing countries.

Why is it such an issue in India?

There seems to be a prevailing attitude of "We are now in a phase of development as an economy. First world countries had an opportunity to grow without regulating pollution. Regulating us will inhibit our ability to catch up".

For some reason the literal end of the world isn't a strong enough argument for them. When I mention it, I am frequently told that it doesn't matter because no matter what is done, the outcome in terms of climate change is going to be the same at this stage.

Not that our problems aren't worth fixing, it's just a stark reminder that some places in the world remain uncivilized.

Source: from there originally. Been there once in the last 10 years. Saw little had changed. Vowed never to go back.

Can definitely see the use case for swift expand a bit with this in its wings.

Does anyone who uses Swift on Linux have any comments, suggestions, use cases, etc.?

Message passing as a core concept of a language is fundamental and necessary (given that interlop with ObjC is important), and having that and macros gives related control structures for free.

The marketing material says semiconductor sensor, which is a little vague.

At least in life sciences (can't comment on other fields), it's not that scientists don't repeat each other's results. After all, if you're going to invest a significant fraction of your tiny lab budget on a research project, you need to make sure that the basic premise is sound, so it's not uncommon that the first step is to confirm the previous published result before continuing. And if the replication fails, it's obviously not a wise idea to proceed with a project that relies on the prior result. But that work never makes it into a paper.

If the replication succeeds, great! Proceed with the project. But it's time-consuming and expensive to make the reproduction publication worthy, so it will probably get buried in a data supplement if it's published at all.

If the replication fails, it's even more time-consuming and expensive to convincingly demonstrate the negative result. Moreover, the work is being done by an ambitious student or postdoc who is staring down a horrible job market and needs novel results and interesting publications in order to have a future in science. Why would someone like that spend a year attacking the work of an established scientist over an uninteresting and possibly wrong negative result, and getting a crappy paper and an enemy out of it in the end, instead of planning for their own future?

If enough people fail to replicate a result, it becomes "common knowledge" in the field that the result is wrong, and it kind of fades away. But it's not really in anyone's interest to write an explicit rebuttal, so it never happens.

-- Richard Feynman, "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman", pp. 225-226

It's not a binary option. One poor experiment might give us some evidence something is true. A single well reviewed experiment gives us more confidence. Repeating the results similarly does. As does the reputation of the person conducting the experiment and the way in which it was conducted.

It's not a binary thing where we decide something is accepted or rejected, we gather evidence and treat it accordingly.

I blame this on the neo-liberal ideology. This intense focus on getting money's worth, on tying grants to specific goals, counting publications etc. Driving research exclusively on a very narrowly defined money incentive has driven us further into this sort of mess. The money grabbing journals which has prevented any significant innovation in how science is shared.

I think what science needs is a model closer to that of open source. With open projects anybody can contribute to but where verification happens through personal forged relationships. The Linux kernel code quality is verified by a hierarchy of people trusting each other and knowing something about each others quality of work. Work should be shared like Linux source code in a transparent fashion and not behind some antiquated paywall.

I don't think the grant system can entirely away, but perhaps it should be deemphasized and instead pay a higher minimum amount of money to scientists for doing what they want. Fundamental science breakthrough doesn't happen because people had a clear money incentive. Neither Einstein, Nils Bohr, Isaac Newton or Darwin pursued their scientific breakthroughs with an aim of getting rich. Few people become scientists to get rich. Why not try to tap into people's natural desire to discover?

Independent replications of experiment (and the corresponding independent reports of observations) are a crucial part of the scientific method, no matter how much you wish it wasn't. Nature doesn't care if it is inconvenient for you to discover her secrets, or that it is more difficult for you to hype up your findings to the unsuspecting public.

The other issue, especially in the life sciences, is inaquedate statistical input. If someone performs an underpowered, confounded experiment and gets a positive result, then someone else performs the same underpowered confounded experiment and gets a negative result, what have we learned except that the experiment is underpowered?

For example, here are two product specifications for a dye called Sirius Red, the first by Sigma-Aldrich[1] and the second by Chem-Impex[2]. The Sigma-Aldrich product contains 25% dye while the Chem-Impex contains equal or greater than 21%. These two dyes could be quickly assessed with a spectrophotometer in order to determine an equivalency, however you need both dyes on hand which doesn't seems like a good use of funding. Also this touches on another problem in replication which is, what is in the other 75%+ of the bottle?

[1] http://www.sigmaaldrich.com/Graphics/COfAInfo/SigmaSAPQM/SPE...[2] http://www.chemimpex.com/MSDSDoc/22913.pdf

What I think is overlooked in this discussion as that a lot of confirmation work already happens. Most (all?) scientific results are incremental progress built on a heap of previous work. In the course of normal research, you reproduce existing results as necessary before altering conditions for your own study. If you can't confirm the results, well then perhaps you have a paper (though it can be politically challenging to get it published, and that's a separate problem). But if you do, then you don't waste time publishing that, you get on with the new stuff.

Ultimately, I don't think scientists do accept results in their field that they have not repeated.

In contrast, if you are in machine learning and you are extending an existing architecture you are very directly dependent on that original technique being useful. If it doesn't "replicate" the effectiveness of the original paper, you're going to find out quickly. Same for algorithms research. Some other comments here have mentioned life sciences being the same.

So I think there's a qualitative difference between sciences where we understand things in a mostly statistical way (sociology, psychology, medical studies) where the mechanism is unknown (because it's very very complicated), but we use the process of science mechanistically to convince ourselves of effectiveness. e.g. I don't know why this color makes people work faster/ this drug increases rat longevity / complex human interactions adhere to this simple equation, but the p value is right, so we think it's true. Versus sciences where we have a good grasp of the underlying model and that model is backed up by many papers with evidence behind it, and we can make very specific predictions from that model and be confident of correctness.

Those two aren't the same, and I think far too many think that the point is the latter when, imho, it's actually the former. Pure screwups will likely get found out, just like glaring bugs are usually found. It's when your result actually has a huge variance but you're looking at only one (or a few) samples and draw conclusions from it that's insidious, like the fact that it's the bugs that just change the output by a tiny bit that are the hardest to notice.

The general idea for research to be accepted is that it makes some novel, albeit small, impact on the field, acceptable for publication in a peer reviewed journal or proceeding. Repeating someone else's experiments wont get you that, so in general it wont help you graduate or move you toward a higher position at a university or in your profession, meaning there is very little motivation for researchers to pursue such endeavors.

So instead of just throwing money at the problem, we may need to entirely revamp how we recognize the pursuits of researchers.

If competition for research dollars ceases to be so cutthroat, it will go a long way towards solving this and many other seemingly entrenched cultural problems.

In order for a lot more replication to get published, what would be needed would be for people who spent their careers replicating others' results (at the expense of not producing any important novel results of their own) to get tenure at top institutions (outcompeting others who had important novel results but not enough published replications).

Peer review is supposed to do this, but the fact that peer reviewers are often colleagues leads to collusion, whether intended or not.

Maybe we need a separate body of scientists whose sole joband whose entire prestigederives from taking down and retracting bad science.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adversarial_system

So I agree with the title "We Should Not Accept Scientific Results That Have Not Been Repeated". But I would add to it "We Should Not Accept Scientific Results from Studies That Weren't Preregistered". Registration of studies forces negative results to be made public, allowing for the positive result rate / replication rate to be calculated.

Otherwise the existence of a "positive" result is more a function of the trendiness of a research area than it is of the properties of the underlying system being studied.

If results are genuinely useful, then people will want to build upon that work, and will have to repeat the science. On the other hand if it can't be repeated, then it will not get further work done and fade into obscurity. Curious what other peoples opinion on this are?

The drive to get tenure is a big reason that scientists publish so much, funny that was not mentioned.

After all any scientific test that fails when somebody else repeats it is not science but the domain of magic and religion, so clearly not science.

Probabilities, for example, are not applicable to partially observed, guessed and modeled phenomena. It should be a type-error.

As for math - existence of a concept as a mathematical abstraction does not imply its existence outside the realms of so-called collective consciousness. Projecting mathematical concepts onto physical phenomena which could not be observed is a way to create chimeras and to get lost in them.

Read some Hegel to see how it works.)

Schneier said, "This kind of cyberattack targets the very core of our democratic process. " In this case, though, the attack targeted actors who prevented democratic process.

Were we exposed to fictitious narratives intended to advance pro-Russian agendas? Was truth revealed, without manipulation of content? It seems to be the latter.

Attacking the polls would be unacceptable and deserve retaliation, but it hasn't happened yet. Attacking a whistle blower who has helped to reveal a corrupt political process isn't something I'd agree with. Schneier speculates that foreign influence will continue into the polls -- I guess we had better strengthen the election process and ensure transparency, then.

Exceptionalism is political crack. States seek to influence elections in other states. Always have, always will. Having a candidate aligned explicitly aligned with the interests of a foreign state is quite common in Americas. As is having a foreign state explicitly align themselves with a candidate.

But there's a problem.

Elections are managed by state governments by design. This is to prevent centralized political corruption. Having the feds "take the lead" is a little too nebulous to be practical.

What could be done is a certification system for electronic voting that requires a paper audit trail and individualized printed receipts for each voter. (Which would be encrypted to prevent others from determining which votes were cast)

The big leap is that electronic-only systems are never going to work. For various reasons, I don't think most folks are ready to go there. That is the major problem that must be solved. After that's fixed, the other stuff will at least be easier to address.

Phew, I feel better getting that off my chest. Good thing nobody reads dissertations.