That was just a bit too much for me. Bionic people would still be using condoms - that is just common sense.
Also, will women still be getting pregnant in vivo? Because if so, then 'because bioengineering' wouldn't be sufficient protection from the hollow mutant zombie babies that would be produced (as a side effect of all the _bioengineering_)
I've seen quite a few career women hire surrogate mothers. E.g. their eggs, the guy's sperm, but a different mother. That's certainly something that's only possible due to medical technology. Similarly, the pill was a huge revolution and there are trials for reversible male contraception as well. If all STDs are curable and everyone controls their fertility by better means, why would you bother with a condom that removes the sense of touch for one of the parties?
depends on how representative the sample is? But yeah, a few thousand _might_ be good enough if you are able to pick sufficiently randomly - but still from each representative class!
Yes of course, but it's a bit unfair to dismiss a survey you have not read on the basis of it being 'only' over 9000 people out of 120M, when that same amount in a properly set up investigation would be more than enough to make significant claims about a population of 300M.
We can of course theorize about whether or not all classes where properly represented, and of course we can't immediately regard the results as absolute truth, but the fact is that this was a serious survey and should be treated as such until review has shown otherwise.
So Techcrunch references the quote below from the Guardian.
"Look to Japan to see the start of this growing trend: over 25 percent of young men and 45 percent of young woman say they are no longer interested in sex."
The Guardian makes this quote;
"The number of single people has reached a record high. A survey in 2011 found that 61% of unmarried men and 49% of women aged 18-34 were not in any kind of romantic relationship, a rise of almost 10% from five years earlier"
and references the formal study that is linked in the top comment and the one I also linked.
But this quote that Techcrunch took from the Guardian;
" A survey earlier this year by the Japan Family Planning Association (JFPA) found that 45% of women aged 16-24 "were not interested in or despised sexual contact". More than a quarter of men felt the same way."
... is linked to another study. Well they don't actually link to the study, just to the homepage of the people who did.
Which has in the website title, "Every Child a Wanted Child", which isn't quite likely to be as unbiased as the official census linked above.
Now I'm trying to track down the actual study which hasn't been referenced by either Techcrunch or The Guardian which has the major quote they are selling their articles with.
Edit: Huffington Post ran a similar article with the same reference, they linked to this article as the source
"In other words, the Internet was agog over a report that 22 males and 38 females aged 16-19 said either that they had no interest in sex or despised it. When the Huffington Post spun this story as “a third of the nation’s youth” disliking sex, they were basing it on the response of 60 self-selected people."
Haha, very nice work! So let me get this straight. They selected only 3000 people from 16-49 (not 9000), then of those, they managed to find the addresses of only 2693 to give them the survey, and then only 1540 actually did the survey. Of those 1540 just 126 were between ages 16 and 19, and from those slightly under half, so 60 people, said the thing that was quoted.
My housemates were just talking about this Japanese issue yesterday and coming up with all sorts of conclusions and hypotheses as to why this cultural phenomenon might occur, when actually there is no hard evidence that it exists!
seemingly the program is also run backwards. so maybe it will try coins with various biases until it determines the model that gives the fair flipping?
i am speaking from what i gathered reading the article and the other comments. seems pretty interesting to me.
I didn't read the article but I am going to read your thesis. I have a question: Is it possible to have enterprise gamification? What should be the end goals - the achievements so to speak?
Isn't the whole idea of gamification(an idealization that didn't quite happen I guess) is to make crud work seem like fun? But, then, wouldn't repetition of the same joyless task be mundane to the point of being Sisyphean? I agree that a game achievement is fun to get but archiving mail day after day would get old pretty fast(I think).
And as a grad student myself I must ask, have you considered the possibility of gamification systems in academe(school in general)? I guess that's what the trophies(and convocations) are for, right?
So there is evidence that people will go looking for intrinsic motivation. The famous example is that of a car builder as described in relation to Flow Theory [1], where this guy on an assembly line would try and make a game out of his small piece, trying to assemble it faster and faster. However, what happens when you introduce extrinsic motivators into the mix is what is known as the Overjustification Effect, where people start to think they are doing it for the extrinsic motivator and erode their intrinsic motivation. If we gave our car mechanic an extra $20 if he was always in the Top 20% of workers, he's going to start thinking he's doing it for the $20 and not because he wants to do better at his internal game.
So if we assume that people will go looking for intrinsic motivation in even the most tedious jobs, then we can design structures that provide feedback to enhance that motivation. The key to metrics is that they need to provide feedback on the things that the employee cares about and helps them to understand how they are doing in whatever motivates them. For our car mechanic, maybe we want to do things like:
* Show a timer with how long it's taking him to make them, how he's doing over the day, how he's doing in comparison to yesterday
* Show him the cumulative effort, illustrating how many widgets he's put together
* Show him how his work is important to the company (providing him with purpose), maybe with how many cars he's allowed to be built, and which dealerships they go to
None of this is really "gamification" as you'd think of the term. They're means to support the gameful context that the employee can choose to, or not choose to engage in (e.g. the stock market is basically gambling, you choose whether you treat it as a game or not). It is, however, going to help get the sort of output that you wanted when you went looking for gamification.
Notice the risk here: If he's building things faster to play his game, his work might get sloppier. That's why such things need really careful monitoring and tweaking before being deployed. Same thing with the Target checkout thing where it shows how quickly the checkout person is pushing people out the door. My guess Target's real goal isn't getting people out the door, but getting happy customers out the door. If a checkout person is being incentivized to actively not help out customers with problems that require more attention, then it's possible it's working to harm the overall goal.
EDIT: As far as gamifying education, you might be interested in "Punished by Rewards", which is a book about intrinsic motivation in schools, and was published long before gamification appeared on the scene. The book has it's critics, but it's an interesting take.
Even further than just the Overjustification Effect, it is important to point out that as soon as you introduce the concept of work-as-game, you turn work into a competition, where you are specifying a successful outcome. Then the players(employees) have to choose rational strategies to "win".
A major problem in enterprise gamification efforts is when the rules, strategies, and outcomes conflict with the ultimate business objectives in the first place. Others here are correct to cite examples where optimal strategy to win a game differs from the goal of the company. e.g. to rank customer service agents based on customer calls handled, not the outcome of the calls.
Ultimately, additional complexity added to almost any job will backfire in some way. Creating a situation where employees need to both do the job and win the game is problematic, made worse when you are already providing them with the compensation for them to do the job, and the game mechanics that favor winning the game.
There is a parallel here between Gamification of Work, and Enterprise Social Networks (Yammer, Chatter, etc.) where these collaboration suites have had trouble catching on, since they were additive to the existing process of email. It tends not to matter much that the UI/features are better for a wider array of collaborative tasks if they have to be used in addition to the pre-existing systems. Collaboration software competes with time spent collaborating by other means, gamification competes with time spent working toward other (more relevant goals).
I don't have research for you off the top of my head, but here's anecdotal support -- there's no way these people can get this good at their tedious menial jobs[1] without finding a strong (superlatively strongest in the world) intrinsic motivation to perform better.
As Lewisham puts it, structure to maximize enjoyment of their intrinsic games is the best. Ideally, find out directly from the employees (or by being them for a while) what intrinsic games they play for their tedious tasks, and then try to build structure around making it more fun -- there's essentially 4 parts to it - holistic goals, performance stats, realtime feedback (these 3 are mentioned by example by Lewisham), and the hardest-to-implement, fun interactions.
The last is complicated, but for example, it's the reason why a clickety mechanical keyboard may be more fun to type on than one of those polymer rollable keyboards, if you have an employee whose job is to type all day [you and me probably]. Sometimes workers find ways to turn their interactions with their work fun on their own (like those in [1]), but for the less intrinsically motivated, employers facilitating it can have a huge effect.
The key word is pipeline. If you have some analysis that runs in several stages, you'll be taking the output of one stage, and connecting it to the next. If you want to compose multiple phases, chained together, raw MapReduce isn't going to help you very much with the chaining.
What's described in the paper is a way to do the chaining in a nice way. The system will take care of writing the raw MapReduces for you. But it'll also do a lot of work on the interconnections between your stages as well.
MapReduce wasn't designed for iterative algorithms or streaming data, whereas Google Dataflow and Spark (http://spark.apache.org/) make iterative algoritms easy. It's a much simpler programming paradigm, and it allows you to do iterative graph-processing and machine-learning algos (http://spark.apache.org/mllib/) that are impractical on MapReduce.
