If your takeaway from your link was that "it's fine" and not "that further research is necessary"... you are going one step further than the article.
I can understand why people don't want screen time when their kids are toddlers -- you only get to raise your kids once. If the jury is out on whether or not "screentime" is bad, some parents err on the side of caution. Regardless, kids are malleable enough that any "familiarity gap" that the "iPhone user from age 2" has over the "iPhone user from age 6" has will likely be near zero within a few months at that age.
What benefits have you found your child to have derived from relatively early smartphone use beyond being able to have access to their parents at any time during the day?
My personal take is that, as with all things, moderation is key.
The article says: "While we agree that the well-being of children is a crucial issue and that the impact of screen-based lifestyles demands serious investigation, the message that many parents will hear is that screens are inherently harmful. This is simply not supported by solid research and evidence."
If an effect is so small that existing studies haven't measured it yet, then it's probably fine to ignore it even if future studies might find a very small effect.
> you only get to raise your kids once
> If the jury is out ... err on the side of caution
> as with all things, moderation is key
It's one thing when you use hand-wavy platitudes to guide your own parenting choices. The problem is that supposedly rational organizations (WHO, government bodies) use similar hand-waving platitudes in setting official recommendations and policies.
> If an effect is so small that existing studies haven't measured it yet, then it's probably fine to ignore it even if future studies might find a very small effect.
This is just blind scientism of the worst kind. The only things you can draw this conclusion about are _the specific possible effects that have been studied_. The possibility of screens around children all day hasn't been around for very long at all, and it's not irrational for parents to suspect that there may be effects that would only show up in, e.g., longitudinal studies.
Hell, the _very statement that you're quoting_ uses the words "the impact of screen-based lifestyles demands serious investigation". Parental caution (and those of institutional recommendations) in the lead-up to a more fleshed-out body of scientific literature on the topic isn't unreasonable at all.
No, it's an inference drawn form imperfect information, which is the bedrock of policy-making and civilized life in general. Screens have been around for decades now. They have been the subject of significant study in different contexts. The average American has watched more than four hours of TV per day for more than thirty years. An entire generation was raised in front of the TV. If there was a major first order effect from "screen time," we'd know about it by now.
Still, the topic isn't strictly on people's interactions with a screen. The biggest difference is availability. You couldn't carry your T.V. with you everywhere you go, and it can't do even close to as much as a mobile phone can.
I'll agree that there's imperfect information because of how new the technology is, and how it's difficult to study the long-term effects because of that. However, erring on the side of caution while doing something as non-deterministic as raising a child because you don't know the consequences is not an incorrect course of action.
>beyond being able to have access to their parents at any time during the day //
That sounds like anything but an advantage if you eventually seek to have children be independently capable and willing to rely on their own resources.
> That sounds like anything but an advantage if you eventually seek to have children be independently capable and willing to rely on their own resources.
I mean, this is fuzzy-headed thinking. You can flip that around just as easily: allowing a kid to reach out to a parent as needed using her own agency can reduce the anxiety that makes children clingy. It's like training wheels: do they encourage or discourage biking without them?
>If I had a cellphone when I was a kid, taking the bus for the first time would not have been so terrifying. //
Isn't it being "terrifying" and yet you having the gumption to do it what builds your character and prepares you to take on things without having your hand held? You were relying on your self - your skills, your organisation; and not on your parents?
"And now, little Jack, it's time to learn to swim. [throws child in pool] C'mon, use your gumption! Stop drowning! And stop all that yelling. This is building character!
Oh, he's drowned. Never mind! Better luck with little Fred!"
Having a way to talk to parents in an emergency isn't having your hand held. It's like a parachute that allows you to do more dangerous things than you would do otherwise. I didn't end up actually using that cellphone because I didn't get lost, but that doesn't mean the phone was useless.
Maybe this is not the case anymore because phones are cheap but when I was a kid I felt proud that my parents trusted me with such an expensive piece of hardware. I considered it a responsibility.
Agreed - discomfort and fear have value. If you can't stomach the low-stakes game of using public transport without a lifeline how will you handle anything more serious?
In addition to other responses, I'd like to point out that it also reinforces shared values and expectations of connectivity and communication between family members.
Says the person linking to "informationliberation dot com". Pot, meet kettle.
Sure her twitter profile is highly politically charged and should likely have made her unfit for clearance, but citing that as evidence that she should be institutionalized is ridiculous. She'd likely say the same about you given your proclivity for "informationliberation". Where does that leave us for discourse?
Have either of you been thru clearance? I have. They're really excited to know if you can be bribed with drugs or sex or simple money. If you have the politics of a typical college professor they're not terribly interested. The clearance process was mostly CYA, was this candidate dumb enough to say he'd sell secrets to the soviets for weed or cash to pay loansharks or kinky sex?
I've read this woman's weird social media profiles. What a nutcase. The systemic failure was in her direct superior not discussing some red flags that would be noteworthy at any other organization with HR and/or the police. Her boss is supposed to be having an awkward conversation with HR beginning with "So I've got this direct report, and in public she hates the CEO. And she's intensely racist, everything with her is all about race race race, and btw she bitterly hates the CEO's race, although she likes some other races. So she hates the race of some coworkers including the big guy, and she likes the race of other coworkers, and says this all in public which must be very intimidating to her coworkers. And she hates a couple entire countries include some that we have coworkers from which must be very awkward in the office. And she tweets out parodies making fun of the CEO, in public. And she denies and parodies the CEOs policies, and denies the CEO is the legitimate leader of the company, which makes me think shes not going to react rationally at all, if the CEO or anyone else in the chain of command disciplines or fires her, we're going to need security if not cops present. And she identifies her own race as being terrorists, which in an era of workplace violence frankly scares me, and she does this in public so her coworkers see her identify herself as terrorism race or whatever violent idiocy, and we're making an incredibly hostile workplace for every coworker who's not suicidal or martyr complex. She believes she's about to die from climate change or some nonsense, the specifics don't matter, which is super terrifying in the context of self identifying as being a terrorist, making me scared she's going to strike first perhaps. So, HR person, do we wait for her to go postal and shoot the entire office, or is there some kind of employee assistance plan for mental illness I mean if this can all be fixed with some pills she seems otherwise OK, or can we call security and fire her WRT the whole workplace violence thing combined with her bitter racism toward coworkers or the ethnic thing where she hates certain countries that we have coworkers in/from or ..."
I could probably be bribed with a comprehensive family health insurance plan, with no deductibles and low co-pays. Just putting that out there.
A simple cash bribe is a nice gesture, obviously, but really, you'd just be bribing my spouse or my kids. That's why I don't like getting cash or gift cards as birthday gifts. I appreciate the thought, but you know that's just going to get spent on electricity for the house, or a replacement AC compressor, or a tank of gas. A good gift is something that person, specifically, would want, but probably couldn't justify slipping it into the family budget.
So yeah, bribing me with the same kind of health plan that I got a taste of once, and then never saw again, would be so much more effective than a briefcase full of cash. A defined-benefit retirement plan might work, too.
But that works both ways. If my [loyal] employer were to bribe me in that fashion, I'd be nigh-unflippable. ...unless the ethics reporting hotline was useless and career suicide, I guess.
So I wouldn't say the systemic failure is in not recognizing warning signs and raising red flags. It's because so many decent people just don't want to work for certain parts of the government any more. That leads to lowered standards, just to meet staffing requirements. And then everyone has to get "insider threat" briefings all the time. Decent people want decent job conditions, including pay commensurate with the private sector, and benefits sufficient to raise 2.1 kids in a solidly middle-class lifestyle. Sane people don't want to work for paranoid employers. Stable people don't want to worry about going bankrupt from a medical emergency. Reliable people want to be able to plan out career and retirement. And above all, honorable people don't want to turn on their own neighbors.
How likely is it that an employee like the one you describe could have been selected specifically to burn Intercept? After all TFA is published in the official CIA press organ.
Well, I guess what I'm getting at is a clearance is top down CYA, like say I sold 72 M-60 machine guns to MS13 to pay off my gambling debt, and a journalist discovers in 5 minutes that I posted that to twitter before I got my job of working at the armory, and the journalist is going to ask the Commanding General of the post why no one noticed that before I got the job and did exactly what I said I'd do. So thats very top down outside agency approves you.
That's different from bottom up, a supervisor is supposed to handle (aka, fire from job) someone who spouts off about how proud they are to be racist, etc. Nobody ever asked a commanding general "how come you hired someone who flaked out and went nuts" "well, stuff happens". On the other hand its precisely the job of her immediate supervisor in a bottom up fashion to notice she's, well, gone nuts and is saying stuff that opens the company to hostile working environment lawsuits.
I'm not even commenting on her, uh, peculiar belief system, but the mistaken idea about how clearances work.
Clearances are a mix of pre-crime / CYA / shouldda known type stuff.
A direct report going insane in public is totally a supervisor direct report problem.
Clearances also vary a lot over time... 50 years ago the Soviets could bribe a gay guy into giving up secrets... today the gay guy is probably happily married and nobody cares so its no longer a clearance disqualification. On the other hand I can't imagine any scenario in the history of business where an employee stating in public that they hate the race of their CEO and some managers and coworkers would result in anything but firing, like forever pretty much everywhere.
Someday, after we stop punishing people for it, I imagine weed use will no longer be a clearance issue. How do you extort someone for secrets because they're a casual user of a cool legal substance? I suspect it'll never be acceptable in any workplace to ever say in public "I hate (some level of manager) because he's a (insert race here)"
He never said he was fit for a top secret clearance. Her Twitter profile should've been an instant disqualification from any sort of security clearance.
Nor did I say that the poster here was fit or unfit. I speculated about what two extreme opinion holders would say to one another.
My point was that polarizing the discourse and reducing the other side to "just came out of the psych ward" does absolutely nothing to further reasonable arguments.
Yeah, she shouldn't have had a clearance, but if anyone thinks her posts are particularly unusual, they haven't been following politics on Twitter this spring.
Hate to be a pedant... but I'm not sure any one person gets to define what "music in the art sense" even is.
Yes, Ableton is rigid. Yes, Ableton favors certain musical styles over others. Yes, Ableton, here and in their design of Live, may just be giving lip service to anything beyond rigid song structure, tempo and dynamic changes, etc. Yes, Ableton loves their little boxes.
But, I find it hard to believe that Ableton has a "complete disregard for music in the art sense." If "art" inherently means "unquantifiability" or pure "aesthetics", then sure, session view Live might not be your best bet. Regardless, arrangement view is basically the same as Pro Tools as far as I can tell/remember from what I've used of Pro Tools.
I think either my phrasing was terrible (likely) or people aren't seriously considering what I am saying.
Try just looping a sample that is of arbitrary length, not some multiple of beats. This is something that we could do fairly easily since the 1980s, and with moderate effort before that. Ableton made this in to an unusual technique.
The entire arrangement view only superficially resembles protools, the automation, the time stretching, everything really, is completely different.
I don't understand, it's easy to get arbitrary length loops, that's the reason there is a "fixed length" button on the Push 2 which you can enable if you want.
The arrangement view is not meant to be Protools.
Ableton is actually quite nice for doing experimental and unusual music, it just is built around doing it LIVE. If you want to paint outside the lines, you can with it. "clicking boxes on and off" is simply a way of perceiving layering.
You can disable quantizing and "warp" for clips (or just some clips if you like).
I sometimes use Ableton for noise shows, you can definitely get weird and off the grid with it. Record in 2 loops, not quantized so their lengths don't match exactly, duplicate each loop a few times. Disable warp on a few copies, enable repitching on a few others. Then when you twist the tempo knob some loops rise in pitch while getting faster, some just get faster but keep constant pitch, and some stay the same length and timbre. Record that to another track, then duplicate THAT and repeat, etc.
This takes like a second. Drag a sample into an audio track (in arrangement view), copy it, paste it again where the last sample ended, repeat until it goes on as long as you need. Do you not know how to use Ableton at all?
It breaks. But now you're just adding arbitrary conditions. If you want it to loop without breaking when the tempo changes, load it into Simpler, turn off warping, and create loop points around all of the audio that you want. And then create a single MIDI note holding it on for as long as you need. Or if you need something really unusual, load a looper plugin into Ableton--there are tons. You're acting as if problems that only require a few minutes of cursory thought are impossible to solve.
I recommed Steve Reich - Music for 18 musicians :-)
Composing in the DAW is the best way to make someone else's music. Create your own creative process, then you are on the way to your own sound.
You can turn off auto-warp on audio tracks by default globally, and you can disable warp on a per clip basis as you go.
In your specific case... disable warping on your ambient track, line it up against your warped/synced "another sort of loop" in arrangement view, and then change the master tempo of the track until you find out what you want in terms of different tempos. (This is off the top of my head, and without the program in front of me. Apologies if it's vague.)
Live can definitely function as a "dumb" multitrack recorder that lets you do those things -- but, by default it has all the tempo/beat/quantize options turned on.
I saw your edited post above... I think people are reacting negatively to your criticisms because they're a bit harsh, and, I personally think it's shooting the messenger (Live). You can do the things you want to do in Live... but by default out of the box, it's not what's it designed for. Live lowers the barrier entry to making sound... the people/users cranking out 4-4 120bpm tracks likely wouldn't be making anything had there not been Live. If you don't want to call that sound art or music, that's on you. To many people, that's still music, and music they might not have created otherwise.
EDIT: Just saw your other post here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14300672) with some more specific criticisms. I feel your pain. You obviously already know how to do the thing I'm mentioning above, and are referring to more complicated scenarios. Thanks for sharing.
>What if I want the sound of rustling leaves to come and go across the course of a song?
Trigger it via MIDI as a one-shot in the sampler, for example. Sampler and Simpler params can be automated. If you want some 'arbitrary' looping, again use the loop points of Sampler and set the (re)triggering appropriately.
You can do all these things if you want to, you just have to invest enough time learning the tools.
Edit: If you respond, you may mention that you have invested the time. Perhaps you have, and I'm just misunderstanding your case or needs.
Not sure why this is downvoted. California, like many other jurisdictions, seems to make a distinction between groceries/"raw" foods, and "prepared foods" when it comes to sales taxes. Unprepared foods are generally exempt from sales tax, while store-prepared foods are not exempt. E.g. an unsliced bagel in NY is untaxed, but a sliced bagel can/must be taxed. Fruit and vegetables likely fall into the untaxed category.
From Wikipedia: In grocery stores, unprepared food items are not taxed but vitamins and all other items are. Ready-to-eat hot foods, whether sold by supermarkets or other vendors, are taxed. Restaurant bills are taxed. As an exception, hot beverages and bakery items are tax-exempt if and only if they are for take-out and are not sold with any other hot food. If consumed on the seller's premises, such items are taxed like restaurant meals. All other food is exempt from sales tax.
It is more complex that that: hot food might not be taxed if it is "to go" (Starbucks and their breakfast sandwiches ....), Whole Foods will always apply tax to its food bar items, the ice cream parlor down the street will apply sales tax if you say "for here" but not if they assume take out.
It is very very confusing, and I haven't really figured it out yet.
Sales tax on food in general tend to be pretty arcane. Notoriously, McVities sued the British revenue services to have some of their biscuits classified as cake instead of biscuits, because there's no VAT on cake. (They won.)
Using the title "engineer" in conjunction with "submitting the critique and calculations [...] to members of the public for consideration and modification [...] of traffic signals", I believe, is the critical part here.
If he had merely submitted the "critique and calculations" for "consideration" as a concerned citizen, he would have not gotten a fine. Simply put, he called himself an engineer and suggested that public infrastructure be changed. In Oregon, when you're not licensed by the state, you can't use the title "Engineer", and you definitely don't want to use it while trying to suggest modifications to public infrastructure.
I'm not equating the two in terms of "I believe both situations are completely just"... but doing what he did is akin to a thief walking himself into the police station. The purpose of the Board of Engineers in most states is not to decide what is "good engineering practice" and what is "bad engineering practice", it's to regulate licensure and set the bar for who is qualified to be an "Engineer" in the eyes of the state. He mis-navigated the American system, for better or worse, and paid a fine that is meant to dissuade people from doing things like this:
> Using the title "engineer" in conjunction with "submitting the critique and calculations [...] to members of the public for consideration and modification [...] of traffic signals", I believe, is the critical part here.
I hear you, and agree that when he says "I'm an engineer", we have a certain set of laws that apply to that speech.
I'm saying there is another aspect which is the the crux of the reply-to-top-level comment to which I objected: that Final Report is saying "doing [math and stuff] on [public things] is engineering, and you did [math and stuff], so you're doing engineering without a license". I don't think my "the Final Report is saying..." is unfair: check the Final Report sections 8,9, and 10.
I bet there are a lot of confounding issues in this particular case, but, very narrowly, what I'm saying is that using publicly-available data and speaking (without saying "I'm an engineer") of applications of "special knowledge of the mathematical, physical, and engineering sciences" cannot be illegal or fine-able, yet this is pretty literally what sentence three of section 13 (Final Order, Page 6) says is happening.
The law is not without context, nor is the law not without exceptions.
Indeed there is a whole set of exceptions related to "Exception to application of ORS 672.002 to 672.325"[0].
You may be interested in ORS 672.060(6)(a and b):
(6) The performance of engineering work by a person, or by full-time employees of the person, provided:
(a) The work is in connection with or incidental to the operations of the person; and
(b) The engineering work is not offered directly to the public.
Which basically covers the run of the mills, "I'm doing math and engineering in my backyard, or my friend's front yard, or for my neighbor".
Indeed, this is one of the affirmative defenses that he tried using, but was rejected.
Basically, you can't just stop at a definition in law, you have to read the full law to know what the law says.
Understood - I read those exceptions and his attempt to use them. Obviously neither exception applies; but it's the fact that the definition of engineering in ORS 672.005(b)[0] is so broad is worrying. Saying that I can do some math and create a nice graph for my neighbor, but not post it on imgur without a fine, is a step too far for my taste.
Please do yourself a favor and read this for a while instead. Taking bits of statute in isolation and extrapolating from them is a Bad Idea, and if ou ever get sued it will impair your ability to understand your own case. I've seen what that looks like close-up and it's not pretty.
That's because you're lifting it out of the relevant context. He has already messed things up for them by previously claiming to be an engineer to government agencies and local and national media.
He can't unring that bell because he already accepted a warning (absent any fine or penalty) and agreed to abide by the Code on not calling himself an engineer and then repeatedly broke that agreement, so he doesn't get to keep selling his proposed traffic solution because of his demonstrated bad faith.
It's like someone who called themselves a doctor and turned out to have no medical qualifications being enjoined from wearing a white coat and a stethoscope and hanging around hospitals offering unsolicited medical advice.
According the final order, he is not. Page 2 of [0].
"Jarlstrom is not now, and never has been, registered to practice engineering in Oregon, or any other state in the United States. Jarlstrom has claimed to be a Swedish engineer. However, engineering is not a regulated profession in Sweden. No licensure, registration or certification is offered or required to practice engineering in Sweden"
Completely agreed. He pretty much barked up the one tree that actively cares about use of the title "engineer", and used it in violation of the law (as it is now).
Had he sent the letter/formula/math/suggestions to the local state university civil engineering department, the local/state Dept. of Transportation, or the local/state representative, the response would have fallen on less deaf ears, and his use of the title would have likely gone less noticed.
They didn't fine him at first. They warned him not to do it, and explained why. He acknowledged this and agreed in September 2015 not to present himself as an engineer again. Then he changed his mind and resumed doing so.
Barry Schwartz specializes in telling only half the case to people who know nothing about law, while leaving out any facts that would show his clients in a bad light. Like he'll tell you about the plight of an oyster farmer whose business was shut down by the evil federal government, without mentioning that the farmer in question signed a contract for a fixed-term lease and the government extended the deadline several times before finally enforcing the terms of the lease.
Pick one or more of his cases then go look up the actual court opinions. The facts always seem to be very different from the version he presents to his audiences. He relies on people taking his claims at face value and not doing any fact-checking of their own.
I'm not an expert in Barry Schwartz but I think you're just making his argument stronger.
Focusing on the usage of the term "engineer" when what was in discussion was the traffic lights, which was much important, shows such a shortsightness. Of course, everybody was just doing their job, just following the rules.
Its more of you shouldn't give legal advice, and let people assume you are a lawyer, if you are not a lawyer.
Presumably, if he prefixed this with IANAE, there would be no issue. Well, in this case, a traffic engineer.
But essentially he was defining himself to have greater authority over the subject matter than he actually had, which while here is not really problematic, the act itself often can be.
Jarlstrom was informed that he wasn't entitled to hold himself out as an engineer and agreed not to do so. The reasons not to do that are valid, for the simple reason that it pretends to a level of expertise he does not have, when trying to influence how public infrastructure is run.
I have said many times that Jarlstrom could simply have pitched his idea without claiming to be an engineer. Why didn't he? Probably because people did not listen to him as readily if he did not use that title.
what was in discussion was the traffic lights, which was much important
Why is it so important? Only because Jarlstrom says it is and claims that his solution is world-changing. But this is sales talk. If his solution is really that good, then he should be happy to present it as an amateur, without pretensions to qualifications he does not hold.
His proposal sounds OK, but I know nothing of traffic engineering and can't really evaluate it. Neither, I suspect can anyone else except the one person who posted that they are a licensed professional traffic engineer. It's unclear what, if any, assertions Jarlstrom is making about the benefits of implementing his scheme. Will it save any lives or reduce the number of accidents? No idea. All we have is this: '"hen you make a turn you slow down but that's not accounted for in their solution, so people are getting caught in red light cameras for making safe turns.'
OK, I understand he is not crazy about red light tickets because his wife got one when driving around their hometown, but so what? What is so overwhelmingly urgent about this that the Board should make it heir priority? Why doesn't Jarlstrom have the patience to push his idea as a regular driver without making false claims to qualifications he does not in fact possess? I must reiterate that I have absolutely no problem whatsoever with his amateur traffic engineering endeavours...if he would have clearly labeled them as such.
but he is calling himself an engineer to leverage social credibility that attaches to that professional term. I can share my legal opinions with you all day but no matter how well-formed those opinions are it doesn't alter the fact that I am not qualified to practice law, so the only person I could legally represent in court in myself. It would be dishonest of me to label myself as a lawyer, because people who didn't know any better would easily believe me and might create all sorts of problems for themselves by relying on that false belief.
What's going on here is that you heard a sympathetic story about something you think you understand well - who doesn't understand traffic lights, they are so familiar - with an underdog pitted against the image of a large unresponsive bureaucracy. And that is the point at which pany people in this thread have stopped thinking. Look across the thread, there are even people insisting that Jarlstrom is in fact a licensed engineer, repeatedly, based on absolutely no evidence whatsoever! People are literally inventing facts to uphold their preferred version of the story.
I am a bit depressed to see how easily people are taken in, and abandon reason in favor of their emotional reaction to a piece of obscure public policy. I have no opinion on the right length of traffic light periods (because I don't drive, thank heavens), and I would have no objection to people evaluating Jarlstrom's proposal and adopting it worldwide. But he chose to go about advancing his proposal in a way that he knew would cause problems, and now he is claiming to be a victim after doing something that he knew in advance would create such a problem.
His legal case will go nowhere because he chose to antagonize the very people who were best-positioned to assist him, for no other reason than to inflate his own ego. It would be wise to ask yourself why the story excluded so many important details about the sequence of events, and perhaps to reread pg's famous Submarine essay: http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
I couldn't care less if he's a licensed engineer or not, if he was calling himself one or not...
I do care whether the traffic lights need fixing, what kind of fixing, if my local traffic lights suffer from the same issue and how it was troubleshooted.
All the rest of this discussion is just wasting everybody's time. And it is only happening because someone didn't have the good judgment to not fine someone who was obviously interested in the collective well being (initially motivated by personal reasons? who cares?).
All rules followed to the letter and society is losing.
You should. If I start calling myself an engineer, and start making noise, about how some bridge or other needs to be retrofitted right this minute... My opinion on the matter is not as valid as that of an actual engineer. And you should probably not conclude that the bridge needs retorfitting, solely on my testimony.
It's like a product manager, with no understanding of how software is built, coming to your daily standup, and telling everyone about what compiler flags they should be using. All the while, calling themselves a programmer/software engineer. If your company isn't insane, it should censure him for that - especially if he said he'll stop doing it.
> Jarlstrom was informed that he wasn't entitled to hold himself out as an engineer and agreed not to do so. The reasons not to do that are valid, for the simple reason that it pretends to a level of expertise he does not have, when trying to influence how public infrastructure is run.
Actually, from the documents provided, he initially made the claim that he held an engineering degree in electronics, which is hardly holding himself out as a registered engineer in the state of Oregon. In a later email he commented to the board that he was an excellent engineer, which may in fact be the case given that he held a degree in engineering. Again, there is no attempt to misrepresent himself as licensed in Oregon.
The first incident is a huge stretch to say he was attempting to mislead the public that he was a registered professional engineer. In fact, if he was a Swedish engineer, regardless of whether they regulate the industry or not, it is a factual statement to say he is a Swedish engineer and is not an attempt to make false claims of his credentials. The are arguing that he cannot speak of his occupation in another country and perform engineering calculations in the state of Oregon. That is clearly a violation of his free speech.
The second statement that he was an excellent engineer is a little more vague, but it is also a factual statement that he is an engineer. He does not ever claim to be a registered professional engineer in the state of Oregon and it is a valid argument that they cannot prevent him from stating his background in engineering.
If he was a doctor in Sweden, it would be perfectly if he still called himself a doctor in Oregon without implying that he was licensed to practice medicine. He would in fact be, after all, a doctor. Essentially what they are doing is equating the performing of engineering calculations (to back up his theory and present to actual engineers) with the practice of medicine. They are attempting to bolster that with two weak (but possibly valid) claims that he was representing himself as a registered professional engineer in Oregon in the process.
The fact is that the laws in this case are vague enough that they could be used to keep someone quiet for whatever reason--perhaps they didn't like the media making them look bad. Ultimately, that would be up to a judge to decide if they are in fact infringing on his first amendment rights.
> I am a bit depressed to see how easily people are taken in, and abandon reason in favor of their emotional reaction to a piece of obscure public policy
I don't see how, all the documents are right there in the article. And seriously, I have read well over thirty condescending comments from you in this thread with your fake intellectualism and it is a bit much. But hey, why don't you refer me to an essay or something.
Except he didn't use it in violation of the law. He wasn't performing professional work, nor was he designing something for construction or any of the other defintions of "practicing engineering"
Not sure if this is sarcasm or not, but the Constitution is but one piece of law in the US. There's a litany of state legislation (and I presume federal, as well) that regulate the use of job titles (e.g., doctor, engineer, lawyer, dentist, etc.). Most of them still on the books, and most of them attempting to nip the "direct harm to someone else" in the bud. That is what this article sort of willfully ignores: sure, this guy didn't exactly go out of of his way to harm people, but others have and do for their financial (or otherwise) benefit. [1]
I doubt that these laws are going away any time soon. Perhaps modified as more and more influential people see "programming" as "engineering", but doubtful that they'll go away for things like civil/mechanical/electrical infrastructure.
Perhaps on the North Sentinel Islands now, or 4,000 years or so elsewhere in the world, "no regulations" is / was the default position. That isn't the case for recent history in most of the world.
Claiming that "no regulations" is the default position, and that all existing and future regulations must be reasoned, argued and articulated from first principles sounds like a distraction, more so than a reasonable way to approach the current political atmosphere.
My point is that neither "insects are unpleasant" nor "plants are pleasant" nor "doctors are 66% male" are immutable features of the universe. They are merely snapshots of the human view of world conditions, as the world is now. "True now", but not "true forever and always".
The paper seems to advocate for designing ML systems that learn that what is "true now" may not be "true forever and always". It seems to be quite the opposite of "there are certain truths that ML systems should not learn."
If your standard for truth is "immutable feature of the universe" then you might as well give up now because we don't know about any of those, or indeed if any exist at all.
Setting such a standard for a machine is ridiculous if all you want is a new tool to get some work done.
Quite possibly. Words relating to insects will occur in news articles about malaria, zika, crop destruction, etc. Words relating to plants might occur in articles about arbor day, spring time, environmentalism, etc.
An exercise: Words relating to insects will occur in news articles about environmentalism, crop production, rituals of rebirth, etc. Words relating to plants might occur in articles about crop destruction, the international drug trade, people getting poisoned, etc.
rmxt questioned the universality of sentiment analysis. Responding by noting specific contexts, free from a clear coherent general structure, is an assertion against the discovered sentiments' universal truth.
But it is a universal truth that humans generally find plants pleasant and insects unpleasant. And the word "pleasant" is entirely based on human preferences after all.
What I'm probably missing indeed is that scoping of universality to humans. Lately I've been trying to be more explicit in my written communications in an attempt to understand both the limits of my knowledge and perceptions and the limits of the sources of information that I digest.
Is suggesting that pleasantness is a sentiment that's not unique to humans really that controversial?
super late edit: it's specifically flowers, not plants, that people are biased towards finding pleasant
I can understand why people don't want screen time when their kids are toddlers -- you only get to raise your kids once. If the jury is out on whether or not "screentime" is bad, some parents err on the side of caution. Regardless, kids are malleable enough that any "familiarity gap" that the "iPhone user from age 2" has over the "iPhone user from age 6" has will likely be near zero within a few months at that age.
What benefits have you found your child to have derived from relatively early smartphone use beyond being able to have access to their parents at any time during the day?
My personal take is that, as with all things, moderation is key.