I'm sympathetic to the worries of a local population about being exposed to a nuclear disaster. The thought of radiation effecting you, your friends and family is horrifying.
Where I diverge from the article is the opinions of the anti-nuclear activists, where they say "It is time to bring nuclear energy to an end". I realize that nuclear power is scary and that this particular reactor may have a higher than average risk profile. However, where they lose me is the alternative. There, currently, is no viable alternative to nuclear that provides the same safety and econimic benefits, not to mention environmental pros of nuclear.
Simply not liking something is not enough reason to get rid of it. Who knows maybe a new, safer plant would have been built if they were allowed, but the people voted against it. I find this type of reasoning problematic, it has somehow become common (or I'm just realizing its happening) to rally against something without considering the alternatives that would have to replace it.
This ("there's no alternative") seems not to be true at all:
In Germany, 13% of our energy is nuclear energy. Only 13%. We're a net exporter of energy, big time, so we could (almost) disconnect nuclear power right now, if we didn't want to export energy to our neighbours. We're at 52 TWh (tera whatt hours) export per year right now.
In the last 18 years we've gone from 143 TWh (2000) to 92 TWh (2018) per year nulcear energy generation. In the same time, wind energy alone has added 160 TWh per year, so that alone is more than enough to compensate. There is another 105 TWh from water, sun & bio gas that we added. But wind energy alone is not even close to fully captured.
Thing is: each nuclear energy plant in Germany right now makes more than 1 million € per day in profits. Each plant. If you'd have that plant as an energy producer, would you take it offline?
Agreed entirely. Also Germany is experincing massive swings in wholesale cost as wind and solar resource comes and goes, with huge negative prices in summer especially.
Negative prices may sound good but in reality it is causing chaos with backup generation and the economics of the grid.
Also keep in mind that the carbon mass per kWh in Germany has been rising recently, because of all the dirty brown coal that is getting burnt when wind and solar generation is low (instead of nuclear). Add this with some of the most expensive consumer prices in the world and very few people would recommend following Germany's model.
First of all the germans could have used nuclear energy, but since they are closing them down this is only going to increase. Second of all if the alternative energy system was so solid as many of you seem to believe why did they need to use coal? Its amazing to me that people cant see the issue with thier so called green position.
The use of coal is very much a political issue. The social democrats see themselves as the workers party. And historically their strongest base was the coal/steel workers. they have some problems shutting down coal, because this would go against "their own" people (even if there are not many coal worker left). Also some coal mines are in eastern Germany which already faces some unemployment issues and has a lack of industry.
But still coal is being phase out. The highest ratio of electricity from coal was 46,9% in 2013. In 2018 it is 38.4%. Not going down fast enough, but still going down.
You are right, that there needs to be some sort of mechanism to stabilize the grid in case renewables are not available. But nuclear energy is not an option for this since it takes days to start a reactor. So what are the options?
* Gas turbines (in the short run, known technologie, fast start-up times, but still creating CO2 even if less than coal)
Nuclear is the ONLY option as it would provide the baseline energy needs and then you can add the others on top.
That's how you do it properly instead of using nonscaleable energy solutions to solve an exponentially growing demand. Again wind and solar is doing around 1% of the worlds needs. They are not even close to being able to solve the basic energy needs.
Coal is used because solar and wind is insufficient not because it's political.
Here's the thing. Nuclear power isn't automatic. It isn't static. It isn't founded on anything so reliable or durable as, say The Pyramids of Egypt or South America.
We don't build these things to last thousands of years. We build them to last a few decades.
And the people that run them? You can select dependable people, but no one seems to be able to quantify the objective details that make for an ideal nuclear engineer. Is there an unlimited supply? What if market forces apply pressure to our feedstock of nuclear engineers?
How do you know there will always be people to tend the flame?
Look at New York City's MTA and its subway system. There are people willing to spend time running those trains and maintaining those tunnels and booths, but how much skill does that require, and how much does it cost?
Given the option to take on a role operating a train as an engineer on an NYC subway line (pick any line), underground in smelly, toxic soot covered tunnels inhabited by roaches, rats and bums all urinating and defecating as needed, drunks on the weekends, commuters punching and fighting each other in the morning and on the way home during rush hours, 12 hours a day for the rest of your life, which other jobs would you take first, provided matching pay?
Garbage man? Dishwasher? Short order cook? Professional baseball player? Basketball player? Porn star? Cashier? Branch manager at a bank? Librarian? Truck driver?
Now perform the same exercise for nuclear engineer.
Nevermind the science, What about the social forces? The human factors are the issue.
If it were as simple as stacking bricks and leaving them where they are, with a failure mode rendering the system dead and little more than an explorable landmark, without consequence no one would complain. But that's not what happens when these things fail.
If the potential is so valuable, why not build them with all the reverance of an international landmark?
People can see through this fact. Such a plan will never see the light of day. Nuclear plants will always be bult with all the charm of an American public school. A place with all the charm of a child prison, running on a razor thin margin.
If the power they can produce is so plentiful, why are they not built to lend the impression of an unlimited budget?
I understand this article is mainly concerned with a particular power plant that may have its potential structural defects downplayed due to financial reasons.
Nuclear is the safest, greenest, most scalable, most reliable and plentiful energy form we have.
More people die every year from Coal than have died from Nuclear in it's entire history.
More people die every year of setting up solar and wind than of nuclear.
I could go on.
The fear of nuclear is absurd and 100% due to the success of a mostly anti humanist environmental movement and the completely un-scientific political debate that surrounds this (which also have found it's way into the climate debate)
Nuclear failures are different - they make an entire area uninhabitable for hundreds of years and they're very difficult to clean up without getting a lot of people killed.
Making a small area uninhabitable vs killing millions a year, i know where i take my chances. Chernobyl killed almost no one, fukushima killed almost no one. Mother nature kill more people in a day than have died from all nuclear disasters together. You really have the proportions wrong in such a fundamental way, unfortunately supported by media, politicians and environmentalist.
No it didnt kill a lot and i would urge you to find that evidence. Furthermore the amount of people who died from chernobyl in all the time after is a fraction of the people who dies of natural phenomena from nature every year, add on top of that the other reasons people die and chernobyl is not even worth mentioning. Again you guys have your proportions completely wrong at a fundamental level.
Coal mining makes large areas uninhabitable. Chernobyl and Fukishima made areas uninhabitable for humans, but they seem to be gardens for flora and fauna (because people aren't bothering them).
Coal isn't great either (worse in a lot of ways), but the type of risk is different.
I just find it odd that Nuclear seems to create these almost religious followers like the parent comment I replied to that ignore the tradeoffs and special risks of Nuclear failures. Wind and solar seem a lot more preferable and are getting better with battery improvements leading to increased capacity with a lower cost.
You should find any evidence of your own position before you start calling other people religious. The risk of nuclear is not even comparable to the risk of things you do everyday and take for granted are not worth worrying about. Find the evidence that show nuclear is even a fraction as dangerous as you claim. Dont take my worth for it, educate yourself. Then come back with the evidence and i will rally up behind you.
Wind and solar are not even close to being able to deliver like nuclear and they deliver a fraction of the worlds need (1%). More people die from setting up solar and wind, way more animals die because of wind, both wind and solar pollute more. Its pretty obvious who is the religious person here.
I have a favorite article for when people say that - https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-35761136 - which notes that there are areas inside the Fukushima exclusion zone with an additional annual dose of 13 millisieverts vs city of Ramsar in Iran where they have an annual dose of 250 millisieverts. The citizens of Ramsar obviously have found the place to be inhabitable although I'm sure some safety expert is working to kick them out of their homes too.
While the danger of installing solar cells is a good point, I suspect most working class neighborhoods would rather have these high-risk, well-paying jobs for a lot of young people than have a much smaller number of people running a nuclear plant at some remote location. Concentration of capital is also a risk.
I would add that the problems of nuclear are mostly self-inflicted and due to an unwillingness to admit to its own shortcomings. To give you an example, a Nuclear physics professor told my class, with a straight face, that nuclear plants were designed so well that one could expect a catastrophic failure no more than once every thousand or so years. Since the actual frequency of catastrophic failures has been more like one in every twenty years or so, his model was clearly off by orders of magnitude - but he hadn't updated it! Nuclear has probably the largest expert problem of any industry I've encountered, it's full of smart people living in a completely different world than the 'un-scientific' public they look down their noses at. If Nuclear is to fulfill its potential the people in the field need to do some painful introspection and recognize that the uncertainties in their models are actually much larger than they'd like to believe. I'd recommend any book by Taleb if you think that's an avenue worth pursueing.
I'd wager that the ex inhabitents of the Fukushima region disagree.
And this was Japan. You can't accuse them of being a bunch of Vodka swilling engineers that misjudged the signalling of a couple of dials because they were drunk.
The problem is that the consequences of a nuclear catastrophy are horendous and in the hands of profit seeking, private companies with a potential tendency to cut corners it gets outright dangerous.
The fear of nuclear is absurd and 100% due to the success of a mostly anti humanist environmental movement and the completely un-scientific political debate that surrounds this
You don't know me. You have no idea who I am or how I form my opinions. You just essentially judge anbody a manipulated, non-thinking idiot who disagrees with your point of view.
I was pretty excited to try this out (there is an online demo linked), however after some playing around I found the experience lacking. Not that things sounded _bad_ persay but that I found it incompatible with actually playing anything that sounded nice.
I think part of my disatisfaction is due to pattern recognition. As humans we recognize patterns EVERYWHERE, even when they don't exist. So what happens (or what I believe might be happening) is that I think I recognize a pattern, try to play a note to continue it, then the NN decides otherwise. Although the resulting sound may be nice to an outsider it breaks my internal model, making it sound "bad" to me.
I do however like the idea of augmenting insturments to make them easier to play, I'm personally guitly of having many potential songs in my head but not having near enough the skill to execute them.
I think the dissatisfaction you're talking about arises necessarily from projects that generate notes with a network trained on a bunch of MIDI data. Our ears expect music to have structure (chord progressions, etc) but models like this only really mimic small-scale features of the source. So any given phrase of 3-5 notes can sound musical, but over the course of a measure or two the illusion breaks and it sounds largely indistinguishable from a random walk of notes.
That's the analogy I usually make, yeah - it's like generating a story with a neural network trained on a bunch of stories. You'll get grammatical phrases, and sometimes sentences, but naturally none of it will make any sense.
>I do however like the idea of augmenting insturments to make them easier to play, I'm personally guitly of having many potential songs in my head but not having near enough the skill to execute them.
Yeah, we've been doing that for a while with music tech starting from basic sequencers, arpeggiators and looper pedals, down to programmable automatic accompaniment on keyboard workstations (you press a chord -- or even one or two keys -- and the virtual band is playing the backing track in the right key).
Anyway, for your problem of having songs in your head: hum them into a portable recorder (cell phone/whatever) whenever you have an idea. At home, try to pick up the melody on an instrument that you can play. With software, record the melody to a click track/metronome. If you can figure out the chords, layer them on top. There are plenty of drum loops lying around. Boom! You've transformed an idea into something others can listen.
IIRC that's how Michael Jackson composed. And if you can't play an instrument, you can hum to a friend who can play, and figure out things together. It really works!
The constraints need some tweaking. For example, it should be possible to repeat a note by repeating a keypress. The input could be interpreted more strictly as a Parsons Code [1].
I really like where this is going, it seems a bit rough around the edges right now (which is totally fine!) but functional enough to be useful. Really happy it's free, open source and offline first (I can just sync through Drive or Dropbox).
Couple thoughts on some exploring:
- Webpage capture: seems that only links with `http` in front work, would be great to get resolving working nicer (say news.ycominator.com should work). Can't see this being a large issue as mostly I would copy paste from my browser, which keeps the http
- The "inspect element" menu in the editor seems a bit unnecessary, as I don't really think of PDFs as HTML. I guess this may be nice for some folks who are familiar with HTML but for me its a bit confusing.
- I managed to crash a page by highlighting a section and using the page down buttons(unsure exactly what caused this)
- I had some performance issues when resizing the page on a longer pdf (140ish pages), crashed and then wouldn't reopen until I restarted the application
As I said a bit rough around the edges still, but as you hopefully get more use these bugs/inconveniences will get ironed out. Excited to see this develop and great work!
> Can't see this being a large issue as mostly I would copy paste from my browser, which keeps the http
We will ship a chrome extension so you can do one page sync between Polar and your browser.
We're going to use Firebase for the auth and sending of this data between instances.
> - The "inspect element" menu in the editor seems a bit unnecessary, as I don't really think of PDFs as HTML. I guess this may be nice for some folks who are familiar with HTML but for me its a bit confusing.
I will probably remove it by default and add a 'developer' mode which turns these on.
> - I had some performance issues when resizing the page on a longer pdf (140ish pages), crashed and then wouldn't reopen until I restarted the application
Waiting forward for the Chrome extension. I'd rather not have another app open all the time / or open it each time I want to add a bookmark.
Meanwhile, I'd find helpful a shortcut for the 'Capture' command – ideally it would also be pre-populated with the clipboard, like Pocket does on mobile – when detecting a url in the clipboard.
The headline indicates that forgetting someone's name is bad, however the article treats that as forgetting someone entirely. I'm curious what the impact of the inbetween would be; that is "I remember I've met you before, but I can't remember your name".
The article also seems to conflate forgetting appointments with forgetting facts. I can easily see how if someone forgot an appointment with me, it would be annoying and damage the closeness of a relationship. I have zero resentment, however, for someone forgetting my name. I have forgotten people's names far too many times to get angry over such things.
> I have forgotten people's names far too many times to get angry
Same here. I've forgotten enough names on people, even people I've known for ten years and deal with on a weekly basis, to be bothered by it. I generally remember the name some minutes later, but it's often too later by then. I've never found asking someone for their name ("Dude, I'm sorry, I'm completely blanking on your name", depending on the formality of the event) to cause any particular problems.
As someone who's absolutely abysmal at recalling names and physical features, but with a good memory for personality and interactions, my experience has been that the impact's rather minimal - while it can lead to a few awkward moments, it's much more important for social interaction to remember who someone is than their arbitrary identifier.
Plus it sets the stage for any number of anecdotes or comparisons.
If I can remember someone but not their name I usually try and be quite frank about - "hey sorry I forgot your name but when we met you had that cool story about how you did X".
I think we have a lot to learn from the human brain still. I am continuosly fascinated by our ability to learn quickly and use previous experience to bootstrap learning. I think the next breakthrough has a high chance of being a collaboration between the neuroscience community and CS. What is really interesting about Hinton is his background, experimental pyschology.
Although not explicitly what the report is focussed on, this resurfaces my, perhaps mislead, hope that AI will be the field to prove that the Chinese style of eduation will prove unfruitful. As someone attempting to work in this field right now I intepret it as something that although on the surface is highly mathematical/statistical at its base still rests on critical thinking and creativity.
The latter attribute, creativity, is something I have always thought was necessary to foster with freedom in thought and expression, two things I see incompatible with the authoritarian system currently in place in China. Maybe I'm naive and romantic about the Canadian/Western style of education and China will inevitablly dominate AI through force of will. However, my personal experience working with it, and experimenting with improvement in my own small corner of applied science tells me otherwise.
Would be very curious to hear others thoughts on this, perhaps from people further along than I (still a lowly undergrad).
Edit: I don't want my comment on math to imply that there is no creativity within mathematics. I've gone through too many heavy math courses to believe that. I'm instead trying to say that there is a place, even beyond mathematics, for creativity and intuition, where you don't need the mathematical understanding to build something novel.
Having gone to school in China I think that the Chinese people not being creative is incorrect. The public US education system is just worse all around. However there are pockets of extremely high quality that exist but aren't indicative of the US as a whole.
What is an advantage however is the US culture which promotes a certain type of courage. In degenerate cases it combines with bad education to become a naive form of arrogance and self indulgance. In the most actualized forms it combines with strong work ethic and refusal to look away from reality to create very big change. (ironically this freedom culture combines best with immigrant mentality)
The Chinese are very creative, except this creativity is often expressed in trivial ways because the culture creates a sense of "fineness" with things. The US culturally has what the Chinese refer to as "the heroe's dream" where everyone imagines themselves the hero. I suspect Chinas large population as well as it's more authoritarian government plays a role. Historically pre-communist era even the "important" things were left to the imperial elite.
My frame of reference is actually the Canadian education system, not the american one. I like to believe we are slightly better than the american's in terms of providing an better baseline education (this might be due to us being "socialist"). I do agree that both Canadian and American education has a lot to learn from China, however I think what you mentioned about courage is a really good point, and I guess maybe thats what I'm getting at. Thanks for the constructive point of view!
My doubt is that Chinese businesses will be able to produce competitive products that break new ground with markets outside China.
In a political culture that largely will prevent outsiders from participating in business or non-tech academia inside the country (who will want to live/teach inside China, micromanaged by Big Brother's social score — other than the Chinese?), I think China's heavyhanded political leadership of the future will form an insurmountable obstacle against the country's ability to compete in any/all of tomorrow's critical revolutionary exponential multiplier business spaces — the ones that silicon valley startups excel at, that require dynamic multicultural madhouse environs, and that engender future Googles or Apples. Without the freedom and chaos needed for this space to thrive, China will forever relegate its rising business geniuses to pursue mere optimizations of The Next Big Thing, that will be invented where new ideas are free to run amok.
In the not so distant future, China's cut-rate factories distributors and e-tailers will be automated, like everyone else's, and her political stranglehold on the genesis of new ideas will lead to her uncompetitive downfall. That is, if a billion unemployed don't do it first.
And yet the hero's dream has indeed produced staggeringly powerful hero's. These outliers tend to be light years ahead of their non-hero peers. The paypal Mafia (Musk, Thiel, etc), Bezos, Gates, Zuckerberg, Brin, Page, Jobs...
The US is a couple of education reforms away from being a hero generating lottery to a hero generating machine. Also the fact that China is pretty much closed to foreign outside heros ever getting a chance.
I wold find surprising if Chinese people weren't creative; but what I would be curious to know is if that creativity wouldn't be stifled when it goes against the academic establishment, ie: how easy is it for a scientist to propose and pursue a novel theory that goes against the current scientific consensus - and thus, against his or her superiors' theories? Would that be a problem?
There are plenty of creative people in china that retain their creativity inspite of the rigid Chinese educational system. Yes, some kids will get beat down into obedience, but China has a lot of people, so some won’t.
The bigger problem is just talent based: china isn’t taking much advantage of non chinese talent, while America is. The American talent pool for top tier talent is simply much larger than china’s despite having a much smaller population.
I hadn't thought about talent pool and very good point. In my mind even if China did want to take advantage of this they may have issues due to their reputation (I for one would not want to live/work in china due to their blatent disrepect for IP).
Follow up: Do those people then get encouraged to continue to foster their creativity within the system? Does the government, upon seeing that someone "withstood" their education change their approach and allow them to continue to explore?
It depends on your company, but creativity isn’t shunned in chinese industry, or even in Chinese PhD programs. Instead, you pay some lip service to some correct thought concepts and you are given wide freedom over the rest of your work, there is a lot of meritocracy allowed. Chinese are also actually quite clever in their subversion.
I would say Japan and Korea are much worse than China, with very restrictive corporate cultures that are actually more Confucian than China.
The natural order of human civilization derides IP. In the absence of a supremely powerful, globe-spanning government, enforcement is impossible. In the presence of honest intellectuals, it is impossible to deny that all progress is gained by standing on the shoulders of giants. Yesterday's Nobel is today's homework. Attempts to embargo knowledge are not just backwards, but thermodynamically futile.
Intellectual property management is archaic. And your other claims are borderline racist.
I am very sorry if I came across that way at all. I have nothing against chinese people, I am talking about the government here. If this style was prevelant in, say Russia, or the USA I would hope I would have the same opinion. I could be wrong about the government, and thats totally fine, but please please do not think I am at all racist.
You seem to have an overly simplistic view of human nature which may have triggered gp's racist alarm. Look back into the history of Western science: plenty of creativity from scientists who grew up in the eras before creativity gained it's current exalted status. Likewise Chinese people won't all turn into automotons just because the Chinese government policy does not maximize their creative potentials.
I have never thought of myself as understanding people well, so thats no surprise. I guess what was interpreted was that I said "Chinese people are not creative", rather than the more moderate "Authoratian governments do not foster creativity as well as Democracies, and this will harm their AI research". I dislike arguments being taken to extremes, and was hoping to gain insight into what other people thought on this topic, instead of being critized for "being borderline racist". Other commentors have succesfully critized my argument, and I love being shown I am wrong. But I expected more from this forum on not taking things too far.
You do not have much life experience outside of the west, or professional experience in China, but you feel some kind of cultural superiority that roused you to suggest that democratic traditions encourage creativity and authoritarian government discourages it.
Your priors are wrong. I work in the US, public and private grants are shrinking year over year, and anti-intellectualism is rampant. Meanwhile my Chinese colleagues, at the same place in their career, are practically local celebrities and receive unprecedented (in the US) resources to do decade longitudinal research and increase headcount. In reality, China is on the bleeding edge in AI because their government and private industry has the social cohesion to focus on scientific advancement. Besides the vast intellectual capital at their disposal, they can cheaply afford to iterate quickly as the means of manufacturing and production are local.
I think creativity is the wrong thing to focus on if you are interested in where China may fall short as it largely depends on personal initiative. People are creative despite of their government and society, which all exert conforming pressures wherever you are. If the saying "necessity is the mother of all inventions" rings true at all, people in the developing world certainly face more necessities to be creative.
Where China may fall short is actually when people become overly "creative": authoritarianism conditions people to individually work around rules they don't like instead of working together to change the rules. When rules are ignored you have rampant corruption and heavy pollution despite rules on the book.
As I cannot reply to squeegee5 comment I'll reply here:
So, because I don't have the right experience I shouldn't voice my opinion, in a way that suggests I am willing to be proven wrong? I never said I was correct, I said this is what I think and wanted to know what others thought. I never claimed to be qualified, I actually implied I wasn't. It seems you have more experience in this area than I, so I learned something from your comments. Again my issue with your comment isn't that you're telling me I'm wrong, its that you are telling me I am racist
FYI: it's possible to say racist things unintentionally - i.e. without being racist. I'm not saying that's what you did in this thread: but you shouldn't assume that someone is calling you a racist when they say "[...]your other claims are borderline racist"
So I cannot critize elements of a goverment style without being racist? I am not saying that "Chinese people are not creative", I am simply saying that I do not thing this style of government fosters creativity. And I am very open to that being wrong, however I would prefer (as other commenters of done well) to be shown counter examples to my belief and provided evidence. Telling my I am being racist for critizing a method of governance, of a county that the article is talking about is absurd.
There are many things that the Chinese government is fantastic at, for example energy. Their transition to green energy has been fantastic for both the industry and the planet as a whole, and I wish other governments would follow their example. If I critized the green energy policy of the American government would I then be anti-USA?
Generalizing and taking arguments to extremes is something I didn't expect on this forum and am dissapointed to have to respond to.
The parent is attempting to 'teach the controversy', by trying to convince others that there -even is- reasonable debate among informed people on this subject (that government policy creates cultural norms, and these norms are suppressed creativity and intellectual conformity). The lie then becomes a kind of half-truth, automagically. These accusations aren't exclusively associated with race (the same was said of the Japanese, Soviets before them, Americans circa 1800s, etc), but that is merely cover when you accuse China of IP theft and the very concept is an intellectually deficient product of trade protectionism.
Deriding culture on the basis of tenuous claims is a deceptive way to evade accusations of racism.
I don't wand to sound snarky, but you take issue with their blatant disrespect for "intelectual property", but not with their blatant disrespect for some basic human rights?
Just citing one example, there are many reasons why I may or may not want to work in China. This one just came to mind first as it was a major reason one of my employers didn't do buisness there. The human rights abuses are a whole different bag of worms that I didn't want to get into here.
Yet we Chinese have less top masters that revolutionize the fields they are in. I, too, believe we have more than enough number of brains to have the leaping happen. It's just the mind and behaviour of combination at individual level being dramatically reduced. And for the a few still hold them, the incentive to keep doing with combination mind and behaviour is simply negative. Hence, at the group level, there are less organically grown mature groups of individuals to provide foundation/platform for those capable and willing to do that. A metaphor I can think of are the soil and the seeds. How people perceive the soil leads to what people's expectations on the issue.
> The latter attribute, creativity, is something I have always thought was necessary to foster with freedom in thought and expression, two things I see incompatible with the authoritarian system currently in place in China.
This is such oft repeated nonsense. Creativity exists in authoritarian systems. Creativity existed during slavery. Creativity existed during the dark ages. It existed during the age of kings. It existed during religious tyranny. It always exists.
> Maybe I'm naive and romantic about the Canadian/Western style of education and China will inevitablly dominate AI through force of will.
What is canadian/western style education? It's so funny how we mock our education system as producing factory drones incapable of thinking but whenever china is mentioned, we pretend like our education system fosters creativity. People constantly regurgitating the trope about "creativity" and "china not having it" just shows how well brainwashed we are. I wonder how the chinese built their own unique civilization if they weren't creative?
> Would be very curious to hear others thoughts on this, perhaps from people further along than I (still a lowly undergrad).
It's a simple matter of wealth. If china can develop enough and get enough money to be able to spend time doing the research, then they will make progress.
It's simply a matter of wealth, people, resources and stability. China has the people obviously. They have stability so far ( I doubt anyone is going to invade them and destabilize them a la opium wars ) and they appear internally stable as far as any can tell. They have a large enough territory. So it's simply a matter of wealth. Can they get wealthy enough to build universities, companies, etc to fund research?
Creativity, research, etc has nothing to do with the political system. The authoritarian soviets were able to send people to space. Nazi germany was able to advance research on everything. So did imperial japan. The authoritarian and tyrannical european colonial powers ravaging most of the world made great contributions to science/knowledge. So did we while we were busy exterminating the natives and enslaving blacks.
The system doesn't matter. People are just as creative in china as they are here. The system doesn't matter. It's a matter of wealth/funding and stability.
It isn’t that the western education system fosters creativity, they are just less effective in beating it out. In china, you have to compete very hard, you can’t slack off, you must get a good score on the gaokao to assure your future, and don’t fall asleep too much in your patriotic indoctrination classes. In the west, meh, it’s a fact that there is less pressure, and you can even refuse to stand for the pledge of allegiance if you want (in the usa, I still find the whole pledge during school thing wrong).
China still has a lot of creative people, but the structural differences of the Chinese education system can’t be ignored, and I cringe whenever politicians say we should have schools more like theirs.
China is not just single block. Chinese education is evolving and experimenting with new things.
Example: Shanghai (25 million people) decided to do something new. They learned from other countries with good PISA results and adopted it to their system. Less tests and more long term projects. Little more autonomy for theaters and better rewards. Their experiment was a success and they reached the same level in PISA studies as Finland and Singapore.
Given China's backwards residency system, you have to exclude people in Shanghai who don't hold Shanghai hukou, so you get around 13 million rather than 25 million. But ya, Shanghai students do really well on the PISA exam, which is one of the things that is promoted a lot.
But I don't see how performance on an exam relates to creativity at all.
I think this has been much relaxed recently. You just need to prove that you live in Shanghai for more than 6 months (rental is okay) and either pay social security taxes or are registered as seeking employment. Thanks to the one child policy, if they don't relax enrollment policy the schools are going to run out of students.
No, not just that, there are now specific rules to place those without hukou ahead of those who have.
e.g. in my area, say kid's dad has hukou in the local area and kid's mum has hukou from another area in Shanghai, then the kid will get lower priority for applying schools in the area comparing to those with one of the parents with hukou in the area and another one without hukou in Shanghai at all. The logic is that the first couple has the option to send their child to a different area in Shanghai while the second one doesn't have such option available to them.
I think that only applies to middle class chinese with formal resident permits. Migrant workers from the villages, which make up much of that 12 million, still have to leave their kids at home. Anyways, shanghai is a bad example of equitable education.
School enrollment is permitted for those with temporary resident registration (which most everyone should qualify) but requires three year continuous registration, so is still a high bar to cross. Hope to see continued relaxation. They will need the younger generation to fill the schools as fertility rate stays low.
Thanks for the reply, I guess we can agree to disagree on some points ha. I tried to keep my answer diplomatic and open to being told I was wrong so glad someone took me up on that :).
In terms of your question on education, I have only experienced Canadian education but I have never thought of it producing "factory drones" , exactly the opposite. Some of the most creative thinking I have seen has been in the classroom, with professors/teachers asking us to point out their flaws, or think of better answers than they presented.
The results of creativity spreading to the economy can be hampered by the government. But I strongly disagree that creativity and innovation can't flourish under authoritative regime.
Educational system does not create or remove creativity, it's just a common myth. The reason why Chinese students look so mediocre is because they value science and engineering so much. It's seen as a path to good live. The creative people are still there, but there is more mediocrity because there are so many of them.
China: 4.7 million STEM graduates per year = 34 per ten thousand.
US: 0.56 million STEM graduates per year = 17 per ten thousand.
Chinese have adopted market mechanism and Chinese companies compete on global free markets. Government is just coordinating and supporting the industry just like DARPA is doing in the US.
Perhaps I phrased my point wrong. To me critical thinking/creativity and questioning authority are all intertwined. I see those attributes being emphasized very strongly here (in Canada), and from an outsiders point of view, less strongly in China. I actually didn't think that Chinese students were mediocre at all, my intepretation was that China was exceptionally strong in science and engineering due to that social tendency that you mentioned.
>To me critical thinking/creativity and questioning authority are all intertwined.
And I maintain that this is just a story we tell to ourselves. Can you find anything to back it up.
Two reasons for this.
1) Different cultures express same things differently and get same results using different methods. Direct challenge is not the only way.
2) Chinese are not especially obedient or submissive. Regional riots and unrest that you don't see in the news happen regularly. The way people solve their problems with government is very different from the West. Chinese priorities are in getting ahead in their life, not in political activism. If Chinese government fails to deliver economic growth they will have to deal with more rebellious people.
Using Hoftedes research to compare different cultures: China has similar levels of individualism and their long term orientation is similar to Germany, South Korea and Taiwan, but their cultural uncertainty avoidance very low. It's lower than US, Germany South Korea or Japan.
ps. Cultural comparisons in social sciences contain lots of BS but Hoftede's research is relatively solid. His research in IBM is classic. It has limitations but it is useful.
Thanks! I probably have a biased view so maybe I need to step back and look at what other people are saying. I'll look into Hoftede's research when I have the time.
I might also add that maybe there are divisions within Han Chinese culture that Hoftede's research don't get.
Looking from the west China looks like solid block and Han Chinese who make up 92% of the Chinese population look even more so. Chinese government want's to propagate this view of unity. Maybe Beijing and Canton are culturally more like Germany and Britain or like South Korea and Japan.
> this resurfaces my, perhaps mislead, hope that AI will be the field to prove that the Chinese style of eduation will prove unfruitful [...]
>
> The latter attribute, creativity, is something I have always thought was necessary to foster with freedom in thought and expression, two things I see incompatible with the authoritarian system currently in place in China.
It's always dangerous to believe something based on wishing it were true.
Yes, China is an autocracy, and yes autocracies might hamper scientific and technological development (though there are many counterexamples). It would certainly be very convenient for the West if China's growth faltered because their political system can't do AI.
But China has an impressive record of economic growth over the last 30 years. In a decade it will probably overtake the USA's GDP at current exchange rates to become the world #1 economy; with 4 time's the USA's population, China doesn't need as high GDP/head to have a total GDP much higher than USA. A rich China means they will have plenty of money for education and AI. Chinese people already score higher in IQ tests than westerners. It is quite likely that they will start selecting embryos for intelligence soon, and then there will be a bigger IQ gap -- with more people who're more intelligent, China will have a massive advantage in AI research (as well as everything else).
It strikes me as entirely plausible that China will dominate the world in the 21st century, in AI research as well as economically and militarily.
I’ve never studied in China, but having spent a reasonable amount of time working in a Chinese tech company, I do agree.
It’s not that there wasn’t creativity, but the culture very strongly did not allow for anyone to perform duties or tasks even moderately outside of exactly what they were told to. I think this definitely has and will hold them back.
China still scores near the top of the international maths olympiads. These competitions are designed to force you to require creativity and not just memorise formulas So even if the system doesn't produce high average creativity, it seems to produce high creativity at the top level.
I guess the average person doesn't have very much life insurance (<$100k on average per person). Looks like about 100 people have died from earthquakes in the last 30 years in CA, so maybe that gives you $10M in life insurance expenditures.
Health-wise, let's say every injury has cost $30k on average (IMO a very generous estimate). Looks like there have been about ten thousand injuries or so over the last thirty years. So that's $300M.
Let's say for the sake of argument that an early warning system reduces losses by 50%. So that gives us $150M in value over thirty years. Or about $7.5M per year in value. (Less, really, because value saved in the future has to be discounted.)
That doesn't really go very far even toward maintaining an existing system, to say nothing of developing a new one. (Assuming the last thirty years is representative, that my napkin math is good, etc.)
Probably a better way to guesstimate the "value" of a life is to look at the wages that would have been earned if alive. The median income of a worker in the US earns $44k/year, and can probably expect to work another 30 years for retirement (median US age is 37). Multiply those numbers together, and the median death would have earned $1.2M. If you do more rigorous probability distributions, you could probably build a better estimation of what this number would be. Of course, you could also argue for more precise estimates of someone's value than their wages. But the magnitude of the number does appear to gel with regulatory thought: most regulatory agencies seem to do cost-benefit analysis of regulations assuming that saving a life is worth costing at most a few million. $100K per life does seem quite low.
A hedge fund might have motivation do it, but I don't know how one would reconcile the cross purposes of knowing the info ahead of time for stock trades vs warning the public asap.
If you're worried about getting claim-jumped by an HFT firm subscribed to the public-warning system, a few millisecond delay might allow for trade execution?
Once you plan for any delay then the ethical/financial discussion then goes to why not 0.1s or 1 second or two? It might be more ethically balanced, and less of a PR nightmare if a hedge fund were satisfied with maybe matched parallel feed and the advantage they get for just having the infrastructure to respond to a richer signal sent at the same time as the public warning. The public warning is a yes or no to send, but the feed might have added data such as uncertainty, or initial locations.. etc.
I believe comparing engines to batteries is misleading. As you are comparing _capacity_ to _energy_, and although the units are the same the meaning is very different. The emissions to produce the initial capacity may be similar (200g vs. 250g), however those emissions are spread over the life of the battery (~1000 cycles). So ignoring power input (which is a bad assumption) batteries would be 0.2g/kWh vs. diesel at 250g/kWh. Of course ignoring power isn't fair, but it shows the manufacturing emissions are neglible compared to diesel engine emissions when spread over the batteries lifetime.
I think you got the emissions of a charge cycle mixed up with emissions of battery production per capacity unit.
For the CO2 per 1 kWh capacity, the emissions of battery production are 200 KILOgrams. I got the 200 grams from 200 kg by dividing by a supposed 1000 charge-cycle life of a battery.
So my calculation showed that per 1 kWh power charged/discharged, the emissions come out at 200g per kWh.
Which is comparable to using diesel to produce the same amount of power.
"For the CO2 per 1 kWh capacity, the emissions of battery production are 200 KILOgrams."
I don't know if that's true, but if it is, it will be largely due to the CO2 footprint of the grid. Battery manufacturing is energy-intensive.
A battery factory powered by 100% renewable energy, on the other hand, would have a greatly reduced carbon footprint. And producing more batteries enables more renewable energy sources, getting us closer to that goal.
I also believe that in this application (short-haul Norwegian ferry), the expected life of the batteries is far greater than 1000 cycles. These ferries do multiple trips per day, every day, and recharge each time. Since they've been in service since 2015, they will already have a lot more than 1000 cycles on the batteries.
An example of a battery factory powered (eventually) by 100% renewable energy is the Gigafactory using a combination of wind and solar. Even today, it is entirely powered by electricity. It doesn't even have a gas line (as would be common for any large building, especially an industrial one). Its solar roof is eventually going to be 70MW. They've just started installing part of it, and from satellite and aerial imagery it looks like they have a few Megawatts already installed.
And assuming the vast majority of the energy used in battery production is electricity, then the figure for emissions that you used is highly dependent on grid mix. For instance, coal is roughly 1kg of CO2 per kWh. The current US grid is less than half of that (~430grams/kWh by my calculations using data through December 2017). If your study assumed coal power for battery production and assuming the Gigafactory is no more efficient (doubtful), then even today before the solar roof is installed, the CO2 emissions is already closer to ~90kg of CO2 per kWh of capacity. The grid is improving roughly 4% per year, and the Tesla Gigafactory roof and wind turbines coming online should drop that even more.
...especially as the Gigafactory starts buffering its own electrical load with its own batteries to reduce the cost of its grid connection and transportation of the batteries and components is increasingly done with Tesla Semis.
I see your point, my mistake. However there are still many arguments to be made for this strategy. First of all, in terms of carbon capture it is much easier to capture carbon at a factory then on a boat, or any mobile vehicle for that matter. Secondly, arguing that diesel is equal is ignoring that diesel needs to be transported to and from the fueling station, and extracted from the ground, this should be factored into it's emissions (I'm not sure how). As far as I know moving electricity is far easier than moving liquid fuel, as long as you are in a preexisting industrial zone.
So I do agree, perhaps on a pure emissions standpoint they may be more equal than most think, however in terms of environmental impact batteries seem to be able to cater to technological advances (carbon capture and better manufacturing with scale) much better than diesel (which you NEED to burn to use).
Refining oil also requires substantial amounts of power. From what I’ve read the power to refine a litre of gasoline e.g. requires as much power as an electric car would need to go the distance 1 litre of gasoline gives you.
If refining 1 liter of gas took the energy potential of 1 liter of gas then we wouldn't be dominated by the petroleum industry... The chemical energy storage in hydrocarbons is stupid efficient compared to the alternatives.
Oil refining is very energy intensive, but gasoline production is highly energy positive. Interestingly: atomic process heat for refining could tae a huge chunk of CO2 off our roadways and also improve oil production numbers significantly (20%-ish).
>There are 3,000 Packstation machines in Germany[1] and 90 percent of the people living in Germany were within ten minutes of a DHL Packstation.[2]
There are also Paketboxen, which are smaller installations for residential areas. The whole system works pretty well for me. The one big downside is, that it only works with DHL/Deutsche Post parcel. They are the dominant player here, but sometimes delivery by them is not available.
Yes! DHL is notoriously understaffed or incompetent in my Berlin neighbourhood. When i order packages to my apartment, often the guy will not even enter the building. He will drop off the package at some random neighbour 1 block away or the next Post office which as well is way too small and understaffed and i will recieve the notification card 2-3 days later (Email is fine though). Going to the post office, waiting in queue for 20-30 min is pretty normal.
Since i am using Packstationen this problem has largely gone away and works perfectly for 95% of my deliveries.
Ah, another Berlin DHL sufferer. Either they don't even ring the bell, or drop it off at some neighbour that isn't there, or at a shop that closes at 4pm. Packstation has been a god's end, next to my supermarket anyway, 24/7 usable and having the doors plop open makes it feel like a Christmas calendar.
We've banned this account for continuing to violate the guidelines after we've asked you several times to stop. We're happy to unban accounts if you email hn@ycombinator.com and we believe you'll post civilly and substantively in the future.
Seems like they were launched around similar times (both came out in 2011) so that a definite possibility. However from what I know about Waterloo's design projects (as this was a final year design project) this project was most likely started in 2010, so technically amazon's locker came out later. Although who knows who copies who when things get released so close to each other.
I would imagine that Amazon began working on their solution for some time before its release as well. Not that it matters to me who beat who but just to point out that they still likely started around the same time.
I did some digging in the /r/uwaterloo subreddit and it turns out that some customers were getting packages at no cost. Perhaps it wasn't financially viable.
I used it a bunch of times and having it on campus was pretty great. It was way safer than having the packages left randomly at the front of your residence. So as far as a "solved problem" is concerned, this definitely wasn't solved in any shape or form at Waterloo until BufferBox arrived.
I forget where I read this (somewhere on HN most likely), but there is a major difference between what Google/Waymo is doing and their competion. It all goes back to the DARPA days; The waymo approach is a hybrid one, its terrain detection using LiDAR as well as visual based systems. To see and "understand" the environment using a mix of these technologies is very different than what, say Tesla is doing, which is using cameras to do what is basically advanced lane following (although it is still fantastic technology). I believe that its this dichotomy in approaches which causes what people interpret as Waymo falling behind, or well, not being as ahead as they once were. Many other companies are catching up using visual based systems, but I believe there is a wall they will hit, where they will need to go through a major iteration of their technology to match what Waymo is currently doing.
Where I diverge from the article is the opinions of the anti-nuclear activists, where they say "It is time to bring nuclear energy to an end". I realize that nuclear power is scary and that this particular reactor may have a higher than average risk profile. However, where they lose me is the alternative. There, currently, is no viable alternative to nuclear that provides the same safety and econimic benefits, not to mention environmental pros of nuclear.
Simply not liking something is not enough reason to get rid of it. Who knows maybe a new, safer plant would have been built if they were allowed, but the people voted against it. I find this type of reasoning problematic, it has somehow become common (or I'm just realizing its happening) to rally against something without considering the alternatives that would have to replace it.