Maybe he realized that his behavior would be against the new CoC.
Maybe he had a good conversation with people he respects, where they confronted him with his behavior, and he was finally able to view his behavior through the lens of an outsider.
Maybe he finally found and realized the "bugs" in his social interaction code and needs some time of to improve his mental tools.
I meant "the best" for the advertisers, not necessarily for the users. It is possible to do this transparently and there are times when users may actively search such "ads" out (and being paid a small fee, instead of that fee going to ad click companies), but the trend is going to obfuscation. You can block ads, but you won't block content.
In a sense this complaint and PR is such a form of obfuscated advertising. The money and technological skills is in the hands of the advertisers, not the users, so this will be an unfair fight (advertisers will be better at hiding ads, than users are able to detect them).
I do think that Google has data sharing with "hundreds of companies". These are not advertisers, these are ad companies. They recently updated to comply with GDPR.
Edit: And about it being "evil" or "bad", let's just say that it is "unnecessary" (from a user viewpoint). You can still make money from ads without hovering up user data. But then you don't make money from users not clicking on the ad, and it is slower to build up an effective profile. Relevant ads are better than irrelevant ads, but nothing beats no ads at all. The best future ads will not look like ads at all (but will be hidden inside reviews and editorials).
Current audience. What about a new young audience? What about the part of the audience that wants to listen to him on Twitter?
> That would be against Twitter's freedoms.
I think you should be able to fire your users for being assholes. But I do realize the slippery slope here. I could discriminate on race, political preference, smell, weight, sexuality, age, etc. and that causes me to label someone an asshole.
Now Twitter, the biggest public and digital town square of our future, labels you an asshole, but does not specify exactly why. The global media town crier goes around town telling everyone you are now the new village idiot. Even if you vehemently agree with their decision, this should give you pause: How could such a system be hacked by adversaries/what vulnerabilities are exposed? How much unchecked social/tribal power is held in the hands of the few? What would such a system look like if it is artificially/clumsily converged to a majority opinion ideology chamber? Then, will you still be heard by your audience if you have a dissenting/unpopular/asshole opinion? Not too long ago "homosexuality is not a mental disorder" was an unpopular opinion. Do you trust our current evolution enough to say: "We are there. We can now freeze our morals and views."
This may have something to do with: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/ny-news-conspiracy-... I think the Russia investigation has unearthed links between conspiracy theorists and efforts to divide and undermine US politics and these companies were warned behind the scenes to stop being complicit (or perhaps they had a inter-company meeting, Bilderberg-style). Also there was a concerted effort by media companies to have Jones banned. They kept him in the news cycle for weeks. Finally, the left united to have him banned, made him an issue and visible to employees of these companies.
The Periscope video was the last straw. Jones was angry and ranting, because that journalist had claimed that his campaigning/efforts lead to Jones' ban on social networks.
> Important to note that tech platforms did not enforce their own rules and take action against Alex Jones / InfoWars on their own accord.
> It took media outlets to point out for weeks that InfoWars was skirting the rules on these tech platforms for them to enforce own standards.
Previous offenses include: "dehumanizing trans people". That looks very bad on paper, so you search for the video, and you see him discussing an over-the-top drag queen reading a book for children in a public library. To me, with the long nails and the thick make-up and the wig, the drag queen really looks demonic/ridiculous/freaky and he remarks on that. You should have the right to call that abnormal and refuse to want to see that normalized.
Look at what happened with Pewdiepie when a media company goes on a crusade with an agenda, it is very similar.
The bottom line for this decision is not harassment or abuse, it is the political preference of Twitter's employees. Maybe it is not a good idea to have a left-leaning workforce police online debate, even if it is their platform. For all the talk about diversity, SF companies sure could do with some more political diversity.
They should have banned Alex Jones from public discourse when he had this crazy conspiracy theory that high-ranking politicians and businessmen workship Moloch and child sacrifice. They should have banned Alex Jones when had the crazy conspiracy theory that chemicals and pesticides in the water change the sex of frogs. They should have banned Alex Jones for saying that Lady Gaga turns satanism into a performance and flirts with illuminati symbology. They should have banned Alex Jones for stating that weather manipulation is still a thing after the Environmental Modification Convention.
They actually reduced the average length of stay for knee replacement from 3.3 to 2.4 days. They verifiably saved costs of a middle-sized hospital of 10m$ a year. If we assume professional integrity, then they won't intentionally inflate projected savings, so we have no reason to doubt their expectations. (Just like I don't have any reason to doubt that you don't give inflated life expectancy projections to your patients, or receive kickbacks from needless prescriptions). It is, on a professional level, like telling an engineer who projects a bridge to be safe, that they likely build an unsafe bridge, and you'll only believe it when at least a 1000 people have crossed it (trust me, I am a lorry driver who loves driving over bridges).
The hospital in the article also used Allscripts.
> The next step for Flagler was to review the findings with the Physician IT Group (called the PIT Crew) and to make the necessary changes to AllScripts. Physician buy-in is critical...
> There are two interesting anecdotes from this process that bear repeating. The first is that once doctors became aware of the work that was being done, requests for membership in the PIT Crew skyrocketed and attendance at the bi-weekly meetings doubled. Doctors want access to data.
> The second is that one of the more accomplished physicians remarked that the care process model for pneumonia was far lighter than what he would have used, but upon looking at the outcomes, readily agreed that it delivered the same or better care in almost every case – and that what he was doing was essentially unnecessary, or wasteful. Presented with the evidence, he committed himself to rethinking his approach.
Edit:
> but decreasing length of stay by 2 days would be a shocking advance.
If you look at the industry average, maybe. But these 2 days were for this specific hospital (being a community hospital they get many different patients, and you can't have experts for every area). Perhaps removing those 2 days brought them closer to industry average, which seems like a very reasonable advance.
> probably doesn't have the data to really build a robust model
It is both possible to build robust models on small datasets (and that data is shared, or more abundant than you expect).
> Even major academic centers have relatively limited data for the number of permutations of health possibilities.
This is one of the problems they (the IT supplier) solved. They are able to build regulatory-proof models from 100.000's of permutations. Another, more recent, advance is in counterfactual analysis (what would have happened if this pneumonia patient also had COPD?).
This is more of a puffy PR piece for the IT supplier.
The methods they use are very advanced mathematics / graph theory. If we take the modern usage of the word "AI", then this qualifies. These methods are beyond what anyone can do in Excel. Usually data is so big and complex that a manual analysis takes months. It does not scale to sit down and find ways to reduce costs. Using unsupervised pattern detection does scale.
About the consultants vs. engineers and the power to actually implement systems: Many IT systems that call themselves "AI", are not. They require tons of labeled data, a human making assumptions, lack justification and transparency, are not embedded properly in the business (lack UI, documentation, buy-in, data processing), and don't continuously learn.
You need an entire ecosystem of processes and software tools to have the power to change (identifying problems is easy, of course engineers already know what's wrong with their daily work, if they could implement a solution, then a proper engineer would, but they really need a consultant and CEO backing to actually get something actionable).
I wonder if there is a deeper structure/nature to business growth and popularity, something akin to the Matthew effect [1] ("to everyone who has more will be given") or power laws.
People have limited energy to store and rank objects, so they settle on one or two per field/subject, and all future energy goes into maintaining that categorization.
An example would be "Hulk Hogan", even though I am not interested in wrestling, I do know that name. If I am similar to others, such as journalists, this would explain why that name is getting bigger and bigger: people just add on energy on the current most popular choice.
Encryption while keeping the "shape"/"form" of the data intact. This way you can have secure third-party computation, without that third-party knowing exactly what data it is operating on.
> One of my random question is that what does Google gain by spending resources on developing course like this?
Mindshare or more generally PR. Also to "collect" the talent on their platforms (Tensorflow, Google Cloud, ...). Also these guides were repurposed from existing (internal) guides and are a few years old by now, so the cost is low.
You further describe the role of a data engineer or ML engineer. If you'd approach data science with a focus on engineering and tool use, you could be one of the few dangerous data scientists that is able to go end-to-end (should be safe for at least 5 years when such pipelines are evolved without much human intervention).
> But when I see data science, no excitement. All I imagine is image manipulation and fancy charts.
This is because, while there is legit substance to the hype, the hype is real and it is focused on deep learning ImageNet (and later GAN's, Atari games, Go). Being able to show deepdreamed images and cat neurons is like catnip to journalists. Computer vision is but a very small part of ML and lots of data-driven companies have no need for such skills. Charts are made by analysts.
Everything (including block chain) will move closer to ML paradigm of learning software. Data infra engineers will see their infra increasingly used for ML. It remains all software (very advanced, but accessible to anyone) and hardware (still a asymmetry here between industry lab and practitioner). Don't get left out: Do machine learning like the great engineer you are, not like the great machine learning
expert you aren’t.
This is what scares me about these stories. First kill any competition (go in debt if you need to) to become a giant. Then start enforcing (sometimes arbitrary or politicized) rules to the detriment of some customers who now have nowhere else to go.
Uber with surge pricing and this MomCorp weed ban (Uber drove the taxi's out of your neighborhood first, so now you have to pay for surges). "Sorry sir, I won't pick you up and drive you home, even though you are drunk, and unable to drive, because I only pick up people with a 3.7 rating or higher."
Netflix for entertainment (you rely on it so much for entertainment that you simply don't see a movie if it is not on there).
AirBnB refusing hosts to host you, if they suspected you came to Charlottesville to protest/march for your beliefs (that are counter to AirBnB's beliefs). Not saying that those protesters are not scummy or that AirBnB does not have the right, but look at the future where AirBnB owns 90%+ of accommodations. Can you imagine a hotel chain acting like this? "Sir, we saw you say on Twitter that you came here to protest. The management has decided you can't sleep here. The next competitor is 50 miles that-ah way. Good luck!".
Is there still animo for this? I would love to invest in elderly care technology, especially AI for Alzheimers.
Would this still be possible, or is it a big company (Philips?) thing now?