This is an interesting analysis, but I have a serious problem with the strong implication that high vividness = good.
At the rock bottom of the vividness scale, we find Jane Austen, Isaac Asimov, Agatha Christie, C.J. Cherryh, and Danielle Steel -- all extremely popular authors. And at the very top, we find George R.R. Martin, Roald Dahl, Poul Anderson, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Ray Bradbury, and Kim Stanley Robinson -- also popular, but generally not quite of the same stature as those on the first list.
Possibly the reading public is slightly biased toward low vividness. Meanwhile, I have at least two favorite authors on both lists.
The really tough barrier is getting enough people with the required expertise to do the annotation.
Annotation sites like to say, "Hey, we have this paper and we have this paper." Meanwhile, thousands of new scientific papers are published every day. Of course, the majority of those are not going to be of interest to any journalist. But even when we whittle the pile down to those that are, there is still a huge amount of work to do, and some qualified person has to do it.
And why would they do it? I'm an academic researcher. So I have the required expertise to do this kind of annotation for papers in my narrow specialty. But my life is full with my own research and publishing and teaching and advising and committees and paperwork .... And every October I have to write up a report on my achievements for the past year. Getting a paper published counts for a lot in that report. Annotating someone else's paper is not going to count for much at all. If I start substituting the latter for the former, then my career is going to go down the tubes pretty rapidly.
I think it would be great if this kind of thing could actually happen. But I don't see how to make it happen.
The problem -- if it is one -- is certainly not limited to the Win 8 Start menu. There are plenty of interfaces where pressing a button, or some similar action, pops up a new full-screen or nearly full-screen UI element that looks & works differently from what was there before.
I wonder whether any research has been done on whether this makes any significant number of users forget what they were doing. If not, I think such research would be worthwhile.
MacOS does this, albeit less intrusively, with full screen apps. (Note that "full screen" means no window chrome, which is different from "maximized".)
Normal task switching is near instantaneous, but full screen apps add about 0.3 seconds of animation to their switch. It's enough to break my concentration, so I end up rarely using full screen even though I prefer it for most apps.
It seems to me that this article is concentrating on the wrong thing. The biggest problem in the incidents in question is not misbehavior by police; it is misbehavior by EMS workers.
Consider: a police officer and an EMS worker are dealing with someone who is difficult to subdue. The police officer -- who does not have the expertise to know whether it is a good idea -- requests that the person be injected with ketamine. The EMS worker -- who does have the expertise -- does so, knowing that it is a bad idea.
What most needs to change here is the EMS system.
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EDIT. I guess I mean to say that the people involved here (as opposed to the article) are concentrating on the wrong thing. The police are the ones that have changed their policies. But it seems to be the EMS system that has the more serious problem.
How do you infer that the article concentrates on the misbehavior of police more than misbehavior by EMS workers?
I have read it a few times now, and I don't get that interpretation.
If anything, the medical system comes off worse. For example, compare:
> Hennepin EMS Medical Director Jeffrey Ho and Minnesota Poison Control System Medical Director Jon Cole dismissed the findings of the report as a “reckless use of anecdotes and partial snapshots of interactions with police, and incomplete information and statistics to draw uninformed and incorrect conclusions.”
with
> Minneapolis Police Chief Medaria Arradondo would not comment on the specifics of the draft, but credited it for changing his department’s approach to interacting with EMS workers.
> How do you infer that the article concentrates on the misbehavior of police more than misbehavior by EMS workers?
Well, I guess it's not so much that the article concentrates on police misbehavior, but that the actual people involved did so. The article does not give us complete information, of course, but it appears that the police basically said, "We messed up, and we're fixing things," while the EMS people said, "There isn't any problem." And since the EMS people apparently are the problem, I find the response disturbing.
The article is based on "the findings of an investigation conducted by the Office of Police Conduct Review", so I think it's reasonable that it concentrates on the police conduct.
That's assuming the premise "it is a bad idea" is true.
I also don't believe it is inappropriate for the police to suggest that physical restraint isn't working and that something else should be tried (as that is there area of expertise)
I don't think it's inappropriate either. But we should note that police do not have expertise regarding the administration of drugs.
Someone with no expertise in a field can suggest anything they want to. Those with expertise who are actually making the decisions need to be held to account for them.
> Bell knew there was a distinct possibility of a patent fight with Edison, so on three occasions he had papers and experimental products sealed in tin boxes and deposited at the Smithsonian Institution for safekeeping.
> "A really smart mathematician, Fra Luca Pacolini, demonstrated mathematically, that the four regular solid bodies: the Tetrahedron, the Cube, the Octahedron, and the Icosahedron, correspond respectively to the four elements: fire, earth, water, and air."
I think it means that the writer doesn't really know what he is talking about.
And, by the way, there are five regular solids. The other is the dodecahedron. I imagine the writer would say that corresponds somehow to the "quintessence" some philosophers used to go on about. But that still doesn't mean this idea has anything to do with physical reality.
EDIT. By the way, in spite of all the mystical silliness that seems to surround it, personally, I think that the Soul of the World sculpture is a really cool idea.
the idea comes from ancient philosophy, when philosophers could make claims like "everything is made of fire" or "everything is made of water" or "everything is made of triangles" and argue it reasonably. the platonic solids, also, are five in number, where the fifth is a dodecahedron. i think it was plato, among others, who also believed in a fifth element, aether, but i cant remember the details.
how one would demonstrate any of these relationships mathematically is beyond me.
There is another way to view this. We might think of these programs as encouraging people to do things that society needs, instead of what they need. Then the payment is there to offset the personal cost.
Note. I've thought about this for all of 10 seconds. I might be 'way off.
Hm, I don't know of a rule that specifies how to use the word "about".
To me at least, "about 328 feet" seems okay. It gives you more precision than "about 300 feet" while still letting you know that it's not exactly 328 feet.
The point is that extra precision is unwarranted. We only know that it missed by somewhere between 50 and 149 meters, so it's not appropriate to imply that we know it more precisely.
This discussion reminds me of the time Apple quoted surprisingly precise weights for how much material they recovered through recycling[1]. It turned out the figures were converted from heavily rounded metric numbers.
The best part was that in the websites for some some markets they converted the very precise imperial figure back to metric and claimed something that was close to the original rounded number number but off enough to be extra weird (like 2,999 kg of silver).
> Basically, the Army blew the levee to save a town, Cairo, IL, at the expense of (a few) homes and (lots of) farmland on the MO side.
Are you sure about the "homes" part?
20 years ago, I was a professor at Southeast Missouri State University in Cape Girardeau. As part of new faculty orientation, we took a bus tour of the area. During the trip, we passed through the Birds Point-New Madrid Floodway. We were told that no one was allowed to live there, so that it could be flooded on short notice without endangering people or their homes.
For the interested, I found this: https://www.ebay.fr/itm/Tableau-Litho-signee-mine-de-plomb-p...
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