Random links
- Google's Self-Driving Car Gets Mixed Reviews
- One reporter's experiences with riding in the Google car. I suspect that some of the limitations were due to him actually being a reporter and thus Google operating the car in a more-risk-averse-than-normal manner. Still, there does seem to be some big bugs left to work out as described in the article.
- Behavioral economics at Starbucks
- "Meantime, though, there’s a way to reduce some of that waste: Charge customers 10 cents for every paper cup they use. As it happens, the company already does just that. It just doesn’t do it in an effective way. ... if Starbucks really wanted to save trees, it wouldn’t offer discounts to people who bring mugs. It would charge a dime to everyone who does not." Of course, as the post also hints at, changing their policy would likely cost them revenue.
- In European Crisis, Iceland Emerges as an Island of Recovery
- Seems to argue that not adopting the Euro is a key reason why Iceland seems to be recovering more effectively than the Eurozone. Strange then that Iceland is still talking about ditching its currency in favour of the Canadian dollar, when it'd probably have less influence over monetary policy than it would have had if it was participating in the Euro. The article does talk about a lack of investment in businesses as a result of the policies - will have to see what impact these policies have in the longer term.
- Does computation threaten the scientific method?
- An argument for requiring researchers to release their source code. The interesting bit: "we then performed a reproducibility experiment, which took three years, using the same processed data from eight other companies, the same algorithms in the same programming language, and the same input data, but coded independently. You then get the collage. ... Individually, they all look very convincing but they are significantly different to a geologist, even though they are supposed to be the same. It turned out that these differences are entirely due to latent software defects that have lain hidden, for years in some cases, before being flushed out by this reproducibility experiment." Their figure caption: "Reproducing results gives 9 different answers."