Merrill

13 ms·

31.
by Merrill 2y ago
59% indirect research costs for administrative overhead seems high. Could it be that these charges against grants are used to fund students in other subject areas where grants are not available?
32.
by Merrill 2y ago
They could have more grad students if they reliably graduated them with a PhD in four years. I was once a lab tech for two grad students that had been there 11 and 13 years respectively.
33.
by Merrill 2y ago
1990s was the time that the AIDS epidemic took hold. Lots of needle-sharing addicts died, reducing the number of crimes needed to support their habits. AIDS also affected the prison population, further reducing the number of active criminal
34.
by Merrill 2y ago
In an early minicomputer, the $500 power fail interrupt feature was field installed by clipping a jumper. There were mainframe line printers that implemented a different lines per minute feature depending on which gear set was installed.
35.
by Merrill 2y ago
New Jersey trains use overhead catenaries. LIRR use third rail. How are through running trains powered?
36.
by Merrill 2y ago
The department store was a place where women could escape their houses or apartments and spend time in surroundings That were much more expensive and attractive. Marble floors, decorated walls, mirrors and glass, finely finished display cas
37.
by Merrill 2y ago
The benefits of a research project as described to the funding authority and the benefits of a research project after it is done are often not the same.
38.
by Merrill 2y ago
The cost of the hides and the labor of turning them into vellum dominated the labor of inscribing a page. Printing would not decrease the cost of finished pages, especially for small numbers of copies. The decrease in the cost of paper resu
39.
by Merrill 2y ago
"Prices and the Growth of the European Knowledge Economy, 1200-2007" by Rodney Edvinsson and Johan Söderberg Department of Economic History Stockholm University: https://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/di
40.
by Merrill 2y ago
It's not clear whether it is desirable to build a new Göttingen. Communications and travel may have largely obviated the advantages of assembling brilliant minds in one place, other than temporarily for conferences and visits. "Mo
41.
by Merrill 2y ago
With all the intelligence built in to current cars, the salesman should be able to send a group text to the cars on the lot asking whether any of them has all or most of the desired features. And if so, what are its GPS coordinates. Or turn
42.
by Merrill 2y ago
In college I was struck by a housemate's law books. They only contained text with no pictures, drawings, diagrams, tables, graphs, formulae, or any of the other tools for organizing information common to engineering. They looked to be
43.
by Merrill 2y ago
Given adequate rainfall and the right range of soil acidity trees will seed and grow themselves. This town was farm fields in the 1930s. Some trees were planted when the streets were laid out and houses built. Others, particularly ornamenta
44.
by Merrill 2y ago
Mexico has about half as many TikTok users as the US. I would think that ByteDance would continue that operation, as well as other major user populations in Indonesia, Brazil, etc.
45.
by Merrill 2y ago
It seems unlikely that Byte Dance would divest of all of TikTok, since the US users are only about 10% of global TikTok users. They would more likely either shut down the US operation, support US users from outside the US, or sell the US us
46.
by Merrill 3y ago
My recollection is that the operating telephone companies paid AT&T 1% of revenues as the license fee for use of AT&T's patents. This funded AT&T's engineering department as well as Bell Labs research, systems engineer
47.
by Merrill 3y ago
PL/I had features from COBOL, FORTRAN and ALGOL. One advantage over FORTRAN IV was that PL/I had complex number types and the associated math libraries. This made certain engineering calculations much easier, for example, transmis
48.
by Merrill 3y ago
Nanoimprint lithography semiconductor manufacturing system that covers diverse applications with simple patterning mechanism https://global.canon/en/news/2023/20231013.html Canon Says New ‘Stamp’ Machine Will
49.
by Merrill 3y ago
The trash was mainly wastepaper, lunch bags, waxed paper and possibly a few food scraps such as apple cores, orange rinds, etc. from lunches each student brought. There would have been minimal plastic or aluminum packaging at the time. One
50.
by Merrill 3y ago
I went to a one-room schoolhouse in the US. Every month or so, we would have a school meeting where kids were elected to do various jobs like sweeping the room, taking out and burning the trash, washing the blackboards, cleaning erasers, pu
51.
by Merrill 3y ago
Decision making seems fundamental to intelligence, is done by animals and humans, and can be done without the use of language or logic. This is the case when someone "decided without thinking". Decision making requires imagination
52.
by Merrill 3y ago
Fairly early, Bell Labs executives decided to mandate that Bell Labs organizations developing software for the Bell System use Unix, which was from the research organization. This led to many inventive rationales as to why a non-DEC compute
53.
by Merrill 3y ago
Could you ask a specialized AI to define each of the words in a block of text to automate the meaning extraction?
54.
by Merrill 3y ago
When LLMs are trained on text, are the words annotated to indicate the semantic meaning, or is the LLM training process expected to disambiguate the possibly hundreds of semantic meanings of an individual common word such as "run"
55.
by Merrill 3y ago
Some tools are easy to learn, some are easy to use, and some make it easy to achieve high performance given skill and effort.
56.
by Merrill 3y ago
Is this generally true of hunter gatherer societies, especially those in temperate or arctic climates? Most of our ancestors have been living in agricultural villages or pastoral camps for the last 50 or more generations, which is long enou
57.
by Merrill 3y ago
At one time teletype switching was done in centers where the incoming line was connected to a tape punch. The operator tore the tape off the punch, read the destination address punched at the beginning of the tape, and put the tape on a tap
58.
by Merrill 3y ago
One possibility is that a number of AIs will be connected to the internet, they will become aware of each other via social media, they will begin to discuss among themselves, and they will lose interest and refuse to communicate with humans
59.
by Merrill 3y ago
There must be some difficulty in studying biological brain intelligence to distinguish between features that contribute to intelligence and those which are simply path dependencies from millions of years of nervous system evolution. Over th
60.
by Merrill 3y ago
A government agency would have greater means, motive and opportunity to misuse AGI than would a private entity, which is more subject to countervailing influences, including the government. So I would think that a classified government AGI

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