A toothpaste factory had a problem. They sometimes shipped empty toothpaste boxes without the tube inside. This challenged their perceived quality with the buyers and distributors. Understanding how important the relationship with them was, the CEO of the company assembled his top people. They decided to hire an external engineering company to solve their empty boxes problem. The project followed the usual process: budget and project sponsor allocated, RFP, and third-parties selected. Six months (and $8 million) later they had a fantastic solution – on time, on budget, and high quality. Everyone in the project was pleased.
They solved the problem by using a high-tech precision scale that would sound a bell and flash lights whenever a toothpaste box weighed less than it should. The line would stop, someone would walk over, remove the defective box, and then press another button to re-start the line. As a result of the new package monitoring process, no empty boxes were being shipped out of the factory.
With no more customer complaints, the CEO felt the $8 million was well spent. He then reviewed the line statistics report and discovered the number of empty boxes picked up by the scale in the first week was consistent with projections, however, the next three weeks were zero! The estimated rate should have been at least a dozen boxes a day. He had the engineers check the equipment; they verified the report as accurate.
Puzzled, the CEO traveled down to the factory, viewed the part of the line where the precision scale was installed, and observed just ahead of the new $8 million dollar solution sat a $20 desk fan blowing the empty boxes off the belt and into a bin. He asked the line supervisor what that was about.
“Oh, that,” the supervisor replied, “Bert, the kid from maintenance, put it there because he was tired of walking over to restart the line every time the bell rang.”
As things stand, the Google Shopping results allow smaller, independent e-commerce stores to reach the top of Google's search results.
Take this functionality away, and we risk the top search results being a combination of Amazon + other large retailers for the majority of e-commerce related searches.
Google wants to sell (now sold) Boston Dynamics, a robotics company they acquired in Dec 2013. People are speculating why, and some claim this is because of a "culture clash".
I no longer work for Google so what follows is pure speculation.
Boston Dynamics (BD) are very successful pioneers. But their algorithms are not based on Deep Learning (DL) principles. And Google is leading the world in Deep Learning and can apply it to anything they want, including robotics. DL based algorithms do not provide a complete robotics solution today but there is wide agreement that this is the best path forward for the field. Why is this important? The difference is robots that can walk vs robots that can dance ballet. The goal is "graceful locomotion" which will be an order of magnitude more adaptive, more energy efficient, and faster than the current generation of robots.
I am suspecting this is part of the culture clash. Imagine a meeting where Google comes to BD staff and says "we want you to toss out all the software you have written, retrain your engineering staff to use DL and other Holistic methods, and create a new generation of robots capable of learning rather than being programmed"... then I can see BD staff saying "Ahem. That'll take a few years". And Google might then say "Forget that".
Changing one person's mindset and stance from Reductionist to Holistic methods is a multi-month to multi-year effort; I have tried that and have rarely succeeded. Now imagine a company's worth of engineers that need to do that switch. It might be much better, cheaper, and faster to start a company from scratch and hire a more receptive crowd of engineers. And seed them with Googlers that already drank the Holistic Kool-Aid.
The hardware solutions BD created is know-how and intellectual property that Google currently owns since they own BD. When they sell off BD they could exclude the key patents or sell them as non-exclusive licenses. Which means Google could start a competing robotics company, use the BD patents and hardware know-how, and add a Deep Learning based software stack to run that hardware much faster than they could turn BD around.
Recently I did an interview with physicist Thomas Myers. He's a regular contributor to /r/spacexHe runs a website The Physics of SpaceX (http://thephysicsofspacex.wordpress.com), dedicated to breaking down various SpaceX topics, specifically:- Explaining the infeasibility of second stage re-use - Comparing first stage rocket engines - Comparing upper stage rocket enginesThe cool thing is that...
"they won't all improve your health in other areas"
Meaning that there are different ways in which to reduce calories. If you were to lower your calorie intake below your expenditure, but do it through a high sugar diet, that may still result in weight loss, but it wouldn't necessarily improve other health markers.
This study also looked at other health markers (including triglycerides and cholesterol) and measured improvements.
It's just a study with interesting data, no fad diets.
Although when you consider how prevalent carbohydrates are in western diets, you could be forgiven for jumping to the conclusion that lower carb diets are a fad.
This however has nothing to do with whether or not you show up at co-working spaces! We're not dealing with the secret service here, they're not tracking your every movement.
According to the j1visa.state.gov site one of the requirements for the J1 trainee program is:
"Has five years of work experience outside the United States in the occupational field in which they are seeking training"
Did you meet this criteria or manage to circumvent it?