Your counterexample is not even close to being accurate. Italy and Switzerland have much more in common than China and Japan. Italian is even one of the official languages of Switzerland. Switzerland and Italy are both essentially federations of distinct provinces. Both are recognizably Western European. China and Japan are worlds apart, as are China and India.
My main point was that there's plenty of reasons for China and Japan to be different, especially when it comes to driving norms. Are you surprised as the other poster was about these differences between China and Japan?
And going back to the original intent: would you say driving in Zurich and driving in Naples are two distinct experiences?
It is called Pythagoras's Theorem precisely because Pythagoras, according to legend, first proved the statement of the theorem within the framework of Greek geometry. Proof matters to mathematicians, and Pythagoras is justly famous for his achievement. There is archaeological evidence that much older civilisations than the Greeks, such as the Sumerians, Babylonians and the Egyptians, were persuaded of the correctness of Pythagoras's Theorem. But there is no surviving evidence that anyone other than the Greeks produced a satisfactory proof, nor did any other civilisation even possess a formal mathematical system capable of representing a logically correct proof.
I can confirm this is 100% correct. Anyone who doubts it just needs to compare quality of old editions of SciAm from before 2000 and those after 2000. The decline in quality is stark.
I do agree that the "Deutschland 83/86/89" TV series was great espionage drama, but I also think your Eurocentric bias is showing. I have often wondered why Asia has been continuously overlooked in the espionage TV drama stakes. Even John LeCarré's "The Honourable Schoolboy" never got adapted to the screen. My conclusion is that it is not due to a lack of good material but due to political and cultural reasons. Westerners are uncomfortable with portraying Asian geopolitical adversaries such as Communist China and North Korea because they don't want to be accused of racism. When was the last time you saw or read a tale about Chinese spies? Sadly, this has resulted in a vast, unexplored region of espionage drama being totally ignored. I wonder if they make Asia-focussed spy drama in Japan?
Right now I am watching The Sympathizer, a Vietnamese drama about the Cold War, focussed on the Vietnamese take on the matter. Its on HBO Max. Weekly release so not yet finished. They just added the third episode, and I've almost finished that. Seems very much promising.
South Korea also has a cinema scene. I once saw a Korean horror and it was unlike anything I saw before. Like, really weird. But it had nothing to do with spy drama.
A lot of spy drama or action from the Cold War era is very over the top and/or propagandist/fear mongering. Drama is dramatized, but can easily be regarded as overdramatized, bending the truth too much in the process. At such point, a good documentary on the subject is probably preferred. The faith I have in a country like China or North Korea being authentic on such matters in documentary is near zero, and thus I assume their drama on the matter will equal the low effort American cinema we saw previous century.
That a band like Laibach was allowed to play in North Korea is very much telling to me.
I watched the first episode the Sympathiser last week. It occurs to me that South Korea is the only Asian country that has produced significant modern-era (i.e. Cold War and later) espionage dramas that have been widely distributed in the West: these with the two Koreas as protagonists, of course. The only other Asia-focussed espionage dramas that spring to mind are a few with pre-WWII era plots involving Imperial Japan.
I am English, and old enough to have seen "Sandbaggers". I don't know how I never heard of this show until I found the complete series on Youtube a few months ago. Now I am enjoying viewing it for the first time.
A.k.a. "Le bureau des légendes": criminally underrated. Was available to view in Australia on SBS On Demand, where I serendipitously encountered it. It is right up there with the best of John LeCarré's film and television adaptations: "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy", "Smiley's People", "The Little Drummer Girl", etc.
Personally, I rather like these these; they have a certain retro-appeal, in particular old Springer mathematics publications. We are so spoilt with LaTex.
For last point. Maybe the universities should step up and use that massive administration machine they have build for this publishing. Just post it on one of their websites. Link to the original paper in the prestigious journal.
Regarding you last point: out of interest, what kind of venues were you thinking of? Be this personal blogs of said academics, just dumping it on a preprint server or actual ("formally published") publications?
I read Silicon Snake Oil soon after it was published (1996) and I felt Cliff Stoll's views were excessively pessimistic at the time. He was definitely out of tune with the Dot Com Zeitgeist. But a quarter of a century later he might be experiencing a degree of Schadenfreude.
Computers have still not successfully replaced newspapers.
Computers have still not successfully replaced teachers.
Computers have still not changed the way government works.
Computer technology has undoubtedly had enormous effects on many aspects of society but it has failed to produce benefits that many early technology idealists and entrepreneurs predicted, and it has made some things a lot worse.
We have lost the quality journalism that was nurtured by the old broadsheet newspapers because they no longer have the necessary money nor inclination to do it.
Education systems are in decline everywhere. Teacher quality has declined. The best teachers find jobs outside the education systems. Student performance has declined despite vast investments in technology for education. Student attention spans have declined and mental health problems have greatly increased along with increased exposure to technology.
Governments at least have benefited from technology in that has enabled mass surveillance and control of their citizens. But other areas of government administration for public benefit, such as health administration and education have not improved. Yet governments have wasted vast amounts of taxpayer money in failed technology projects. Wider citizen participation in democracy? Not so much.
What Cliff Stoll seems to have underestimated is people's willingness to put up with cheaper, lower-quality technological alternatives to quality newspapers, good teachers and public administration.
> Computers have still not successfully replaced newspapers.
I never read print newspapers. I do read print magazines.
> Computers have still not successfully replaced teachers
Largely institutional inertia. Those of us who do not send our kids to school have found the technology incredibly useful.
It is also not just a matter of replacing teachers, but greater access to them and how one interacts with them. My daughter has remote tutors, one where I could not find a subject specialist (currently classical civilisation and Latin, previously astronomy, all for GCSEs for those familiar with the British system) easily near where we live. She is set and submits work online. She is doing an online course for another subject with assignments marked by a tutor.
My older daughter's school (college for A levels) made good use of technology, particularly during lockdown, but also before that. Her university seems to use a lot of remote assessments and submission of assignments etc. (I do not know how well though).
> Computer technology has undoubtedly had enormous effects on many aspects of society but it has failed to produce benefits that many early technology idealists and entrepreneurs predicted, and it has made some things a lot worse.
I agree. That is why the middle aged of us here are so cynical. We saw the promise and feel cheated.
> We have lost the quality journalism that was nurtured by the old broadsheet newspapers because they no longer have the necessary money nor inclination to do it.
That is also because people are too lazy to look for alternatives. There are blogs by experts in every field. You can get your economic analysis for an economist, your foreign news from people in other countries.
Do not get overly nostalgic for old broadsheets - the lack of diversity of sources also meant their errors and sloppiness was never spotted by most people. Gell-Mann amnesia was rampant.
> Education systems are in decline everywhere. Teacher quality has declined. The best teachers find jobs outside the education systems.
I do not think that can be blamed on technology. We have that problem in the UK, and it is clear to me that the biggest problem is the tendency to manage by target setting. League tables and metrics dominate. Teachers leave because they hate the working environment and cannot do their jobs properly.
> Governments at least have benefited from technology in that has enabled mass surveillance and control of their citizens. But other areas of government administration for public benefit, such as health administration and education have not improved. Yet governments have wasted vast amounts of taxpayer money in failed technology projects. Wider citizen participation in democracy? Not so much
Governments do not necessarily want what citizens want. Politicians have one set of values, civil servants another. The big influential groups (media and big business) have yet another set of interests. None are aligned with what the population at large want (even when their is a consensus) nor their interests.
Yes, but a "range of prior distributions" doesn't mean every possible prior distribution. Sometimes, the information in the prior distribution is required to get you to a place where your computational system can efficiently explore a meaningful subspace instead of providing nonsense.
If meaningfully different priors lead to meaningfully different posteriors, you're probably missing something that would either eliminate one of those priors from contention or marry the differing behavior in some unifying explanation/model. Either way is a win in my book; both provide a new direction for research!
