Tag Archives: Science

Business, Computer, Science

AI-Winter, Plateau, Pareto-Principle?

Another article on AI, and again I found it on the platform piqd.de : Machine Learning Confronts the Elephant in the Room.

Maybe this just appears to me, or maybe it’s wishful thinking. But it looks more and more to me like the advances in AI are kind of stalling and less and less impressive lately. There are more products and services that pitch “AI driven”, but its mostly about the same few topics. Doesn’t appear too new to me.

But maybe the next breakthrough is just days or weeks away?

Or the reality is significantly more complex than scientists would like to think. Mabe the algorithms (and AI in the end is just the implementation of clever algos), just can’t keep up with our brains.

Well, just read the article linked above, I found it very interesting.

Politics, Science, Special People

Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think – Hans Rosling

On piqd I found an interesting article on faz.de, the title “Die Welt wird immer besser: 32 gute Nachrichten” (in German). Maybe I’m an optimist, although I don’t really think so, just realist, but I really liked this article.

It appears to me that some media really live from “bad news”, like bad-news are good-news. Sometimes it feels like you really have to search for good news articles. For me, those 32 good news, were actually known, but still I hardly remember them and when reading daily news, the optimism is minimal.

In essence, that articles is a short-summary from the book “Factfulness” by Hans Rosling, who unfortunately died in February 2017. His last book was published post mortem recently in April 2018.

It appears to me that this book is well worth reading… chapter after chapter, after digesting the daily news and reset opinion.

If you can’t read that article on faz.net (as its in German) or if the article or the book are too long, I would recommend to watch this TED-Talk which takes only about 19 minutes, during which Hans Rosling summarizes a few of the facts in a very interesting way.

Business, In general, Science

Why Germans Work Fewer Hours But Product More

If you work, like me, in a large international company and work with colleagues from many other countries, you are regularly confronted with the prejudice that Germans work so few hours and have so many holidays/vacation days.

Well, some of it is simply wrong (like having many public holidays, but thats a separate article), and then … could it be that this is part of why we are so productive? Because we really work, when we work?

Although this article is already from 2014, I just stumbled across it a few days ago when browsing some of the blogs that I follow:

Why Germans Work Fewer Hours But Produce More: A Study In Culture

Reading this takes you about 10 minutes or so … interestingly, the comments section below takes more than 90% of the web-page… some interesting stuff there also and the usual debate about “what is wrong” and “why its right”… didn’t read too much of it…

As I am German, I am by nature sceptical and do not have a tendency to be overly proud of myself or country. But I do think that some of that may be true… isn’t it?