I noticed the lowest performance corresponds to a woman senator. I plotted what I think are only all woman senators and they all are under the S&P500 performance.
Maybe someone with better statistical knowledge than me can study if there is a significant difference between man and woman senator stock performance.
Sorry for the off topic comment but this then/than mistake I read every day is just getting on my nerves.
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What to Know:
Than and then are different words. Than is used in comparisons as a conjunction, as in "she is younger than I am," and as a preposition, "he is taller than me." Then indicates time. It is used as an adverb, "I lived in Idaho then," noun, "we'll have to wait until then," and adjective, "the then governor."" [1]
You think that's a bad language mistake? The title (and the article itself) says that their CPU run is 3.5x faster than GPU. But actually it's 3.5x as fast, which is a radically different thing: "3.5x faster" would mean "4.5x as fast", in the same way that "50% bigger" means "150% times the size" not "50% of the size".
Edit: Clearly this is a contentious comment, and even those of us that see things this way mostly seem to agree that we understand the intended meaning (but things get fuzzer with smaller numbers expressed as percentages e.g. "120% faster"). Surely, though, it makes more sense to use the completely precise phrasing "3.5x as fast", especially for the main statement of the main result in an academic paper.
> I think "two times faster" would mean "twice as fast", not "three times as fast".
I don't see how that's the case. What is "50% bigger"? I understand it as 150% of the size. Similarly, I would understand "90% bigger" to mean "190% of the size" and "100% bigger" to mean "200% of the size", and I'm sure that is how they are used in practice.
So then surely "200% bigger" means "300% of the size"? And "two times bigger" - which is mathematically identical to "200% bigger" - would be three times the size. I acknowledge that the phrase is often used like you say but I don't think that is its literal meaning, and if you used that in a contract I think it would legally be interpretted in the way I've said (I'm thinking of consumer law in a situation where something is "n times bigger for the same price").
All this applies analagously to speed and x times faster. I gave the examples above with size because I think it's a bit more of a common thing to talk about this way and speed is a bit more subtle because what we're measuring here is the time which is something / "speed" and here the numerator isn't clear (number of training runs perhaps).
Interestingly, in Russian "100% bigger" and "two times bigger" will have different prepositions, so it's more clear that in the first case you do sum (x + 100%x = 2x), and in the second case you do multiplication (2 x = 2x).
I'm quite sure it's the same in English (sum with % and multiplication with times), but I'm not a native English speaker.
I'm a native English speaker, I don't think I would ever say "two times bigger", sounds like bad grammar. I would read "2x the size" as "twice the size" or "two times the size", but not "add on twice the size".
So I agree with the article, "3.5 times faster (1 hour vs. 3.5 hours)" is perfectly correct, and it is OK to abbreviate "3.5 times" as "3.5x".
That's just sloppy language and you got used to it. Twice as fast means twice as fast. Two times faster means two times faster. One time faster would mean twice as fast. 0.5x faster would mean 50% faster or 150% as fast. 0.5x slower would mean 50% slower or 50% as fast.
I agree and, if you are mistaken, I'd have to observe that this is a spectacularly unclear way of communicating an increase.
The meaning of "two times faster" as "twice as fast" is certainly the way such a statement would generally be interpreted everywhere I've worked.
It is of course possible that the meaning suggested by quietbritishjim is archaic British, but I certainly don't believe it's current: I've worked in various places Cambridge and London for the past 18 years and, as I say, have never encountered it.
> if you are mistaken, I'd have to observe that this is a spectacularly unclear way of communicating an increase.
I absolutely agree with that, and in practice if I ever see that turn of phrase with anything more than 100% then I assume that they are using it the way that you're thinking of. But I maintain this is not the literal meaning. At the same time, I'm not saying people should be subtracting 100% to make the number mathematically correct, that would definitely be bizarre. Instead, I'm saying they shouldn't be using such a weird turn of phrase in the first place, so the headline should simply be "Deep learning on CPU 3.5x as fast as on GPU"
> I've worked in various places Cambridge and London for the past 18 years and, as I say, have never encountered it.
You have really never encountered an item in a supermarket saying "now 20% bigger!"? Thinking about it now, they're usually charging the same amount as the old size (otherwise it's not much to brag about really) in which case they use the vastly clearer phrase "20% extra free", but I'm sure I've seen the former phrase.
> A personal note: I know the disparagement of Times-er from long ago, from my grade school years, I think; I was taught that two times more than X really means 'three times as many as X'. Since authority figures insisted on this interpretation, I avoided the construction entirely (as, as far as I know, I still do). Yet I've never stopped asking, "Why don't you understand the clear meaning of what people are saying?"
>> That last reaction incorporates one criticism of Times-er, namely that it is "illogical" or "irrational": X times more than Y MUST MEAN 'Y plus X-times-Y (that is, 'X+1 times Y'), not 'X times as many/great as Y' (that is, 'X times Y'). (In the most common variant of this reaction, X times more than Y is disparaged because it is said to be ambiguous, with both the 'X times Y' and 'X+1 times Y' interpretations.)
>> The appeal here is to the idea that ordinary-language expressions are simply realizations of logical (or arithmetical) formulas. This is just backwards. The formulas are there to represent the meanings of expressions; they are not the prior reality, merely cloaked in (those devilishly vague) words of actual languages.
What annoys me even more is that I keep using this comparison in a wrong way despite knowing better. BTW, what do you say if you made something twice as fast? Once faster?
People using 'further' instead of 'farther' (used for distance) used to get me upset, but people mistake them so often that I realized I was getting upset for no good reason. I know what they meant even if they were ignorant of the grammar. I agree that in an academic paper you don't want to see grammar mistakes, but in many other contexts if you understand what is meant, it's no use getting bent out of shape.
I think it could be easily attributed to the fact that most non-native speakers learn English at school by studying its grammar in written form, where the two words are distinct. Native speakers, instead, learn English as their spoken language, where the words sound basically identical to each other.
As a non-native, I learned "then" and "than" in different contexts, months if not years apart. I also learned them in speech and in writing at the same time.
Please don't quiz me on how to read bear, pear, tear, fear, spear, clear, and dear.
People using 'further' instead of 'farther' (used for distance) used to get me upset, but people mistake them so often that I realized I was getting upset for no good reason. I know what they meant even if they were ignorant of the grammar. I agree that in an academic paper you don't want to see grammar mistakes, but in many other contexts if you understand what is meant, it's no use getting bent out of shape.
I do understand it but, for my colleagues and friends who don't have English as their first language, it adds another caveat to learn and remember without a logical basis. That's another place to introduce ambiguity and errors.
I don't get angry at non-standard usage but I think it's important not to ignore the purpose of consistent style.
yea very true! and as someone who grew up speaking french, i want people to stop making the viola/voila mistake too. viola is an instrument. voila is what you mean most of the time.
also off-topic, but i heard the word senglish, for singaporean english, on a podcast yesterday. that made me realize how english has the potential to become a universal language with each country having their own version.
french people already use the term frenglish when they mix english words with french. we could have spanglish, japenglish, germanish, etc. they don't have to be called those though.
it would be totally awesome to be able to communicate with almost everyone in the world. just like the internet!
It's not not knowing the meaning, it's simply a proofing mistake in phonemic writing. For a native speaker, spelling as it sounds is second nature, making morphological distinctions is harder.
For a non-native speaker it's hard to tell the two apart. Then and than sound pretty much the same. And even if one knows the difference, it's easy to make a typo.
In the sort of "international pidgin English" that's spoken anywhere outside the UK such subtle differences should just be ignored.
I don't know about that, this kind of mistakes (then/than, effect/affect) are getting on my nerves as well, and I'm definitely not a native english speaker.
Not to mention that this specific kind of mistakes (similar sounds) are at least as often from native speakers as from non-native in my experience/native language.
In French, a lot of people mistake Ça for Sa for example, native and non-native alike
I don't agree,
I'm not a native speaker and probably like many, I leaned english by reading so those two words sound very diferently in my head.
I'm always lost when I see this mistake.
I don’t think you’ll get much play for suggesting (to an audience of at least some programmers) that we should allow for more ambiguity in language, heh.
The programmers I’ve met without an eye for detail are usually ones I do not like working with.
Hehe, true, but unlike programming languages, the languages humans use for communication are "sloppy" and ambiguous by definition. Grammar rules have been invented after the fact to create the illusion that there's order where none exists.
English allows much more "freedom" than many other languages (e.g. German), maybe that's one reason why it has been so successful in the end.
If they are just ignored, how will anyone learn? If they really were small (to the meaning of the sentence) differences, then whatever, but switching than for then changes the sentence.
Anyone interested on this might also be interested in an mobile app called "Cell Lab: Evolution Sandbox" [1], which does a good take on a cell simulation "game".
For the small phone seekers, I've been eyeing the Sharp Aquos R2 Compact. Its a small phone (like they don't make them any more) with a headphone jack. Only problem in my opinion is the non-replaceable battery. Furthermore, since the phone is sold just in Japan, I'm fearing that the always-on shutter sound will still be active in Europe (I read it was sim dependent)
People will find a way..
I see in the future one can subscribe to one of these streaming services for just one month, and then use recording software 24/7 to record all the shows and movies they want to watch in the future. Repeat with another service and slowly build your own database.
That sounds like a lot of work for something you can already do by just watching on free streaming sites or torrents. It’s as illegal as recording and storing the content after your subscription probably.
The lack of knowledge in news articles regarding space topics is astounding.
If you want to learn more about Snoopy, Scott Manley makes a great video about it!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jXVYZm9epmU
The orbit description starts at 3:30 but the rest is worth a watch, full of interesting footage and data!
Maybe someone with better statistical knowledge than me can study if there is a significant difference between man and woman senator stock performance.