Category: Science

2011 年的研究，開放辦公室與病假的關聯性

忘記從哪邊冒出來的連結，反正是個 2011 年的研究：「Sickness absence associated with shared and open-plan offices--a national cross sectional questionnaire survey.」。2011 年在丹麥的研究：

METHODS: The analysis was based on a national survey of Danish inhabitants between 18-59 years of age (response rate 62%), and the study population consisted of the 2403 employees that reported working in offices. The different types of offices were characterized according to self-reported number of occupants in the space. The log-linear Poisson model was used to model the number of self-reported sickness absence days depending on the type of office; the analysis was adjusted for age, gender, socioeconomic status, body mass index, alcohol consumption, smoking habits, and physical activity during leisure time.

都是與 cellular office 比較，可以看出大於六個人的開放辦公室病假的量高出許多：

RESULTS: Sickness absence was significantly related to having a greater number of occupants in the office (P<0.001) when adjusting for confounders. Compared to cellular offices, occupants in 2-person offices had 50% more days of sickness absence [rate ratio (RR) 1.50, 95% confidence interval (95% CI) 1.13-1.98], occupants in 3-6-person offices had 36% more days of sickness absence (RR 1.36, 95% CI 1.08-1.73), and occupants in open-plan offices (>6 persons) had 62% more days of sickness absence (RR 1.62, 95% CI 1.30-2.02).

CONCLUSION: Occupants sharing an office and occupants in open-plan offices (>6 occupants) had significantly more days of sickness absence than occupants in cellular offices.

看起來只是拉數字出來分析... 另外信心區間的洞好大 XD

PyPy 5.9 支援 Pandas 與 NumPy 了

PyPy 5.9 支援 machine learning 常用的 Pandas 與 NumPy 了：「PyPy v5.9 Released, Now Supports Pandas, NumPy」，包括 2.7 與 3.5 的相容版本：

The PyPy team is proud to release both PyPy3.5 v5.9 (a beta-quality interpreter for Python 3.5 syntax) and PyPy2.7 v5.9 (an interpreter supporting Python 2.7 syntax).

對於使用 Python 大量計算的人來說可以進場測試了 XD

現有語音控制的安全性問題：使用聽不見的高頻下令

雖然相關的理論很早就有了，但上個禮拜放出來的論文完整實做出來，叫做 DolphinAttack，取自於海豚可以聽見人類所聽不到的聲音：「DolphinAtack: Inaudible Voice Commands」(這邊的錯字是作者造成的，submit 到 arXiv 的標題有錯，但論文內描述則是對的)。

無論是 Siri 或是 Google Now，或是其他的控制軟體，都設計成能接受多種不同語調的人，而這個部份目前放的都太寬，造成人類聽不到的區段也可以下令：

也可以看到成功機率很高：

應該會有些調整...

各種職業與離婚率

也是篇研究，講各種職業的離婚率：「Divorce and Occupation」，副標題「Some jobs tend towards higher divorce rates. Some towards lower.」。拿的是 2015 美國的資料分析出來的：

Using data from the 2015 American Community Survey, for each occupation, I calculated the percentage of people who divorced out of those who married at least once.

依照離婚率，由高往低排：

如果是把中位薪拿出來，把邊界的幾個標出來：

原網頁的資料是互動式的形式，游標移上去可以看到每個點是什麼...

Flat UI 反而造成使用者困擾

在「Flat UI Elements Attract Less Attention and Cause Uncertainty」這邊透過追蹤眼球的技術，發表了研究結果：

Summary: Flat interfaces often use weak signifiers. In an eyetracking experiment comparing different kinds of clickability clues, UIs with weak signifiers required more user effort than strong ones.

其中最明顯的一個例子就是大家被訓練「有底線的文字應該可以按」，這也是最能馬上被想到的問題... 不過這算是 Flat UI 的問題嗎？

The popularity of flat design in digital interfaces has coincided with a scarcity of signifiers. Many modern UIs have ripped out the perceptible cues that users rely on to understand what is clickable.

打數學式子的工具

看到 Mathcha 這個網站，除了可以輸入 TeX 的公式外，也有 WYSIWYG 的方式輸入，而最後可以輸出成各種格式 (包括 TeX)，或是直接丟連結給其他人：

輸入的部份，對於不知道的符號葉可以用畫的 XD

然後網站上的標示寫沒有支援 IE 與 Edge，不知道是真得不支援還是沒列上去而已... XD

字母在單字裡的位置分佈

是一篇老文章了... (2014 年的文章，最近從其他地方提起)

這邊講的是英文，不過同樣方式也可以拿來分析其他語言：「The distribution of letters in English words」，原始文章在「Graphing the distribution of English letters towards the beginning, middle or end of words」。

原文有描述他的資料分析來源：

The data is from the entire Brown corpus in the Natural Language Toolkit. It's a smaller and out-of-date corpus, but it's open source and easy to obtain. I repeated the analysis with COHA, the Corpus of Historical American English, a well-curated, proprietary data set from Brigham Young University for which I have a license, and the only differences were in rare letters like "z" or "x".

在程式競賽得獎負面相關於工作的品質

2015 的文章以及演講，最近冒出來看到的。Google 的 Peter Norvig 提到了用 ML 的方式分析，發現程式競賽的成績與工作品質的負面相關性：「Being good at programming competitions correlates negatively with being good on the job」。

換句話說，程式競賽的成績反而是是個負面指標 (對於 Google 內的情況分析出來的，所以是基於 Google hiring process 的前提過濾過的)。

In this talk, Peter talked about how Google did machine learning and at one point he mentioned that at Google they also applied machine learning to hiring. He said that one thing that was surprising to him was that being a winner at programming contests was a negative factor for performing well on the job.

給了一些對原因的猜測：

Peter added that programming contest winners are used to cranking solutions out fast and that you performed better at the job if you were more reflective and went slowly and made sure things were right.

YouTube 的留言處也有一些猜測，像是：

What he's talking about is the fact that several extremely important parts of software engineering are not included in these contests, for example code reusability, maintainability, decomposition of the problem using the OO paradigm, etc. All of these make a good engineer, but are not necessarily needed in competitive programming contests.

CMU 推出 Product Management 的課程

CMU 的 CS (Computer Science) 發的新聞稿：「Carnegie Mellon Offers New Master's Degree in Product Management」。

副標也清楚寫出是一年的課程：

One-Year Program Turns Computer Professionals Into "CEOs of the Product"

除了 CMU CS 外，也結合了 CMU 的 Tepper Business School 一起開：

A joint program of the university's School of Computer Science (SCS) and Tepper School of Business, the Master of Science in Product Management (MSPM) program will start January 2018.

另外一個不同角度的 Product Management。