Seems like they are just counting the weird features of languages. It is correct that language like Turkish (probably Hungarian as well) is least weird because it does not have any of the weird features like word gender, irregular verbs, prefixes etc. But two main features of language, extreme inflection and vowel harmony makes learning it difficult.
I suspect that Turkish scores low on the weird score as it was reformed in the 20th century. Prior to it's reformation it was a language mostly only spoken and occasionally shoehorned into a more ornate language's arabic script (called Osmanci - pronounced Oss-mann-juh).
Turkish was the language the lower and middle Turkish classes typically used during the Ottoman period. When the language reforms came in not long after the establishment of the modern Turkish republic, they were specifically designed with the idea of unifying the people by language and being easy to learn to read and write, which is how Turkey went from a literacy rate of 30% to 70% in just a few years.
Turkish is weird to a western european, but once you get past the initial weirdness is probably the most regular and structured language you'll ever learn. Which you'll find exceptionally weird if you've ever tried to queue for a ferry ticket in Turkey (which is not regular or structured at all).
Because it varies widely :).
It is entirely based on your query -- whichever source is detected as best for that type of query (i.e. Yandex is better at handling symbols, Bing's advanced syntax is better [mostly]), and of course it changes over time as rules are tweaked and added.
Y-axis need to start at zero when the data being presented is a bar graph and the bar is filled in. If it is a scatter plot with points being plotted, then it's generally not misleading to shift the axis.
I don't disagree with that - a bar chart that doesn't start at zero can be misleading. But for what he was trying to do---compare means---it would have been a perfectly fine choice to do a lineplot/very thin bar plot and start the y-axes somewhere other than zero if he included error bars and clearly labeled things.
The big problem I see with the project is that everone seems to be focused on hardware, which I think should be at the bottom of the the list to provide decent digital education system.
Money should be spent on good educational content and infrastructure to distribute this content. End devices will change every year anyway but content stays for long time and it is content that actually matters.
The content delivery part actually could be independent of the hardware, but government of course can subsidize a cheap and robust device for students. Which naturally means an OSS solution like android.
However Microsoft entrenchment is at highest levels in Turkey and prevents development of a healthy IT ecosystem. Even the best universities completely bound to Microsoft tools and technologies. So I would expect they will try to derail this project on both software and hardware fronts.
This project has slim chance of success because of wrong focus and poor software expertise of contractors. But I can't blame them for trying. Turkey adapts technologies very fast, and has a chance to leapfrog other countries on this front.
Sorry to be skeptical, but I can't help but think:
Number of "battery breakthrough" news I heard in the last 15 years: >100, Actual battery breakthroughs: 0
We've been spoiled by Moore's Law in technology. In comparison, all the "battery breakthroughs" of the past decade are pretty feeble. If someone could double or triple the energy density of a battery, that would be a breakthrough.
Unfortunately, there's another discipline where energy density is important: explosives. The critical difference is in how quickly the energy is released, and as Li-Ion batteries show it isn't always as controllable as we'd like.
I'm running a thinkpad with an 8 hour (theoretical) maximum battery life. Actually it's like 5 or 6. But the model from a year or two years before that would have only gotten 1-2 hours battery life.
So improvements are being made and we're seeing them. It's just slow going.
That's what really separates consumer electronics from cars: processing data requires (from a theoretical physics standpoint) a minuscule amount of energy, and there's a lot of room for improvement even with current technology.
Moving heavy things up hills or through air at high speeds requires a respectable amount of energy, and current technology is already within an order of magnitude or so to the theoretical peak efficiency.
They invented NiMh batteries that hold their charge for a while; now I can actually use them in game controllers and flashlights and such without needing freshly charged ones every time I've left 'em in the closet for a few weeks.
Not a density breakthrough, but a UX breakthrough for sure.
To add weight to your skepticism the article states, "Eventually (in another 10 years or so), li-ion batteries could be replaced with li-air batteries." !0 years is a long time-frame.
Exactly. 10 years is way past the Technological Event Horizon, which is about 2 years.
Which means that unlike, for example, memristors, lithium air batteries most likely won't happen, and if they do happen, their happening will be a consequence of other research.
(Which is an argument why most research should be fundamental and open-ended, i.e. not directed towards specific outcomes.)
It's fair to be skeptical of all these announcements but I can't help but think that batteries have gotten better over the last 15 years. Whether these improvements were "breakthroughs" or not is a matter of interpretation.
Batteries have become vastly better over the last 15 years. It's just that this stuff ends up as gradual progress, not sudden jumps, so you don't notice it unless you're looking for it.
There have been quite a few battery breakthroughs at the lab level, especially in the past 3 or 4 years. That is massively different from scaling up manufacture and bringing to market.
Also, I suspect that investors in this sector are hedging their bets and waiting for a clear winner to emerge before spending the big money.
Google's penetration in China was very low (we've had native Chinese speakers living with us for the last three years and they had hardly heard of Google).
Not only is Google's share in China low, it's falling.
It appears to have made a splash around 2000-2003 or so, which is when most of the publications and testimonials/comparisons are from. Looks like it's been mostly in maintenance mode since then, with relatively minor performance and compatibility releases around once per year, which may be why they haven't done a re-assessment against more recent competitors.
