Brad Ideas - Solve this - Comments

The Madness of a Beep Beep Beep

Anonymous — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 14:04:52 -0800

Just moved into an Urban area, really very nice spot.. Day after the move, the beeping at 7:01 am three days a week started with the Garbage trucks and it's so loud, ear plugs would not suffice! I read all your comments from others and was wondering, nothing new in your blog recently... I find it amusing that people would scream at you about your thoughts. How ignorant, as ignorant as the Dude that created this Beep Beeping...
IN Madness, I try not to get Mad and go to the GYM but it's in that room too! HELP! :(

Backup beeper death

Anonymous — Sat, 14 Jan 2012 20:08:03 -0800

If only the driver looked where he was going instead of relaying beeper technology
Here the link http://www.health.ny.gov/environmental/investigations/face/03ny036.htm
"Upon inspection by OSHA investigators, the back-up beeper of the payloader was not operational following the incident. Later that day when the payloader was checked again, the back-up beeper was operating at a louder than normal level. The business manager stated that the back-up beeper had been working prior to the incident although it is not known whether it was working immediately before the fatal accident occurred. It is possible that the back-up beeper was damaged during the collision since it was located in the rear grille cover which was the general area of impact. The company subsequently replaced the back-up beeper."
After the accident did the driver disconnect the beeper? Then finding out he would be in more trouble if the beeper was not working and reconnected it?
The back-up beeper was operating at a louder than normal level. What is the normal level? 117db? Threshold of pain is 130db. If you read the link you know the victim had worked there for 5 years and had been ill for 2 1/2 months. Did the louder than normal level make him sick?
Who checks the beeper to make sure is not louder normal level? The military has sonic weapon of 150db. They think it works. It is called THOR.
If the beeper is driving you out of your mind. Go to the hospital and report it as an OSHA incident. By law OSHA must investigate. Don't be calm really let them know how you feel.

Ban the Beep!

Anonymous — Sat, 31 Dec 2011 18:31:17 -0800

Truck beep is horrible noise pollution. It's worse than a leaf blower. It is grossly inconsiderate and should be banned. Beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep,......... It just trashes the quality of life. If someone wants to drive a truck, that's entirely their business, not mine. If the driver doesn't want to hit anyone, it's his business. He should look where he's going. Use a mirror! Since when did his truck driving become any of my responsibility? If I were to sit outside in my car with the stereo cranked up, there would be noise complaints and I would be told to stop. It's called disturbing the peace. If someone is dumb enough to stand behind a backing-up truck - let them get run over. I don't care. Their worthless DNA will be deleted from the gene pool.
Oh yeah,.. ban car alarms too, and hang the idiots who have them!

I was in the US Army for 12

Trent — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 11:09:42 -0800

I was in the US Army for 12 years. Non of the vehicles have backup alarms. Why? because when you are backing up a large vehicle, you are required to have an assistant to help guide you in reverse and it let's others know to watch out.

i have to wake up at 5 every

Anonymous — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 08:38:41 -0800

i have to wake up at 5 every morning and they come at four. it's soo freaking annoying because i live in a cul de sac and they have to back up then go forward and backup and go forward. who the heck is going to be outside at 4 in the morning that you're going to run into at a cul de sac???

SOLUTION

Frustrated & tired — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 06:40:40 -0800

I call them idiot whistles!

There are no need for idiot whistles of any kind to be heard OUTSIDE any vehicle, the idiot who is responsible for possibly hitting, running [or backing] over, or harming any living creature is in the driver seat. The DRIVER should be the one who is being warned, and ONLY the driver. We already know to watch out! Watch out for that child watch out for that stray dog watch out for the leaping deer, let alone the poor sad turtle, watch out for that motorcycle and especially watch out for the OTHER idiots on the road!

As a DRIVER backs up, engaged the moment the vehicle is put into reverse, a previously installed warning sensor mechanism which sounds off [or in a noisy construction site scenario; a revolving yellow caution light comes on] to be HEARD or seen INSIDE the vehicle and ONLY INSIDE THE VEHICLE, by the driver, after all who IS driving and THOUGHT to be in control, WHEN and ONLY WHEN the said sensor mechanism installed in the vehicle encompasses an OBSTACLE OF ANY KIND in its path, whether a person, animal, wall, hedge, shrub, tree, telephone pole, fire hydrant, or another idiot in another vehicle, or what have you.

If this sensor mechanism, already in wide use in many personal private automobiles, were to be made MANDATORY by the government for use in all FEDERAL, STATE, and LOCAL CITY vehicles and all other forms of public transportation; refuse trucks, fire engines, buses, you name it, just imagine the impact it would have on this often intolerable noise pollution, world wide.

SOMETHING must be done! and sadly I must leave it up to the BEEPING government to start what should have been done before the PROBLEM, which it most certainly is one, ever began. What do so many of them do for all that money besides find ways to waste more of it, idiots!

Wishing all a truly PEACEFUL holiday season! but doubt we'll be having one ever again in our lives...

Rethink outside the box start from scratch to find real and lasting solutions for a better future for all.

Excessive warning disorder

Anonymous — Sun, 13 Nov 2011 19:46:27 -0800

This person has EWD. I think it's clear.

High energy sound wave

Anonymous — Sun, 13 Nov 2011 18:32:43 -0800

Replace high energy sound waves with radio waves. A collar worn around the neck, first a audible warning of 117db and if too close a shock. The driver of the Dangerous vehicle would have a device that would not stop until the driver pushed a button in the blind spot of the vehicle. It will teach them to do it fast. The backing up vehicle could sound all cell phones with the backup warning tone. Until you really get assaulted by this kind of sound, you just cant understand. That hopeless feeling that nothing can be done. No way out,like a trapped animal, running back and forth in the cage. You try to tell someone, that blank stare. You know what I am talking about. Good luck along your way.

I got a new tv last christmas

TV fix — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 00:12:31 -0700

I got a new tv last christmas, and and wait to see all the channels I wanted to watch. But when I turned it on, there was something off, the whole thing was streched and the sides are cropped off(the shows are 16:9 but thinks my screen is 4:3) and the only person that can help is my dad. He did not know about the problem and 6 months went by until I showed him the sports channels and he notices that he hates it because its wierd(In other words, "Streched") and fixes it. You know what, show some people their favourite channel, the ones that they watch all day, that are either 4:3 or think your tv is 4:3 and they will not love it.

Yes, especially with

Jon — Sun, 25 Sep 2011 20:07:17 -0700

Yes, especially with animated shows. Apparently it's okay to stretch out cartoons. Nope, sorry, even animated people look like football heads when stretched out.

At the moment I'm stuck with a hotel TV that not only stretches out the 4:3 signal, but it's zoomed in past 16:9 so it's painful to watch.

The WORST sound in the world

Anonymous — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 04:14:32 -0700

Even when it stops (which seems to be never) you can still 'hear' it. Your brain gets fried from it. You can't concentrate. Nothing blocks it out. We had a road reconstruction project on my street that went bad and as such took TWO YEARS to complete with the only respite being the most freezing of the winter months. As soon as I opened my windows again there they were again, starting from scratch. I went to talk to the foreman one day and he was a rude jackass in response. I talked to the City and they didn't give a rat's ass. I talked to the neighbours about starting a class action lawsuit and two of them actually responded by telling me to buy ear plugs and stop being hostile!!!!! (WTF?? turned out they had some driveway repairs done by the company while the project was ongoing.. likely for free) Magically though, after I talked about a lawsuit the project of two years wrapped up in only 4 more days.

Anyway I'm blabbering on now but I want to support the outcry about these alarms. They serve NO purpose because like another poster said they are so continuous that people don't pay attention to the safety aspect of it at all anymore. Not to mention.. the guys ON the construction site get ear protection!!!

The first thing to look at

PlatypusNinja — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 18:22:18 -0700

The first thing to look at would be: why are sessions filling up? Is it just that the room is too small? Can you move the most popular lecture to a larger room? Can you videoconference the lecturer to a second room? Can you clone the most popular sessions and run them multiple times on separate days?

The second thing: if you're collecting all this advance information anyway, a good idea would be to first identify which students want which sessions, and second work out which sessions should be parallel with each other. (And only third start assigning students to sessions.) If there's a large population which wants to attend both Session A and Session B, you should make sure Session A and Session B don't happen simultaneously. This is probably NP-hard to solve optimally, but you could do okay with a greedy algorithm, or just have a human stare at it for half an hour.

As to assigning students to rooms: rather than asking them to bid points, you might allow them to go to real-world effort to improve their chance of getting admitted. For example: "If there's a specific session you want to attend, optionally submit a 50-word paragraph when you sign up describing something you did related to the session topic. If you really want to attend, send us a 60-second home video showing something you did that's related to the session topic. If the session fills up, people who submitted videos get priority, and people who sent us paragraphs get second priority."

Vote Buying

Baylink — Thu, 25 Aug 2011 17:22:40 -0700

/selling is definitely the problem with any voting method (a different thing from the vote *counting* method) which doesn't require people to come to a public place of some type.

I don't have any snap answers for your other questions, but I'm happy to see that you didn't miss that point, as so many do.

Isn't this a voting system?

Baylink — Thu, 25 Aug 2011 16:25:24 -0700

I might be wrong, but while reading your initial description, I was reminded of my favorite condorcet replacement for our current first-past-the-post vote counting system for political elections: The Schulze method (FKA Cloneproof Schwartz Sequential Dropping)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schulze_method

There may be additional internal ties that that misses, but...

Simplicity and clarity

brad — Wed, 03 Aug 2011 18:34:02 -0700

There are two goals which may sometimes not match here.

You do want simplicity, so people understand how it works.

But you also want clarity and finality. Students get upset when they lose, and while most people will objectively agree that random is fair, they can still get angry at having had bad luck. That’s why I went to bidding. It’s very clear, and very clearly fair, when you see that the people who won all bid more than you. That’s also the problem with non-linear optimization. The result may be more fair (or more optimal by whatever criteria we optimized) but it’s not always obvious why. With bidding, the students are upset at losing but blame themselves. Though sometimes they blame themselves for not understanding things well enough.

An ideal system both is easy to understand and has clear results which the student feels were under their control. My original plan had been to just have people lay out all their weights, and pay what they bid. I think that’s less fair, because in such auctions you get annoyed that two people who got the same thing paid a radically different price, and also you get annoyed if you paid a lot for a session that nobody else was competing for. it leads to a lot of bidder’s remorse and strategic bidding. I selected the uniform price auction as it is well regarded as an answer to those things.

If all 10 days are done at once, then you can make the rule that all 40 amounts must sum to 1,000 for example, and so you just apportion your points. Or you can require that the largest bids on all 10 days sum to 1,000, though that means once you have decided to bid 200 on your 1st choice for a day, you will bid 199, 198 etc. on the others as there is no cost to it in spite of your true desires. You do need to make and enforce a rule about no two bids on the same day being the same, as even with many suggestions, students still did this a lot.