As far as I can tell, from a outsider layman's perspective, the Media Lab exists only to marry "artists who aren't good at technology (but think they are)" and "technologists who aren't good at art (but think they are)" so that they can get together and set large piles of cash on fire and call it research.
Ted versus The Media Lab [video]
61–70 of 162 posts
Re: Ted versus The Media Lab [video]
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Doctoral students...heavily monetize that credential at the end of it. Ha! If only! To continue doing research, the usual next step is a postdoc (~$50k/yr). Industry positions pay better, but outside of ML, there aren't tons of them and biotech (for example, which the media lab does) salaries aren't crazy high. I'd bet that anyone with a PhD could have made more money with a masters degree and a switch to industry.
> I'd bet that anyone with a PhD could have made more money with a masters degree and a switch to industry. This is common knowledge for those pursuing CS PhDs. You don't do it for the money. If you only care about money, a master's degree is what you want.
A lot of jobs I have seen recently say a PhD is highly desirable while a Masters is essential. Obviously I don't suggest people start doing a PhD for the money, however I'm surprised to think that you can't out-earn your alternative self with a Masters seeing as the difference in study time is 2 years but you'd be entering industry as an 'expert'. Especially if you target your PhD at something like computational finance, autonomous vehicles, etc.
Re: Ted versus The Media Lab [video]
#63This is well known in academia and exist outside of Media Lab as well. For example, I asked a professor (not associated with the Media Lab) about using hype to get grants. He said: "It's just like the stock market right, money goes here, it goes there, it's all story telling. I have to tell stories too because if I don't, then other people will tell this story and get the money. But I think I can use it better than o…
A cousin of this is what one researcher in the field of evolutionary machine learning called "dullwashing" to me in a conversation about academic funding. If he wants to do some really interesting somewhat outside-the-box work, he often has to find some way to make it look incredibly dull and inside-the-box and incremental in order to convince some funding bureaucrat to fund it. Most money is dumb and flows in a herd…
I'm not sure why this is getting voted down except for maybe your tone because this is my experience in so many different things. I've worked for several marketing firms in the past and the quickest way into investors' hearts is to pitch them your idea reframed as a combination of things that are already successes. For example, we worked with a video game developer and their pitch was "It's like GTA mixed with Call of Duty" or for TV show pitches it's always "It's like The Good Place meets Dexter" or some permutation of already existing properties. Investors don't ever (or at least almost never) want to go for the risky ideas. They want to go for the things that will make them money and the easiest way to win them over is to compare it to something that's already made money.
Re: Ted versus The Media Lab [video]
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
Spotify's impact on our culture is "People like to stream music. Here is a service that lets them do so.". You didn't need the Media Lab to come up with that idea, and indeed, it didn't.
Why do you think they acquired Echo Nest for 50 million euros? It's the music discovery engine, not the streaming.[0] [0] http://the.echonest.com/pressreleases/spotify-acquires-echo-...
> It's the music discovery engine,
Didn't the Music Genome Project / Pandora do this half a decade before Spotify?
Re: Ted versus The Media Lab [video]
#65As a high school student I got a chance to visit MIT's CSAIL with some other high school students and it killed all interest I had in attending MIT because what I previously thought would be a total hacker and mad scientist sort of place turned out to be a bunch of marketing gimmicks (with a couple carefully managed demos of things that were "cool" more so than useful, new, or innovative).
First, you know that CSAIL is not the media lab, right? Secondly, there’s nothing gimmicky about CSAIL. Perhaps nerds sitting around writing code or proving lemmas on a whiteboard isn’t so “cool” to look at as a high schooler, but that doesn’t mean it’s isn’t an exciting place when you’re old enough, knowledgeable enough, and creative enough to enjoy it.
Re: Ted versus The Media Lab [video]
#66This is well known in academia and exist outside of Media Lab as well. For example, I asked a professor (not associated with the Media Lab) about using hype to get grants. He said: "It's just like the stock market right, money goes here, it goes there, it's all story telling. I have to tell stories too because if I don't, then other people will tell this story and get the money. But I think I can use it better than o…
>they're really selling the image of technological progress. That's such a broad brushstroke. Consider, for example, Echo Nest's research in machine listening in Barry Vercoe's Music, Mind and Machine group. This all made it into Spotify when they acquired Echo Nest. His work led and pushed other researchers in the field at ISMIR, etc. Hard to downplay the impact of Spotify on our culture. This is not "hokum." And as…
Spotify acquired Echo Nest in 2014. Spotify was already wildly successful at that point, and were latest in a long line of music streaming services that came before them. They also already had recommendations. It was basically an acquihire and most of the team has already left.
Re: Ted versus The Media Lab [video]
#67What's up with these research institutes attached to universities running schemes for grant dollars? Maybe across the board incentive structure reform should be mandated by accreditation bodies. Another recent case: the University of Central Florida is the news this morning for their research institute professors running a "grants for PhD" quid-pro-quo program where grant funders were receiving PhDs in exchange for c…
It’s not a scheme. It’s how you pay for research that’s on the edge enough to not be a viable grant, because grants are all about incrementalism.
Re: Ted versus The Media Lab [video]
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
> This approach saved me both much ego and time. (This can be read as a joke, but I'm mostly serious. As an interaction designer I cannot stress how right you are about this and that it is no joke at all . There's a seven-year old comment here on HN[0] that really drove home the importance of looking beyond the tech-savvy bubble that we live in for me: > I look at UI changes in a totally different way now. My saw me…
I read some of the context at your link, and, not having a heart of stone, I can see why the desirability of changes isn't a sure thing. However. Balanced against that is the reality that those same users are often the most entitled about it when something breaks. Tears to jeers in an instant. So I don't know.
Eh, I run Linux on my laptop so my first association with entitled users are fellow Linux users who hate each and every kind of change to Gnome, KDE or whatnot, not my parents, aunts and uncless who express genuine frustration about being left behind.
Especially because a lot of interface changes that confuse the latter group are really, really hard to justify beyond "fashion", while genuinely causing problems for them, whereas with the former group it's often an annoyance that they know how to work around that is nevertheless blown up to epic proportions, like Sayre's Law in action but for the graphic design of an interface.
Re: Ted versus The Media Lab [video]
#69This is well known in academia and exist outside of Media Lab as well. For example, I asked a professor (not associated with the Media Lab) about using hype to get grants. He said: "It's just like the stock market right, money goes here, it goes there, it's all story telling. I have to tell stories too because if I don't, then other people will tell this story and get the money. But I think I can use it better than o…
>they're really selling the image of technological progress. That's such a broad brushstroke. Consider, for example, Echo Nest's research in machine listening in Barry Vercoe's Music, Mind and Machine group. This all made it into Spotify when they acquired Echo Nest. His work led and pushed other researchers in the field at ISMIR, etc. Hard to downplay the impact of Spotify on our culture. This is not "hokum." And as…
Spotify's biggest impact is legal "free" music. It's not even a technological innovation (in fact, their technology sucks - I can't even reorder or duplicate playlists!), it's just a legal innovation (or "innovation", as Uber would say).
Re: Ted versus The Media Lab [video]
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
Spotify's impact on our culture is "People like to stream music. Here is a service that lets them do so.". You didn't need the Media Lab to come up with that idea, and indeed, it didn't.
Yeah OPs comment is some sort of idealistic historical revision that ignores the fact that there were a myriad of streaming services that predated Spotify. It's a pretty weird thing flex about too. Like isn't streaming music based on preferences pretty easy?
> Like isn't streaming music based on preferences pretty easy?
No, I don't think so.
Millions upon millions have been spent pouring money into recommendation engines (which is an advanced "based on preferences"). Companies like Netflix know that they can keep customers that much longer if they're good at finding the needles in the haystack for each specific customer, and they famously offered a million-dollar bounty to anyone that could improve their algorithm by even a few percentage points (and, just as famously, everyone recognized that it would be worth far more than a million dollars to them).
Pandora tried to do it by creating a "music genome" for every single song in its database, with dozens of attributes per song, thus linking disparate songs though much more than just "genre."
Nowadays it's pretty much "throw a massive database at a ML system, and pump out 'people who like these 10 songs tend to like this song'", but for a long time those systems were crappy. And, even now, its hard for those systems to find a balance between showing you something that matches what you've listened to, and playing you ten nearly-identical songs in a row.