Other than the stupid analogy to Good Will Hunting to appeal to a wider audience, the actual content of the article seems interesting. I didn’t even know that we had an algorithm to generate Carmichael numbers (pseudoprimes, numbers that satisfy Fermat’s little theorem without being prime), let alone an even more efficient algorithm devised by this guy.
Once in a while these lone geniuses turn out to be the real deal.
Sure, but as far as article quality, the only math presented is via some random papers with Chinese and formulas scrawled on them. The explanation of why we should care about this stuff is cursory at best.
For anything labeled math, I kinda expect it to have at least one of:
in-depth descriptions of the math involved (or at least legible formulae)
links to full proofs
code or pseudocode for implementing an algorithm
pretty visualization accompanied by explanation of some facet of math
This article has none of the above; I know little more now after reading it than I did before. Your comment was at least in high in information quality, and used less of my time.
You really want CNN to show source code and mathematical formulae? Even a visualisation of this seems difficult. I can’t think of how to explain it with a drawing.
Perhaps a link to a paper would be reasonable, though.
This sounds needlessly snobby to me. We are all laypeople here in one way or another. You seem lay in mathematics and I am lay in compilers, databases, and network design.
I think that it is pretty obvious at this point: CNN and similar news systems, due to the shifting requirements of the 24-hour news cycle, dropped significantly in story quality by trading detail for constant yammer. As that too has failed, they’ve embraced the web. Because of that second shift, they’ve moved over into more and more clickbait, taking their already lackluster coverage and retooling it to fit a modern–read: buzzfeed–audience. Unfortunately, they suck at that too.
If you’d linked a New Yorker, Atlantic, or even Playboy long-form bio piece on this bloke, I would’ve probably upvoted it. Instead, we get the usual tepid “gee whiz look at this cool nerd” article with a couple pictures and no links and no math to engage with.
Most news outlets are just not very good. Even when they are very good, their article value is predicated on novelty and not technical merit…as one would expect, those being news sites and not journals. Lobsters is not a news aggregator and instead so far seems to be more a collection of technical articles of merit, aimed at people who actually have technical qualifications (by definition, not laypeople). News articles are intended for people who have no particular qualifications whatsoever.
It was a bad submission, and was flagged as such. Stuff from news sites usually is.
Flagged. Clickbait.
Other than the stupid analogy to Good Will Hunting to appeal to a wider audience, the actual content of the article seems interesting. I didn’t even know that we had an algorithm to generate Carmichael numbers (pseudoprimes, numbers that satisfy Fermat’s little theorem without being prime), let alone an even more efficient algorithm devised by this guy.
Once in a while these lone geniuses turn out to be the real deal.
Sure, but as far as article quality, the only math presented is via some random papers with Chinese and formulas scrawled on them. The explanation of why we should care about this stuff is cursory at best.
For anything labeled
math, I kinda expect it to have at least one of:This article has none of the above; I know little more now after reading it than I did before. Your comment was at least in high in information quality, and used less of my time.
You really want CNN to show source code and mathematical formulae? Even a visualisation of this seems difficult. I can’t think of how to explain it with a drawing.
Perhaps a link to a paper would be reasonable, though.
I really want CNN articles–which are aimed at the layman–to stay off of Lobsters–which is not for the layman.
This sounds needlessly snobby to me. We are all laypeople here in one way or another. You seem lay in mathematics and I am lay in compilers, databases, and network design.
I think that it is pretty obvious at this point: CNN and similar news systems, due to the shifting requirements of the 24-hour news cycle, dropped significantly in story quality by trading detail for constant yammer. As that too has failed, they’ve embraced the web. Because of that second shift, they’ve moved over into more and more clickbait, taking their already lackluster coverage and retooling it to fit a modern–read: buzzfeed–audience. Unfortunately, they suck at that too.
If you’d linked a New Yorker, Atlantic, or even Playboy long-form bio piece on this bloke, I would’ve probably upvoted it. Instead, we get the usual tepid “gee whiz look at this cool nerd” article with a couple pictures and no links and no math to engage with.
Most news outlets are just not very good. Even when they are very good, their article value is predicated on novelty and not technical merit…as one would expect, those being news sites and not journals. Lobsters is not a news aggregator and instead so far seems to be more a collection of technical articles of merit, aimed at people who actually have technical qualifications (by definition, not laypeople). News articles are intended for people who have no particular qualifications whatsoever.
It was a bad submission, and was flagged as such. Stuff from news sites usually is.
No, but are citations so hard?
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