Fighting wars requires the ability to weigh up civilian harm against military advantage. AI-enabled weapons might not be able to do this, as we explored in September
2019年，湄公河上游大建水壩，只顧發電，不顧民生死活：
2019/11/21 - A proliferation of upstream dams is beginning to impose costs across much of Asia. ... A Thai farmer sits beside a drought-stricken irrigation canal fed by the Mekong River in 2010. | BLOOMBERG ...
你知道英文第三人稱複數代名詞they，現在可以當成單數代名詞使用嗎？
韋氏辭典已為they增加一個新詞義，可指稱性別認同為「非二元性別」的人士。美國心理學會更建議，可在寫作專業文章時以they取代he（他）或she（她）。
they，他們/她們。韋氏詞典週二宣布，2019年的年度詞彙是人稱代詞they 。該詞典的年度詞彙基於數據選出，今年其網站和應用程序上“they”的搜索量比2018年增加了313%。這說明越來越多人使用這個古老的複數人稱代詞，來指代性別認同非二元的個人。今年年度詞彙的候選單詞還包括與特朗普彈劾調查有關的quid pro quo（交換條件）、impeachment（彈劾）等。
Our Word of the Year for 2019 is they. It reflects a surprising fact: even a basic term—a personal pronoun—can rise to the top of our data. Although our lookups are often driven by events in the news, the dictionary is also a primary resource for information about language itself, and the shifting use of they has been the subject of increasing study and commentary in recent years. Lookups for they increased by 313% in 2019 over the previous year.
English famously lacks a gender-neutral singular pronoun to correspond neatly with singular pronouns like everyone or someone, and as a consequence they has been used for this purpose for over 600 years.
More recently, though, they has also been used to refer to one person whose gender identity is nonbinary, a sense that is increasingly common in published, edited text, as well as social media and in daily personal interactions between English speakers. There's no doubt that its use is established in the English language, which is why it was added to the Merriam-Webster.com dictionary this past September.
Nonbinary they was also prominent in the news in 2019. Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal (WA) revealed in April during a House Judiciary Committee hearing on the Equality Act that her child is gender-nonconforming and uses they. Singer Sam Smith announced in September that they now prefer they and them as their third person personal pronouns. And the American Psychological Association’s blog officially recommended that singular they be preferred in professional writing over “he or she” when the reference is to a person whose gender is unknown or to a person who prefers they. It is increasingly common to see they and them as a person’s pronouns in Twitter bios, email signatures, and conference nametags.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/word-of-the-year/they
To a great extent, increases in dementia are the price of progress: more and more people are living long enough to get Alzheimer’s, some because they survived heart disease, strokes or cancer. It is a cruel trade-off.
It's a trade-off.
This "selling out" of future employees was an extremely tough call for the unions, a trade-off they agonized over. To their credit, many locals refused to go along, even though they were under enormous pressure to do so. For those who did agree, as soon as management had that two-tier wage provision under their belt (and despite assurances that it wouldn't happen), they began cutting into the very medical and pension benefits the union had sold its soul to preserve. It was ugly.
What happens when bad measures drive out good is strikingly described in an article in the current Economic Journal. Investigating the effects of competition in the NHS, Carol Propper and her colleagues made an extraordinary discovery. Under competition, hospitals improved their patient waiting times. At the same time, the death-rate following emergency heart-attack admissions substantially increased. Why? As targets, waiting times were and are measured (and what gets measured gets managed, right?). Emergency heart-attack deaths were not tracked and therefore not managed. Even though no one would argue that the trade-off - shorter waiting times but more deaths - was anything but a travesty of NHS purpose, that's what the choice of measure produced.
In such occasions, the law now allows an unspecified amount of extra time for repairs before the car company is required to permanently replace the vehicle or pay a refund. However, during the extended wait, the car's owner must be provided with a loaner vehicle, Corbitt told the Dispatch.
A consortium of automakers sought the change, citing parts manufacturing delays in Japan following the magnitude 9.0 earthquake and tsunami that devastated the country's northeast coast on March 11.
The Ohio law's new wrinkle is called a "fair trade-off" by consumer watchdog Kip Morse, president of the Better Business Bureau of Central Ohio.
We’ve looked at how groups form against each other and what happens to an individual voice in the team. We wonder how we make a team more efficient and also what the risks are of having teams. Teams don’t always do better than individuals, but there is a Helen Keller quote I particularly like: “Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much.” This summarises the trade-off. You can’t do a lot alone, but you are more in control. You can do less of your own thing in a bigger team, but you can achieve more.
To help develop its strategy, Dow Jones employed a variant of conjoint analysis, a technique that has been widely used in market research for 30 years. In a traditional conjoint analysis, survey respondents are asked which products or product attributes they value as a trade-off between two or more options, repeated in enough combinations to yield a reliable ranking of each attribute’s importance. Dow Jones used this type of analysis in a new way, to identify prospective readers and reveal their preferences. After its redesign to attract this new customer segment, the Journal (now part of the News Corporation) saw a 35 percent improvement in its efforts to add new subscribers through direct marketing, reversed a three-year slump in ad sales, and experienced an annual revenue improvement of US$25 million from new programs and pricing initiatives.
But randomizing, of necessity, involves a trade-off. Focusing on short-term cost-effectiveness often leads managers to implement new programs at sites or at times when they think they will do the most good. But such targeted interventions make it impossible to evaluate the program's overall effectiveness, as one could with randomized deployment.
trade-off
noun
1 [C] a situation in which you balance two opposing situations or qualities:
There is a trade-off between doing the job accurately and doing it quickly.
She said that she'd had to make a trade-off between her job and her family.
2 [C usually singular] a situation in which you accept something bad in order to have something good:
For some car buyers, lack of space is an acceptable trade-off for a sporty design.
A trade-off (or tradeoff) is a situational decision that involves diminishing or losing one quality, quantity or property of a set or design in return for gains in other aspects. In simple terms, a tradeoff is where one thing increases and another must ...
權衡取捨
trade-off トレードオフ ((同時に満足できない諸条件の間の取捨選択［調整］)).
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