I was wondering if it altered the quality of calories taken in. The article mentioned that it wasn't just dropping calories from drinks, since they were counted as part of the allocated amount.
On the other hand, if people were eating (for instance) more proteins in place of the simple sugars of fizzy drinks, they would drastically alter how their body was interacting with those 1800 calories.
I was disappointed by the apparent attitude in the article that every calorie was equal, regardless of source. I really believe calories are to the nutrition industry what counting lines of code is to software: a number that is just too easy to calculate but absolutely meaningless in measuring anything.
"...absolutely meaningless in measuring anything."
This is not true, not for calories nor for lines of code. Both are not sufficient measures when used on their own, and both need context to be interpreted in, but outright dismissing any measurement of them is just as wrong as blindly relying on them.
Apart from this, this study was done by professional nutritional researchers - the article may have dumbed down their word a bit but I'd be hard-pressed to believe that they didn't account for things like that.
I'm curious (please don't take this combatively, it's not meant that way) where you've seen value in measuring lines of code. What is the context that makes the measurement valuable?
I ask because in the many years I've developed software or managed the development of software, I've never found it a useful metric to study because there are too many variables that impact it. However, if I'm missing something there, I'd like to know.
When you have a team of people who do the same work, if there is one person who consistently writes half as much code as the rest that could be a reason to look deepen into that person's performance. When you have for example a new project, you split up all task to be done in several-hour long chunks and you assign those chunks to all team member in a way so that the work is comparable (roughly equal parts GUI, algorithm implementation etc.), it's reasonable to expect that everybody would product about the same amount of code (or checkins or similar). If someone is 2 or 3 standard deviations from the median, that says something. Maybe it says something about that person, maybe about the way tasks are allocated, either way it says something.
Comments
I was wondering if it altered the quality of calories taken in. The article mentioned that it wasn't just dropping calories from drinks, since they were counted as part of the allocated amount.
On the other hand, if people were eating (for instance) more proteins in place of the simple sugars of fizzy drinks, they would drastically alter how their body was interacting with those 1800 calories.
I was disappointed by the apparent attitude in the article that every calorie was equal, regardless of source. I really believe calories are to the nutrition industry what counting lines of code is to software: a number that is just too easy to calculate but absolutely meaningless in measuring anything.
"...absolutely meaningless in measuring anything."
This is not true, not for calories nor for lines of code. Both are not sufficient measures when used on their own, and both need context to be interpreted in, but outright dismissing any measurement of them is just as wrong as blindly relying on them.
Apart from this, this study was done by professional nutritional researchers - the article may have dumbed down their word a bit but I'd be hard-pressed to believe that they didn't account for things like that.
I'm curious (please don't take this combatively, it's not meant that way) where you've seen value in measuring lines of code. What is the context that makes the measurement valuable?
I ask because in the many years I've developed software or managed the development of software, I've never found it a useful metric to study because there are too many variables that impact it. However, if I'm missing something there, I'd like to know.
When you have a team of people who do the same work, if there is one person who consistently writes half as much code as the rest that could be a reason to look deepen into that person's performance. When you have for example a new project, you split up all task to be done in several-hour long chunks and you assign those chunks to all team member in a way so that the work is comparable (roughly equal parts GUI, algorithm implementation etc.), it's reasonable to expect that everybody would product about the same amount of code (or checkins or similar). If someone is 2 or 3 standard deviations from the median, that says something. Maybe it says something about that person, maybe about the way tasks are allocated, either way it says something.