Domain: city.ac.uk
Stories and comments across the archive that link to city.ac.uk.
Comments · 21
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Re: forcing of diversity
The study found that even babies as young as nine months gravitate toward stereotypically gendered toys."
See this article for more details. I realize that actual science is bigoted.
https://www.city.ac.uk/news/20...
Even non-human ones do!
What does that tell us?
It tells us that in a world where evolutionary pressure has over time modified primates to survive. Given that there are two primary actor/functions in pairing, sex, and reproduction -with marked different needs and responsibilities - it isn't surprising that male and female primates evolved with different characteristics. And this isn't a bad thing, and this isn't asexist thing. It is just the difference between saying the sun is bright yellow, and someone else insisting it is a dull green color and how dare we assign a color to that star?
And as you noted somewhere in the past - not everyone is identical even if there are admitted generalized differences to the two man sexes. these characteristics fall on a curve. Some women are quite masculine, some men effeminate. Some women are very interested in technical matters, some men in people.
But they are all people, and should be able to pursue any career they are physically and/or mentally capable of.
But the idea that anyone can be anything is simply wrong.
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Re: forcing of diversity
I don't see that it helps either bolster your argument or weaken mine.
Because it wasn't designed to bolster or weaken any arguments.
Here's a piece: "A new study in the journal of Infant and Child Development says that this preference for gendered toys might not be because he’s watched too much Bob the Builder on Netflix or because everyone likes to remark on what a little “dude” he is. The study found that even babies as young as nine months gravitate toward stereotypically gendered toys."
See this article for more details. I realize that actual science is bigoted.
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Time to stop position bias
It's interesting that ballots still list candidates in alphabetical order, despite studies showing that the position of a candidate in the ballot can influence election results (e.g. https://pprg.stanford.edu/wp-c... (PDF) and http://openaccess.city.ac.uk/4...). Our local government elections have been using randomized ballot order for a while now. Voting papers have the candidates in different orders so all candidates appear in all positions. The order any particular voter sees is random. Apparently it's easy enough to implement and it really does help make elections fairer.
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Re:sTEM
Computer science isn't about computers, in the same way that physics isn't about telescopes. I'll illustrate this by linking a couple of computer science papers:
* The Derivative of a Regular Type is its Type of One-Hole Contexts: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/v...
* This paper give a name and applications to something maths only calls "strong lax monoidal functors": http://staff.city.ac.uk/~ross/...Or how about watching an introductory computer science lecture from Stanford. Bob Harper introduces type theory and how to use the doctrine of computational trinitarianism to check whether you've made a significant discovery in computer science: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
There's more to computing than transistors. There's more to software than mathematicians study (the second paper's a good example).
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Re:15 years in the embassy
http://www.city.ac.uk/news/201...
The "money" quote:
âoeIt [Sweden] collaborated with the United States on extraordinary rendition by the CIA of people who had applied for asylum to Sweden. And Assange's Wikileaks website exposed a whole range of US-Swedish cooperation that did not reflect well on Sweden's global image as âa good stateâ(TM).That's why sweden would extradite Assange unless there is a significant change of government. He embarrassed the government of Sweden.
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Re:Great idea! Let's alienate Science even more!
"Reason" is good, but too often gets conflated with "Rational self-interest" in discussions of morality. In fact, emotions and irrationality seem to help us become more predictable agents and get around some of the sticking points of rational self-interest. Here's a paper on the evolutionary advantage of the emotional dimension of moral agents in societies: http://www.cass.city.ac.uk/__d...
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Re:Of course you realize,
Sorry, I managed to drop the links, so I'm posting again.
The vast majority of foreigners moving to Europe come from former European colonies, plus guest workers summoned by European companies in times of labor shortage; not exactly a stellar record. The US, on the other hand, has received very large numbers of immigrants and refugees since its founding, and by and large without serious tensions.
Sources?
It's definitely not true today. Germany alone harbours more than twice as many refugees as USA.
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/imm_ref_pop_by_cou_or_ter_of_asy-refugee-population-country-territory-asylumFrom Afghanistan, Europe harbours more than eight times as many refugees as USA.
http://www.staff.city.ac.uk/~rc391/shanaz/linda/diaspora.htmlSince USA invaded Iraq and up until 2007, it had granted refugee status to a measly 800 Iraqis, while Sweden had accepted 18 000.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refugees_of_Iraq#United_StatesI'm going as far as saying, USA doesn't take responsibility for the refugee problems it's creating.
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AdTI: Handouts for Neocons
Fact: AdTI employs James Kilpatrick as a senior fellow. Kilpatrick made a career defending segregation and apartheid.
Fact: AdTI employs John Norquist, the not-so-big-time younger brother of big-time conservative activist Grover Norquist.
Fact: AdTI president Ken Brown's sole research qualification is a BA in English from George Mason. He has built a career out of milking shady publications, agent-of-foreign-power lobby groups, and dubious business-academica-government incest groups.
Half of the links from the AdTI front page are broken. The other half send you to repositories of op-eds and recorded radio shows.
This is not a research institute. Not even a bad research institute. This is a demi-journalistic hack shop where goldbricking bottomfeeders of right-wing policy studies and editorial-writing filch cash from gullible corporations in return for hastily-written hokum.
Please do not post any more from these con artists. I'm sure they get paid by the hit. -
thousands of OSes aren't requiredActually, there's research and literature that examines how big an "N" you need in N-version software diversity for survivability, and it isn't thousands; in fact, many operational high-reliability systems actually only use two versions of software (the space shuttle's computers are built this way as are some aircraft systems). So the comment of needing thousands of OSes really isn't true.
I've been surprised at how much heat and how little light (as in research light) has been applied to this argument. Dan's diversity argument is on pretty solid ground in the research community. As an example, here are a set of papers nicely compiled by the City University of London's Center for Software Reliability on fault tolerance, and there are quite a few citations on the use of diversity in software. If you don't like the University's papers, you can find similar papers published by the ACM and IEEE, These might help readers with deciding which point of view is best supported by research. Diversity isn't a slam dunk (lots of nasty details to get right), but it's certainly well-examined ground for high-reliability systems, and a lot of folks are now looking how you apply these same principles to commercial, off-the-shelf systems.
A final thought: the Internet itself is one of the best examples of such a diverse system. At one point, no RFC was ever approved without two independently-developed implementations of the standard. It's one of the reasons it has worked so well and evolved so well over the last 30 years or so.
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My major problem: electronic text reading speedsI love ebooks- I've got Eastern Standard Tribe, several other novels, and many shorter texts on my Treo. Nothing is better for interstitial time: grocery lines, red lights, airplane trips, stretches of empty interstate like 50 across Nevada...
But if you have to read a lot of text at once- for either work or personal use- paper still wins, because paper isn't just a little bit faster: reading speeds are significantly faster for paper.
Electronic text formats that try to make e-pages look just like paper pages don't help. You'll often be much better off reading small chunks of text with big fonts and very wide margins.
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Re:Depends what they're looking for
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Driving 45 on the highway: reading speeds...I like ebooks and the ideal of ebooks. I've got that 1994 science fiction CD with the annotated Fire Upon the Deep. I've always got magazines and short stories on my Palm. They fill in those timegaps- lines at Costco, waiting rooms, airports and airplanes (although evidently some airlines won't let you use combo Palm / phones even with wireless off), long stoplights, straight stretches of interstate...
But ebooks still have one fatal flaw for me: paper reads 10%-30% faster. (Two flaws if you count vulnerability to jacuzzis.) I'd found this out on my own at work. If I needed to read 200 pages of reports I was better off sending print-jobs to every printer in the building (splitting reports to prevent irritated coworkers). My time saved was worth the additional printing costs.
That speed difference is like driving 45 instead of 60... ok for short distances, dreadful on roadtrips. As a dedicated (nee addicted) reader, this could mean 100 fewer books read per year. Ouch.
If you must read on a monitor, this advice helps. But until they get electronic paper right, the crushed tree system is the way for me. -
In the UK look for Adult Continuing Education
I have just come back from the first part of a Java course at City University. The teacher emphasised that he was not grooming us for the Sun Exam, rather the concepts of OO modelling etc. The course cost £240 (about $350 USD) for ten weeks of two hours a week lessons.
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Re:Leaks in C++
Bzzt... You fail!
This is actually a classic example of how people screw up exceptions in C++. Aside from a not using unknown() to handle errant exceptions, the bigger problem is the notion that try/catch blocks are how you avoid memory leaks in C++. Take a look at this old problem to give yourself an idea of some of the complexities with exceptions. While the problem does not create a resource leak (indeed, it effectively LOSES resources), it demonstrates how it can go wrong in the most surprising ways.
While it is conceivable to get everything working right using try/catch blocks, you have to write a ton of insanely structured code, and it's very error prone.
What you want to use is the "resource acquisition is initialization" idiom. Here's some info on it here. It's all about the stack and destructors man. -
obligatory ms bashing
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Re:Job Discrimination
I always thought the purpose of a date was genetic sampling. I mean you get the look, the smell(which hopefully isn't too powerfully covered), and through a kiss perhaps a little taste.
:) All of which are susposed to help you determine if mating with this person would produce fit offspring. Obviously if it would then you will be attracted to this person.
I managed to dig up some stuff on it for anyone interested, my recolection is dim anyway.
Try The Single Chromosome's Guide To Dating
Or the Google Text Conversion -
Re:Intellectual property is extremely important
I must have missed that.
But I can tell that this is a highly respected publisher that is Very Concerned About Freedom. In fact, based on their home page it looks like they're mostly concerned about anarchy, anarchy, and, well... anarchy. An appropriate publisher, I guess.
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Re:To make things clearYes, it would be good if the rest of Information Liberation were "liberated" as well. Martin explains why its not at the end of the chapter that is online, but I think his argument can be reversed - I think the publicity Freedom Press would get from putting the whole book online would be invaluable, especially for a small press no one much has ever heard of.
Danny.
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The Slashdot EffectSeems like the Slashdot effect has taken down another web site. Multics' ISP has shut them down because they have exceeded their bandwidth/hits limit. Luckily there are mirrors in the US and England.
I can't currently get to the US mirror either, so I am not including the link here.
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Alternate Link
Since the site linked from the story appears to have been slashdotted, here is an alternate link to the same story.
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Writing KDE apps with GTK
One thing that is overestimated is the toolkit dependence of KDE. Sure, Qt is needed for the basic libs, but as they are free software, this will never be a problem.
But why does everybody think *every* KDE app does need to use Qt? For programmers, KDE is just a framework, and you can easily 'plug in' other toolkits.
Ktk for Tcl/TK A Tixwish extension, Ktk offers KDE look and feel for Tcl/Tk developers, without using Qt
StarOffice 5.0, offers some KDE integration like Drag&Drop, Mimetypes and KMenu support. Its widget set is not publicly available, but it shows this can easily be done.
FLTK supports theming in the next release, which does also include certain KDE support
There is no fundamental problem in writing a KDE support lib for GTK, making it easy to add a certain KDE compliance to GTK apps. Maybe it's not as comprehensive as with Qt apps, but common Drag&Drop, colours, Mimetypes, address book, help system still make it a lot easier for the user.
It could be a compile-time option (like Window Maker), or even a run-time check for the KDE system running.
So people won't end up having two desktop environment libs loaded into memory.
Once again:
KDE is a open framework for the developer, and an integrated environment for the user.
The user doesn't care about which widgets are used, as long as they feel the same. The developers don't have to use Qt to make their apps fit into this environment.