Domain: hamilton.edu
Stories and comments across the archive that link to hamilton.edu.
Comments · 10
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Re: Christ on a popsicle stick, now what?Please read: Human Rights Watch complaining about detention without charges; An article about a pool in 2002 were Muslims are complaining about the detentions and specially The CIA torture report.
I know that in general people can flee from the USA if they so choose (when not detained). I do know there is a difference in degree between what the Germans did and what the US is doing now, as many Muslims and many blacks and latins are doing fine even with the indefinite detentions, but I can also see that they are not completely different. It's some people losing their lives and their freedom way more often than other people, because of their races/religions. It is worth mentioning that the prison system is very lucrative, both for the work done in prisons and for the subsidies that they get for keeping people in prison.
I answered the other post mentioning facts and suggesting important reads. "Hate mongering" is a very common expression used to dismiss what other people are saying, but it should be used against angrier posts, not concern about serious issues and others knowledge.
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For politics/economics...
Paul Krugman, David Frum, Ezra Klein, Robert Reich, Ryan Avent, Jared Bernstein. I don't always agree with them, but they have a pretty good track record.
Also, read this:
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Re:Girls are less capable and you're not doing eno
Are the teachers actively discriminating against girls?
In a word? yes, they are.
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Re:Sex discrimination.
They're already giving more attention to boys; this should just level the playing field.
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Re:Enterprise Systems
That's not tier 2 support! That's straight off the "reboot your paragraph" script they give to the first-line flunkies. From http://www.hamilton.edu/writing/writing-resources/common-writing-mistakes --
As a strong comma, [the semicolon] can be used to provide strong separation of two independent clauses with a coordinating conjunction (normally, a comma provides this separation) or to separate a series of phrases or clauses with internal commas.
(emphasis mine).
The clause preceding the semicolon has a number of internal commas. The use of a semicolon serves to make it clear that the following words are not part of the list of things by which the clusterfuck is backed.
"Proper" English grammar is a lot more nuanced (and regionally varied) than most people are willing to believe, and it's certainly more complex than the dozen or so rules you learned in elementary school.
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People Suck at Prediction
Take a gander at this paper on the subject. Most people have about a 50/50 shot or worse at accurately predicting binary events. The worse part is interesting--that some people are just consistently terrible.
The truth is, you have to have incredibly detailed knowledge about a subject and a philosophic outlook on it that's appropriate. Technological change is especially hairy because there's a lot exciting technology that ends up getting killed by socio-cultural or political reasons. For instance, in the late 70's it was unthinkable that we wouldn't have a moonbase by 2010, but no one was looking at a little defense project called ARPANET. Ooops.
I'm no expert on this shit, so I can't speculate about what's going to be hot in the future. I thought the iPad was stupid, and I think Dark Matter is a bunch of bullshit. I also think Kurzweil is awfully optimistic about the Singularity. That said, I'm aware of my own track record,on prognostication, and unless it's about healthcare IT (my field), I'm ready to be as surprised as IBM was when they ended up having a worldwide market for more than 5 computers.
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Motorcycle Maintena, New Machine, and Just For Fun
My own personal bookshelf includes a multitude of Java textbooks and references (I'm a high school CS teacher), one of which is programming.java by Decker and Hirshfield which was my college textbook in CS 141 and 142 and good ole HamTech. I also have my other college texts: Structured Computer Organization by Tanenbaum, Fundamentals of Sequential and Parallel Algorithms by Berman and Paul, Programming Languages by Sethi, Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach by Russell and Norvig and a handful of reference materials (Learning GNU Emacs, Java in a Nutshell, C++ for Java Programmers, The Practice of Programming, and Learning the UNIX Operating System). But by far, the two books that I have in my collection that I would recommend are Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Persig and Soul of a New Machine by Kidder. Both were required reading in college CS courses, the profs in the dept thought that if we were to graduate with a CS degree, these were two books that we needed to read, they were right. Excellent books, and something more interesting as a gift than a reference book. The third book to suggest would be Just For Fun by Torvalds and Diamond. While I haven't read it myself yet, I thought it would be helpful to include two suggestions of books that I have read and one that is on my wish list...
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Re:WRONGThese examples were extreme and obvious, but if you think nothing like that was ever used in IQ tests then YOU don't know what the hell you are talking about. From this paper about the problem:
An example of a culturally biased question from the SAT is: "Runner:Marathon A) envoy:embassy B) martyr:massacre C) oarsman:regatta D) referee:tournament E) horse:stable. (Herrnstein and Murray, 1994)" This question seems more likely to be answered correctly by upper class children (who are predominantly white) because they are more likely to know what a regatta is.
IQ test questions and problems test *cognitive abilities* and reasoning, among other things, *not* knowledge.
That's what tests nowaday TRY to test, but as the example above shows, even questions aimed to test cognitive abilities require knowledge, which can create a bias.
Besides that, "cognitive abilities" and "reasoning" are rather hard to define clearly, especially in how exactly they are related to "intelligence". More specifically relating to a gender bias: in order to avoid probles as in the example above, today's IQ tests often use abstract figures rather than textual questions. But this may mean the questions strongly rely on spatial sense, something that, according to a lot of research, male brains are somewhat better suited for. -
Re:A non-apple user has some questions:
here's a PDF explaining what Software Update in Mac os x http://www.hamilton.edu/college/its/documentation
/ operating%20system%20related/os%20x/external/ins-u singosxupdate-osx.pdf so you can read how it works and has picture of the SU gui cheers! -
Even better...and simpler!
Even though pre-made images are great, something as simple as a recipe for tweaking a distro to work well with a system could be lucrative.
I am one of many people who host websites devoted to describing how to get different distros working on different machines. In the eleven months since it was first published, my site has had over three thousand hits. Three thousand hits may not seem like a lot, but those could be three thousand customers paying money for a product (a guide to installing linux on their particular laptop) that is nearly free to the producer (simply harvest the data provided by sites linked to by the Linux on Laptops database.)
Beyond that, by providing support and even compatability gaurantees for specific laptops they have information for, this could well be a very, very lucrative business for a company, without having to produce their own images!