I have no idea as to exactly how qualified Jemison is. She may fit the bill on her own merits.
However, it is true that the foundation of Affirmative Action is the suspension of hiring standards in order to fill racial quotas for ethnic groups with lower mean qualifications, especially IQ. It cannot work any other way if it is to be implemented across the board in a society. If AA is enacted, it follows that most (not all) black people in highly qualified positions did not get there solely because of merit. It also follows that organizations like NASA that exist to pioneer very difficult things will be adversely impacted by AA.
I would think that a lot of people have a better chance of being astronauts than Hollywood A-Listers, for example. The pool of people wanting to be in the film industry is so much larger. How many people really want to be astronauts? Certainly less than most of the state of California and all those enrolled in film schools, acting classes and the like.
You cynical man. For all you know, upper management have a budget flush with cash and have singled out someone in the hard working but unacknowledged IT department for a raise and a promotion.
This. Because rather than the establishment finally admitting that Enoch Powell was right, they are praying for a magical technological solution that will put an end to future riots. A high tech band-aid in other words.
The goal of this study, AFAICT, is to prove Summers wrong in the name of PC. The fact that they mention the Summers controversy in the first paragraph kind of gives that away. Summers was talking about why 'women may have been underrepresented "in tenured positions in science and engineering at top universities and research institutions"'.
It's telling that the authors of this study chose to include data from 86 countries in order to prove their point. In fact, they choose to focus on countries like Tunisia and Bahrain to make their point. Why not the USA, where most of the people in the tenured positions are coming from? Because when they do, the best that they can come up with is a statement like this: "For example, Hyde and collaborators ([20], [25]) reported that girls have now reached parity with boys in mean mathematics performance in the United States, even in high school, where a significant gap in mean performance existed in the 1970s. Likewise, both Brody and Mills ([3]) and Wai et al. ([51]) noted a drop in nonrandom samples of students under thirteen years of age, from 13:1 in the 1970s down to approximately 3:1 by the 1990s in the ratio of U.S. boys to girls scoring above 700 on the quantitative section of the college-entrance SAT examination."
3 to 1 is still huge, and they are trying to make the case that this result might keep going until it is 1:1 like the mean result already nearly is. In fact, that the result of boys:girls in SAT score above 700 (a measure of variance) is still 3 to 1 while there is gender equality in the mean result is an indication that probably 3 to 1 is the most female favorable result that they are going to get. Because the SAT is a proxy IQ test, this is basically saying that while the mean is equal there are 3 times as many men as women in the IQ stratum from which the people who are gifted enough to enter tenured positions in science and engineering at top universities and research institutions can be drawn from.
But let's ignore that and focus on Tunisia and Bahrain, shall we?
Just because our "route" resulted in our "life" situation, doesn't mean that other routes couldn't produce equally valid and viable "life" conditions. We're not that special.
Not necessarily. So far we only know one planet that has evidence of life (our own). For all we know, many of the specific details of the earth and solar system in which it is found combine to make it much more probable that life is found. There appear to be a lot of planets out there, but none we can yet observe giving evidence of life.
To turn the Feynman license plate example on its head, let's try this thought experiment. It is April, 1901 in New York. You can see several cars, but only one has a license plate (having just been required by law on the 25th of that month). It is for argument's sake "ARW 357". What might we infer about license plates, given that this is the only example we have ever seen? If we say that all license plates will be "ARW 357", we will be wrong. However, we might infer that license plates will contain a mixture of numbers and letters, and 6 in an LLL NNN fashion may be sufficient in a typical state (this combination gives 17+ million combinations, which will be reasonable for many states). The license plate itself will be big enough so that the letters/numbers can be seen from a distance, but not too big to be expensive to produce or unsightly. They will have dark letters on a white background. They will be fixed to the front and back of the car to aid identification when the car is traveling in both directions. None of these details is arbitrary. Go around the world and license plates will look a lot alike in general.
If intelligent life on a per planet basis does turn out to be rare, it stands to reason that there is a reason for this. There may only be a few modalities capable of bearing life or have it come into being on a frequent enough basis. Perhaps only one, and if that is the case then earth will be a good model. In any case, we know that planet earth in our solar system was capable of generating life. We at least know that the earth-like/solar system-like modality is capable of generating at least one instance of intelligent life. This modality is certainly a better bet for finding other examples of intelligent life than any random other configuration.
Other fun things to deal with are the rapid staff turnover, the guarantee that they'll take the code you paid them to write with them to a competitor, and that you might find that you don't even have a copy.
This is the primary thing that always discouraged me from the idea of outsourcing from a business perspective. You want the code you are paying for to be an additional barrier to entry or competitive advantage that you have over your competitors. The last thing you want to do is pay the lion's share of the development costs only for your competitors to get those advantages you have paid for at a discounted rate.
I'm not surprised that the idea has been done before as a book. Thanks for providing a pointer.
Somewhere, someplace there is a properly paranoid intelligence out there that is or has shunned the development of radio technology for that very reason (perhaps some sort of hive mind able to exert control over rogue experimentation? It wasn't us though, so I hope for our sake that there is some sort of Mutual Assured Destruction that prevents the doomsday response to the first radio communication, or physical difficulty or impossibility involved.
The very first communications of human origin that alien civilizations might receive will come from Nikola Tesla's attempt to broadcast electrical power through the air a little over a century ago. Provided they have sensitive and directional enough receivers, and can somehow filter out the radio noise from the Sun, that would mean that any civilization within a little over a hundred light years might already be trying to respond to us.
I wonder what exactly they are going to respond to us with. e.g. "Ahh... looks like another civilization just invented radio communications. Very smart of them. It seems their intelligence is only matched by their carelessness. I think it's about time to clue them in as to why they have yet to find intelligent life on any other planet in the galaxy. For a brief second or two they will finally know that there IS life on other planets."
I agree that these classes aren't filler. They are political indoctrination masquerading as "breadth" or whatever they want to call it. And as you say, most engineers would just craft their major to make as many of these classes reinforce their major as best they could. For those classes they couldn't, they'd either lap up, grit their teeth or mindlessly absorb the Marxist viewpoint, depending on their predilection.
I've sat through interviews before where I got hit with some of these "puzzle" questions. The thing that really struck me was that the questions were the kind you'd need to be a Nobel Laureate to solve (not really), but were completely obvious if you *knew* the answer. So, as these were "novel" or "neat" "brain-teasers" - they really assessed only if you were some mathematical savant - and had nothing to do with your coding, or even problem-solving abilities. I'm 100% sure that the interviewer wouldn't have been able to figure out the answers, if he hadn't already known them.
These are really just a proxy IQ test with questions that only someone on the far right end of the bell curve can answer. The reason they do this is because requiring an actual IQ test to be taken is illegal, so they've found a loophole. If the company that was hiring you was not actually requiring that the questions be solved, then my guess is that they had a lower IQ bar than Google but didn't understand the reason behind what Google/Microsoft et al does enough to find some questions that were hard but still easier than Google's questions. Basically a cargo cult approach to hiring.
Happy birthday Vim and thank you Bram and Bill
on
Vim Turns 20
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· Score: 1
Seeing as you are the vim user, you will have significantly less RSI. At times like this it, uh, comes in handy.
It is the same deal with racial terms - and it's not bad attitude on the part of the observer so much as it's that the association with other non-skin color aspects of the phenotype that catches up with whatever word you choose to call the rose. Propensity for criminality, for example.
We've had half a century or more of increased attempts to change the attitude of those who observe it. In 2011 it's impossible to turn on a television or open a newspaper without being hit with an attempt to modify the viewer's attitude in the way that you suggest. Fortunately, the unchecked immigration in our countries has brought the diversity experience to everyone. Now we are forced to ask who we believe - the media or our own lying eyes?
Progress Quest is one of the best antidotes to gaming. Because it shows how robotic and mindless the whole process is, you can start to see games for what they are in many cases - different values of the same variables designed to suck you in, exercise your pleasure centers and part you from your money. Seeing the process from the PQ perspective is like swallowing the red pill.
Gaming in terms of money is relatively cheap. In terms of opportunity cost, it's very expensive. The time that could be spent on what used to be life is now sucked away in some fake universe. Sampling some of the highest art of gaming can be beneficial, but too much of a good thing is a definite vice.
That's one of the reasons I would have ethical qualms about creating a mindless, addictive game - doing such is all too similar to manufacturing or growing drugs.
Slashdot Mirror
I know you're trying for the funny but a lot of them are married or have girlfriends.
I have no idea as to exactly how qualified Jemison is. She may fit the bill on her own merits.
However, it is true that the foundation of Affirmative Action is the suspension of hiring standards in order to fill racial quotas for ethnic groups with lower mean qualifications, especially IQ. It cannot work any other way if it is to be implemented across the board in a society. If AA is enacted, it follows that most (not all) black people in highly qualified positions did not get there solely because of merit. It also follows that organizations like NASA that exist to pioneer very difficult things will be adversely impacted by AA.
I would think that a lot of people have a better chance of being astronauts than Hollywood A-Listers, for example. The pool of people wanting to be in the film industry is so much larger. How many people really want to be astronauts? Certainly less than most of the state of California and all those enrolled in film schools, acting classes and the like.
At least these sort of weapons are a potential foot gun. Anyone developing one has to be at somewhat suicidal to want to do so.
HEEHEEheeeheehee
I've switched to Exaile. Does what I want it to, much like Amarok used to. I will have a look at Clementine.
Surely you can't be serious.
And here I thought it was turtles.
You cynical man. For all you know, upper management have a budget flush with cash and have singled out someone in the hard working but unacknowledged IT department for a raise and a promotion.
This. Because rather than the establishment finally admitting that Enoch Powell was right, they are praying for a magical technological solution that will put an end to future riots. A high tech band-aid in other words.
The goal of this study, AFAICT, is to prove Summers wrong in the name of PC. The fact that they mention the Summers controversy in the first paragraph kind of gives that away. Summers was talking about why 'women may have been underrepresented "in tenured positions in science and engineering at top universities and research institutions"'.
It's telling that the authors of this study chose to include data from 86 countries in order to prove their point. In fact, they choose to focus on countries like Tunisia and Bahrain to make their point. Why not the USA, where most of the people in the tenured positions are coming from? Because when they do, the best that they can come up with is a statement like this: "For example, Hyde and collaborators ([20], [25]) reported that girls have now reached parity with boys in mean mathematics performance in the United States, even in high school, where a significant gap in mean performance existed in the 1970s. Likewise, both Brody and Mills ([3]) and Wai et al. ([51]) noted a drop in nonrandom samples of students under thirteen years of age, from 13:1 in the 1970s down to approximately 3:1 by the 1990s in the ratio of U.S. boys to girls scoring above 700 on the quantitative section of the college-entrance SAT examination."
3 to 1 is still huge, and they are trying to make the case that this result might keep going until it is 1:1 like the mean result already nearly is. In fact, that the result of boys:girls in SAT score above 700 (a measure of variance) is still 3 to 1 while there is gender equality in the mean result is an indication that probably 3 to 1 is the most female favorable result that they are going to get. Because the SAT is a proxy IQ test, this is basically saying that while the mean is equal there are 3 times as many men as women in the IQ stratum from which the people who are gifted enough to enter tenured positions in science and engineering at top universities and research institutions can be drawn from.
But let's ignore that and focus on Tunisia and Bahrain, shall we?
Not necessarily. So far we only know one planet that has evidence of life (our own). For all we know, many of the specific details of the earth and solar system in which it is found combine to make it much more probable that life is found. There appear to be a lot of planets out there, but none we can yet observe giving evidence of life.
To turn the Feynman license plate example on its head, let's try this thought experiment. It is April, 1901 in New York. You can see several cars, but only one has a license plate (having just been required by law on the 25th of that month). It is for argument's sake "ARW 357". What might we infer about license plates, given that this is the only example we have ever seen? If we say that all license plates will be "ARW 357", we will be wrong. However, we might infer that license plates will contain a mixture of numbers and letters, and 6 in an LLL NNN fashion may be sufficient in a typical state (this combination gives 17+ million combinations, which will be reasonable for many states). The license plate itself will be big enough so that the letters/numbers can be seen from a distance, but not too big to be expensive to produce or unsightly. They will have dark letters on a white background. They will be fixed to the front and back of the car to aid identification when the car is traveling in both directions. None of these details is arbitrary. Go around the world and license plates will look a lot alike in general.
If intelligent life on a per planet basis does turn out to be rare, it stands to reason that there is a reason for this. There may only be a few modalities capable of bearing life or have it come into being on a frequent enough basis. Perhaps only one, and if that is the case then earth will be a good model. In any case, we know that planet earth in our solar system was capable of generating life. We at least know that the earth-like/solar system-like modality is capable of generating at least one instance of intelligent life. This modality is certainly a better bet for finding other examples of intelligent life than any random other configuration.
This is the primary thing that always discouraged me from the idea of outsourcing from a business perspective. You want the code you are paying for to be an additional barrier to entry or competitive advantage that you have over your competitors. The last thing you want to do is pay the lion's share of the development costs only for your competitors to get those advantages you have paid for at a discounted rate.
Finally! A disease sent from God to punish people for being Un-American.
I'm not surprised that the idea has been done before as a book. Thanks for providing a pointer.
Somewhere, someplace there is a properly paranoid intelligence out there that is or has shunned the development of radio technology for that very reason (perhaps some sort of hive mind able to exert control over rogue experimentation? It wasn't us though, so I hope for our sake that there is some sort of Mutual Assured Destruction that prevents the doomsday response to the first radio communication, or physical difficulty or impossibility involved.
I wonder what exactly they are going to respond to us with. e.g. "Ahh... looks like another civilization just invented radio communications. Very smart of them. It seems their intelligence is only matched by their carelessness. I think it's about time to clue them in as to why they have yet to find intelligent life on any other planet in the galaxy. For a brief second or two they will finally know that there IS life on other planets."
I agree that these classes aren't filler. They are political indoctrination masquerading as "breadth" or whatever they want to call it. And as you say, most engineers would just craft their major to make as many of these classes reinforce their major as best they could. For those classes they couldn't, they'd either lap up, grit their teeth or mindlessly absorb the Marxist viewpoint, depending on their predilection.
Not sure why you need a citation when it's something you can witness with your own eyes.
This is exactly it. Wish I had mod points.
It's precise, not accurate.
These are really just a proxy IQ test with questions that only someone on the far right end of the bell curve can answer. The reason they do this is because requiring an actual IQ test to be taken is illegal, so they've found a loophole. If the company that was hiring you was not actually requiring that the questions be solved, then my guess is that they had a lower IQ bar than Google but didn't understand the reason behind what Google/Microsoft et al does enough to find some questions that were hard but still easier than Google's questions. Basically a cargo cult approach to hiring.
Seeing as you are the vim user, you will have significantly less RSI. At times like this it, uh, comes in handy.
It is the same deal with racial terms - and it's not bad attitude on the part of the observer so much as it's that the association with other non-skin color aspects of the phenotype that catches up with whatever word you choose to call the rose. Propensity for criminality, for example.
We've had half a century or more of increased attempts to change the attitude of those who observe it. In 2011 it's impossible to turn on a television or open a newspaper without being hit with an attempt to modify the viewer's attitude in the way that you suggest. Fortunately, the unchecked immigration in our countries has brought the diversity experience to everyone. Now we are forced to ask who we believe - the media or our own lying eyes?
World of Warcraft?
Progress Quest is one of the best antidotes to gaming. Because it shows how robotic and mindless the whole process is, you can start to see games for what they are in many cases - different values of the same variables designed to suck you in, exercise your pleasure centers and part you from your money. Seeing the process from the PQ perspective is like swallowing the red pill.
Gaming in terms of money is relatively cheap. In terms of opportunity cost, it's very expensive. The time that could be spent on what used to be life is now sucked away in some fake universe. Sampling some of the highest art of gaming can be beneficial, but too much of a good thing is a definite vice.
That's one of the reasons I would have ethical qualms about creating a mindless, addictive game - doing such is all too similar to manufacturing or growing drugs.