It depends whether you want to work in an area that they need people to work in. PhDs in more technical areas seem to attract pretty few qualified applicants (a major "qualification" often being UK citizenship, as the funding is often restricted in that way). Obviously a PhD in "the tactile qualities of fluffy bunnies" will be a much tougher one to get selected for, as there will be much more competition.
A-levels are for 16-18 year olds, BEFORE university-level study. Anybody who'd be using a Computing A-Level in their job would likely just be maintaining an Access database at a small company or other relatively simple stuff.
I took a Computing A-level a few years ago. I remember us learning MS Access, Visual Basic and a bit of Assembly Language. I wrote my project in PHP but I had to teach myself how to do that. It seems like it's very much down to what the teacher is familiar with and, surprise surprise, most high-school computing teachers are not shit-hot up-to-the-minute programmers. My teacher was, to her credit, pretty fantastic at teaching. She'd been involved with developing Fortran compilers in the 60s etc. She knew her stuff. I can imagine many other schools would not have such talented teachers, especially nowadays when it seems you can get a Computer Science degree whilst remaining a pretty crappy programmer.
I'm in neuroscience research now, I write analysis programs in Matlab and do a bit of Delphi programming to interface with the equipment that we use. I think the A-level that I took was a pretty good set-up for that sort of work.
Well...
*RING RING*
"Hi"
"Hi honey, can you pick up a few things on your way to the party?"
"Sure, what do you need?"
"Well, __________________________________________, I'll pay you back when you get here."
"Don't worry about it, I think that roughly amounts to the money I owe you from lunch the other day anyway."
"Ok, see you later, bye!"
"Bye!"
Yeah... that NEVER happens.
Of course one of the biggest impacts of losing your license is likely to be financial, as for many people it will also mean losing their job (especially the people who are likely to be speeding in the first place).
I've just got to say that for any UK-residents that post is hilarious. Bakers Oven is the Burger King of bakeries here in the UK (Greggs is the McDonalds), this is not the "charming little English shoppe" that you might tell your friends about.
The grandparent was actually saying that drivers cannot speed if the car in front of them isn't. This is true when there's enough traffic for you to be able to see the car in front, but the worst cases of speeding I see are on otherwise empty roads. There is a serious problem here in Birmingham with "boy racers" driving around the city centre at double the speed limit, I'd like to see non-signposted speed cameras to catch them.
There could be health issues though. It's established that if you're looking at a 3D display that's moving around vertically relative to your head it can cause headaches and nausea. Probably just means that you wouldn't want to use something with one of those screens on a bus.
Blimey, that would be a very long "wooshing" noise if I was sure you were taking my comment entirely at face-value.
(It WOULD present an interesting way to investigate the spatiotemporal properties of the effect though. By observing the speed that the change had an effect through time (i.e. between today and January) and comparing that to when events "changed" in both the US and Switzerland one could figure out the relationship between the two.)
Obviously the effect which is stopping the LHC from operating works by propagating a "ripple" back in time. Hence, the article summary WAS accurate at the time of submission, but then the ripple reached January and made the shutdown part of the original plan.
It all makes sense!
From what I understand (having spoken to a patent lawyer about this) Nokia and Apple were both "infringing" each others' patents in a "turning a blind eye" way for a while. Behind the scenes, things will have been getting a little tense (obviously in this kind of situation both parties have a lot to lose if it comes to blows), before erupting in the public spat that we all saw.
Can you explain how picking a pixel at random is better than sampling every 4th pixel? Surely the randomness just increases the chance that you'll miss some essential feature in the image?
I would imagine that it's something to do with the nature of the underlying statistics.
One explanation I can think of is that this method works by looking for "patterns" in the underlying data. If you are sampling every 4th pixel then you could be systematically missing a pattern in the data. Worse than that, the method of sampling you describe could actually introduce spurious patterns!
I'm still waiting for you to come up with a valid argument and stop misrepresenting my position.
If you want to be taken seriously then you need to put effort into explaining your position. I don't see how my representation of your stance was inaccurate. The closest thing to an explanation you gave me moved the analogy to cake when I was working with violent games. A clearer explanation would stick within the same analogy.
If you don't want to be taken seriously then we're both wasting our time.
They get a thrill that a normally functioning brain wouldn't get, they crave more of it, and it's a loop. A normal, sane person would not fall into the loop, but they do because they're abnormal.
How does that not fit much better with my characterisation of your position than with yours?
The problem is that people are desperate for this conclusion to not be true. For all of their praising science etc., geeks still see this as a war of rhetoric. I think eventually a concession will have to be made. Violent video games will not be banned purely because studies show they can increase violent behaviour. Hopefully it'll make parents think twice before buying GTA:V for a ten-year-old.
Check this: I'm a neuroscientist who plays violent video games. I am fine with the idea that they would incline people to violence. It makes sense based on what we know about neuroplasticity. It also squares with what we know about criminal psychology. The important thing is to act in awareness of how the media we consume can influence our behaviour.
I'm sorry but that just doesn't follow. You can't reconcile your comment with the one that you're quoting.
Allow me to simplify your respective stances:
Moryath: Normal sane people will not be inspired to violence by video games. The people who will be are predisposed to go nutso.
Hatta: Video games may well predispose people to be violent, but this doesn't mean that we should ban them anymore than we'd ban cake for being fattening.
Unfortunately, your position has two significant problems. One is a very basic logical fallacy, you can (in hindsight) call anybody who does have the violent reaction "nutso" and thus protect your "normal, sane" people from being treated as having the potential to be changed. The other problem I can see is seperating people into two classes, the "normal" and the "potentially violent". I don't think you'll find much to back up there being this seperation.
Slashdot Mirror
It depends whether you want to work in an area that they need people to work in. PhDs in more technical areas seem to attract pretty few qualified applicants (a major "qualification" often being UK citizenship, as the funding is often restricted in that way). Obviously a PhD in "the tactile qualities of fluffy bunnies" will be a much tougher one to get selected for, as there will be much more competition.
A-levels are for 16-18 year olds, BEFORE university-level study. Anybody who'd be using a Computing A-Level in their job would likely just be maintaining an Access database at a small company or other relatively simple stuff.
I took a Computing A-level a few years ago. I remember us learning MS Access, Visual Basic and a bit of Assembly Language. I wrote my project in PHP but I had to teach myself how to do that. It seems like it's very much down to what the teacher is familiar with and, surprise surprise, most high-school computing teachers are not shit-hot up-to-the-minute programmers. My teacher was, to her credit, pretty fantastic at teaching. She'd been involved with developing Fortran compilers in the 60s etc. She knew her stuff. I can imagine many other schools would not have such talented teachers, especially nowadays when it seems you can get a Computer Science degree whilst remaining a pretty crappy programmer.
I'm in neuroscience research now, I write analysis programs in Matlab and do a bit of Delphi programming to interface with the equipment that we use. I think the A-level that I took was a pretty good set-up for that sort of work.
Well...
*RING RING*
"Hi"
"Hi honey, can you pick up a few things on your way to the party?"
"Sure, what do you need?"
"Well, __________________________________________, I'll pay you back when you get here."
"Don't worry about it, I think that roughly amounts to the money I owe you from lunch the other day anyway." "Ok, see you later, bye!" "Bye!" Yeah... that NEVER happens.
Of course one of the biggest impacts of losing your license is likely to be financial, as for many people it will also mean losing their job (especially the people who are likely to be speeding in the first place).
http://cheezburger.com/View.aspx?aid=3386761984 What a farce!
I've just got to say that for any UK-residents that post is hilarious. Bakers Oven is the Burger King of bakeries here in the UK (Greggs is the McDonalds), this is not the "charming little English shoppe" that you might tell your friends about.
And Safari too, no Slashdot for me today :-(
I think it's funny, but it also seems to be pretty reliable at crashing Firefox on OS X.
Wow, epic reading comprehension fail.
The grandparent was actually saying that drivers cannot speed if the car in front of them isn't. This is true when there's enough traffic for you to be able to see the car in front, but the worst cases of speeding I see are on otherwise empty roads. There is a serious problem here in Birmingham with "boy racers" driving around the city centre at double the speed limit, I'd like to see non-signposted speed cameras to catch them.
There could be health issues though. It's established that if you're looking at a 3D display that's moving around vertically relative to your head it can cause headaches and nausea. Probably just means that you wouldn't want to use something with one of those screens on a bus.
because you own the patent on induction based HID lighting, people couldnt use that technology
That's not what a patent does.
I'm pretty sure you mean to say "Technology y is the new hotness".
Blimey, that would be a very long "wooshing" noise if I was sure you were taking my comment entirely at face-value.
(It WOULD present an interesting way to investigate the spatiotemporal properties of the effect though. By observing the speed that the change had an effect through time (i.e. between today and January) and comparing that to when events "changed" in both the US and Switzerland one could figure out the relationship between the two.)
Obviously the effect which is stopping the LHC from operating works by propagating a "ripple" back in time. Hence, the article summary WAS accurate at the time of submission, but then the ripple reached January and made the shutdown part of the original plan. It all makes sense!
BEST DECISION I EVER MADE.
From what I understand (having spoken to a patent lawyer about this) Nokia and Apple were both "infringing" each others' patents in a "turning a blind eye" way for a while. Behind the scenes, things will have been getting a little tense (obviously in this kind of situation both parties have a lot to lose if it comes to blows), before erupting in the public spat that we all saw.
Can you explain how picking a pixel at random is better than sampling every 4th pixel? Surely the randomness just increases the chance that you'll miss some essential feature in the image?
I would imagine that it's something to do with the nature of the underlying statistics. One explanation I can think of is that this method works by looking for "patterns" in the underlying data. If you are sampling every 4th pixel then you could be systematically missing a pattern in the data. Worse than that, the method of sampling you describe could actually introduce spurious patterns!
My kingdom for a mod point!
I'm still waiting for you to come up with a valid argument and stop misrepresenting my position.
If you want to be taken seriously then you need to put effort into explaining your position. I don't see how my representation of your stance was inaccurate. The closest thing to an explanation you gave me moved the analogy to cake when I was working with violent games. A clearer explanation would stick within the same analogy.
If you don't want to be taken seriously then we're both wasting our time.
They get a thrill that a normally functioning brain wouldn't get, they crave more of it, and it's a loop. A normal, sane person would not fall into the loop, but they do because they're abnormal.
How does that not fit much better with my characterisation of your position than with yours?
Keep wriggling...
Blimey, talk about a predisposition to being aggressive.
Some scientist you are if you didn't bother to read the actual research paper.
The problem is that people are desperate for this conclusion to not be true. For all of their praising science etc., geeks still see this as a war of rhetoric. I think eventually a concession will have to be made. Violent video games will not be banned purely because studies show they can increase violent behaviour. Hopefully it'll make parents think twice before buying GTA:V for a ten-year-old.
Check this: I'm a neuroscientist who plays violent video games. I am fine with the idea that they would incline people to violence. It makes sense based on what we know about neuroplasticity. It also squares with what we know about criminal psychology. The important thing is to act in awareness of how the media we consume can influence our behaviour.
I'm sorry but that just doesn't follow. You can't reconcile your comment with the one that you're quoting.
Allow me to simplify your respective stances:
Moryath: Normal sane people will not be inspired to violence by video games. The people who will be are predisposed to go nutso.
Hatta: Video games may well predispose people to be violent, but this doesn't mean that we should ban them anymore than we'd ban cake for being fattening.
Unfortunately, your position has two significant problems. One is a very basic logical fallacy, you can (in hindsight) call anybody who does have the violent reaction "nutso" and thus protect your "normal, sane" people from being treated as having the potential to be changed. The other problem I can see is seperating people into two classes, the "normal" and the "potentially violent". I don't think you'll find much to back up there being this seperation.