It's interesting how it seems, at least to me that the population at Slashdot is pretty quick to question the directionality of a study by pointing out that correlation does not imply causation. But when it comes to things like funding biasing people - I don't observe the same readiness. Even though when the claim is made that is essentially the same as saying that correlation does imply causation.
The only study I know of on this subject generally, was done by Eggers, et al. and IIRC they were pretty clear that you can only tell from the data that a bias exists but you can't tell if studies that have industry funding are biased toward industry or if non-industry funded studies are biased toward non-industry agendas. One thing they did say that their study suggested was that studies that had mixed funding turned out "higher quality" data. Again, calling on my memory here this was in reference to things like correlation coefficients.
I doubt it's actually saying what you claim...
But it's interesting that you recognize that you still need a classical channel to do this transfer but don't seem to realize that the classical channel, by your assumptions requires line-of-sight anyway. So it's at least unclear that the transmission is either more efficient in either time or power transmitted.
As I coder I get that it takes time to determine how you are going to solve a problem and that time isn't necessarily spent coding (although sometimes it is - for example solving a performance problem often enough means writing a bunch of test cases to see how they pan out) and I'd say that I've most certainly solved a complex problem while doing something completely different (I'm not a network engineer but I solved a problem that was baffling our engineers and some preliminary work by IBM while I was walking home).
However, it's not the general case. Most of the time figuring out how to approach a problem is done in design meetings or by casual talking with co-workers about *code*, or searching the internet for other people who have solved this problem, or writing small sample programs or sometimes working something out on the whiteboard (or with pen and paper even).
So to *generally* say having coffee or surfing Fark.com qualifies as work is at least arguable.
That said, I'd say that as a manager the most important metric I'd use for productivity lies somewhere between your first and second metric.
"Solving problems at a reasonable rate" - isn't good enough a criteria since it just changes the argument to "Well what's a reasonable rate".
"Justifying delays" - is a useful metric but it misses the big one...
"Being able to accurately ( 80% of the time ) have your work be equal to or less than your estimate*
Ok I'm really not clear on what you're trying to illustrate here.
Sure you can get a minority result from an experiment but the less likely the outcome, the more costly it is to get those results and the less likely anyone else who repeats that experiment will see the same result set.
In other words if you tried to rig a test with a 95% confidence level. You would have to run the same test twenty times just to guarantee a result outside your confidence interval *but* that doesn't guarantee that the result shifts in the direction you wish the result to go.
Not only that but any other group who repeats that experiment is more likely than not to end up with a result that differs from yours. Worse yet, if they happen to have a significantly larger N (or some other feature that would tend to improve accuracy) then it's your experiment not theirs that will tend to be looked upon skeptically.
So what exactly is bothering you here? That people rig results by spending twenty times the amount of grant money? At those prices and at that risk you might as well just "shape" your data or some other kind low-tech scam.
An actual thing to be concerned of is *NOT* the idea that there is some slight chance of fixing results but rather that there is no obligation to publish. So that someone who funds a study who doesn't like the outcome can make sure that it doesn't see the light of day. This is a real problem in fields like medicine.
Probably not in a useful sense of the word...but I can see you're more than a little stupid.
It is possible, but not necessitated that some of the enemies of the USA *benefited* from this. But if *that's* the interpretation of "aiding" we must use "an enemy of the USA potentially benefited from this act" then this would apply to such a ridiculously wide variety of acts that a rational person could only conclude that your legal system is just one step closer to idiocracy than it was yesterday. The more likely case - is that you're wrong.
peope like you that expect people to work on there on dime and give you the results are the bane of the IT industry. YOU and your ilk are why the IT industry is a pit to work in most of the time.
That's pretty amusing...I'll assume that your response comes from your mental faculties being so limited that you are unable to type and think at the same time.
Here's what I'm saying...as an "intern" you will likely be put on crappy work. That *is* your employment. It's not good, it's not fair but it is likely the case. I can't count the number of times I've seen Computer Science students be forced to do what could be accomplished by any McDonalds Employee.
So here's the thing...if you simply sit there and do your job - and I'm not discounting here that help desk is hard work. All you will end up with is a resume with "helpdesk" on it. When you are looking for a CS job paying a living wage (which this poster clearly is) and your resume ends up on my desk. I will throw it in the trash. Why? Because, fair or not I want to see some business experience in the tools my team works with.
So how do you get that when you're being told to explain to people how to configure their wireless settings ten times a day (and reset peoples passwords for twenty times a day)? Show that you can be of *more* value! Now you might think you can just come up to me (or any other manager) and ask for some time to do this at work. However a (good) manager will do a quick mental risk assessment and to them...if they are experienced enough your request will come off like: "Hey, I'd like a week off work to attempt to prove that I can save you money. I know it's likely that I've never solved this kind of problem before and that my work estimates are likely terribly wrong and since I'm here for a very limited time I may just end up leaving with no product, a product that is undocumented and/or nobody can maintain. So how about it?"
Ok now that we have that nonsense out of your system. How do we turn this "Do you want fries with that" work experience into something that will actually do some good in the work world. Well you prove to management that you can do the work before you ask!!
Look I'm going to be frank here...lots of places put CS people on helpdesk, or on tickets - which is just the programmers helpdesk;-).
If you want to impress me, come up with an idea that will improve something in a noticeable way. i.e. A script that avoids one of the more time consuming problems we have. Write a proof of concept on your own time. Then show it to me.
On my team this would easily earn you a written recommendation and I would certainly give preference to you on subsequent work-terms. If I had an entry-level position - you'd also be a first round candidate.
Even if your boss *does* none of those things - at least you have something with tangible results that you've done for a IT firm which you can put on your resume.
If you apply a loose decoding scheme (that is, sometimes certain rules apply and sometimes they don't) to a tiny subset of the text then you increase your likelihood of producing a internally consistent system. Personally I don't know much about medieval vegetables but looking at modern pictures of a few of those decoded wasn't very compelling. From there people seem to be arguing for an equally loose interpretation of the pictures (or supposing of the way the older plants looked) which sounds a lot like the arguments I heard about remote viewing drawings...and about as compelling.
But getting back to the letter from "Henry Markram". My reading of the article is that it says a few things: i) That this *isn't a simulation of a cats brain* which regardless of what one believes about intelligence appears to be correct. ii) This isn't anything new.
Who writes headlines like that anyway? Given a large enough, well distributed enough group it's highly likely that someone thinks it's awful... and also someone who treats it as their god.
Now all my post's headline needs is a pic of domo-kun.
So I'm reading this and these guys come across like goofs somewhat...
Pg. 4 - says: "The top 10 vulnerabilities for the first half of 2009, included familiar names such as Sun, IBM, SAP, PHP, and Apache." which is according to page 7 the ones they classified as "as the most severe." whatever that means.
But in page 6 they say: "Sun Java, PHP, and Apache continue to be among the Top 10 vendors having the most severe vulnerabilities for the first half of 2009."
However in the whole top 10 list there are only two mentions of PHP that I can see...and these are problems with phpMyAdmin - which is way outside what I would consider a reasonable interpretation as a problem with PHP being a "vendor" of a vulnerable product.
So either there's a bunch of missing information or these guys can't tell the difference between PHP and an application written in PHP, or... something
The browser stuff seems too difficult to tell - if the actual question one is looking for is which is a safer experience. Were all vulnerabilities equally bad? Were they indexed with some information about usage? In other words do we look at the number of people using the vulnerable version and take that into account.
Like a lot of whitepapers the information isn't very helpful and the math is downright insulting.
Muscle mass is a really important point. I don't understand the obsession with weight. I went from 32% body fat to 15% body fat and weighed exactly the same. Guess which one of those left me feeling and looking better?
Depends on what you are talking about. The reason the medical community is concerned about weight is that it's a pretty straight forward correlation to a number of diseases. Having a better muscle to fat ratio allows you to compensate for this.
Eating some amount of calories in oatmeal and eating the same amount in breakfast cereal will have different results: your body works harder to digest the oatmeal
Sure but not by very much at all.
Cutting calories is a myth.
I'm not even sure what that means but you would be hard pressed to find something that correlates as strongly with your weight as your caloric intake.
In fact, while losing about 20kg of fat and putting on the same amount in muscle, I ate more than I had eaten before I started the program. I ate more. I exercised more. The ratio of calories coming in to those going out probably didn't change
The problem is with the "abouts" if you're not tracking really precisely then your research isn't helpful. For example, I tracked my food intake to the gram and tracked weight loss for a few weeks to set a baseline for what my burn was. Further weight loss tracked within 1% of the expected rate.
but that increase in the total drove my body into overdrive and tricked it into ramping up my metabolism even further than the exercise amounted to.
But likely not by much. Man, people toss around the term "metabolism" like it's something magical. Sadly it too must obey the laws of physics which put some limiters on exactly how much you can burn.
As a campus we were surprised when we were looking into sharepoint - that we were already licensed for it (but apparently needed some other licenses to do something useful). That said I suspect it's simply a marketing ploy - drop sharepoint licenses into campus packages and then your pitch is: "Well you're already paying for it (mostly)". If the number of MS people who were sent to do the info sessions and pitch are any indication of expected future investment then I highly doubt this is anywhere near as easy to manage as they say (or our admins seem to want to believe).
Meh...this is simply shifting the argument to the definition of 'needed' and possibly 'obsolete'.
Personally, I just look at it in terms of 'use-cases'. The use-cases for cursive wiring are smaller than they were. Big deal - that also happened with the advent of cheap typewriters. Hardly news but I'd also define 'obsolete' as having near zero use-cases. I have a team of rather technical 20 somethings report to me and I am surprised how much they resort to paper and pen. Likewise the students at school still carry them and still write notes.
So given that writing doesn't appear to be obsolete by my definition. It's a question of cursive being faster than non-cursive. If it isn't then it's likely *not* about being obsolete but if in fact they were ever faster. If, on the other hand it *is* faster then one could even argue that it's farther from being obsolete today than it has been. Since it could be argued that modern usage has a higher emphasis on speed.
As I've pointed out in other slashdot articles. Signing our name is still a huge requirement for solemnization. Doctors will often do it dozens of times a day.
There are also interesting possibilities of teaching this stuff. The Waldorf method of schooling - distributes much of it's materials with the text in cursive. There was one study which concluded that as a result students needed less handwriting instruction.
What is this the second article about cursive writing on/. this year. Doesn't even seem very technology related not to mention it's pretty much a fluff piece. Tends to spur a bunch of mindless "cursive must die" postings. Probably the occasional moron "nine-times" will post...
Even if we want to think this is discussing technology - there is very little of general import to discuss. Is cursive still useful. Yes. Is it less necessary than before? Yes. Therefore it's reasonable to believe that less people will be doing it (or doing it well).
Now on to the fluff.
The decline of cursive is happening as students are doing more and more work on computers, including writing. In 2011, the writing test of the National Assessment of Educational Progress will require 8th and 11th graders to compose on computers, with 4th graders following in 2019.
The article seems to be about excluding the teaching of handwriting. So what if this test is going to be on a computer (and I'd say that it at least could be argued that this is a *bad* thing). We can assume that the students are both being taught keyboard skills and are using keyboards at home. The writer only has an argument here is if one could be shown as a detriment to the other - and even then one would have to argue the relative merits.
"We need to make sure they'll be ready for what's going to happen in 2020 or 2030," said Katie Van Sluys, a professor at DePaul University and the president of the Whole Language Umbrella, a conference of the National Council of Teachers of English.
Uh...why would this necessitate that? No answer. In fact if you read Oppenheimer's "The Flickering Mind" you'll see just how close this parallels the fear-mongering arguments given for computers for ages - without much evidence to support it - "Oh noes if our children don't get exposed to computers by grade three they will lag behind".
Graham argues that fears over the decline of handwriting in general and cursive in particular are distractions from the goal of improving students' overall writing skills. The important thing is to have students proficient enough to focus on their ideas and the composition of their writing rather than how they form the letters.
It's interesting because you could argue the same thing about computers themselves. That they distract from the actual process of writing.
Besides, it isn't as if all those adults who learned cursive years ago are doing their writing with the fluent grace of John Hancock.
No, but Id wager that most of us know what good writing is and could write well when the need arose. In the odd case where I do need to compose formally by pen my handwriting is rather good - if I do say so myself.
Anyway this article doesn't really ask any interesting questions, doesn't cite any interesting research. It's less valuable than water-cooler talk.
I'd suggest that anyone who values skepticism wrt technology in education check out Oppenheimer's "The Flickering Mind". I'm just finishing it now and despite it's flaws it's worth a look. It makes a decent case that the evidence for computers in the K-12 classroom is weak and the maintenance of the machines (including upgrades) are costly.
That said, this veers somewhat from the idea of 'touch typing'. Which AFAIK has been taught in my district from Gr 9 upwards (at least as early as 1985). Personally I started non-touch typing when I was around ten and only took it for two years - once in Gr 8 and then in Gr 9. I've been using computers since Gr 6 - and eventually I just started using computers the same way I was taught to type. Teaching students to type seems pretty reasonable but to be honest all I can really recall of those classes is just doing timed practice paragraphs and exercises (when I wasn't goofing off). For a while my computer typing was still non-touch while I would touch type to a degree in class. Eventually the two just dovetailed.
I don't know this detail about the study but in my experience using a roll of overhead was the norm for those who used it at all - in university anyway. One of the conclusions of the study was that there was more information on display for a longer period with blackboards. Which would still hold true even with the "roll of overhead".
Thinking back to my university days. Classrooms were equipped with at least three blackboards across and in some cases two high (for a total of six).
My sister was one of the first teachers around here to get those. She actually knows how to use it, and uses it to great effect.
Interesting fact, in the late 1990s a research team affiliated with UCLA examined the results of the Third International Math and Sciences Study one thing noted was that correlation with the use of blackboards. Students from classes that used blackboards tended to do better than those with overhead projectors.
I'm a big supporter of technology and I work in Education but I do find it interesting how an article on touch-typing evolved (or devolved) into a rant-war on technology in education.
It depends - again it's a question of the numbers. Although there is some good evidence that a PS is the most likely part to fail in a rig and as such you should know what your plan is for a failure. A large storage setup could provide similar mitigation with multiple units assuming your storage pool is large enough or a less critical storage pool could be mitigated with a cold spare.
Man these kinds of things pop up all the time. How are we to usefully talk about 'rate of progress' when it seems pretty difficult to even define how you measure scientific progress at all? In other words...if you can't answer the question "How many horses make an atomic bomb" then you're probably asking something worth arguing either way.
This is the oft repeated rationale. Personally...I don't see it as so cut-and-dried. Four years from now you may throw this thing away but it also realizes it's ROI way sooner than the branded hardware + support contract (considering that the cost of support increases over time it's always possible that you will NEVER get a positive ROI on a product). The truth is to get the most out of your money you have to run the numbers in each case. Not only that but you should do so at each renewal period. For example we own a plethora of Nortel equipment much of which is still useful but is also EOL. We pay a premium in support for these products many of which could be had cheaply in the secondary market (this is not limited to Ebay BTW). These devices are part of a much larger system so system replacement is expensive. The correct solution is to budget for replacement (outright or incremental), calculate your failure rate and buy and store replacement units (don't forget to calculate disposal costs). Instead the admins act stupidly they request hundreds of thousands of dollars to replace the system outright right away. When I ask them to justify this they hem and haw about labour used in maintaining the system, or service interruptions (implicitly falling for the logical fallacy of: 'newer is better"). However they never seem able to come up with figures for this. i.e. How much time do you spend resetting this hardware when it fails? How much downtime do we incur with it?
So we replace it...incurring significant downtime of course.
Anyway all that said I think their device has merit...I think for smaller shops having redundant power would be useful.
Personally even in the "low end" case I suspect that is unlikely.
Certainly possible but like anything it's the "tyranny of the small sample" isn't it? I'm only judging this from the data we've collected from our managed machines - so modest hundreds. Generally we see people who simply have a lot running. Interesting sub-case this is also true on one of our 'high-end' groups - developers.
PAE also would benefit another small group - those who have 4GB installed but only can use 3-3.5GB.
In any case, if their usage ever changes such that an app would like to use all of their RAM (and I do find it hard to imagine apps that use over 1GB but could never make use of more are common)
Try thinking about having twenty processes running rather than four. I have fifteen right now and I'm not doing any real work. Also 'could never make use' is a weak argument. All that needs to be argued is "more or as useful than". To me, again being able to use PAE on my old machine would have saved me time. 'If usage ever changes' is also weak - nobody is arguing that PAE would be a solution until the end of time but it seems reasonable that a machine could go without replacing or without an OS upgrade until it's EOL. Considering that we already have had a number of users that are in (or near) this boat this seems a reasonable if not likely case.
To me, "practical" also means "not unnecessarily restricted" because otherwise your "practical" solution is just waiting to become impractical when the limitation bites you in the ass.
This seems to simply shift the argument from the definition of 'practical' to the definition of 'unnecessarily restricted'. As well your illustration is weak. Generally you don't adopt an application without any thought as to the requirements.
Basically, if you have more than 4GB of RAM in your system, a 64-bit OS is imminently more practical than the other option.
meh. Suit yourself but that's really "adjectives over evidence" as we say around here.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm more in the "let's all get our caloric intake to a reasonable level before we start bothering with this kind of diatary micromanagement" camp.
It's interesting how it seems, at least to me that the population at Slashdot is pretty quick to question the directionality of a study by pointing out that correlation does not imply causation. But when it comes to things like funding biasing people - I don't observe the same readiness. Even though when the claim is made that is essentially the same as saying that correlation does imply causation.
The only study I know of on this subject generally, was done by Eggers, et al. and IIRC they were pretty clear that you can only tell from the data that a bias exists but you can't tell if studies that have industry funding are biased toward industry or if non-industry funded studies are biased toward non-industry agendas. One thing they did say that their study suggested was that studies that had mixed funding turned out "higher quality" data. Again, calling on my memory here this was in reference to things like correlation coefficients.
I doubt it's actually saying what you claim... But it's interesting that you recognize that you still need a classical channel to do this transfer but don't seem to realize that the classical channel, by your assumptions requires line-of-sight anyway. So it's at least unclear that the transmission is either more efficient in either time or power transmitted.
As I coder I get that it takes time to determine how you are going to solve a problem and that time isn't necessarily spent coding (although sometimes it is - for example solving a performance problem often enough means writing a bunch of test cases to see how they pan out) and I'd say that I've most certainly solved a complex problem while doing something completely different (I'm not a network engineer but I solved a problem that was baffling our engineers and some preliminary work by IBM while I was walking home).
However, it's not the general case. Most of the time figuring out how to approach a problem is done in design meetings or by casual talking with co-workers about *code*, or searching the internet for other people who have solved this problem, or writing small sample programs or sometimes working something out on the whiteboard (or with pen and paper even).
So to *generally* say having coffee or surfing Fark.com qualifies as work is at least arguable.
That said, I'd say that as a manager the most important metric I'd use for productivity lies somewhere between your first and second metric.
"Solving problems at a reasonable rate" - isn't good enough a criteria since it just changes the argument to "Well what's a reasonable rate".
"Justifying delays" - is a useful metric but it misses the big one...
"Being able to accurately ( 80% of the time ) have your work be equal to or less than your estimate*
Ok I'm really not clear on what you're trying to illustrate here.
Sure you can get a minority result from an experiment but the less likely the outcome, the more costly it is to get those results and the less likely anyone else who repeats that experiment will see the same result set.
In other words if you tried to rig a test with a 95% confidence level. You would have to run the same test twenty times just to guarantee a result outside your confidence interval *but* that doesn't guarantee that the result shifts in the direction you wish the result to go.
Not only that but any other group who repeats that experiment is more likely than not to end up with a result that differs from yours. Worse yet, if they happen to have a significantly larger N (or some other feature that would tend to improve accuracy) then it's your experiment not theirs that will tend to be looked upon skeptically.
So what exactly is bothering you here? That people rig results by spending twenty times the amount of grant money? At those prices and at that risk you might as well just "shape" your data or some other kind low-tech scam.
An actual thing to be concerned of is *NOT* the idea that there is some slight chance of fixing results but rather that there is no obligation to publish. So that someone who funds a study who doesn't like the outcome can make sure that it doesn't see the light of day. This is a real problem in fields like medicine.
Probably not in a useful sense of the word...but I can see you're more than a little stupid.
It is possible, but not necessitated that some of the enemies of the USA *benefited* from this. But if *that's* the interpretation of "aiding" we must use "an enemy of the USA potentially benefited from this act" then this would apply to such a ridiculously wide variety of acts that a rational person could only conclude that your legal system is just one step closer to idiocracy than it was yesterday. The more likely case - is that you're wrong.
peope like you that expect people to work on there on dime and give you the results are the bane of the IT industry. YOU and your ilk are why the IT industry is a pit to work in most of the time.
That's pretty amusing...I'll assume that your response comes from your mental faculties being so limited that you are unable to type and think at the same time.
Here's what I'm saying...as an "intern" you will likely be put on crappy work. That *is* your employment. It's not good, it's not fair but it is likely the case. I can't count the number of times I've seen Computer Science students be forced to do what could be accomplished by any McDonalds Employee.
So here's the thing...if you simply sit there and do your job - and I'm not discounting here that help desk is hard work. All you will end up with is a resume with "helpdesk" on it. When you are looking for a CS job paying a living wage (which this poster clearly is) and your resume ends up on my desk. I will throw it in the trash. Why? Because, fair or not I want to see some business experience in the tools my team works with.
So how do you get that when you're being told to explain to people how to configure their wireless settings ten times a day (and reset peoples passwords for twenty times a day)? Show that you can be of *more* value! Now you might think you can just come up to me (or any other manager) and ask for some time to do this at work. However a (good) manager will do a quick mental risk assessment and to them...if they are experienced enough your request will come off like: "Hey, I'd like a week off work to attempt to prove that I can save you money. I know it's likely that I've never solved this kind of problem before and that my work estimates are likely terribly wrong and since I'm here for a very limited time I may just end up leaving with no product, a product that is undocumented and/or nobody can maintain. So how about it?"
Ok now that we have that nonsense out of your system. How do we turn this "Do you want fries with that" work experience into something that will actually do some good in the work world. Well you prove to management that you can do the work before you ask!!
Understand now?
Look I'm going to be frank here...lots of places put CS people on helpdesk, or on tickets - which is just the programmers helpdesk ;-).
If you want to impress me, come up with an idea that will improve something in a noticeable way. i.e. A script that avoids one of the more time consuming problems we have. Write a proof of concept on your own time. Then show it to me. On my team this would easily earn you a written recommendation and I would certainly give preference to you on subsequent work-terms. If I had an entry-level position - you'd also be a first round candidate. Even if your boss *does* none of those things - at least you have something with tangible results that you've done for a IT firm which you can put on your resume.
If you apply a loose decoding scheme (that is, sometimes certain rules apply and sometimes they don't) to a tiny subset of the text then you increase your likelihood of producing a internally consistent system. Personally I don't know much about medieval vegetables but looking at modern pictures of a few of those decoded wasn't very compelling. From there people seem to be arguing for an equally loose interpretation of the pictures (or supposing of the way the older plants looked) which sounds a lot like the arguments I heard about remote viewing drawings...and about as compelling.
But getting back to the letter from "Henry Markram". My reading of the article is that it says a few things: i) That this *isn't a simulation of a cats brain* which regardless of what one believes about intelligence appears to be correct. ii) This isn't anything new.
Who writes headlines like that anyway? Given a large enough, well distributed enough group it's highly likely that someone thinks it's awful ... and also someone who treats it as their god.
Now all my post's headline needs is a pic of domo-kun.
So I'm reading this and these guys come across like goofs somewhat...
... something
Pg. 4 - says: "The top 10 vulnerabilities for the first half of 2009, included familiar names such as Sun, IBM, SAP, PHP, and Apache." which is according to page 7 the ones they classified as "as the most severe." whatever that means.
But in page 6 they say: "Sun Java, PHP, and Apache continue to be among the Top 10 vendors having the most severe vulnerabilities for the first half of 2009."
However in the whole top 10 list there are only two mentions of PHP that I can see...and these are problems with phpMyAdmin - which is way outside what I would consider a reasonable interpretation as a problem with PHP being a "vendor" of a vulnerable product.
So either there's a bunch of missing information or these guys can't tell the difference between PHP and an application written in PHP, or
The browser stuff seems too difficult to tell - if the actual question one is looking for is which is a safer experience. Were all vulnerabilities equally bad? Were they indexed with some information about usage? In other words do we look at the number of people using the vulnerable version and take that into account.
Like a lot of whitepapers the information isn't very helpful and the math is downright insulting.
Muscle mass is a really important point. I don't understand the obsession with weight. I went from 32% body fat to 15% body fat and weighed exactly the same. Guess which one of those left me feeling and looking better? Depends on what you are talking about. The reason the medical community is concerned about weight is that it's a pretty straight forward correlation to a number of diseases. Having a better muscle to fat ratio allows you to compensate for this. Eating some amount of calories in oatmeal and eating the same amount in breakfast cereal will have different results: your body works harder to digest the oatmeal Sure but not by very much at all. Cutting calories is a myth. I'm not even sure what that means but you would be hard pressed to find something that correlates as strongly with your weight as your caloric intake. In fact, while losing about 20kg of fat and putting on the same amount in muscle, I ate more than I had eaten before I started the program. I ate more. I exercised more. The ratio of calories coming in to those going out probably didn't change The problem is with the "abouts" if you're not tracking really precisely then your research isn't helpful. For example, I tracked my food intake to the gram and tracked weight loss for a few weeks to set a baseline for what my burn was. Further weight loss tracked within 1% of the expected rate. but that increase in the total drove my body into overdrive and tricked it into ramping up my metabolism even further than the exercise amounted to. But likely not by much. Man, people toss around the term "metabolism" like it's something magical. Sadly it too must obey the laws of physics which put some limiters on exactly how much you can burn.
As a campus we were surprised when we were looking into sharepoint - that we were already licensed for it (but apparently needed some other licenses to do something useful). That said I suspect it's simply a marketing ploy - drop sharepoint licenses into campus packages and then your pitch is: "Well you're already paying for it (mostly)". If the number of MS people who were sent to do the info sessions and pitch are any indication of expected future investment then I highly doubt this is anywhere near as easy to manage as they say (or our admins seem to want to believe).
Observe with...
Meh...this is simply shifting the argument to the definition of 'needed' and possibly 'obsolete'.
Personally, I just look at it in terms of 'use-cases'. The use-cases for cursive wiring are smaller than they were. Big deal - that also happened with the advent of cheap typewriters. Hardly news but I'd also define 'obsolete' as having near zero use-cases. I have a team of rather technical 20 somethings report to me and I am surprised how much they resort to paper and pen. Likewise the students at school still carry them and still write notes.
So given that writing doesn't appear to be obsolete by my definition. It's a question of cursive being faster than non-cursive. If it isn't then it's likely *not* about being obsolete but if in fact they were ever faster. If, on the other hand it *is* faster then one could even argue that it's farther from being obsolete today than it has been. Since it could be argued that modern usage has a higher emphasis on speed.
As I've pointed out in other slashdot articles. Signing our name is still a huge requirement for solemnization. Doctors will often do it dozens of times a day.
There are also interesting possibilities of teaching this stuff. The Waldorf method of schooling - distributes much of it's materials with the text in cursive. There was one study which concluded that as a result students needed less handwriting instruction.
What is this the second article about cursive writing on /. this year. Doesn't even seem very technology related not to mention it's pretty much a fluff piece. Tends to spur a bunch of mindless "cursive must die" postings. Probably the occasional moron "nine-times" will post...
Even if we want to think this is discussing technology - there is very little of general import to discuss. Is cursive still useful. Yes. Is it less necessary than before? Yes. Therefore it's reasonable to believe that less people will be doing it (or doing it well).
Now on to the fluff.
The decline of cursive is happening as students are doing more and more work on computers, including writing. In 2011, the writing test of the National Assessment of Educational Progress will require 8th and 11th graders to compose on computers, with 4th graders following in 2019.
The article seems to be about excluding the teaching of handwriting. So what if this test is going to be on a computer (and I'd say that it at least could be argued that this is a *bad* thing). We can assume that the students are both being taught keyboard skills and are using keyboards at home. The writer only has an argument here is if one could be shown as a detriment to the other - and even then one would have to argue the relative merits.
"We need to make sure they'll be ready for what's going to happen in 2020 or 2030," said Katie Van Sluys, a professor at DePaul University and the president of the Whole Language Umbrella, a conference of the National Council of Teachers of English.
Uh...why would this necessitate that? No answer. In fact if you read Oppenheimer's "The Flickering Mind" you'll see just how close this parallels the fear-mongering arguments given for computers for ages - without much evidence to support it - "Oh noes if our children don't get exposed to computers by grade three they will lag behind".
Graham argues that fears over the decline of handwriting in general and cursive in particular are distractions from the goal of improving students' overall writing skills. The important thing is to have students proficient enough to focus on their ideas and the composition of their writing rather than how they form the letters.
It's interesting because you could argue the same thing about computers themselves. That they distract from the actual process of writing.
Besides, it isn't as if all those adults who learned cursive years ago are doing their writing with the fluent grace of John Hancock. No, but Id wager that most of us know what good writing is and could write well when the need arose. In the odd case where I do need to compose formally by pen my handwriting is rather good - if I do say so myself.
Anyway this article doesn't really ask any interesting questions, doesn't cite any interesting research. It's less valuable than water-cooler talk.
I'd suggest that anyone who values skepticism wrt technology in education check out Oppenheimer's "The Flickering Mind". I'm just finishing it now and despite it's flaws it's worth a look. It makes a decent case that the evidence for computers in the K-12 classroom is weak and the maintenance of the machines (including upgrades) are costly.
That said, this veers somewhat from the idea of 'touch typing'. Which AFAIK has been taught in my district from Gr 9 upwards (at least as early as 1985). Personally I started non-touch typing when I was around ten and only took it for two years - once in Gr 8 and then in Gr 9. I've been using computers since Gr 6 - and eventually I just started using computers the same way I was taught to type. Teaching students to type seems pretty reasonable but to be honest all I can really recall of those classes is just doing timed practice paragraphs and exercises (when I wasn't goofing off). For a while my computer typing was still non-touch while I would touch type to a degree in class. Eventually the two just dovetailed.
I don't know this detail about the study but in my experience using a roll of overhead was the norm for those who used it at all - in university anyway. One of the conclusions of the study was that there was more information on display for a longer period with blackboards. Which would still hold true even with the "roll of overhead".
Thinking back to my university days. Classrooms were equipped with at least three blackboards across and in some cases two high (for a total of six).
My sister was one of the first teachers around here to get those. She actually knows how to use it, and uses it to great effect.
Interesting fact, in the late 1990s a research team affiliated with UCLA examined the results of the Third International Math and Sciences Study one thing noted was that correlation with the use of blackboards. Students from classes that used blackboards tended to do better than those with overhead projectors.
I'm a big supporter of technology and I work in Education but I do find it interesting how an article on touch-typing evolved (or devolved) into a rant-war on technology in education.
It depends - again it's a question of the numbers. Although there is some good evidence that a PS is the most likely part to fail in a rig and as such you should know what your plan is for a failure. A large storage setup could provide similar mitigation with multiple units assuming your storage pool is large enough or a less critical storage pool could be mitigated with a cold spare.
Man these kinds of things pop up all the time. How are we to usefully talk about 'rate of progress' when it seems pretty difficult to even define how you measure scientific progress at all? In other words...if you can't answer the question "How many horses make an atomic bomb" then you're probably asking something worth arguing either way.
This is the oft repeated rationale. Personally...I don't see it as so cut-and-dried. Four years from now you may throw this thing away but it also realizes it's ROI way sooner than the branded hardware + support contract (considering that the cost of support increases over time it's always possible that you will NEVER get a positive ROI on a product). The truth is to get the most out of your money you have to run the numbers in each case. Not only that but you should do so at each renewal period. For example we own a plethora of Nortel equipment much of which is still useful but is also EOL. We pay a premium in support for these products many of which could be had cheaply in the secondary market (this is not limited to Ebay BTW). These devices are part of a much larger system so system replacement is expensive. The correct solution is to budget for replacement (outright or incremental), calculate your failure rate and buy and store replacement units (don't forget to calculate disposal costs). Instead the admins act stupidly they request hundreds of thousands of dollars to replace the system outright right away. When I ask them to justify this they hem and haw about labour used in maintaining the system, or service interruptions (implicitly falling for the logical fallacy of: 'newer is better"). However they never seem able to come up with figures for this. i.e. How much time do you spend resetting this hardware when it fails? How much downtime do we incur with it?
So we replace it...incurring significant downtime of course.
Anyway all that said I think their device has merit...I think for smaller shops having redundant power would be useful.
Personally even in the "low end" case I suspect that is unlikely.
Certainly possible but like anything it's the "tyranny of the small sample" isn't it? I'm only judging this from the data we've collected from our managed machines - so modest hundreds. Generally we see people who simply have a lot running. Interesting sub-case this is also true on one of our 'high-end' groups - developers.
PAE also would benefit another small group - those who have 4GB installed but only can use 3-3.5GB.
In any case, if their usage ever changes such that an app would like to use all of their RAM (and I do find it hard to imagine apps that use over 1GB but could never make use of more are common)
Try thinking about having twenty processes running rather than four. I have fifteen right now and I'm not doing any real work. Also 'could never make use' is a weak argument. All that needs to be argued is "more or as useful than". To me, again being able to use PAE on my old machine would have saved me time. 'If usage ever changes' is also weak - nobody is arguing that PAE would be a solution until the end of time but it seems reasonable that a machine could go without replacing or without an OS upgrade until it's EOL. Considering that we already have had a number of users that are in (or near) this boat this seems a reasonable if not likely case.
To me, "practical" also means "not unnecessarily restricted" because otherwise your "practical" solution is just waiting to become impractical when the limitation bites you in the ass.
This seems to simply shift the argument from the definition of 'practical' to the definition of 'unnecessarily restricted'. As well your illustration is weak. Generally you don't adopt an application without any thought as to the requirements.
Basically, if you have more than 4GB of RAM in your system, a 64-bit OS is imminently more practical than the other option.
meh. Suit yourself but that's really "adjectives over evidence" as we say around here.