Depends on the country. In the US (and in Canada, I'm pretty sure) the degree which allows you to practice medicine is indeed a doctorate (MD or DO.) I understand that in Britain it's actually a bachelor's degree (BM) and that MD is a title you only get if you do additional research work; the US equivalent is MD/PhD. But in any case, it is a shame that the work "doctor" is so inextricably associated with medicine is most people's minds. Medical doctors have to work very hard to earn their title; so do other kinds of doctors, and all of them should be recognized for it. If you need to make the precise distinction, the right word to use is "physician."
My grandfather, a retired professor of literature (with a PhD, of course) has a number of health problems and often has to call up new hospitals or specialty practices. He always leads the conversation with, "This is Dr. Hardy..." Amazing how much red tape that can cut through.
There are levels of criminality. A shoplifter is not equivalent to a bank robber. A bar brawler is not equivalent to a mass murderer. A dumbass kid who hacks into his school computer is not equivalent to someone running an identity theft ring.
You're missing the point. Most people do realize that he's very unlikely to actually serve 38 years in prison. We also realize that most criminals, whatever the crime, serve much less than the maximum possible sentence. What's outrageous here is that even the maximum sentence for what he did is that long.
I often hear people defending bad law by saying, "Oh, it's never going to be that bad in practice." Which is (a) naive, since very often it is that bad somewhere, for someone, and (b) a fundamental misunderstanding of the problem.
Down the road if he decides to falsify some information it won't really matter much will it? Maybe just cut and paste some analysis results so it looks like he did all the required tests. I mean come on? Those tomatoes likely don't have any salmonella bacteria on them. It'll be fine. Those toys? No lead in them. That pet food form China? Good stuff.
The idea that we should lock people up because of potential crimes they might commit is an obscenity.
Yes, he did something bad, and he should be punished for it. But punishing him on the same scale we punish rapists and bank robbers is absurd.
The best thing to do, and the best way to develop young minds is to show them all the evidence,
All the evidence supports evolution. Every last bit of it. So while I agree that "showing them all the evidence" is a great idea, that's clearly not what creationists have in mind.
describe to them all of the ideas,
There are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of creation myths out there, from religions past and present; if we include mythology in the category "all the ideas," then a quick summary of those myths would take up a full academic year at least. OTOH, if we want to present only scientific ideas in science class, fortunately there's really only one idea that needs to be taught.
and then let them make up their own minds.
Indeed. They'll do that regardless, of course. But if we teach them critical thinking instead of blind faith, and evidence instead of fairy tales, then the choice they'll make is a lot more likely to be one that has some relation to reality.
Enjoy your ignorance. Those of us doing useful research that private industry chooses not to fund will go on doing what we do, and people like you will go on benefiting from it.
If you factor out the duplication/repetition, the result is rather compact and non-uniform. Repetition of form is what makes code *look* neat, but lots of repetition is generally considered poor form.
Compact, yes; non-uniform, no. Consistency of style (variable naming, indenting, braces, use of spaces, etc.) leads to code that looks good on the screen and is more readable. This isn't repetition of actual code, which is indeed bad (someone once said that if you write three or more lines of code that do essentially the same thing more than twice, that's a good sign you need to put it into a function) but a lot of it is repetition of the way you write the code.
Also those big verbose asterisk box banners some developers put in their code to make it look "professional" just waste space. A lot of that info should be in the source code tracker or is redundant in one way or another.
Wasting space doesn't seem like much of a concern; the days when storage was priced on a per-byte basis are long gone. If a header block that adds a kilobyte to the size of a source file saves whoever inherits the project an hour in how long it takes to understand the code, that's a worthwhile tradeoff -- and well-written header blocks can very often save days, not just hours.
Never, ever, ever rely on external organization to contain all the necessary file information. In any project of any size, someone, sooner or later, will end up with an orphaned source file: no information about it except the file name and contents. No matter how tight your version control system, this is pretty much guaranteed to happen. Good in-file documentation is the only way to ameliorate this.
Oh, FFS. Whenever you're doing any serious research, talking to your colleagues -- and yes, damn it, when you're doing software engineering, a lot of/.ers are your colleagues -- is how you form good ideas and organize your thoughts. This is true in any field. I've noticed that a lot of hotshot geeks like to imagine themselves as Lone Geniuses Bringing Great Ideas Into The World Through Sheer Brilliance And Force Of Will. Guess what? The LGBGIITWTSBAFOW approach works reasonably well for small software projects and one-off research papers. For anything bigger, such as a PhD thesis, it's a recipe for failure. Every computational tool you use in your daily work started through collaborative research.
The submitter is clearly not asking anyone to write his thesis for him. He's gathering ideas, that's all. If you have something useful to contribute, speak up. The fact that you choose to snipe at him instead ("I'm appalled at the quality of post-secondary education that this guy has supposedly received") pretty clearly indicates that you have neither the experience to understand what he's doing nor the expertise to contribute to or comment on his work.
Let them!! Seriously, it'll make more converts to Linux and open source so that we can finally do away with these asshats.
That's the naive, optimistic view. The cynical, pessimistic view is that the people who are pushing for this truly awful law consider any use of F/OSS to be equivalent to piracy ("You're using software you didn't pay for, therefore you must be a pirate!") and they'll be able to find prosecutors, judges, and juries who can be duped into accepting this view.
If the government had been making technology decisions twenty years ago, we would all be stuck on ISDN.
Twenty years ago, the goverment was making technology decisions about something called ARPAnet. Typical stupid, wasteful government program that never went anywhere, of course. Fortunately, private enterprise led the way with bold innovative paradigm-breaking optimized syngergies, which is why we can now have this kind of discussion here on the Compuserve forums!
I don't have anything to add to what you just said -- just want to say, that's a brilliant post and I wish I had mod points right now. Whoever modded you "flamebait" is a moron who has probably read far too many management books.
You know, you can go through basic training (or some other physically demanding training course) and get in shape... and still be a geek. Seriously. Build some muscles, lose some fat, and you'll still be just as smart as you were before. I've done it, and so have lots of other folks on/. We didn't magically forget all our geek skills, or undergo some drastic personality transplant.
With the political tilt as it is, a large part of the software development community is likely prejudiced against helping our country.
You made a typo there. Here's a correction:
With the political tilt as it is, a large part of the software development community is likely inclined against helping politicians use the Army as a tool to fight wars which harm our country.
"This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land..."
I don't use the quote tag mainly because I don't like the way Slashdot renders text enclosed by it, but that's a clever way to make your point.
My work is in biostatistics -- closely related to, although not the same as, your field -- and bioinformatics, and it is indeed important to state when fuzziness exists. But I strongly disagree that the way to do that is to use imprecise language. One of the most important tasks of the statistician is to quantify uncertainty, and the way to do that is with confidence intervals and p-values, not with easily misinterpreted terms. I guarantee you that an FDA inspector or NIH grant reviewer is really not going to be impressed by the use of "average" without clarification of exactly what kind of average is meant.
Great post. I am a professional statistician and cringe anytime makes the point that you also criticized. It shows complete lack of understanding, which as you point out, is rather funny in a sad kind of way.
How nice I'm also a statistician and I cringe any time people abuse statistical terminology with specific meanings (which means I spend a lot of time cringing while reading Slashdot.) Why don't you?
So the insistence on splitting hairs between 'mean' and 'median' and 'average' is very clever in a schoolkid kind of way, but not very bright... Intelligence is not cleverness. They are not spelled the same, they have different roots, and they have different meanings.
Indeed, "intelligence" and "cleverness" are different words with different definitions. So are "mean," "median," and "average." You may consider pointing out the difference between these words to be merely "schoolkid cleverness," but it's a real difference and should not be glossed over.
Honestly, I probably wouldn't have bothered replying if OP hadn't used the word "statistically." You're correct that in everyday speech "average" connotes a useful fuzziness, but when you preface an assertion with "statistically," you're implying a degree of provable truth that the common usage of "average" rightly lacks.
The CLT says nothing about the distribution of samples, only the distribution of means (or sums) of large samples. In other words, there's no particular reason to think that a sample of intelligence scores (however measured) from a population will follow a normal distribution unless, like IQ, the score is defined so that the underlying distribution is normal. The article you linked to explains quite nicely what the CLT actually says.
Here's the old adage: You know how stupid the average person is? Statistically, half the people are more stupid than that.
Statistically, this is true only if: (a) you're using "average" to denote median, rather than mean, or (b) intelligence follows a perfectly symmetrical distribution. Since "average" in casual usage generally denotes mean, and since many natural phenomena don't follow symmetrical distributions*, "half the people are stupider than average" probably isn't true.
You could have Googled this information, you know.;)
*And yes, I know IQ is defined so that it follows a normal distribution -- thus it's symmetrical by definition. For this reason alone, it's unlikely to correspond to the actual distribution of intelligence in the population.
You're right, of course, but remember that this "business method" is clearly the invention of people who like the idea of pigeonholing. The reality is that most good software engineers (actually, most good engineers, period) are well-rounded people with a variety of social and artistic as well as technical skills. But most management-focused types have no technical skills at all, and few if any artistic skills -- social skills are all they've got, and so they have to pretend that they're something special and unique. Very often, the way to do that is for them to say, "You geeks over there, stay in your corner!"
Microsoft, Oracle, Adobe, and most of the other well-known software companies became successful long before software patents were widespread. The appropriate way to protect software is through copyright, not patent. (As for "business method" patents like the one this story is about, they're not an appropriate subject for any kind of IP protection at all.) The major argument in favor of proprietary software has always been that the profit motive inspires developers to work harder and create better software than those who do it for free. If this is true, then it is the obligation of proprietary software companies to make products that live up to this idea.
companies go and spend lots of money to research and develop something, then the open source community goes and takes the best of it, re-codes and gives it away for free
You seem to think this is a trivial process. Trust me, it's not.
Aargh. That should have been "remnant" rather than "replica" above, of course.
I think I will patent "noticing that you just made a dumb error on a/. post because you didn't use the preview button." C'mon, you all know you've done it. Pay up.
True. Patent trolling is perhaps the last replica of the dot-com boom idea that anything with the word "internet" in it is automatically worth a bunch of money. Hopefully it will soon go the way of the sock puppet.
Slashdot Mirror
Depends on the country. In the US (and in Canada, I'm pretty sure) the degree which allows you to practice medicine is indeed a doctorate (MD or DO.) I understand that in Britain it's actually a bachelor's degree (BM) and that MD is a title you only get if you do additional research work; the US equivalent is MD/PhD. But in any case, it is a shame that the work "doctor" is so inextricably associated with medicine is most people's minds. Medical doctors have to work very hard to earn their title; so do other kinds of doctors, and all of them should be recognized for it. If you need to make the precise distinction, the right word to use is "physician."
My grandfather, a retired professor of literature (with a PhD, of course) has a number of health problems and often has to call up new hospitals or specialty practices. He always leads the conversation with, "This is Dr. Hardy ..." Amazing how much red tape that can cut through.
There are levels of criminality. A shoplifter is not equivalent to a bank robber. A bar brawler is not equivalent to a mass murderer. A dumbass kid who hacks into his school computer is not equivalent to someone running an identity theft ring.
You're missing the point. Most people do realize that he's very unlikely to actually serve 38 years in prison. We also realize that most criminals, whatever the crime, serve much less than the maximum possible sentence. What's outrageous here is that even the maximum sentence for what he did is that long.
I often hear people defending bad law by saying, "Oh, it's never going to be that bad in practice." Which is (a) naive, since very often it is that bad somewhere, for someone, and (b) a fundamental misunderstanding of the problem.
Down the road if he decides to falsify some information it won't really matter much will it? Maybe just cut and paste some analysis results so it looks like he did all the required tests. I mean come on? Those tomatoes likely don't have any salmonella bacteria on them. It'll be fine. Those toys? No lead in them. That pet food form China? Good stuff.
The idea that we should lock people up because of potential crimes they might commit is an obscenity.
Yes, he did something bad, and he should be punished for it. But punishing him on the same scale we punish rapists and bank robbers is absurd.
Here is the list of charges against Khan
No, those are the charges against Kahn. The charges against Khan are a lot worse.
The best thing to do, and the best way to develop young minds is to show them all the evidence,
All the evidence supports evolution. Every last bit of it. So while I agree that "showing them all the evidence" is a great idea, that's clearly not what creationists have in mind.
describe to them all of the ideas,
There are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of creation myths out there, from religions past and present; if we include mythology in the category "all the ideas," then a quick summary of those myths would take up a full academic year at least. OTOH, if we want to present only scientific ideas in science class, fortunately there's really only one idea that needs to be taught.
and then let them make up their own minds.
Indeed. They'll do that regardless, of course. But if we teach them critical thinking instead of blind faith, and evidence instead of fairy tales, then the choice they'll make is a lot more likely to be one that has some relation to reality.
Enjoy your ignorance. Those of us doing useful research that private industry chooses not to fund will go on doing what we do, and people like you will go on benefiting from it.
If you factor out the duplication/repetition, the result is rather compact and non-uniform. Repetition of form is what makes code *look* neat, but lots of repetition is generally considered poor form.
Compact, yes; non-uniform, no. Consistency of style (variable naming, indenting, braces, use of spaces, etc.) leads to code that looks good on the screen and is more readable. This isn't repetition of actual code, which is indeed bad (someone once said that if you write three or more lines of code that do essentially the same thing more than twice, that's a good sign you need to put it into a function) but a lot of it is repetition of the way you write the code.
Also those big verbose asterisk box banners some developers put in their code to make it look "professional" just waste space. A lot of that info should be in the source code tracker or is redundant in one way or another.
Wasting space doesn't seem like much of a concern; the days when storage was priced on a per-byte basis are long gone. If a header block that adds a kilobyte to the size of a source file saves whoever inherits the project an hour in how long it takes to understand the code, that's a worthwhile tradeoff -- and well-written header blocks can very often save days, not just hours.
Never, ever, ever rely on external organization to contain all the necessary file information. In any project of any size, someone, sooner or later, will end up with an orphaned source file: no information about it except the file name and contents. No matter how tight your version control system, this is pretty much guaranteed to happen. Good in-file documentation is the only way to ameliorate this.
Oh, FFS. Whenever you're doing any serious research, talking to your colleagues -- and yes, damn it, when you're doing software engineering, a lot of /.ers are your colleagues -- is how you form good ideas and organize your thoughts. This is true in any field. I've noticed that a lot of hotshot geeks like to imagine themselves as Lone Geniuses Bringing Great Ideas Into The World Through Sheer Brilliance And Force Of Will. Guess what? The LGBGIITWTSBAFOW approach works reasonably well for small software projects and one-off research papers. For anything bigger, such as a PhD thesis, it's a recipe for failure. Every computational tool you use in your daily work started through collaborative research.
The submitter is clearly not asking anyone to write his thesis for him. He's gathering ideas, that's all. If you have something useful to contribute, speak up. The fact that you choose to snipe at him instead ("I'm appalled at the quality of post-secondary education that this guy has supposedly received") pretty clearly indicates that you have neither the experience to understand what he's doing nor the expertise to contribute to or comment on his work.
Let them!! Seriously, it'll make more converts to Linux and open source so that we can finally do away with these asshats.
That's the naive, optimistic view. The cynical, pessimistic view is that the people who are pushing for this truly awful law consider any use of F/OSS to be equivalent to piracy ("You're using software you didn't pay for, therefore you must be a pirate!") and they'll be able to find prosecutors, judges, and juries who can be duped into accepting this view.
If the government had been making technology decisions twenty years ago, we would all be stuck on ISDN.
Twenty years ago, the goverment was making technology decisions about something called ARPAnet. Typical stupid, wasteful government program that never went anywhere, of course. Fortunately, private enterprise led the way with bold innovative paradigm-breaking optimized syngergies, which is why we can now have this kind of discussion here on the Compuserve forums!
I don't have anything to add to what you just said -- just want to say, that's a brilliant post and I wish I had mod points right now. Whoever modded you "flamebait" is a moron who has probably read far too many management books.
You know, you can go through basic training (or some other physically demanding training course) and get in shape ... and still be a geek. Seriously. Build some muscles, lose some fat, and you'll still be just as smart as you were before. I've done it, and so have lots of other folks on /. We didn't magically forget all our geek skills, or undergo some drastic personality transplant.
With the political tilt as it is, a large part of the software development community is likely prejudiced against helping our country.
You made a typo there. Here's a correction:
With the political tilt as it is, a large part of the software development community is likely inclined against helping politicians use the Army as a tool to fight wars which harm our country.
That may well be why he goes by "Chip."
Did you read what you linked to?
..."
"This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land
I don't use the quote tag mainly because I don't like the way Slashdot renders text enclosed by it, but that's a clever way to make your point.
My work is in biostatistics -- closely related to, although not the same as, your field -- and bioinformatics, and it is indeed important to state when fuzziness exists. But I strongly disagree that the way to do that is to use imprecise language. One of the most important tasks of the statistician is to quantify uncertainty, and the way to do that is with confidence intervals and p-values, not with easily misinterpreted terms. I guarantee you that an FDA inspector or NIH grant reviewer is really not going to be impressed by the use of "average" without clarification of exactly what kind of average is meant.
Great post. I am a professional statistician and cringe anytime makes the point that you also criticized. It shows complete lack of understanding, which as you point out, is rather funny in a sad kind of way.
How nice I'm also a statistician and I cringe any time people abuse statistical terminology with specific meanings (which means I spend a lot of time cringing while reading Slashdot.) Why don't you?
So the insistence on splitting hairs between 'mean' and 'median' and 'average' is very clever in a schoolkid kind of way, but not very bright ... Intelligence is not cleverness. They are not spelled the same, they have different roots, and they have different meanings.
Indeed, "intelligence" and "cleverness" are different words with different definitions. So are "mean," "median," and "average." You may consider pointing out the difference between these words to be merely "schoolkid cleverness," but it's a real difference and should not be glossed over.
Honestly, I probably wouldn't have bothered replying if OP hadn't used the word "statistically." You're correct that in everyday speech "average" connotes a useful fuzziness, but when you preface an assertion with "statistically," you're implying a degree of provable truth that the common usage of "average" rightly lacks.
The CLT says nothing about the distribution of samples, only the distribution of means (or sums) of large samples. In other words, there's no particular reason to think that a sample of intelligence scores (however measured) from a population will follow a normal distribution unless, like IQ, the score is defined so that the underlying distribution is normal. The article you linked to explains quite nicely what the CLT actually says.
Here's the old adage: You know how stupid the average person is? Statistically, half the people are more stupid than that.
;)
Statistically, this is true only if: (a) you're using "average" to denote median, rather than mean, or (b) intelligence follows a perfectly symmetrical distribution. Since "average" in casual usage generally denotes mean, and since many natural phenomena don't follow symmetrical distributions*, "half the people are stupider than average" probably isn't true.
You could have Googled this information, you know.
*And yes, I know IQ is defined so that it follows a normal distribution -- thus it's symmetrical by definition. For this reason alone, it's unlikely to correspond to the actual distribution of intelligence in the population.
You're right, of course, but remember that this "business method" is clearly the invention of people who like the idea of pigeonholing. The reality is that most good software engineers (actually, most good engineers, period) are well-rounded people with a variety of social and artistic as well as technical skills. But most management-focused types have no technical skills at all, and few if any artistic skills -- social skills are all they've got, and so they have to pretend that they're something special and unique. Very often, the way to do that is for them to say, "You geeks over there, stay in your corner!"
Microsoft, Oracle, Adobe, and most of the other well-known software companies became successful long before software patents were widespread. The appropriate way to protect software is through copyright, not patent. (As for "business method" patents like the one this story is about, they're not an appropriate subject for any kind of IP protection at all.) The major argument in favor of proprietary software has always been that the profit motive inspires developers to work harder and create better software than those who do it for free. If this is true, then it is the obligation of proprietary software companies to make products that live up to this idea.
companies go and spend lots of money to research and develop something, then the open source community goes and takes the best of it, re-codes and gives it away for free
You seem to think this is a trivial process. Trust me, it's not.
Aargh. That should have been "remnant" rather than "replica" above, of course.
/. post because you didn't use the preview button." C'mon, you all know you've done it. Pay up.
I think I will patent "noticing that you just made a dumb error on a
True. Patent trolling is perhaps the last replica of the dot-com boom idea that anything with the word "internet" in it is automatically worth a bunch of money. Hopefully it will soon go the way of the sock puppet.