It's a generational thing, I suppose. The people who make up the RIAA (and equivalent organizations in other countries) and -- more importantly -- the politicians they buy, are of an age to think in terms of listening to music on a stereo, just as they think in terms of watching programs on a TV; the idea of a computer as a general-purpose device that can take over all of the entertainment functions previously fulfilled by special-purpose devices is still kind of alien to them. Specifically, it's something "those damn kids" do; which means that of course it's a privilege, not a right, because you know, it's kids. And I suspect that we'll have to wait 20+ years for the generation which currently sees computers as entertainment hubs to reach the age where they'll have enough clout to change this attitude.
And all the general database tips: if you aren't already good at design, learn, learn, learn. Don't ignore the theory: if you don't know the difference between third-normal and Boyce-Codd, go learn it. Don't just read: make test DBs in each form, and build test cases in each one. Make sure you understand at least the basics of set theory. I'm not kidding - folks will tell you it doesn't matter, but the difference between a competent DB developer and a great one is frequently a deep understanding of theory. Being in a line of work that exposes me to designs done by a lot of other people, I can tell a surprising amount about their knowledge and work habits by looking at how they build DBs.
This one cannot be emphasized enough. One of my major jobs as a DBA was teaching some set theory to the other members of my dev team -- smart people, with lots of practical experience, but they didn't have the practice thinking that way that I did.
This is one of many advantages I gained, IMO, from having a math major and CS minor rather than the more usual other way 'round, and one of the best answers to people who whine, "why do I have to take so much math to get a degree in CS?" People don't think of DB programming as inherently mathematical like, say, games programming, but it is -- not in the "crunching numbers" sense, but in the sense that it ties in quite directly with the roots of mathematics. Learn the theory, and the code will follow; don't learn the theory, and your code may be acceptable, but it will never be really good.
Wikipedia and Google, and for that matter Slashdot, are probably among the best ways to track common usage of tech terms. Certainly there are no written, traditionally published references which are likely to be able to keep up.
There's a lot of software out there which was neither trivial nor obvious. Just because most computer "R&D" work (in quotes because most of it is almost entirely "D" without a whole lot of "R") offers only minor improvements on existing systems doesn't mean all of it is that way.
That being said, neither algorithms nor genes should be patentable. Ever. By anyone.
Actually, the linked article refers to quite a bit of academic literature on this particular subject. Before waxing philosophical on other people's philosophical waxing, perhaps you actually... oh, hell, I'm not going to say it.
... is actually a fundamental problem built into all IP law: the assumption that money is the prime motivator for creative endeavors. (And yes, science is a creative endeavor.) This is a myth successfully propagated by generations of moneymen, but a myth is all it is. Scientists, like artists, certainly want to make a living from their work, but the best ones pretty much always do what they do simply because they want to do it, not because they expect it to make them rich. If your primary concern is making money, OTOH, you don't have the time (or, probably, the brainpower; suits who think of themselves as intellectuals because they have an MBA simplye have no idea what goes into a serious scientific education) to become good at anything that constitutes real creative work.
It's always kind of amusing to see Crichton held up as a model of scientific thinking when, in fact, he's built a career on playing to people's worst (and silliest) fears about science. AFAICT, he's just as anti-science as the most rabid creationist, only in a different way.
I don't expect journalists to be experts in science. I do, however, expect them to be experts in learning enough about fields in which they have no personal experience to be able to report on those fields accurately. Otherwise, what the hell did they go to j-school for?
Re:Applies to everything, not just science...
on
Bad Science in the Press
·
· Score: 2, Informative
The difference is that journalists covering those other fields they know nothing about are expected to do their homework and, by the time they finish writing the story, know something about it. They don't always succeed, of course, but the editors' and readers' expectation is that they'll at least try. When it comes to reporting on science, OTOH... well, TFA has it exactly right.
One point that's touched on in TFA, but perhaps not given enough attention, is the spurious idea of "balance," usually personified by getting a few words from a serious scientist on one hand and a few paragraphs from a quack on the other. This is how we end up with "ancient mysteries of Atlantis" and "professional paranormal investigators" and astrologers and creationists/ID'ers et al being taken seriously.
I agree that it's not the fault of the schmuck on the other end of the line, but (primarily) the schmuck's boss. But it's silly to compare telemarketers and janitors, for the simple reason that we need janitors; we don't need telemarketers. Janitors perform a useful service by keeping things clean. Telemarketers are parasites.
Good thing you're so much smarter than all them fancy-pants scientists and engineers with their high-falutin' PhD's and book-learnin' working on that damn-fool idea! If they just listen to you, they'll stop wasting their time!
So, if over 50% of scientific papers are wrong, does it make sense to be so concerned that Creationist / I.D. subscribers will use that fact to that advantage? These studies are important in our society; they have a large impact. From diets to car safety to prescription drugs to behavioral profiling, many aspects of our society are based on these types of studies. This information can change lives (or end them as we found out with Vioxx), so I think we need to be concerned about addressing the underlying causes of these problems rather than worrying about those crazy I.D. folks.
The thing is, there are different degrees of wrongness. It's one thing to write a scientific paper that may be "wrong" in the sense that the evidence for a particular hypothesis may not be quite as strong as the author would like; if that hypothesis is of any particular importance, and it is in fact false, sooner or later someone will come along and show it to be so. It's quite another to attack and try to tear down science itself, which is what the creationist/ID folks do. In the world they'd like to create, there would be no such thing as actual science -- and what passed for science in that world would be wrong, not just marginally wrong but drastically so, all the time.
Wake up. It was never Seal's job in the first place. No-one owns a job or has a right to a job.
Remarkably, people tend to work better if they have some reasonable expectation that their jobs are their jobs, and good employers understand this. Attitudes like the one you express, while all too common, are ultimately destructive to employers and employees alike.
You have pretty much hit on the key metric that is most often overlooked - the cost of the people running it.
Are you kidding? This is never overlooked, because the anti-F/OSS crowd keeps harping on it. "Sure, you'll save $x,000 on software," they wail, "but what about the cost of wages? That will go way up, because open source is haaaard!"
Which, of course, is bullshit. The fact is, F/OSS IT solutions cost no more to administer than comparable proprietary ones do, and often cost less, because Oracle DBA's and the like make businesses pay through the nose. I fought a long and mostly successful battle to move my employer away from proprietary to F/OSS for our IT needs, and I built the infrastructure mostly from scratch, myself. Wages for proprietary software: one employee. Wages for F/OSS: one employee, who was a hell of a lot happier working with his choice of tools than with whatever crap a "solutions vendor" wanted to foist on us.
The upshot? We have a stable, working IT infrastructure, and because of the money we saved, the department was able to grow in recent years from one employee (me) to four, keeping pace with the company's growth from a four-person shop in a single office to a $30 million / year multinational. Granted, this may not be all that impressive by MegaConglomerCo standards, but we make a good product and a lot of people, including me, are pretty damn happy about how things worked out.
And the charges could be a lot more serious -- IIRC, there are some very serious laws about adults who solicit children for criminal activity. The kids need an aggressive lawyer who will threaten to "go nuclear" if the school doesn't back down.
... I think it's kind of hilarious how stuffed-shirt companies like IBM, and the news organizations that report on them, have tried to adopt hacker slang. "Spear phishing"? It kind of reminds me of Christian pop music that desperately tries to be cool but always looks and sounds ten years behind the times.
What I would call the law of evolution -- "species evolve as a result of mutation and natural selection over time" -- is a pretty simple statement. I think the analogy to the laws of thermodynamics is appropriate; they sound like simple statements, and in fact they are, but in fact they cover " a huge collection of laws, theories, and hypothesis, as well as a whole bunch of stuff that hasn't been discovered yet" just as much as evolution does.
As far as "maybe it's aliens, not God" goes, I think that's a red herring, honestly. The aliens had to come from somewhere; all that idea does is push the First Cause one step farther back. As a practical matter, AFAIK all the people actively pushing ID are in fact religious believers who, if pressed, will admit that their "Designer" is the God of Abraham.
The problem is that many of the "holes" have already been filled, but the creationist crowd (yes, that includes ID'ers) keeps loudly claiming that they haven't; in a related vein, many of the alleged holes aren't holes at all, but the creationists keep claiming that they are. There's a whole lot of "moving the goalposts" going on.
Let's head off the most common arguments right now
on
Equal Time For Creationism
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Evolution is not "just a theory," because in scientific usage, "theory" does not mean "unproven guess" as it does in common usage; it means "hypothesis which has stood up to rigorous testing against the best available evidence." In this sense, evolution is "just a theory" the same way gravity is "just a theory."
In a similar vein, "law" in a scientific sense means "theory which has stood up so well and so long that although it's possible to disprove it, that doesn't look likely to happen." Evolution in this sense is a "law" to the same degree as Newton's laws of motion (suitably modified by Einstein) or the laws of thermodynamics.
Those who oppose teaching creationism in schools are not "afraid of teaching the controversy." There is no controversy among biologists about whether evolution happens, although there may well be controversy about the specific details, any more than there is controversy among historians over whether the Holocaust happened or controversy among geographers over whether the Earth is round or flat.
If we are to include Judeo-Christian-Islamic creation myths (both "young Earth" and "Intelligent Design" varieties) in science classes, why stop there? Let's throw in the Hindu, Buddhist, Shinto, Jainist, etc. creation myths too. "Teach the controversy," right?
There is no inherent conflict between religious belief and the scientific method, unless believers make it so. Many scientists are religious. Scientists do not "hate religion" or "hate God." When religion makes specific, testable claims about the nature of reality, then it is putting itself into science's realm, and faces the same risks of disproof that any other set of demonstrably wrong ideas does. As long as it sticks to matters of morality and spirituality, it can go its merry way.
There you go, folks. Now, enjoy your regularly scheduled flamewar.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, no doubt, but they'll be different crazy ideas; using a computer to listen to music won't be crazy at all. ;)
No, they can't.
It's a generational thing, I suppose. The people who make up the RIAA (and equivalent organizations in other countries) and -- more importantly -- the politicians they buy, are of an age to think in terms of listening to music on a stereo, just as they think in terms of watching programs on a TV; the idea of a computer as a general-purpose device that can take over all of the entertainment functions previously fulfilled by special-purpose devices is still kind of alien to them. Specifically, it's something "those damn kids" do; which means that of course it's a privilege, not a right, because you know, it's kids. And I suspect that we'll have to wait 20+ years for the generation which currently sees computers as entertainment hubs to reach the age where they'll have enough clout to change this attitude.
And all the general database tips: if you aren't already good at design, learn, learn, learn. Don't ignore the theory: if you don't know the difference between third-normal and Boyce-Codd, go learn it. Don't just read: make test DBs in each form, and build test cases in each one. Make sure you understand at least the basics of set theory. I'm not kidding - folks will tell you it doesn't matter, but the difference between a competent DB developer and a great one is frequently a deep understanding of theory. Being in a line of work that exposes me to designs done by a lot of other people, I can tell a surprising amount about their knowledge and work habits by looking at how they build DBs.
This one cannot be emphasized enough. One of my major jobs as a DBA was teaching some set theory to the other members of my dev team -- smart people, with lots of practical experience, but they didn't have the practice thinking that way that I did.
This is one of many advantages I gained, IMO, from having a math major and CS minor rather than the more usual other way 'round, and one of the best answers to people who whine, "why do I have to take so much math to get a degree in CS?" People don't think of DB programming as inherently mathematical like, say, games programming, but it is -- not in the "crunching numbers" sense, but in the sense that it ties in quite directly with the roots of mathematics. Learn the theory, and the code will follow; don't learn the theory, and your code may be acceptable, but it will never be really good.
The tower was used to worship other gods namely Pegan ones which is why he was angry.
Pegan gods? Are those gods which only eat pegs? Or pegasi?
Wikipedia and Google, and for that matter Slashdot, are probably among the best ways to track common usage of tech terms. Certainly there are no written, traditionally published references which are likely to be able to keep up.
There's a lot of software out there which was neither trivial nor obvious. Just because most computer "R&D" work (in quotes because most of it is almost entirely "D" without a whole lot of "R") offers only minor improvements on existing systems doesn't mean all of it is that way.
That being said, neither algorithms nor genes should be patentable. Ever. By anyone.
Actually, the linked article refers to quite a bit of academic literature on this particular subject. Before waxing philosophical on other people's philosophical waxing, perhaps you actually ... oh, hell, I'm not going to say it.
... is actually a fundamental problem built into all IP law: the assumption that money is the prime motivator for creative endeavors. (And yes, science is a creative endeavor.) This is a myth successfully propagated by generations of moneymen, but a myth is all it is. Scientists, like artists, certainly want to make a living from their work, but the best ones pretty much always do what they do simply because they want to do it, not because they expect it to make them rich. If your primary concern is making money, OTOH, you don't have the time (or, probably, the brainpower; suits who think of themselves as intellectuals because they have an MBA simplye have no idea what goes into a serious scientific education) to become good at anything that constitutes real creative work.
It's always kind of amusing to see Crichton held up as a model of scientific thinking when, in fact, he's built a career on playing to people's worst (and silliest) fears about science. AFAICT, he's just as anti-science as the most rabid creationist, only in a different way.
I don't expect journalists to be experts in science. I do, however, expect them to be experts in learning enough about fields in which they have no personal experience to be able to report on those fields accurately. Otherwise, what the hell did they go to j-school for?
The difference is that journalists covering those other fields they know nothing about are expected to do their homework and, by the time they finish writing the story, know something about it. They don't always succeed, of course, but the editors' and readers' expectation is that they'll at least try. When it comes to reporting on science, OTOH ... well, TFA has it exactly right.
One point that's touched on in TFA, but perhaps not given enough attention, is the spurious idea of "balance," usually personified by getting a few words from a serious scientist on one hand and a few paragraphs from a quack on the other. This is how we end up with "ancient mysteries of Atlantis" and "professional paranormal investigators" and astrologers and creationists/ID'ers et al being taken seriously.
I agree that it's not the fault of the schmuck on the other end of the line, but (primarily) the schmuck's boss. But it's silly to compare telemarketers and janitors, for the simple reason that we need janitors; we don't need telemarketers. Janitors perform a useful service by keeping things clean. Telemarketers are parasites.
They get 'em at them-there fancy schools when they get too big for their britches, of course!
The space elevator is a fantasy (etc.)
Good thing you're so much smarter than all them fancy-pants scientists and engineers with their high-falutin' PhD's and book-learnin' working on that damn-fool idea! If they just listen to you, they'll stop wasting their time!
So, if over 50% of scientific papers are wrong, does it make sense to be so concerned that Creationist / I.D. subscribers will use that fact to that advantage? These studies are important in our society; they have a large impact. From diets to car safety to prescription drugs to behavioral profiling, many aspects of our society are based on these types of studies. This information can change lives (or end them as we found out with Vioxx), so I think we need to be concerned about addressing the underlying causes of these problems rather than worrying about those crazy I.D. folks.
The thing is, there are different degrees of wrongness. It's one thing to write a scientific paper that may be "wrong" in the sense that the evidence for a particular hypothesis may not be quite as strong as the author would like; if that hypothesis is of any particular importance, and it is in fact false, sooner or later someone will come along and show it to be so. It's quite another to attack and try to tear down science itself, which is what the creationist/ID folks do. In the world they'd like to create, there would be no such thing as actual science -- and what passed for science in that world would be wrong, not just marginally wrong but drastically so, all the time.
Wake up. It was never Seal's job in the first place. No-one owns a job or has a right to a job.
Remarkably, people tend to work better if they have some reasonable expectation that their jobs are their jobs, and good employers understand this. Attitudes like the one you express, while all too common, are ultimately destructive to employers and employees alike.
You have pretty much hit on the key metric that is most often overlooked - the cost of the people running it.
Are you kidding? This is never overlooked, because the anti-F/OSS crowd keeps harping on it. "Sure, you'll save $x,000 on software," they wail, "but what about the cost of wages? That will go way up, because open source is haaaard!"
Which, of course, is bullshit. The fact is, F/OSS IT solutions cost no more to administer than comparable proprietary ones do, and often cost less, because Oracle DBA's and the like make businesses pay through the nose. I fought a long and mostly successful battle to move my employer away from proprietary to F/OSS for our IT needs, and I built the infrastructure mostly from scratch, myself. Wages for proprietary software: one employee. Wages for F/OSS: one employee, who was a hell of a lot happier working with his choice of tools than with whatever crap a "solutions vendor" wanted to foist on us.
The upshot? We have a stable, working IT infrastructure, and because of the money we saved, the department was able to grow in recent years from one employee (me) to four, keeping pace with the company's growth from a four-person shop in a single office to a $30 million / year multinational. Granted, this may not be all that impressive by MegaConglomerCo standards, but we make a good product and a lot of people, including me, are pretty damn happy about how things worked out.
And the charges could be a lot more serious -- IIRC, there are some very serious laws about adults who solicit children for criminal activity. The kids need an aggressive lawyer who will threaten to "go nuclear" if the school doesn't back down.
... I think it's kind of hilarious how stuffed-shirt companies like IBM, and the news organizations that report on them, have tried to adopt hacker slang. "Spear phishing"? It kind of reminds me of Christian pop music that desperately tries to be cool but always looks and sounds ten years behind the times.
What I would call the law of evolution -- "species evolve as a result of mutation and natural selection over time" -- is a pretty simple statement. I think the analogy to the laws of thermodynamics is appropriate; they sound like simple statements, and in fact they are, but in fact they cover " a huge collection of laws, theories, and hypothesis, as well as a whole bunch of stuff that hasn't been discovered yet" just as much as evolution does.
As far as "maybe it's aliens, not God" goes, I think that's a red herring, honestly. The aliens had to come from somewhere; all that idea does is push the First Cause one step farther back. As a practical matter, AFAIK all the people actively pushing ID are in fact religious believers who, if pressed, will admit that their "Designer" is the God of Abraham.
The problem is that many of the "holes" have already been filled, but the creationist crowd (yes, that includes ID'ers) keeps loudly claiming that they haven't; in a related vein, many of the alleged holes aren't holes at all, but the creationists keep claiming that they are. There's a whole lot of "moving the goalposts" going on.
- Evolution is not "just a theory," because in scientific usage, "theory" does not mean "unproven guess" as it does in common usage; it means "hypothesis which has stood up to rigorous testing against the best available evidence." In this sense, evolution is "just a theory" the same way gravity is "just a theory."
- In a similar vein, "law" in a scientific sense means "theory which has stood up so well and so long that although it's possible to disprove it, that doesn't look likely to happen." Evolution in this sense is a "law" to the same degree as Newton's laws of motion (suitably modified by Einstein) or the laws of thermodynamics.
- Those who oppose teaching creationism in schools are not "afraid of teaching the controversy." There is no controversy among biologists about whether evolution happens, although there may well be controversy about the specific details, any more than there is controversy among historians over whether the Holocaust happened or controversy among geographers over whether the Earth is round or flat.
- If we are to include Judeo-Christian-Islamic creation myths (both "young Earth" and "Intelligent Design" varieties) in science classes, why stop there? Let's throw in the Hindu, Buddhist, Shinto, Jainist, etc. creation myths too. "Teach the controversy," right?
- There is no inherent conflict between religious belief and the scientific method, unless believers make it so. Many scientists are religious. Scientists do not "hate religion" or "hate God." When religion makes specific, testable claims about the nature of reality, then it is putting itself into science's realm, and faces the same risks of disproof that any other set of demonstrably wrong ideas does. As long as it sticks to matters of morality and spirituality, it can go its merry way.
There you go, folks. Now, enjoy your regularly scheduled flamewar.Don't blame the editors -- the press release contains the same irritatingly vague language.
*snort*
Okay, next question ...