Gender isn't an issue here. Female professors can cause trouble for male students. What matters here is that power imbalance is bad for any relationship. There's a great deal of risk in any situation like that for the one with less power to be squelched or even abused. It doesn't mean abuse ALWAYS happens, but one reason we want to empower women in our modern society is so that they have more choices. If a woman is undereducated, for instance, she may find it harder to get out of an abusive relationship. A more educated woman will have the ability to get a job and get the hell out. Again, this doesn't mean a majority of relationships are abusive. But when there is more balanced power, relationships have lower occurrence of abuse and more viable escapes.
So maybe 95% of relationships between profs and undergrads would work out just fine. Sure. No problem. Let's assume that most people are genuine and don't want to cause anyone harm. What we're dealing with here is both the subtle and major effects of the power imbalance that is inherent in relationships between professors and students.
A professor simply doesn't have the right to take that kind of risk with a student.
MOSTLY, I had in mind the idea of a professor (who is likely to be at least 30 due to the time required to get both undergrad and doctoral degrees) dating an undergrad, many of whom are under 20. Whether or not someone that age is capable of making good decisions about whom to date (many are) does not change the fact that the professor is in a position of authority over all students, regardless of what department they each are in. It's either an abuse of authority or a great risk of authority abuse.
Now, the counter example doesn't disprove the general case. Say you have a 30 year old junior professor in Chemistry who starts dating a 34 year old undergrad majoring in Fine Arts. That 34 year old is VERY likely to have the maturity to make good dating decisions (at least compared to a 20 year old), but that professor could still cause the student trouble. If those people get together, and it works out, GREAT FOR THEM. I hope they have a great life. We can come up with more unusual cases, like a prof and a student both in their 40's. Honestly, most people wouldn't take notice, although some may still ask them if they're sure this is a wise idea.
We can argue these corner cases all we want, but the rules are there to deal with the majority of cases where the professor is substantially older than the students. Even if we didn't have the prof/student issue as a factor, there is still a power imbalance that comes from large age differences in relationships, and that power imbalance can be abused.
First of all, I’m happily married and would not want to violate what my wife and I have agreed to, whether she knew about it or not.
But the university I work for (along with most others) take inappropriate behavior very seriously. I have had to pass certifications on this, so I have put some thought into the issue. When you are in a position of power relative to someone else, there is just way too much potential for abuse of that power. If you understand that underlying principle, then you can safely date without causing any harm.
Unless your university has very specific fules, I would suggest perhaps a few rules of thumb that should keep you out of trouble: - Don’t ever date a student in your own department. - Staff in your own department, maybe, but have to be handled carefully — avoid any you might have some authority over. - Faculty in your own department are pretty much free game, especially if they’re tenured. - Faculty and staff at any level in any other department are free game. - Graduate students in other departments, maybe, but have to be handled carefully — prefer older ones. - Never date an undergraduate student, even if they’re nontraditional. - Any student who has graduated and is no longer a student is okay, but you have to be careful about others suspecting that the relationship might have started before they graduated, which could get you into trouble.
Also, just because you first meet someone off campus (at a bar, say) doesn’t mean that these rules don’t apply. If you find out that someone you’re talking to at a bar is an undergrad at your school, you really need to break it off immediately. I don’t care how turned on you are by each other at that moment, the risk of that biting you in the ass later is just too great.
And remember, this isn’t all about you protecting yourself from getting into trouble. It’s about protecting your students from psychological harm. I’m in Computer Science, and we just don’t have enough women in STEM fields. We have to make sure women (and men for that matter) feel that they’re going into a safe educational environment where people in authority are not going to prey on them. Students should earn their education and their grades, not buy them with favors, and they need to be able to be awarded the education and grades they’ve worked for without predators interfering.
From what I gather, VW put a lot of money into developing a new Diesel engine that turned out to not balance all the tradeoffs the way they wanted. They can get power, but at the cost of fuel economy and emissions. They can get lower emissions, at the cost of fuel economy and power. They can get fuel economy at the cost of power and emissions. To redesign the engine would have been very costly, so they decided that instead of making a better engine, they'd adjust the tradeoff depending on the operating conditions. So what's going to happen now with the recalls, if they meet emissions requirements, they won't get fuel economy and performance that are competitive with petrol engines, and lots of VW customers are going to be very unhappy, and they're going to lose a lot of business to vehicles that have the performance and fuel economy characteristics people want.
So what's likely to have happened within VW is that they built and tested engines and found that they were never going to meet all the requirements at once. So engineers reported this to managment who made the decision to add "defeat device" software to violate emissions standards under normal operating conditions. And I'm sure it went pretty far up the chain of command, because no one engineer is going to want to bear the weight of that decision, nor can they because all of this would require the involvement of lots of engineers. And since this mechanism was formally added to the design, then they'd have formal testing procedures that ensure it behaves the way they intend, so the testing engineers will also be aware of all of this as well.
So who is at fault? It's a cascade: - The emissions laws are incompatible with consumer demands. - The laws of physics make it very hard to meet consumer demands while also meeting emissions standards. - The engine design engineers produced a design that couldn't balance all the tradeoffs. - The software developers took carefully planned steps to develop the defeat device.
So, basically, those to blame are God, hardware engineers, software engineers, lawmakers, and consumers. Basically the whole universe.
I'm sure you can find plenty of teams of rockstar coders who can scale in amazing ways. Unfortunately, this does not apply to teams of average programmers. An average programmer knows how to code but is typically much less intuitive about how their components impact other developers. To deal with this, you need to do all this up-front design work that it entirely serial (not scalable) and takes a substantial portion of the total development time.
When I was a kid, I thought my parents were cheap, avoiding juice and watering it down. Now we do that for our own kids. They demand juice, so we give them apple and grape juices that don't taste like ass when you dilute them (can't do that with orange juice). And of course, we only give them the orange juice that has calcium added, and we give them almond milk and coconut (with added calcium), sometimes mixed with the unsweetened kind. The juice is mostly given as a treat... we try really hard to give them mostly water (filtered from the tap) as much as we can. Especially at night, because we don't want the sugar metabolites to damage their teeth.
Something they really enjoy, incidentally, is water kefir. It's like probiotic soda. Not too sweet, with a bit of a yeasty taste (reminds me of beer but without the alcohol). So they get probiotics, and they think it's soda. Same thing with Kombucha. Those are especially good when they pick up a stomach bug.
When you're on the go, and your body doesn't handle soda very well, a bottle of water is nice to get. Yes, we have water filters at home, and lots of people have them at work, but what about when you're on travel? Bottled water is a great way to get some filtered water.
Let me begin by clearly stating that if you PREJUDGE someone on the basis of ethnicity, then that's prejudiced and wrong. For example, if you believe that Latinos are dumb, and you prevent someone named Fernandez from entering a gifted program (or getting hired to a job they're qualified for, etc.), then that's immoral and also not supported by any science. Although there MAY be some differences in mean IQ between ethnic groups, as one scientist said, the world's greatest mathematician might come out of the poorest slums of India. According to some, Neanderthal DNA that is found in Europeans and Asians MAY give them a statistical advantage over Africans who do not carry those genes, but this is only a statistical advantage, which you cannot use to make a priori judgements about an individual. (In other words, any facts about ethnicity and IQ statistics are interesting to anthropologists but not managers or school administrators.)
However, once you eliminate the prejudices, are there any genetic features that may make one group have a slightly lower probability of generating geniuses than another? I've read scholarly papers that showed, for instance, that Africans have a slightly lower mean IQ than Europeans, who have a slightly lower mean than Asians. (Note that the gap between whites and blacks in America is much smaller because of a lot of mixing.) Mind you, this doesn't account for the variance, where we find that the groups have vastly more overlap than they do difference. It also doesn't account for other adaptations, like how Africans have been shown to have superior social ability, and although it doesn't show up in IQ, it does show up on other measurements that any decent intelligence test should include. We have to keep in mind that we are a single species, and although there are some geographically separated groups, each group is very well adapted to their environments.
Then there are social factors. Parents that aggressively educate their young children before preschool will give those kids an advantage, rightfully pushing many of them into gifted status, regardless of what their IQ might have measured as if other factors had been equal. Regardless of genetics, the human brain is very flexible, and early education can have a profound effect on later intelligence. So your black and hispanic families who whip their kids into doing their homework and learn their ABCs early will outperform kids of lazy white parents, and they should be judged on performance, not probabilities.
It'a also interesting to see how measured intelligence is biased by socioeconomic status. It doesn't matter what color you are -- if you're poor, you're very likely to score lower on intelligence tests. Now, there is surely some interaction between socioeconomic status and gene transfer, and that's interesting once again to anthropologists. But what it really tells us is that people with lower incomes are disadvantaged by more limited educational opportunities (and/or educational aggression from parents), and to improve our society, we need to improve education among the poor. And education is the great equalizer.
I will swear to you up and down that when I was a kid in Tampa, FL, I saw the full episode of "The Power of the Daleks" (first episode of the second doctor). But when I found it again a few years ago, there were only telesnaps. I'm willing to believe that my memory is faulty. But the thing is, the episode plot was totally familiar to me, and I recognized scenes. Also, I would be surprised if any PBS station (either WEDU or WUSF there) would play telesnap episodes.
YOUR response is a perfect example of the things that will go WRONG with changes in men's attitudes towards women. Do you think every concern or complaint that comes out of a women is bullshit? Only your concerns are valid?
The men who treat women as human beings, with respect and compassion, those are the ones who get sex. Not the assholes who want women to just shut up and put out.
If you make sex bots that look too realistic, and this causes men to objectify women, then perhaps this would carry over into how they treat real women. (Mind you, in that case, the genes that lead to this behavior would be eliminated from the gene pool.)
On the other hand, some men just have higher sex drive and just need to deal with some physical discomfort, unconnected with their emotional relationships with women. If they get their excess needs met somehow, then they might not be total horn dogs when they are around real women and would treat them with more respect as human beings.
Some artiificial ban on some specific technology isn't going to change people's nature. On the other hand, it might help a lot if we were to educate people from a young age that they need to treat other human beings with dignity and respect.
I don't like the idea of tax money being spent on something that is scientifically verfiable as completely wrong. And I also don't want people with serious illnesses not getting proper medical treatment.
However, people have the freedom to do stupid things, and homeopathy is relatively harmless. I mean, it's just expensive tap water. Also, it's a placebo, and placebos have been shown to have some limited effectiveness.
Remember diamond water? I should start selling silicon water. It's special water that's been infused with computer antivirus software by having had it in a water-cooled rig. The imprint of the antivirus software on the water has great antiviral effects in humans.:)
Science FUNDING is political. Scientists are driven by MONEY.
Whenever someone (usually a creationist) tries to tell me about conspiracies in science, I have to laugh. Whether you're working in industry, a university, a national lab, or in your own garage, most scientific endeavors cost money. And when it comes to funding for science, the money is painfully limited. The rejection rate of NSF proposals is somewhere between 80% and 90%. This means there's fierce competition, and scientsts are as competive as any other group. The instant someone publishes something questionable, others pounce on it and try to verify or discredit it. Discrediting another scientist's work is a great way to eliminate them from the competition pool.
Now, let's say a scientist had some solid, objective evidence that there was some kind of unexplainable gap in evolutionary history (because obviously there are mountains of explanable non-gaps). I think they would have a hard time getting that published, because nobody would believe it.
Accidental conspiracies do happen, because scientists can be really stupid. A friend of mine got a paper rejected once because he pointed out the Dijkstra's shortest path algorithm would be faster than Bellman-Ford for any sizable input set. Because, as any CS undergrad knows, an O(n log n) algorithm will be much faster than an O(n squared) algorithm, even if the constant for the n log n algorithm is relatively huge. However, this one reviewer pointed to earlier work by some idiot who said that Bellman-Ford was faster, and the other reviewers swallowed it without thinking. Of course, he got it published somewhere else, but the point is that science does get wrongfully suppressed sometimes, and it can become wide-spread when a large body of scientists believe something that is incorrect. But people aren't getting together in lodges and making plans to fool the populace into believing something they know is wrong. Many scientists don't even think about that sort of thing, because they lack social inclinations.
With all these extra people running for president, isn't this just going to make the wrong person win? The US doesn't have runoffs or any of the other less flawed voting systems. Instead, the votes get split up among the better candidates, and then the least favorite is the one who wins.
Ok, so you can do a lot of coding without knowing math. So what? If you want to do anything really sophisticated, like design games or do high performance computing or any non-superficial use of a computer, you have to know math.
x86 is no longer a microarchitecture. It's just an ISA. It's a total abstraction, and in mid-range to high-end processors, its translation overhead (logic and latency) is minimal. Only in the lowest-end devices (Atom) is it any kind of burden, and ARM dominates in that space.
Yes, CISC is computersciencely evil, not orthogonal, crufty, and whatever else you want to call it. But these days, x86 is just an intermediate language between the compiler and the REAL execution engine.
It's one thing to have a general sense that there might be a higher being that has influenced traditions through history. Some may think that's a silly idea, but it's general enough that you don't lose your sense of reality if someone disproves some factual aspects of your beliefs that you rely on heavily. Even within Christianity, I think that a lot of what we're taught to believe was made up long after Jesus' death. There are a lot of Christian concepts that I just don't think are all that critical, like original sin and the virgin birth. I can even imagine believing in Jesus having divinity without the need for his sinlessness or a resurrection. Sound crazy? It's hard to separate the core of Christianity from all the cruft that came later. The core of the religion is one of forgiveness. People do bad things. If you recognize that you did wrong, admit it, and resolve to change your ways (repent), then you will be forgiven. None of that changes if you dismiss any of these traditions I mentioned. I also admire the Christian Jesus (who may be an amalgam of real historical people) as a great philosopher and counter-cultural rebel.
I love the IDEA of LISP. I also slightly prefer Scheme, which to me is a bit more of a pure functional language. But in practice, I find it too much of a pain to use. I'm not accustomed to rethinking things recursively, and I totally get lost in all of the parentheses.
What many people don't realize about Common Lisp is that it's not really a functional language. It's functional-like. But there are side-effects and lots and lots of procedural constructs that seem out of place in a functional language. Consider the loop macro. It can loop over damn here anything efficiently, but it's not functional style. It's a domain-specific procedural language that you stick between parentheses within some Lisp code. Lisp has some features that make it supremely powerful. The code syntax and the data structure syntax are the SAME; that unification multiplies the power of the language in ways that are hard to describe. The macro facility is not equalled in any other language, because the macros are arbitrary Lisp code that is run at compile time that generates arbitrary Lisp code that then gets compiled. Lisp has also been around long enough that it's collected a huge number of libraries for just about anything, and the compilers are smart enough to produce some extremely efficient machine code.
So I really really want to use Lisp. It's just too much of a headache to deal with actually writing the code.
I've learned more languages than I can remember. C, Fortran, various BASICs, Ruby, Bash, C++, Java, JavaScript, HTML, CSS, SQL, Pascal, Ada, and so on. You know what my favorite language is? Verilog. What I enjoy most of all is designing chips. So I totally grok the theoretical value of languages like Lisp and Haskell, but I have the most fun designing circuits. That probably has a major influence on why I don't enjoy programming Lisp.
Check out "nyuzi.org". This is a fully functional open source GPU. It's synthesizable Verilog and works already in an FPGA. So not only is it more or less complete, but it also came out before MIAOW.
You can say what you want without necessarily being an asshole about it. Ok, I'm sure there are situations where being an asshole is warranted, but the idea is to not be *unnecessarily* rude or insulting when trying to make a point. Generally speaking, if you feel that you have to be rude or insulting, you probably just don't have a good point to make in the first place.
Anonymity is important so that people can make important points without fear or reprisal from one censoring government or another. However, that none of that requires one to act in an non-constructive way.
I'm not telling you what to do. If you want to be an asshole, go ahead. However, if you want intelligent people to LISTEN TO YOU, then being not an asshole is kindof an important component of your communication patterns.
This is related to the whole idea of being responsible with your freedoms. Just because you CAN (and should be allowed to) do something stupid doesn't mean that you SHOULD.
This is the problem. It seems like most Internet users act like morons. I'm not saying they ARE morons, but we all know how a degree of anonymity can cause people to lose control of their inhibitions about what they say. I've seen comment threads that were extremely informative, but that's rare, and mostly on the more obscure websites. Any website that attracts a broader spectrum of users is going to get a lot more moronic posts. People misunderstand the content, flame the content, flame each other, post SPAM, and just generally cause havoc. It's hard to find a signal in the noise. Even when people are well-meaning (which a lot of them are not), discussions can completely devolve.
Sites like slashdot and reddit, which are built on comments, have to have elaborate systems of moderation in order to keep the crap in check. Imagine a completely unmoderated system. It would be completely useless. Oh wait. We had usenet, and from the moment the AOLers got access, it went into decline, and now it's basically dead.
99% of everything on the Internet is crap. Statistically, that includes my comment as well.
What I can tell you is that I'll be using Safari, for instance, and it'll suddenly go into a fugue where it uses 100% of one CPU core (or sometimes more cores) for on the order of 5 minutes. During that time, other apps are also more sluggish (probably competing for access to disk I/O and the compressed swap, neither of which is multithreaded in MacOS).
It's unlikely to be the extensions. When I report this bug to Apple, they too are satisfied (as far as I can tell) that it's not the extensions. I have the following enabled:
ClickToFlash (this should actually be GOOD for the memory footprint) Sessions (because Safari natively sucks at saving and restoring its state) Google Scholar Button (which was only recently installed and has not affected anything)
Slashdot Mirror
Gender isn't an issue here. Female professors can cause trouble for male students. What matters here is that power imbalance is bad for any relationship. There's a great deal of risk in any situation like that for the one with less power to be squelched or even abused. It doesn't mean abuse ALWAYS happens, but one reason we want to empower women in our modern society is so that they have more choices. If a woman is undereducated, for instance, she may find it harder to get out of an abusive relationship. A more educated woman will have the ability to get a job and get the hell out. Again, this doesn't mean a majority of relationships are abusive. But when there is more balanced power, relationships have lower occurrence of abuse and more viable escapes.
So maybe 95% of relationships between profs and undergrads would work out just fine. Sure. No problem. Let's assume that most people are genuine and don't want to cause anyone harm. What we're dealing with here is both the subtle and major effects of the power imbalance that is inherent in relationships between professors and students.
A professor simply doesn't have the right to take that kind of risk with a student.
MOSTLY, I had in mind the idea of a professor (who is likely to be at least 30 due to the time required to get both undergrad and doctoral degrees) dating an undergrad, many of whom are under 20. Whether or not someone that age is capable of making good decisions about whom to date (many are) does not change the fact that the professor is in a position of authority over all students, regardless of what department they each are in. It's either an abuse of authority or a great risk of authority abuse.
Now, the counter example doesn't disprove the general case. Say you have a 30 year old junior professor in Chemistry who starts dating a 34 year old undergrad majoring in Fine Arts. That 34 year old is VERY likely to have the maturity to make good dating decisions (at least compared to a 20 year old), but that professor could still cause the student trouble. If those people get together, and it works out, GREAT FOR THEM. I hope they have a great life. We can come up with more unusual cases, like a prof and a student both in their 40's. Honestly, most people wouldn't take notice, although some may still ask them if they're sure this is a wise idea.
We can argue these corner cases all we want, but the rules are there to deal with the majority of cases where the professor is substantially older than the students. Even if we didn't have the prof/student issue as a factor, there is still a power imbalance that comes from large age differences in relationships, and that power imbalance can be abused.
First of all, I’m happily married and would not want to violate what my wife and I have agreed to, whether she knew about it or not.
But the university I work for (along with most others) take inappropriate behavior very seriously. I have had to pass certifications on this, so I have put some thought into the issue. When you are in a position of power relative to someone else, there is just way too much potential for abuse of that power. If you understand that underlying principle, then you can safely date without causing any harm.
Unless your university has very specific fules, I would suggest perhaps a few rules of thumb that should keep you out of trouble:
- Don’t ever date a student in your own department.
- Staff in your own department, maybe, but have to be handled carefully — avoid any you might have some authority over.
- Faculty in your own department are pretty much free game, especially if they’re tenured.
- Faculty and staff at any level in any other department are free game.
- Graduate students in other departments, maybe, but have to be handled carefully — prefer older ones.
- Never date an undergraduate student, even if they’re nontraditional.
- Any student who has graduated and is no longer a student is okay, but you have to be careful about others suspecting that the relationship might have started before they graduated, which could get you into trouble.
Also, just because you first meet someone off campus (at a bar, say) doesn’t mean that these rules don’t apply. If you find out that someone you’re talking to at a bar is an undergrad at your school, you really need to break it off immediately. I don’t care how turned on you are by each other at that moment, the risk of that biting you in the ass later is just too great.
And remember, this isn’t all about you protecting yourself from getting into trouble. It’s about protecting your students from psychological harm. I’m in Computer Science, and we just don’t have enough women in STEM fields. We have to make sure women (and men for that matter) feel that they’re going into a safe educational environment where people in authority are not going to prey on them. Students should earn their education and their grades, not buy them with favors, and they need to be able to be awarded the education and grades they’ve worked for without predators interfering.
From what I gather, VW put a lot of money into developing a new Diesel engine that turned out to not balance all the tradeoffs the way they wanted. They can get power, but at the cost of fuel economy and emissions. They can get lower emissions, at the cost of fuel economy and power. They can get fuel economy at the cost of power and emissions. To redesign the engine would have been very costly, so they decided that instead of making a better engine, they'd adjust the tradeoff depending on the operating conditions. So what's going to happen now with the recalls, if they meet emissions requirements, they won't get fuel economy and performance that are competitive with petrol engines, and lots of VW customers are going to be very unhappy, and they're going to lose a lot of business to vehicles that have the performance and fuel economy characteristics people want.
So what's likely to have happened within VW is that they built and tested engines and found that they were never going to meet all the requirements at once. So engineers reported this to managment who made the decision to add "defeat device" software to violate emissions standards under normal operating conditions. And I'm sure it went pretty far up the chain of command, because no one engineer is going to want to bear the weight of that decision, nor can they because all of this would require the involvement of lots of engineers. And since this mechanism was formally added to the design, then they'd have formal testing procedures that ensure it behaves the way they intend, so the testing engineers will also be aware of all of this as well.
So who is at fault? It's a cascade:
- The emissions laws are incompatible with consumer demands.
- The laws of physics make it very hard to meet consumer demands while also meeting emissions standards.
- The engine design engineers produced a design that couldn't balance all the tradeoffs.
- The software developers took carefully planned steps to develop the defeat device.
So, basically, those to blame are God, hardware engineers, software engineers, lawmakers, and consumers. Basically the whole universe.
I'm sure you can find plenty of teams of rockstar coders who can scale in amazing ways. Unfortunately, this does not apply to teams of average programmers. An average programmer knows how to code but is typically much less intuitive about how their components impact other developers. To deal with this, you need to do all this up-front design work that it entirely serial (not scalable) and takes a substantial portion of the total development time.
When I was a kid, I thought my parents were cheap, avoiding juice and watering it down. Now we do that for our own kids. They demand juice, so we give them apple and grape juices that don't taste like ass when you dilute them (can't do that with orange juice). And of course, we only give them the orange juice that has calcium added, and we give them almond milk and coconut (with added calcium), sometimes mixed with the unsweetened kind. The juice is mostly given as a treat... we try really hard to give them mostly water (filtered from the tap) as much as we can. Especially at night, because we don't want the sugar metabolites to damage their teeth.
Something they really enjoy, incidentally, is water kefir. It's like probiotic soda. Not too sweet, with a bit of a yeasty taste (reminds me of beer but without the alcohol). So they get probiotics, and they think it's soda. Same thing with Kombucha. Those are especially good when they pick up a stomach bug.
When you're on the go, and your body doesn't handle soda very well, a bottle of water is nice to get. Yes, we have water filters at home, and lots of people have them at work, but what about when you're on travel? Bottled water is a great way to get some filtered water.
Let me begin by clearly stating that if you PREJUDGE someone on the basis of ethnicity, then that's prejudiced and wrong. For example, if you believe that Latinos are dumb, and you prevent someone named Fernandez from entering a gifted program (or getting hired to a job they're qualified for, etc.), then that's immoral and also not supported by any science. Although there MAY be some differences in mean IQ between ethnic groups, as one scientist said, the world's greatest mathematician might come out of the poorest slums of India. According to some, Neanderthal DNA that is found in Europeans and Asians MAY give them a statistical advantage over Africans who do not carry those genes, but this is only a statistical advantage, which you cannot use to make a priori judgements about an individual. (In other words, any facts about ethnicity and IQ statistics are interesting to anthropologists but not managers or school administrators.)
However, once you eliminate the prejudices, are there any genetic features that may make one group have a slightly lower probability of generating geniuses than another? I've read scholarly papers that showed, for instance, that Africans have a slightly lower mean IQ than Europeans, who have a slightly lower mean than Asians. (Note that the gap between whites and blacks in America is much smaller because of a lot of mixing.) Mind you, this doesn't account for the variance, where we find that the groups have vastly more overlap than they do difference. It also doesn't account for other adaptations, like how Africans have been shown to have superior social ability, and although it doesn't show up in IQ, it does show up on other measurements that any decent intelligence test should include. We have to keep in mind that we are a single species, and although there are some geographically separated groups, each group is very well adapted to their environments.
Then there are social factors. Parents that aggressively educate their young children before preschool will give those kids an advantage, rightfully pushing many of them into gifted status, regardless of what their IQ might have measured as if other factors had been equal. Regardless of genetics, the human brain is very flexible, and early education can have a profound effect on later intelligence. So your black and hispanic families who whip their kids into doing their homework and learn their ABCs early will outperform kids of lazy white parents, and they should be judged on performance, not probabilities.
It'a also interesting to see how measured intelligence is biased by socioeconomic status. It doesn't matter what color you are -- if you're poor, you're very likely to score lower on intelligence tests. Now, there is surely some interaction between socioeconomic status and gene transfer, and that's interesting once again to anthropologists. But what it really tells us is that people with lower incomes are disadvantaged by more limited educational opportunities (and/or educational aggression from parents), and to improve our society, we need to improve education among the poor. And education is the great equalizer.
I will swear to you up and down that when I was a kid in Tampa, FL, I saw the full episode of "The Power of the Daleks" (first episode of the second doctor). But when I found it again a few years ago, there were only telesnaps. I'm willing to believe that my memory is faulty. But the thing is, the episode plot was totally familiar to me, and I recognized scenes. Also, I would be surprised if any PBS station (either WEDU or WUSF there) would play telesnap episodes.
Using a sex bot and having a wank... are they all that different?
YOUR response is a perfect example of the things that will go WRONG with changes in men's attitudes towards women. Do you think every concern or complaint that comes out of a women is bullshit? Only your concerns are valid?
The men who treat women as human beings, with respect and compassion, those are the ones who get sex. Not the assholes who want women to just shut up and put out.
If you make sex bots that look too realistic, and this causes men to objectify women, then perhaps this would carry over into how they treat real women. (Mind you, in that case, the genes that lead to this behavior would be eliminated from the gene pool.)
On the other hand, some men just have higher sex drive and just need to deal with some physical discomfort, unconnected with their emotional relationships with women. If they get their excess needs met somehow, then they might not be total horn dogs when they are around real women and would treat them with more respect as human beings.
Some artiificial ban on some specific technology isn't going to change people's nature. On the other hand, it might help a lot if we were to educate people from a young age that they need to treat other human beings with dignity and respect.
I don't like the idea of tax money being spent on something that is scientifically verfiable as completely wrong. And I also don't want people with serious illnesses not getting proper medical treatment.
However, people have the freedom to do stupid things, and homeopathy is relatively harmless. I mean, it's just expensive tap water. Also, it's a placebo, and placebos have been shown to have some limited effectiveness.
Remember diamond water? I should start selling silicon water. It's special water that's been infused with computer antivirus software by having had it in a water-cooled rig. The imprint of the antivirus software on the water has great antiviral effects in humans. :)
Science FUNDING is political. Scientists are driven by MONEY.
Whenever someone (usually a creationist) tries to tell me about conspiracies in science, I have to laugh. Whether you're working in industry, a university, a national lab, or in your own garage, most scientific endeavors cost money. And when it comes to funding for science, the money is painfully limited. The rejection rate of NSF proposals is somewhere between 80% and 90%. This means there's fierce competition, and scientsts are as competive as any other group. The instant someone publishes something questionable, others pounce on it and try to verify or discredit it. Discrediting another scientist's work is a great way to eliminate them from the competition pool.
Now, let's say a scientist had some solid, objective evidence that there was some kind of unexplainable gap in evolutionary history (because obviously there are mountains of explanable non-gaps). I think they would have a hard time getting that published, because nobody would believe it.
Accidental conspiracies do happen, because scientists can be really stupid. A friend of mine got a paper rejected once because he pointed out the Dijkstra's shortest path algorithm would be faster than Bellman-Ford for any sizable input set. Because, as any CS undergrad knows, an O(n log n) algorithm will be much faster than an O(n squared) algorithm, even if the constant for the n log n algorithm is relatively huge. However, this one reviewer pointed to earlier work by some idiot who said that Bellman-Ford was faster, and the other reviewers swallowed it without thinking. Of course, he got it published somewhere else, but the point is that science does get wrongfully suppressed sometimes, and it can become wide-spread when a large body of scientists believe something that is incorrect. But people aren't getting together in lodges and making plans to fool the populace into believing something they know is wrong. Many scientists don't even think about that sort of thing, because they lack social inclinations.
With all these extra people running for president, isn't this just going to make the wrong person win? The US doesn't have runoffs or any of the other less flawed voting systems. Instead, the votes get split up among the better candidates, and then the least favorite is the one who wins.
Ok, so you can do a lot of coding without knowing math. So what? If you want to do anything really sophisticated, like design games or do high performance computing or any non-superficial use of a computer, you have to know math.
x86 is no longer a microarchitecture. It's just an ISA. It's a total abstraction, and in mid-range to high-end processors, its translation overhead (logic and latency) is minimal. Only in the lowest-end devices (Atom) is it any kind of burden, and ARM dominates in that space.
Yes, CISC is computersciencely evil, not orthogonal, crufty, and whatever else you want to call it. But these days, x86 is just an intermediate language between the compiler and the REAL execution engine.
Yes, they are filled with hate and legalism, which is exactly like those Pharisees that Jesus was taunting continually.
It's one thing to have a general sense that there might be a higher being that has influenced traditions through history. Some may think that's a silly idea, but it's general enough that you don't lose your sense of reality if someone disproves some factual aspects of your beliefs that you rely on heavily. Even within Christianity, I think that a lot of what we're taught to believe was made up long after Jesus' death. There are a lot of Christian concepts that I just don't think are all that critical, like original sin and the virgin birth. I can even imagine believing in Jesus having divinity without the need for his sinlessness or a resurrection. Sound crazy? It's hard to separate the core of Christianity from all the cruft that came later. The core of the religion is one of forgiveness. People do bad things. If you recognize that you did wrong, admit it, and resolve to change your ways (repent), then you will be forgiven. None of that changes if you dismiss any of these traditions I mentioned. I also admire the Christian Jesus (who may be an amalgam of real historical people) as a great philosopher and counter-cultural rebel.
I love the IDEA of LISP. I also slightly prefer Scheme, which to me is a bit more of a pure functional language. But in practice, I find it too much of a pain to use. I'm not accustomed to rethinking things recursively, and I totally get lost in all of the parentheses.
What many people don't realize about Common Lisp is that it's not really a functional language. It's functional-like. But there are side-effects and lots and lots of procedural constructs that seem out of place in a functional language. Consider the loop macro. It can loop over damn here anything efficiently, but it's not functional style. It's a domain-specific procedural language that you stick between parentheses within some Lisp code. Lisp has some features that make it supremely powerful. The code syntax and the data structure syntax are the SAME; that unification multiplies the power of the language in ways that are hard to describe. The macro facility is not equalled in any other language, because the macros are arbitrary Lisp code that is run at compile time that generates arbitrary Lisp code that then gets compiled. Lisp has also been around long enough that it's collected a huge number of libraries for just about anything, and the compilers are smart enough to produce some extremely efficient machine code.
So I really really want to use Lisp. It's just too much of a headache to deal with actually writing the code.
I've learned more languages than I can remember. C, Fortran, various BASICs, Ruby, Bash, C++, Java, JavaScript, HTML, CSS, SQL, Pascal, Ada, and so on. You know what my favorite language is? Verilog. What I enjoy most of all is designing chips. So I totally grok the theoretical value of languages like Lisp and Haskell, but I have the most fun designing circuits. That probably has a major influence on why I don't enjoy programming Lisp.
Check out "nyuzi.org". This is a fully functional open source GPU. It's synthesizable Verilog and works already in an FPGA. So not only is it more or less complete, but it also came out before MIAOW.
You can say what you want without necessarily being an asshole about it. Ok, I'm sure there are situations where being an asshole is warranted, but the idea is to not be *unnecessarily* rude or insulting when trying to make a point. Generally speaking, if you feel that you have to be rude or insulting, you probably just don't have a good point to make in the first place.
Anonymity is important so that people can make important points without fear or reprisal from one censoring government or another. However, that none of that requires one to act in an non-constructive way.
I'm not telling you what to do. If you want to be an asshole, go ahead. However, if you want intelligent people to LISTEN TO YOU, then being not an asshole is kindof an important component of your communication patterns.
This is related to the whole idea of being responsible with your freedoms. Just because you CAN (and should be allowed to) do something stupid doesn't mean that you SHOULD.
This is the problem. It seems like most Internet users act like morons. I'm not saying they ARE morons, but we all know how a degree of anonymity can cause people to lose control of their inhibitions about what they say. I've seen comment threads that were extremely informative, but that's rare, and mostly on the more obscure websites. Any website that attracts a broader spectrum of users is going to get a lot more moronic posts. People misunderstand the content, flame the content, flame each other, post SPAM, and just generally cause havoc. It's hard to find a signal in the noise. Even when people are well-meaning (which a lot of them are not), discussions can completely devolve.
Sites like slashdot and reddit, which are built on comments, have to have elaborate systems of moderation in order to keep the crap in check. Imagine a completely unmoderated system. It would be completely useless. Oh wait. We had usenet, and from the moment the AOLers got access, it went into decline, and now it's basically dead.
99% of everything on the Internet is crap. Statistically, that includes my comment as well.
What I can tell you is that I'll be using Safari, for instance, and it'll suddenly go into a fugue where it uses 100% of one CPU core (or sometimes more cores) for on the order of 5 minutes. During that time, other apps are also more sluggish (probably competing for access to disk I/O and the compressed swap, neither of which is multithreaded in MacOS).
It's unlikely to be the extensions. When I report this bug to Apple, they too are satisfied (as far as I can tell) that it's not the extensions. I have the following enabled:
ClickToFlash (this should actually be GOOD for the memory footprint)
Sessions (because Safari natively sucks at saving and restoring its state)
Google Scholar Button (which was only recently installed and has not affected anything)