I'm no expert on WWII, but I believe you're spot on about the U-boats. The German Navy revised their Enigma system several times during the war, leading to a ten month period in 1942, and a ten day period in 1943, when the Allies were unable to break Enigma--and the convoy losses to U-boats soared. Had Bletchley Park not been able to read the Enigma, the Battle of the Atlantic might have gone a lot differently, and it would have taken far longer to build up Allied forces for that invasion. (I have though wondered why the Germans didn't draw any conclusion from the timing of their successes, just after they changed the Enigma system, that the Allies had broken it.)
"Most have moral qualms about things in the Bible, like throwing one's virgin daughters to a mob to be gang-raped." Not sure where you're going with this, since that action is not presented in the Bible as something to be praised or emulated. The Bible is quite clear that there are evil people (in fact all of us, to one degree or another).
"Where do we get our consciences? Duh, from our upbringing. There's no need to hypothesize a God as a cause of a conscience." Maybe, although from what I hear some of it comes from our genes. That said, I think (ymmv) the interesting question is not so much where our consciences came from, but why anyone who does not believe in a God or gods believes there is such a thing as right or wrong. If one Sim destroys another Sim (erases its record on your hard drive, say), is it wrong?
> [Linux] doesn't run most of the software people need
That depends on what people. Most people need a browser, possibly an email program (although I suspect most people use a webmail interface). Those of us who do more things are in a minority. I typically have an email client, a file browser, a PDF reader/ annotator, puTTy connecting me to a Linux system, a programmer's editor...maybe a few other tools (LibreOffice, my banking app); but I'm not average. And you probably aren't either. Average is very over-rated, but in this case the average wins.
> In countries where most street cops mostly carry non-lethal ordinance (like nightsticks) only, > and the guns only come out when you ALREADY CONFIRMED the suspect you're about to > go after is likely to be armed - police hardly ever get shot, crime rates are low
How does this relate to what you said earlier in your posting: > Correlation does not imply causation
Ctrl-Esc doesn't work? I use that to get to the Start Menu in Win7, I would have assumed Ctrl-Esc would have a similar function in Win8 (which I have avoided ever using).
"control as a large key above shift and to the left of the 'A' key, in its proper place" Amen, preach it, brother! That's where God intended it to be.
And on computers where I have permissions to do so, the CapsLock key acts like a Ctrl key. It's a RegEdit hack in Windows; I think there's a similar way to do it in Linux. On most computers the CapsLock LED "knows" I've made the change, but on some keyboards the LED seems to still think that key is CapsLock.
I put the Ctrl keys to use by remapping most of them to be cursor movement keys, so I don't have to take my fingers off the alphabetic part of the keyboard to move the cursor.
1) How does robotic surgery compare to non-robotic surgery? (taking into account risk, as meloneg says) The answer to this could (in principle) help the patient decide which way to go.
2) What are the causes of errors, particularly errors that are unique to the particular method? The answer to this could (and I hope does!) improve the method.
> there really is not any difference between an A and an A. Not on paper, but there is in your head.
That's not to say that you didn't do a great job--if that was your original thinking, then I think you understood the information quite well. As Bengle points out in his response to your post, organizing the material into a "theory" (analogy) has allowed you to remember much of the information, probably long after other students--who might have had more details--forgot it. I had something of the same experience with organic chemistry (not biochem!). Decades after taking it, I can still reason through some of what I learned, even though I never applied it; I doubt that most people who took it back in 1970, and haven't used it since, can say the same thing.
>> critical thinking > Why can't the student's knowledge of logical fallacies be tested? There's far more to critical thinking than logical fallacies: understanding what someone is saying, cutting through the verbiage to the actual argument (assuming there is one!), questioning the assumptions (false assumptions ---> false results even if your logic is perfect), recognizing ad hominem arguments, understanding statistics (although perhaps you're including statistics in logic). Some of that can be tested, I imagine, but it's hard. You have to devise tests that can be computer graded (given the size of the testing population), and then validate the answers. Organizations like the ETS have, I believe, spent lots of time and money on that. I'm not familiar with the literature, so I'm not prepared to say it _can't_ be tested, but I wouldn't be surprised to find it's _not_ tested much.
> creativity >> Some say creativity can in fact be tested.
And some say it can't (http://www.experts123.com/q/can-creativity-be-tested.html). Now I have no idea whether the link I just gave is "right", but I don't know about the one you gave either. I suspect the problem is rather one of validating that tests of creativity predict something useful in the real world. One could say the same about most any other test, but I would _guess_ that it's more true of "creativity" than it is for most other tests. (Which may be the answer to the question you're responding to: we don't test for things when we can't ensure matter.)
> or learning skills. >> Learning skills such as critical thinking and creativity? (See above.)
Or the ability to see other points of view than your own, or to pay attention, or to synthesize different fields (math and physics, for example), or to stay awake in class or when reading the textbook, or to remember after the final exam, or to use the information you've been given in the class to explain real world events, or to arrange a pile of data into a predictive "theory" (more useful for some studies than others--in my own experience, more useful for inorganic or organic chemistry than for biochemistry, where afaict the facts might have been any number of different ways, but God chose one--perhaps for reasons known to Him, but not revealed to me).
In general, I think the AC you're responding to has a point: we tend to test for things that are easy to test for, and hope that they're important. Sort of the keys-under-the-lamppost problem. That said, there are plenty of proposals out there--like the creativity tests your link mentions--for testing other things. The questions are, 1) are they reproducible? 2) do they matter in the real world? and 3) can they be improved (by teaching or otherwise), or are they purely genetic (for example)?
And I hasten to add that there's a huge literature out there on this, about which I know nothing.
Duh! Even if the doctors don't huddle like that, this problem should have been easy to foresee. Any doctor who works at a small hospital would benefit, because serious cases get transported to regional hospitals with specialized/experienced staff. While the specialized/ experienced staff provide an edge for the severely sick, it is probably not enough to compensate for the fact that these patients are likely to do badly even with the best of care; so the doctors in those regional hospitals get penalized by the scores.
If there were an accurate, objective rating system of the seriousness of any given patient, that rating could be used to produce weighted statistics that might compensate for the above bias. But producing such a weighting system, validating it, and getting everyone to agree on it, would be difficult at best.
Agreed, Google simply ignores negative user feedback: I've seen it with Google Maps and Google News, and I hear there are other instances as well. I've stopped using anything Google, not that it makes an ounce of difference to them.
"Martian settlements – likely to be few in number and separated by large distances". One is also "few in number." The problem with these two edge cases (the above poster's zero, and my one) is the "separated by large distances" part.
I agree that FF has gotten a worse UI in recent versions; the one change that would make sense (IMHO) is to eliminate the "x" (= close this tab) on all but the active tab. At any rate, I just set up Pale Moon to see if I liked that better.
But FF isn't the only Mozilla program to have bizarre UI changes, Thunderbird did too. (I think the single thing that any email program could do that would help would be fast lookup based on search. I hate to say it, but Outlook does this reasonably well.)
And Mozilla isn't the only outfit to make UI changes for the sake of changes. Google did this with Google New, Google Forums, and most recently Google Maps (see the outrage in the forums over the changes). And Chrome lacks a real menu. Microsoft did it with the Ribbon, and more recently with Windows 8 (although in the latter case they had the sense to repent). I guess Gnome did it with v3.
Why do the programmers (or someone in these companies) think they know best what we users want/ need?
Then what is the speed of sound at the point where re-entering spacecraft hit the atmosphere? (I realize that "hit the atmosphere" is a relative term, so I suppose the question is what the speed of sound is at the point the spacecraft starts generating enough plasma to interfere with radio.) My guess is that it's nowhere near 8 km/sec / 5. But that's a guess...
Actually...25 years ago was 1990. Windows 3.0 had just come out.
I worked on a project once that used three programming languages. All three of them had gone through incompatibility-causing changes by the end of the project, and that in a space of three years. One was C; it went from 16 bits to 32 (which should tell you when this was). Since I was doing things that depended on the size of int (I was using ints--or maybe it was long ints--to encode things at the bit level), that was relevant. That would not have been too hard to fix. The second language was Prolog; the version I used also transitioned to 32 bits, and the vendor decided at the same time to change the way C calls were made. That would have been more difficult to change in my code. The third language was Smalltalk; the vendor was bought out by its competitor, who had an incompatible version. The version we used was dumped. That would have been a nearly complete re-write.
As a result, my next project encoded its information in XML, and I wrote a converter (in Python) to translate the XML to the programming language of a finite state transducer. When (not if) that transducer becomes obsolete, we'll change the converter. (Of course Python may go out in 25 years, but the converter is the simple part.) I do not expect XML to go obsolete soon, and when it does, at least the data is human-readable (and there will probably be a converter to whatever the replacement for XML is).
"It's absolutely baffling - That people will actually believe that 98% of all the world's scientists are engaged in a mass conspiracy"
I was not aware that 98% of the world's scientists were doing climate research. Now I _am_ worried about Ebola, because what ever happened to all that medical research "they" used to do? And I wonder what scientists all those nasty corporations you say are funding; must be the remaining 2%. Not to mention Bill Gatesand Warren Buffet (I guess those are some of the billionaires you say are funding deniers). There must be some rich scientists out there with all that money going to them.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm no expert on WWII, but I believe you're spot on about the U-boats. The German Navy revised their Enigma system several times during the war, leading to a ten month period in 1942, and a ten day period in 1943, when the Allies were unable to break Enigma--and the convoy losses to U-boats soared. Had Bletchley Park not been able to read the Enigma, the Battle of the Atlantic might have gone a lot differently, and it would have taken far longer to build up Allied forces for that invasion. (I have though wondered why the Germans didn't draw any conclusion from the timing of their successes, just after they changed the Enigma system, that the Allies had broken it.)
"you can't experience a universe in which you don't exist." More of those every day.
Not to mention a nice SciFi story several decades ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"Most have moral qualms about things in the Bible, like throwing one's virgin daughters to a mob to be gang-raped." Not sure where you're going with this, since that action is not presented in the Bible as something to be praised or emulated. The Bible is quite clear that there are evil people (in fact all of us, to one degree or another).
"Where do we get our consciences? Duh, from our upbringing. There's no need to hypothesize a God as a cause of a conscience." Maybe, although from what I hear some of it comes from our genes. That said, I think (ymmv) the interesting question is not so much where our consciences came from, but why anyone who does not believe in a God or gods believes there is such a thing as right or wrong. If one Sim destroys another Sim (erases its record on your hard drive, say), is it wrong?
Watt???! You may not be able to resist, but I amp sure you could revolt.
(I could continue, but under the current laws I could be found guilty of misconduct.)
> [Linux] doesn't run most of the software people need
That depends on what people. Most people need a browser, possibly an email program (although I suspect most people use a webmail interface). Those of us who do more things are in a minority. I typically have an email client, a file browser, a PDF reader/ annotator, puTTy connecting me to a Linux system, a programmer's editor...maybe a few other tools (LibreOffice, my banking app); but I'm not average. And you probably aren't either. Average is very over-rated, but in this case the average wins.
But this *is* the second bridge. Just because the first one got irreparably damaged by climate change ten thousand years ago...
> In countries where most street cops mostly carry non-lethal ordinance (like nightsticks) only,
> and the guns only come out when you ALREADY CONFIRMED the suspect you're about to
> go after is likely to be armed - police hardly ever get shot, crime rates are low
How does this relate to what you said earlier in your posting:
> Correlation does not imply causation
Meta-Hyper-Nonsense
Ctrl-Esc doesn't work? I use that to get to the Start Menu in Win7, I would have assumed Ctrl-Esc would have a similar function in Win8 (which I have avoided ever using).
"control as a large key above shift and to the left of the 'A' key, in its proper place" Amen, preach it, brother! That's where God intended it to be.
And on computers where I have permissions to do so, the CapsLock key acts like a Ctrl key. It's a RegEdit hack in Windows; I think there's a similar way to do it in Linux. On most computers the CapsLock LED "knows" I've made the change, but on some keyboards the LED seems to still think that key is CapsLock.
I put the Ctrl keys to use by remapping most of them to be cursor movement keys, so I don't have to take my fingers off the alphabetic part of the keyboard to move the cursor.
I think there are two measures, both valid:
1) How does robotic surgery compare to non-robotic surgery? (taking into account risk, as meloneg says) The answer to this could (in principle) help the patient decide which way to go.
2) What are the causes of errors, particularly errors that are unique to the particular method? The answer to this could (and I hope does!) improve the method.
> there really is not any difference between an A and an A.
Not on paper, but there is in your head.
That's not to say that you didn't do a great job--if that was your original thinking, then I think you understood the information quite well. As Bengle points out in his response to your post, organizing the material into a "theory" (analogy) has allowed you to remember much of the information, probably long after other students--who might have had more details--forgot it. I had something of the same experience with organic chemistry (not biochem!). Decades after taking it, I can still reason through some of what I learned, even though I never applied it; I doubt that most people who took it back in 1970, and haven't used it since, can say the same thing.
I'll take a shot.
>> critical thinking
> Why can't the student's knowledge of logical fallacies be tested?
There's far more to critical thinking than logical fallacies: understanding what someone is saying, cutting through the verbiage to the actual argument (assuming there is one!), questioning the assumptions (false assumptions ---> false results even if your logic is perfect), recognizing ad hominem arguments, understanding statistics (although perhaps you're including statistics in logic). Some of that can be tested, I imagine, but it's hard. You have to devise tests that can be computer graded (given the size of the testing population), and then validate the answers. Organizations like the ETS have, I believe, spent lots of time and money on that. I'm not familiar with the literature, so I'm not prepared to say it _can't_ be tested, but I wouldn't be surprised to find it's _not_ tested much.
> creativity
>> Some say creativity can in fact be tested.
And some say it can't (http://www.experts123.com/q/can-creativity-be-tested.html). Now I have no idea whether the link I just gave is "right", but I don't know about the one you gave either. I suspect the problem is rather one of validating that tests of creativity predict something useful in the real world. One could say the same about most any other test, but I would _guess_ that it's more true of "creativity" than it is for most other tests. (Which may be the answer to the question you're responding to: we don't test for things when we can't ensure matter.)
> or learning skills.
>> Learning skills such as critical thinking and creativity? (See above.)
Or the ability to see other points of view than your own, or to pay attention, or to synthesize different fields (math and physics, for example), or to stay awake in class or when reading the textbook, or to remember after the final exam, or to use the information you've been given in the class to explain real world events, or to arrange a pile of data into a predictive "theory" (more useful for some studies than others--in my own experience, more useful for inorganic or organic chemistry than for biochemistry, where afaict the facts might have been any number of different ways, but God chose one--perhaps for reasons known to Him, but not revealed to me).
In general, I think the AC you're responding to has a point: we tend to test for things that are easy to test for, and hope that they're important. Sort of the keys-under-the-lamppost problem. That said, there are plenty of proposals out there--like the creativity tests your link mentions--for testing other things. The questions are, 1) are they reproducible? 2) do they matter in the real world? and 3) can they be improved (by teaching or otherwise), or are they purely genetic (for example)?
And I hasten to add that there's a huge literature out there on this, about which I know nothing.
Duh! Even if the doctors don't huddle like that, this problem should have been easy to foresee. Any doctor who works at a small hospital would benefit, because serious cases get transported to regional hospitals with specialized/experienced staff. While the specialized/ experienced staff provide an edge for the severely sick, it is probably not enough to compensate for the fact that these patients are likely to do badly even with the best of care; so the doctors in those regional hospitals get penalized by the scores.
If there were an accurate, objective rating system of the seriousness of any given patient, that rating could be used to produce weighted statistics that might compensate for the above bias. But producing such a weighting system, validating it, and getting everyone to agree on it, would be difficult at best.
Agreed, Google simply ignores negative user feedback: I've seen it with Google Maps and Google News, and I hear there are other instances as well. I've stopped using anything Google, not that it makes an ounce of difference to them.
No future is almost consistent with more of a future.
As it happens, no one owns the right-of-ways on Mars; I imagine you could buy them up cheaply. Not too many road crossings to worry about, either.
"Martian settlements – likely to be few in number and separated by large distances". One is also "few in number." The problem with these two edge cases (the above poster's zero, and my one) is the "separated by large distances" part.
I agree that FF has gotten a worse UI in recent versions; the one change that would make sense (IMHO) is to eliminate the "x" (= close this tab) on all but the active tab. At any rate, I just set up Pale Moon to see if I liked that better.
But FF isn't the only Mozilla program to have bizarre UI changes, Thunderbird did too. (I think the single thing that any email program could do that would help would be fast lookup based on search. I hate to say it, but Outlook does this reasonably well.)
And Mozilla isn't the only outfit to make UI changes for the sake of changes. Google did this with Google New, Google Forums, and most recently Google Maps (see the outrage in the forums over the changes). And Chrome lacks a real menu. Microsoft did it with the Ribbon, and more recently with Windows 8 (although in the latter case they had the sense to repent). I guess Gnome did it with v3.
Why do the programmers (or someone in these companies) think they know best what we users want/ need?
Then what is the speed of sound at the point where re-entering spacecraft hit the atmosphere? (I realize that "hit the atmosphere" is a relative term, so I suppose the question is what the speed of sound is at the point the spacecraft starts generating enough plasma to interfere with radio.) My guess is that it's nowhere near 8 km/sec / 5. But that's a guess...
Actually...25 years ago was 1990. Windows 3.0 had just come out.
I worked on a project once that used three programming languages. All three of them had gone through incompatibility-causing changes by the end of the project, and that in a space of three years. One was C; it went from 16 bits to 32 (which should tell you when this was). Since I was doing things that depended on the size of int (I was using ints--or maybe it was long ints--to encode things at the bit level), that was relevant. That would not have been too hard to fix. The second language was Prolog; the version I used also transitioned to 32 bits, and the vendor decided at the same time to change the way C calls were made. That would have been more difficult to change in my code. The third language was Smalltalk; the vendor was bought out by its competitor, who had an incompatible version. The version we used was dumped. That would have been a nearly complete re-write.
As a result, my next project encoded its information in XML, and I wrote a converter (in Python) to translate the XML to the programming language of a finite state transducer. When (not if) that transducer becomes obsolete, we'll change the converter. (Of course Python may go out in 25 years, but the converter is the simple part.) I do not expect XML to go obsolete soon, and when it does, at least the data is human-readable (and there will probably be a converter to whatever the replacement for XML is).
As Yogi Berra didn't say, the future's not what it used to be.
Sure. Come to the graveyard in a hundred years and collect. You'll be around then, I presume.
"It's absolutely baffling - That people will actually believe that 98% of all the world's scientists are engaged in a mass conspiracy"
I was not aware that 98% of the world's scientists were doing climate research. Now I _am_ worried about Ebola, because what ever happened to all that medical research "they" used to do? And I wonder what scientists all those nasty corporations you say are funding; must be the remaining 2%. Not to mention Bill Gatesand Warren Buffet (I guess those are some of the billionaires you say are funding deniers). There must be some rich scientists out there with all that money going to them.