And here I thought it was so they wouldn't have to listen to the passengers giving them directions.
But all seriousness aside, *how* would a subway passenger have any sense of distance? You're down in a dark tunnel, and for that matter you almost never look out the front (or even the back) of the car; you're looking out the side at the tunnel walls, with no real sense of speed. Even direction is hard to tell, you have only your inner ears to tell, and they're notoriously bad at that. Sometimes you can look forward through the next car and see the curvature of the train, but without knowing your speed, you can't tell how far you've turned.
For that matter, when I used to go caving, it was very hard to get a sense of direction or distance unless we were mapping the cave; and very hard even then to correlate that with above-ground distance. You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike--or all different.
There are plenty of things for which XML databases make sense. We use it for dictionaries (and so does everyone else I know who works on dictionaries). I have no idea whether it makes sense for the government insurance data, but it certainly has application outside of DocBook. (And yes, I also do XML DocBook.)
I've heard that if you kiss a frog, it may turn into a prince. (I think it has to be a male frog.) Wonder what happens if you kiss a pig; using lipstick on a pig might make that experiment easier.
This is certainly true. An Englishman's way of speaking absolutely classifies him. The moment he opens his mouth, he makes some other Englishman despise him. The Scotch and the Irish bring you close to tears. There even are places where English completely disappears; in America, they haven't spoken it for years.
"I found that in organic chemistry once you have a few basic rules, the rest was intuitive derivation." Agreed (at least when I took organic chem, 40+ years ago); see my post a few pages up. Biochem, on the other hand, seemed to me to be just the opposite--nearly all rote memorization. And biochem is probably much more relevant to the physician.
I think the point of Bayesian analysis is not so much that different factors get different weights; that much is usually intuitively obvious. What is not so obvious (to take one example) is the meaning of false positives in tests.
"...understanding of bonding behavior of organic compounds so that they can later extrapolate that knowledge to biochemical processes." I have a post a page or two up from this relating my own experience in organic chem vs. biochem. I was unable to extrapolate almost anything from organic chem (where I excelled) to biochem (which I barely passed). I guess that could have been my stupidity, but I don't think so (I had a high A in organic chem, and the top grade in the class by a wide margin in quantitative analysis).
(It could be that the subject matter of organic chem has changed in the 40+ years since I took it, so that it is now much more like biochem to begin with. In which case my experience is irrelevant to the present situation.)
"the brightest student in my organic chemistry class can only get about 60% of the answers correct... She was a 4.0 student in biochemistry." I had exactly the opposite experience for her, and I think there's a reason. (Bear in mind, I took organic chem and biochem more than 40 years ago, and biochem at least has changed greatly since then.)
In organic chemistry (I refuse to call it orgo), I was able to learn a small set of principles (relative bond strengths of single, double and triple bonded carbons, to take a simple example); from that small set, I was able to deduce most everything else. I got a high A in organic chem. Same in quantitative analysis, only more so. Then came biochem. It was an undergrad - grad course, meaning that if you got a C you were viewed as flunking. I passed, with a very low B.
The difference was that almost nothing in biochem appeared to follow from basic principles. The Krebbs cycle, for example, had to be memorized. And I was no good at memorization; in organic chem, I had needed to memorize very little, everything was logical. I suppose if you are God, then biochem follows more or less logically; but then if you're God, you can remember it anyway. But I think that's the big difference between organic chem (and quantitative analysis, and probably most other forms of chemistry), vs. biochem: mostly logic vs. mostly memorization. That's not to say there's no logical thought required for biochem; we wouldn't know anything about it if we didn't employ logical methods to reason through what is otherwise a soup of data. But when you're learning biochem, you have to slog through a lot of data and not so much theory.
So I'm not convinced it has anything to do with the teaching methodology. I think it's the material, and how you as an individual approach learning it.
I hear "this is new" in lots of "soft" fields, when it appears to me that it's really same-old same-old. I'm not disagreeing, but I am curious: how much of this doctrine is really new, and how much of it is doing the same thing while saying we're doing something new?
> Most educated people marveled it lasted as long as it did.
And I am calling your bluff.
I was there too (born 1950), am educated, and I don't recall anyone saying this, except maybe some right-wingers who wanted to believe it (like some right-wingers wanted to believe Iraq would become a model for democracy in the Middle East). Citations?
Agreed! I did a search to find if anyone else thought 24% was big, otherwise I could be the first responder. In a way, I'm glad I wasn't the first--shows not everyone here is stupid.
Slashdot Mirror
I guess since no one has gotten sent to Gitmo since I don't know when, no one is posting, emailing, or using a cell phone, right? Sheez.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yxBT1pfVAKQ
Wrong.
And here I thought it was so they wouldn't have to listen to the passengers giving them directions.
But all seriousness aside, *how* would a subway passenger have any sense of distance? You're down in a dark tunnel, and for that matter you almost never look out the front (or even the back) of the car; you're looking out the side at the tunnel walls, with no real sense of speed. Even direction is hard to tell, you have only your inner ears to tell, and they're notoriously bad at that. Sometimes you can look forward through the next car and see the curvature of the train, but without knowing your speed, you can't tell how far you've turned.
For that matter, when I used to go caving, it was very hard to get a sense of direction or distance unless we were mapping the cave; and very hard even then to correlate that with above-ground distance. You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike--or all different.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ftgAG3Vnif8 @0:18
http://www.patriotresource.com/lotr/places/mirror.html
There are plenty of things for which XML databases make sense. We use it for dictionaries (and so does everyone else I know who works on dictionaries). I have no idea whether it makes sense for the government insurance data, but it certainly has application outside of DocBook. (And yes, I also do XML DocBook.)
Wonder if they'll open source this? If it takes off, they're going to spend a lot of time to maintain it. If they open sourced it, otoh...
I've heard that if you kiss a frog, it may turn into a prince. (I think it has to be a male frog.) Wonder what happens if you kiss a pig; using lipstick on a pig might make that experiment easier.
Todos sus basos son pertenece a nosotros
This is certainly true. An Englishman's way of speaking absolutely classifies him. The moment he opens his mouth, he makes some other Englishman despise him. The Scotch and the Irish bring you close to tears. There even are places where English completely disappears; in America, they haven't spoken it for years.
If you're much younger than me, you won't understand this comment.
"I found that in organic chemistry once you have a few basic rules, the rest was intuitive derivation." Agreed (at least when I took organic chem, 40+ years ago); see my post a few pages up. Biochem, on the other hand, seemed to me to be just the opposite--nearly all rote memorization. And biochem is probably much more relevant to the physician.
I think the point of Bayesian analysis is not so much that different factors get different weights; that much is usually intuitively obvious. What is not so obvious (to take one example) is the meaning of false positives in tests.
"...understanding of bonding behavior of organic compounds so that they can later extrapolate that knowledge to biochemical processes." I have a post a page or two up from this relating my own experience in organic chem vs. biochem. I was unable to extrapolate almost anything from organic chem (where I excelled) to biochem (which I barely passed). I guess that could have been my stupidity, but I don't think so (I had a high A in organic chem, and the top grade in the class by a wide margin in quantitative analysis).
(It could be that the subject matter of organic chem has changed in the 40+ years since I took it, so that it is now much more like biochem to begin with. In which case my experience is irrelevant to the present situation.)
"the brightest student in my organic chemistry class can only get about 60% of the answers correct... She was a 4.0 student in biochemistry." I had exactly the opposite experience for her, and I think there's a reason. (Bear in mind, I took organic chem and biochem more than 40 years ago, and biochem at least has changed greatly since then.)
In organic chemistry (I refuse to call it orgo), I was able to learn a small set of principles (relative bond strengths of single, double and triple bonded carbons, to take a simple example); from that small set, I was able to deduce most everything else. I got a high A in organic chem. Same in quantitative analysis, only more so. Then came biochem. It was an undergrad - grad course, meaning that if you got a C you were viewed as flunking. I passed, with a very low B.
The difference was that almost nothing in biochem appeared to follow from basic principles. The Krebbs cycle, for example, had to be memorized. And I was no good at memorization; in organic chem, I had needed to memorize very little, everything was logical. I suppose if you are God, then biochem follows more or less logically; but then if you're God, you can remember it anyway. But I think that's the big difference between organic chem (and quantitative analysis, and probably most other forms of chemistry), vs. biochem: mostly logic vs. mostly memorization. That's not to say there's no logical thought required for biochem; we wouldn't know anything about it if we didn't employ logical methods to reason through what is otherwise a soup of data. But when you're learning biochem, you have to slog through a lot of data and not so much theory.
So I'm not convinced it has anything to do with the teaching methodology. I think it's the material, and how you as an individual approach learning it.
...but an absence of citations might.
I hear "this is new" in lots of "soft" fields, when it appears to me that it's really same-old same-old. I'm not disagreeing, but I am curious: how much of this doctrine is really new, and how much of it is doing the same thing while saying we're doing something new?
> Most educated people marveled it lasted as long as it did.
And I am calling your bluff.
I was there too (born 1950), am educated, and I don't recall anyone saying this, except maybe some right-wingers who wanted to believe it (like some right-wingers wanted to believe Iraq would become a model for democracy in the Middle East). Citations?
"In Latin, Jehovah starts with an 'I'." --Indiana Jones
Agreed! I did a search to find if anyone else thought 24% was big, otherwise I could be the first responder. In a way, I'm glad I wasn't the first--shows not everyone here is stupid.
Ah, but if you fuse two morons together, half the time an Alpha male is emitted.
Where are they?
Didn't they do that in Inception, and come out ok?
If you think you yourself compute, then I guess you must be paranoid--otherwise there'd be no observer decoding what you're doing. Right?