Housing has a lot to do with that because in the UK at least housing isn't included in inflation calculations.
I disagree about it being thankless though. I've got more thanks doing IT support and programming than doing almost anything else. And I've done a lot of jobs.
I don't think the problems with Western education systems are caused by a lack of computers, or even a lack of any kind of resource.
The problems we have are caused by the attitudes of many of the parents and students and the lack of a stable and sound education policy and curriculum. Politicians and voters in the West are easily fooled by the money + good intentions = results equation, which is consistently failing to work. In the developing world, on the other hand, where the bottleneck is a lack of resources, a laptop can make a huge difference.
I've read loads of these columns, where tech writers try to be an 'average' user, and then complain about what they think might be difficult to use in Ubuntu. IMO these are worthless.
What we really need to see are some real Linux noobs to be given Ubuntu, and then an assessment of how they get on over a period of hours, days or weeks as they try to go about their business, given their background knowledge and the support services that are typically available. Would be harder to do I suppose, and would have the disadvantage of not knowing what the results would be before starting.
Well I agree with most of that, but it doesn't really answer my comment. I was mostly concerned with your analogy to the fascist science of the 20th century, which was wholly unfair.
I don't think the critisism from Linda Skitka makes any sense, and that comment was based on speculation rather than any actual evidence.
It certainly would be interesting to repeat this research in a socialist country, which would test your hypothesis.
I would also disagree that public funding of broadcasting 'corrupts' journalists. It does seem to me though that public broadcasting appears to attract left wing people, which is a completely different thing, although I suppose the effect is much the same.
Do you think that it isn't appropriate to try to find biological reasons for the differences in political opinions? Even if they exist, and can provide insights into the way people, perhaps people with liberal, conservative or even fundementalist views think.
Or do you disagree somehow with the methodology? In which case perhaps you could volunteer your scientific brilliance to referee future articles for Nature Neurology, which is one of the best neurology journals around.
TFA says nothing about being smart or stupid, and explicitly cautions against such interpretations. If you think that looking for differences between groups of people is inherently and unavoidably prejudicial, then you're wrong. A lot of potentially useful research is currently being help up or prevented by a refusal to acknowledge real differences between people. For example, why a particular group has a higher death rate or more poverty, or indeed seems to produce more political extremeists.
If everything I needed was Open Access then I wouldn't need to use my research library at all. At the moment all my research library does is manage the subscriptions that my University has with journals.
So in an Open Access academic environment, would we still need libraries?
The current model for the dissemination of scientific research is that scientists send letters and papers to journals, which are then peer assessed by reviewers assigned by the journal and, if they meet a certain standard, are printed. Journals used to be printed and sent to subscribers, and nobody complained that they had to pay to receive a copy of the journal.
Now journals can put papers online for their subscribers instead of printing, which makes people wonder exactly what the publishers are doing for the money they expect to get. They don't write the articles or pay the authors, and they don't review them or pay the reviewers (I write and review pretty regularly). But this remains the only accepted way to release your research, to appear in a well respected journal. The journals are now trading purely on reputations they have aquired for the standards of the work they accept.
Public Library of Science, as I understand it, is an online repository of research that is open to everybody. There are also several PLoS journals, that appear online and for free and perform most of the functions of the old paper journals and their online equivilants. PLoS is also gaining a good reputation for quality.
Traditional publishers are in trouble because of this, and will inevitably make some rather desperate arguments to preserve their business models, hence the article.
I don't think standardisation will help. On the contrary, a rigid well documented standardised procedure for approvals will make it far easier for a large corporation to understand the process and exploit or subvert it, with ISO then stuck in its own standards.
What's more important is transparency, that each member documents exactly the process by which it reached a particular decision, and that decisions within each member of ISO, not necessarily across members, are roughly consistent.
Most of the content isn't paid for with public money. The BBC buys rights to broadcast using public money, but that doesn't give it the right to distribute the content however it likes. That's the issue here. The BBC needs a system that will satisfy the rights holders.
I have searched the BBC Trust Website for any evidence of a change of heart, and found none.
This is exactly the same response they gave in the original approval for the iPlayer service.
Full text of the decision from April this year can be found here. From this document:
..In response to a submission from the BBC Executive, we are
dropping our two-year deadline for achieving platform neutrality on seven-day catch-up TV
and will instead audit the Executive's progress every six months.
I would suggest something like the OLPC as an everything. Yes, it's geared for children but I guess you're kind of dealing with... well, in some cases degenerated minds.
'In some cases' is the key phrase here. In most homes there will be enough people who are perfectly capable of using a computer.
In short, my advice is to find the one of them with the most clue or potential for clue and make him/her the sys admin. Then let them do what they like.
I work in geriatric psychiatry and my group has been interviewing older people in institutions to understand in what way their needs are or are not being met. A common theme that arises among the cognitively intact (who are quite often smarter than most of us) is that they feel useless, they can see there are needs within their environment that are not met and they are not empwered to do anything about it. This upsets them greatly.
You've probably got people in your home who were in techincal jobs before they retired, and are more than capable of looking after a couple of PCs. Give them some Linux CDs or Windows or whatever and a good book and let them figure it out. They've probably got nothing better to do.
They'll feel empowered, they'll teach their friends, and leave you alone. Don't patronise them, don't give them a crippled system.
It seems odd that the number would be completely meaningless. You take a huge complex chain, you decide that the sequence of base pairs in the chain is significant, but you decide that breaking this chain into two pieces is not significant? If it's so insignificant then why is it (usually) replicated so consistently? If a chromosome just randomly breaks somewhere, will a centromere just automagically form in the center of the two pieces so that they can replicate themselves the next time the cell decides to divide?
Rearranging the order of genes is not always important in a functional sense - imaging changing the order in which functions are defined in a some software, or moving some definitions around from one file to another. That's certainly different to changing what goes on inside each function. Lots of people are walking around right now totally oblivious to their strange karyotypes. Obviously deletions and duplications are another matter entirely.
And I don't know the answer regarding new centromeres but I can think of two possibilities - either pseudocentromeres already exist somewhere along the chromosome that come to life, or chromosomes break at the centromere, forming two new acentric chromsomes.
The reason we have 46 chromosomes is that chromosomes accidentially break (or join together, or swap bits of material) sometimes during cell divisions.
I think you're right. You need to compare spending on music between those who do download and those that don't. But you'd have to be really careful to choose people who don't download only because of some technical problem like lack of access to a suitable internet connection, rather than because they fundementally differ somehow in their music tastes or shopping habits.
There must be some effect here. I know plenty of people who don't buy any music at all, but certainly would if they couldn't download it for nothing. Obviously the 1 to 1 correspondence between downloading and lost sales isn't useful, but does anybody know of any reasonable estimates of what the loss actually is? Or even how you'd calculate it?
This makes a lot of sense to me. Kids are inherently trusting, and this is not something a lot of parents can teach, since they often aren't very good at it themselves.
It does need a good teacher though, or maybe a policeman from an online crime division or something, a bit like when the traffic police come to talk about road safety.
I also think a lot of my students could do with a course on how not to document their entire lives on Facebook.
In London, public transport use in monitored through personal pre-pay Oyster cards. True, you don't have to use one, but then you get charged about twice as much for your journey.
I think its quite a good point. There might be an overall cost benefit anyway, maybe saving in other communications areas or in preventive health or in education if you put these in every household.
Slashdot Mirror
Housing has a lot to do with that because in the UK at least housing isn't included in inflation calculations.
I disagree about it being thankless though. I've got more thanks doing IT support and programming than doing almost anything else. And I've done a lot of jobs.
I don't think the problems with Western education systems are caused by a lack of computers, or even a lack of any kind of resource.
The problems we have are caused by the attitudes of many of the parents and students and the lack of a stable and sound education policy and curriculum. Politicians and voters in the West are easily fooled by the money + good intentions = results equation, which is consistently failing to work. In the developing world, on the other hand, where the bottleneck is a lack of resources, a laptop can make a huge difference.
Insightful: exhibiting insight or clear and deep perception
Informative: tending to increase knowledge or dissipate ignorance
I've read loads of these columns, where tech writers try to be an 'average' user, and then complain about what they think might be difficult to use in Ubuntu. IMO these are worthless.
What we really need to see are some real Linux noobs to be given Ubuntu, and then an assessment of how they get on over a period of hours, days or weeks as they try to go about their business, given their background knowledge and the support services that are typically available. Would be harder to do I suppose, and would have the disadvantage of not knowing what the results would be before starting.
Well I agree with most of that, but it doesn't really answer my comment. I was mostly concerned with your analogy to the fascist science of the 20th century, which was wholly unfair.
I don't think the critisism from Linda Skitka makes any sense, and that comment was based on speculation rather than any actual evidence.
It certainly would be interesting to repeat this research in a socialist country, which would test your hypothesis.
I would also disagree that public funding of broadcasting 'corrupts' journalists. It does seem to me though that public broadcasting appears to attract left wing people, which is a completely different thing, although I suppose the effect is much the same.
What exactly is your problem with this research?
Do you think that it isn't appropriate to try to find biological reasons for the differences in political opinions? Even if they exist, and can provide insights into the way people, perhaps people with liberal, conservative or even fundementalist views think.
Or do you disagree somehow with the methodology? In which case perhaps you could volunteer your scientific brilliance to referee future articles for Nature Neurology, which is one of the best neurology journals around.
TFA says nothing about being smart or stupid, and explicitly cautions against such interpretations. If you think that looking for differences between groups of people is inherently and unavoidably prejudicial, then you're wrong. A lot of potentially useful research is currently being help up or prevented by a refusal to acknowledge real differences between people. For example, why a particular group has a higher death rate or more poverty, or indeed seems to produce more political extremeists.
123456789123456789123456789123456789123456789
That's how to test uniformity, but not randomness.
Electronic journals don't need housing. Back issues are being scanned and made available fast. I don't have to leave my desk to get current journals.
Most of the rest of your comment was 'library exists to support library'.
If everything I needed was Open Access then I wouldn't need to use my research library at all. At the moment all my research library does is manage the subscriptions that my University has with journals.
So in an Open Access academic environment, would we still need libraries?
The current model for the dissemination of scientific research is that scientists send letters and papers to journals, which are then peer assessed by reviewers assigned by the journal and, if they meet a certain standard, are printed. Journals used to be printed and sent to subscribers, and nobody complained that they had to pay to receive a copy of the journal.
Now journals can put papers online for their subscribers instead of printing, which makes people wonder exactly what the publishers are doing for the money they expect to get. They don't write the articles or pay the authors, and they don't review them or pay the reviewers (I write and review pretty regularly). But this remains the only accepted way to release your research, to appear in a well respected journal. The journals are now trading purely on reputations they have aquired for the standards of the work they accept.
Public Library of Science, as I understand it, is an online repository of research that is open to everybody. There are also several PLoS journals, that appear online and for free and perform most of the functions of the old paper journals and their online equivilants. PLoS is also gaining a good reputation for quality.
Traditional publishers are in trouble because of this, and will inevitably make some rather desperate arguments to preserve their business models, hence the article.
I don't think standardisation will help. On the contrary, a rigid well documented standardised procedure for approvals will make it far easier for a large corporation to understand the process and exploit or subvert it, with ISO then stuck in its own standards.
What's more important is transparency, that each member documents exactly the process by which it reached a particular decision, and that decisions within each member of ISO, not necessarily across members, are roughly consistent.
Most of the content isn't paid for with public money. The BBC buys rights to broadcast using public money, but that doesn't give it the right to distribute the content however it likes. That's the issue here. The BBC needs a system that will satisfy the rights holders.
The BBC isn't the rights holder to most of the stuff it broadcasts, so it isn't really up to them.
I have searched the BBC Trust Website for any evidence of a change of heart, and found none.
This is exactly the same response they gave in the original approval for the iPlayer service.
Full text of the decision from April this year can be found here. From this document:
I think the post was really complaining about the inappropriate use of a 2x2 contingency table.
An analysis of the continuous corruption scores would have been a far better and more powerful use of the data.
I agree with you about the one-tailed test though.
I would suggest something like the OLPC as an everything. Yes, it's geared for children but I guess you're kind of dealing with ... well, in some cases degenerated minds.
'In some cases' is the key phrase here. In most homes there will be enough people who are perfectly capable of using a computer.
In short, my advice is to find the one of them with the most clue or potential for clue and make him/her the sys admin. Then let them do what they like.
I work in geriatric psychiatry and my group has been interviewing older people in institutions to understand in what way their needs are or are not being met. A common theme that arises among the cognitively intact (who are quite often smarter than most of us) is that they feel useless, they can see there are needs within their environment that are not met and they are not empwered to do anything about it. This upsets them greatly.
You've probably got people in your home who were in techincal jobs before they retired, and are more than capable of looking after a couple of PCs. Give them some Linux CDs or Windows or whatever and a good book and let them figure it out. They've probably got nothing better to do.
They'll feel empowered, they'll teach their friends, and leave you alone. Don't patronise them, don't give them a crippled system.
It seems odd that the number would be completely meaningless. You take a huge complex chain, you decide that the sequence of base pairs in the chain is significant, but you decide that breaking this chain into two pieces is not significant? If it's so insignificant then why is it (usually) replicated so consistently? If a chromosome just randomly breaks somewhere, will a centromere just automagically form in the center of the two pieces so that they can replicate themselves the next time the cell decides to divide?
Rearranging the order of genes is not always important in a functional sense - imaging changing the order in which functions are defined in a some software, or moving some definitions around from one file to another. That's certainly different to changing what goes on inside each function. Lots of people are walking around right now totally oblivious to their strange karyotypes. Obviously deletions and duplications are another matter entirely.
And I don't know the answer regarding new centromeres but I can think of two possibilities - either pseudocentromeres already exist somewhere along the chromosome that come to life, or chromosomes break at the centromere, forming two new acentric chromsomes.
The reason we have 46 chromosomes is that chromosomes accidentially break (or join together, or swap bits of material) sometimes during cell divisions.
I think you're right. You need to compare spending on music between those who do download and those that don't. But you'd have to be really careful to choose people who don't download only because of some technical problem like lack of access to a suitable internet connection, rather than because they fundementally differ somehow in their music tastes or shopping habits.
There must be some effect here. I know plenty of people who don't buy any music at all, but certainly would if they couldn't download it for nothing. Obviously the 1 to 1 correspondence between downloading and lost sales isn't useful, but does anybody know of any reasonable estimates of what the loss actually is? Or even how you'd calculate it?
This makes a lot of sense to me. Kids are inherently trusting, and this is not something a lot of parents can teach, since they often aren't very good at it themselves.
It does need a good teacher though, or maybe a policeman from an online crime division or something, a bit like when the traffic police come to talk about road safety.
I also think a lot of my students could do with a course on how not to document their entire lives on Facebook.
I read the title as 'MIT Focuses on Chimp Optimization.'
Thought maybe they'd been having trouble recruiting.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specialist_school
Public transport is not immune to tracking.
In London, public transport use in monitored through personal pre-pay Oyster cards. True, you don't have to use one, but then you get charged about twice as much for your journey.
Why has this been modded troll?
I think its quite a good point. There might be an overall cost benefit anyway, maybe saving in other communications areas or in preventive health or in education if you put these in every household.