I have a rev-b G5 iMac in my office now, which is exactly 6 years old this month. It runs iTunes 9 fine (well, as well as iTunes 9 runs on anything; I don't use it at work for anything). I don't know which version of Safari is on there. I'd meant to wipe and and reinstall to upgrade to Leopard, but never bothered. Still chugging along fine.
I think the best is when a room full of university students taking an exam abruptly find themselves sitting in the dark when the lights time out. Since no one knows where the motion sensor is to wave at it, you find everyone including the professor wildly flailing their arms around for a moment.
As an avid iPad user, I think I agree with your assessment. I was given mine and it took me about 4 months to figure out what it was for. But now that I have, I don't want to go back to life without it. It beats the hell out of a laptop in a lot of situations. (However, it cannot replace my laptop entirely.)
I'm convinced that the human brain is more neuroplastic than that. Like when they make test subjects wear glasses that flip everything upside-down. Disorienting at first, but their brains adjust to it and perceive it as normal eventually.
The question is whether it's worth the neurological effort to adapt to paradoxical focal and convergence distances for two hours then have to switch back. It seems to take some people longer than others to make that switch, some people get disoriented switching back, and some cannot seem to make the switch at all in that amount of time.
What disappoints me is that these are consumption-only devices -- No User-Serviceable Parts Inside. This won't help students learn how computers work or how to write software.
This is exactly what I was thinking. This is miles away from, say, Maine's laptop program. I've seen what those kids are doing with their laptops. You give kids a powerful tool and you get amazing products from them. Sadly, people are going to be impressed by what these kids do with these tablets, not even realizing that they've been hobbled by the limitations of the platform. I like my iPad for certain specific tasks, but "powerful tool" it isn't.
I really don't understand why "Settlers of Catan" hasn't caught on more in the U.S.
What does "caught on" look like? Every tabletop gamer I know has a copy. Settlers of Catan is as hot a game as you're going to find in the U.S. The ceiling on Settlers of Catan is that most people don't play board games.
There are a lot of non-gamers who own a Monopoly, but they don't play it much. With the right marketing push, you might be able to get some of those people to buy a Settlers and stick it in the closet unused with their similarly-unused Monopoly board, but for the fact that it costs almost $40. Milton Bradley/Parker Bros. games can be had for under $20.
This really is the same issue with $1 phone games vs. $50 DS and PSP games. Lots of casuals who have low demands, but high numbers vs. the few connoisseurs who will pay for something they actually use and enjoy with more intensity.
Not to mention that the most important thing that will save pandas-- habitat preservation-- is the very thing that will protect many other species, as well as serving a positive benefit to humans (habitat provides a carbon sink, erosion and flood prevention, groundwater filtration, etc. or even just as land reserved for future generations to exploit). Protecting pandas has a lot of positive collateral effects.
I think they use the word "engineer" in the nautical sense rather than the academic degree sense. You need to be an engineer to be a "ship's engineer". I think traditional nautical terminology predates academic titles like yours, so there's not much you can do about it. On ST, when things are going normally, they are simply operators of equipment that others have constructed. When things go weird, Geordi did have to redesign things. I don't know how many others on his team had the skills to do that. (Besides O'Brien and Barclay, they were all just redshirts who happened to wear yellow, so it's hard to say).
Are you nuts? Have you ever been to grad school? I worked in my field before going back to get a PhD and I found my normal job to be way better. Research and academia may be insular, but it's plenty "real."
Speaking of "hunched over a desk." I have a friend who did get a job outside of academia doing biomed research. She left that job and went on disability from the abysmal ergonomics at her lab. I think she's a manager of the print shop at Staples now.
... The real issue I saw with the biology program is that you were unable to publish or graduate with a null result. You do a valid experiment, which could have shown something, but it turns out biology simply doesn't work that way, and so your experiment simply confirms what is currently known and shows nothing particularly new (but done in a new way, so it could have.) Sorry, you don't graduate...
Wow! That's awful. Bad for the students and bad for the field in general. How much wasted effort happens in disparate labs with people retrying things that someone else already learned isn't right, but left the data in the bottom drawer of a file cabinet? My advisor actually had me go looking for "bottom drawer" experiments when I did my first lit review (fortunately, my specialty is narrow enough that I can pretty much call everyone who is likely to have ever done that work in an afternoon). And she explicitly told me I didn't need a positive finding on my dissertation to defend it successfully.
It's a Fire Quadrangle. The fourth point is Chemical Reaction. Halon systems work from this angle. It doesn't deprive the fire of oxygen, it disrupts the oxidation process itself. Sounds like this magnetic beam does this also, in a different way.
Tobii's devices have a really quick calibration process. If you find your eye convergence changes as you fatigue, it's easy to just recalibrate once in a while to adjust.
Yeah. Tobii has been shipping some really sweet tablet communication devices for people with disabilities with eye tracking for a couple years now. I've played with a few of them and they work pretty well (though operating Windows with it is tiring). The price tag on that eye-tracker add-on is jaw-dropping. I'm hoping that this tech can go mainstream, making it come down in price to make it more available to people with special needs who need it.
"My son should have been buried with dignity, not with a bunch of clowns outside."
Adding more clowns does not improve things in any way at all.
Yes. The counter-protests at funerals need to be handled more respectfully.
However, WBC are going to be at Portsmouth New Hampshire's Seacoast Repertory Theater picketing their production of The Laramie Project later this week. Some street theater to accompany the theater happening inside would be great lulz. Portsmouth loves street theater.
I heard rumblings of a God Hates Shrimp counter-protest. I don't know however, if there will be too big of a showing as Seacoast Rep's response was to half their ticket price for this show, with the rationale that getting everybody inside to actually watch the play is the action most contrary to what WBC wants.
It was probably intentional that they did not give it a realistic, human-sounding voice. Research has shown that people do not want machines to appear too human. They react negatively.
Watson's speech synthesis sounded pretty comparable to the stuff I deal with every day (I work with speech generating devices for people with communication disabilities). Given that IBM already owns voice software, they probably used an off-the-shelf product from one of the other divisions of the company. I doubt that adding a custom voice was part of the mission of the Watson project. I'm not sure, regardless of the voice, that Watson would fall into the Uncanny Valley anyway. It wasn't even slightly human-like. And I've not seen any research that talks about an auditory-only Uncanny Valley. (If such a phenomenon existed, I'm pretty sure I'd have heard of it).
I would love for there to be more conservatives in education. Unfortunately, conservatives believe in _self-interest_ and are therefore unwilling to take positions at considerably below their market value. Currently our schools rely more on _altruism_ for retention than on providing staff with adequate market compensation. And the people motivated by altruism, surprise, surprise, are overwhelmingly Democrats. That's what happens when you insist that people take a difficult and poorly compensated job out of the goodness of their heart
I agree with your entire post and would add something else--not that long ago, the only reason we were able to get qualified people at all is because teaching was one of the only jobs women could get after getting a degree. While it hasn't been like that for a few decades, a lot of teachers (my mother among them) who went into teaching because they couldn't have a career as a scientist after getting a degree in science, are at retirement age and we as a society are having trouble replacing them because teaching pays so poorly compared to other options.
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I have a rev-b G5 iMac in my office now, which is exactly 6 years old this month. It runs iTunes 9 fine (well, as well as iTunes 9 runs on anything; I don't use it at work for anything). I don't know which version of Safari is on there. I'd meant to wipe and and reinstall to upgrade to Leopard, but never bothered. Still chugging along fine.
I think the best is when a room full of university students taking an exam abruptly find themselves sitting in the dark when the lights time out. Since no one knows where the motion sensor is to wave at it, you find everyone including the professor wildly flailing their arms around for a moment.
It's in section 2.3, where he shows that e^(i tau) = 1.
Was it tl;dr? I'm not even average at maths compared to most /. posters, and even I could read the whole thing.
As an avid iPad user, I think I agree with your assessment. I was given mine and it took me about 4 months to figure out what it was for. But now that I have, I don't want to go back to life without it. It beats the hell out of a laptop in a lot of situations. (However, it cannot replace my laptop entirely.)
I'm convinced that the human brain is more neuroplastic than that. Like when they make test subjects wear glasses that flip everything upside-down. Disorienting at first, but their brains adjust to it and perceive it as normal eventually.
The question is whether it's worth the neurological effort to adapt to paradoxical focal and convergence distances for two hours then have to switch back. It seems to take some people longer than others to make that switch, some people get disoriented switching back, and some cannot seem to make the switch at all in that amount of time.
This is exactly what I was thinking. This is miles away from, say, Maine's laptop program. I've seen what those kids are doing with their laptops. You give kids a powerful tool and you get amazing products from them. Sadly, people are going to be impressed by what these kids do with these tablets, not even realizing that they've been hobbled by the limitations of the platform.
I like my iPad for certain specific tasks, but "powerful tool" it isn't.
What does "caught on" look like? Every tabletop gamer I know has a copy. Settlers of Catan is as hot a game as you're going to find in the U.S. The ceiling on Settlers of Catan is that most people don't play board games.
There are a lot of non-gamers who own a Monopoly, but they don't play it much. With the right marketing push, you might be able to get some of those people to buy a Settlers and stick it in the closet unused with their similarly-unused Monopoly board, but for the fact that it costs almost $40. Milton Bradley/Parker Bros. games can be had for under $20.
This really is the same issue with $1 phone games vs. $50 DS and PSP games. Lots of casuals who have low demands, but high numbers vs. the few connoisseurs who will pay for something they actually use and enjoy with more intensity.
Because being edible totally saved the passenger pigeon.
Not to mention that the most important thing that will save pandas-- habitat preservation-- is the very thing that will protect many other species, as well as serving a positive benefit to humans (habitat provides a carbon sink, erosion and flood prevention, groundwater filtration, etc. or even just as land reserved for future generations to exploit). Protecting pandas has a lot of positive collateral effects.
crap, I meant "DON'T need to be an engineer to be a ship's engineer." I previewed it and everything and still missed it.
I think they use the word "engineer" in the nautical sense rather than the academic degree sense. You need to be an engineer to be a "ship's engineer". I think traditional nautical terminology predates academic titles like yours, so there's not much you can do about it.
On ST, when things are going normally, they are simply operators of equipment that others have constructed. When things go weird, Geordi did have to redesign things. I don't know how many others on his team had the skills to do that. (Besides O'Brien and Barclay, they were all just redshirts who happened to wear yellow, so it's hard to say).
Yes! This, exactly. Once I was done taking classes it turned into a horrendous grind.
Are you nuts? Have you ever been to grad school? I worked in my field before going back to get a PhD and I found my normal job to be way better.
Research and academia may be insular, but it's plenty "real."
Speaking of "hunched over a desk." I have a friend who did get a job outside of academia doing biomed research. She left that job and went on disability from the abysmal ergonomics at her lab. I think she's a manager of the print shop at Staples now.
Wow! That's awful. Bad for the students and bad for the field in general. How much wasted effort happens in disparate labs with people retrying things that someone else already learned isn't right, but left the data in the bottom drawer of a file cabinet?
My advisor actually had me go looking for "bottom drawer" experiments when I did my first lit review (fortunately, my specialty is narrow enough that I can pretty much call everyone who is likely to have ever done that work in an afternoon). And she explicitly told me I didn't need a positive finding on my dissertation to defend it successfully.
It's a Fire Quadrangle. The fourth point is Chemical Reaction. Halon systems work from this angle. It doesn't deprive the fire of oxygen, it disrupts the oxidation process itself. Sounds like this magnetic beam does this also, in a different way.
Hell, yes. Money isn't real. It's a symbol; a cognitive tool. If it isn't serving our purposes, we should change it.
Being a slave to our own symbols always reminds me of this passage:
My modpoints expired, otherwise you'd have one. This is exactly my solution to the filing/sorting problem: I delete stuff.
University Park, PA is listed as "University."
Apparently a "park" is too play-mongering for these researchers so they renamed it.
[/sarcasm] seriously now, why would you jump to the conclusion anti-war political correctness was why the name was truncated?
Tobii's devices have a really quick calibration process. If you find your eye convergence changes as you fatigue, it's easy to just recalibrate once in a while to adjust.
Yeah. Tobii has been shipping some really sweet tablet communication devices for people with disabilities with eye tracking for a couple years now. I've played with a few of them and they work pretty well (though operating Windows with it is tiring).
The price tag on that eye-tracker add-on is jaw-dropping. I'm hoping that this tech can go mainstream, making it come down in price to make it more available to people with special needs who need it.
Yes. The counter-protests at funerals need to be handled more respectfully.
However, WBC are going to be at Portsmouth New Hampshire's Seacoast Repertory Theater picketing their production of The Laramie Project later this week. Some street theater to accompany the theater happening inside would be great lulz. Portsmouth loves street theater.
I heard rumblings of a God Hates Shrimp counter-protest. I don't know however, if there will be too big of a showing as Seacoast Rep's response was to half their ticket price for this show, with the rationale that getting everybody inside to actually watch the play is the action most contrary to what WBC wants.
Watson's speech synthesis sounded pretty comparable to the stuff I deal with every day (I work with speech generating devices for people with communication disabilities). Given that IBM already owns voice software, they probably used an off-the-shelf product from one of the other divisions of the company. I doubt that adding a custom voice was part of the mission of the Watson project.
I'm not sure, regardless of the voice, that Watson would fall into the Uncanny Valley anyway. It wasn't even slightly human-like. And I've not seen any research that talks about an auditory-only Uncanny Valley. (If such a phenomenon existed, I'm pretty sure I'd have heard of it).
Dropping the "to be" after "needs" is quite common in the dialect spoken in central Pennsylvania.
I would love for there to be more conservatives in education. Unfortunately, conservatives believe in _self-interest_ and are therefore unwilling to take positions at considerably below their market value. Currently our schools rely more on _altruism_ for retention than on providing staff with adequate market compensation. And the people motivated by altruism, surprise, surprise, are overwhelmingly Democrats. That's what happens when you insist that people take a difficult and poorly compensated job out of the goodness of their heart
I agree with your entire post and would add something else--not that long ago, the only reason we were able to get qualified people at all is because teaching was one of the only jobs women could get after getting a degree. While it hasn't been like that for a few decades, a lot of teachers (my mother among them) who went into teaching because they couldn't have a career as a scientist after getting a degree in science, are at retirement age and we as a society are having trouble replacing them because teaching pays so poorly compared to other options.