It does a manufacturer no good to have forged scientific results if they can't apply them. But even if they do forge their findings, they won't stand up to scrutiny. That's where science works.
They use these junk findings to convince the public of things, though.
Any findings that have not stood up to peer review should be discredited as such. That's the whole point of the article: that journalists are giving undue attention to bad science.
Indeed.
[Falsified] results won't be repeatable in independent experimentation. That's also where science works.
That's true, but it takes more digging to discover that later experiments do not support earlier conclusions. That's way beyond what journalists are doing today.
I had to do some research to find out about this, but it is a little different. Millikan turned out to be right.
Not really. Millikan asked an important question and created a great experiment to find it. But his numeric value for e/m_e was too low. Possibly because he cherry-picked the data, possibly because his value for the viscosity of air was off, etc. For whatever reason, his answer was off. What you don't hear about as often is how subsequent experiments slowly diverged from his:
We have learned a lot from experience about how to handle some of the ways we fool ourselves. One example: Millikan measured the charge on an electron by an experiment with falling oil drops, and got an answer which we now know not to be quite right. It's a little bit off because he had the incorrect value for the viscosity of air. It's interesting to look at the history of measurements of the charge of an electron, after Millikan. If you plot them as a function of time, you find that one is a little bit bigger than Millikan's, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, until finally they settle down to a number which is higher.
Why didn't they discover the new number was higher right away? It's a thing that scientists are ashamed of--this history--because it's apparent that people did things like this: When they got a number that was too high above Millikan's, they thought something must be wrong--and they would look for and find a reason why something might be wrong. When they got a number close to Millikan's value they didn't look so hard. And so they eliminated the numbers that were too far off, and did other things like that. We've learned those tricks nowadays, and now we don't have that kind of a disease.
That's from Cargo Cult Science by Feynman. (Who is known in a few scientific circles himself.;)
Scientists can say anything they bloody well want providing they have the evidence to support the statement. That's how science works.
That's how science is supposed to work. And often, it does. But there are places that will only continue to provide funding if they like the conclusions. And there are ways findings can be publicized without peer review. And there are cases where scientists have been deceived by their expectations or even falsified their data. Consider the controversy surrounding the Millikan oil drop experiment - claims that he cherry-picked his data to line up with what he thought the experiment was. And how if you plot other scientists' subsequent experiments through time, you'll discover that you can plot a trendline from Millikan's number to the current accepted value. That's because they treated values divergent from the then-accepted ones as more suspect. A lot of lessons to be learned there about how to properly do science.
And even Steven Hawking can be wrong.
Of course. But I'm not sure about your specific example - I heard somewhere that he made that bet as sort of a consolation prize. "Well, at least if I turn out to be wrong, I'll get this money." I'm not sure that he ever changed his mind. (I don't care enough to find out for sure.)
It also has one of the highest emitted doses of radiation; google for it.
That would concern me if there were any reproducible evidence that RF radiation harms humans. Since there isn't, I'll just take it to mean that the thing has good reception.
Sorry to break it to you, but we have Nokia phones here, too. I don't remember why I didn't like their UI, but it probably had to do with the address book. If you didn't get it the first time, I'm a bit picky about that area of functionality.
This is Slashdot, News for Nerds. We like gadgets. We don't generally say 'I wish they'd stop adding new features to things, my calculator twenty years ago worked fine!'.
If they neglected the basic calculator functions while adding the new features, I expect we would generally say that. See my sibling post to yours for specifics of why I like my simple phone, but broadly it's because it has a good UI that makes it possible to make calls, see who has called me, etc. with few button presses. That's not true of a lot of the fancier models.
Sounds decent, but this one is a deal-breaker for me:
no analog service (GSM rocks, baby!)
The phone's gotta be CDMA + analog for me to use it. CDMA is what we've got around here, and if I wander around Iowa, sometimes there's only analog service. If I'm 30 miles out on a bike ride through Amish country and crash, I want to be able to call home.
Plus my phone was cheaper. $50 after rebate. I think if you sign up at the right time, they give it away.
The flip cover is the part most likely to break. In addition, I think your LG doesn't have an external display, so you have to open the cover just to see who is calling. My T637 has an automatic key lock that prevents me from dialing in my pants.
If you drop it down an elevator shaft while it's open or something, yeah. But when it's closed, I don't think that will be a problem. (Never has been.) You're right about the external display - the VX4400 has one, though. How does the automatic keylock work? Idle time?
So, for example, if you didn't want Jeff Melloy to call you, you would enter him as " Jeff Melloy". Then he will show up at the end of the list. Give him a "no ring" ringtone and you won't even notice when he calls, usually.
Hehe. Who is this? Did you follow the link to his site on my webpage, or have I met you?
That's a good call. My phone seems to sort spaces to the front, but I just did something similar.
A prefix search of your contact list one button away from the home screen. Some phones hide this away, and it's the most important feature. Other phones I've seen have a substring search - if you hit 'C', you get every entry with a C in it, rather than moving to the ones starting with C. And this one lets you enter more than one letter in your search; some start a new search if you enter a second letter. Handy if you have lots of numbers.
Several phone numbers for each entry: Home, Home2, Office, Office2, Mobile, Mobile2, Pager, Fax, Fax2, None. Handy; for a lot of people I have an apartment number, a parents' house, a cell phone, and an office number. My last phone only let me enter three numbers per contact, and I had to name one of those something completely inappropriate. (Calling the parents' house a "Fax" number or something.) I wish it let you customize the labels, but oh well. The only phones I've seen that do that are these huge Motorola things.
A flip cover. Protects the display, provides longer battery life by allowing the display to shut off, and makes good UI sense - never worry about forgetting the key lock and dialing numbers from your pocket.
A speakerphone. Handy if you have to call tech support and end up on hold forever.
Analog service.
Good battery life.
Caller ID-based ring tones, so you can know who's calling right away. (And they're downloadable, I think.)
A "recent calls" thing a button away. Hit send-send from the home and you call the last person in your dialed, received, or missed calls.
An alarm clock. The only non-phone tool I use all the time. Handier than a true alarm clock because you can set it quickly with the numeric keypad. Plus the act of flipping open the phone and hitting the button is a little less reflexive than hitting a huge snooze button, so it's more likely to wake me up.
A speed dial, one two or three digits. Either hold down the last one or hit send. I don't use it much, though - I can never remember which number is which.
It's a good phone and fits me well. LG really has the best UI. My only real complaints are:
Color display. It just isn't as high-contrast as the BW ones, and they didn't help it by having the reception and battery life icons so tiny. They also could have saved some cost and battery life by going BW. But not much battery life - the display is usually off, anyway.
As mentioned above, no user-enterable labels for numbers. I'd like it to say "Apartment", "Mom's house", "Grundy Center", "Hospital", "Court St.", etc.
A huge data port on the bottom with a pull-off cover you'll inevitably lose if you use the port. Unfortunately, the car charger plugs into this, so you probably will. Less waterproof that way.
It has a few other features (schedule, voice memo, notepad, ez tip calc, full calculator, world clock) that I never use but someone else might find helpful. And a couple stupid "my pictures" / sounds / animations things. Also voice dialing.
I don't see any way to block numbers at the phone level, though. Sorry. Similarly, it'd be nice if a phone could have contact entries that don't show up in the main phonebook. I admit it, I've got a few phone numbers in there that I keep only to know I shouldn't answer the phone if they call. I want to see the name on the caller ID, but I don't want to have to scroll past it. I'm picky about the number of button presses to make a phone call. It has contact groups, but the main phonebook always shows all groups. You have to hit several more buttons to see just one.
Because Fedora Core 3 hasn't been released yet. If you go to the Fedora website, you'll see Fedora Core 3 Test 3 and Fedora Core 2. So...how do these people have Fedora Core 3, given that it doesn't exist?
Working for a vendor I've had many 'seasoned sysadmins' rattle off a password to me like it was nothing.
At work, I've gotten used to the necessity of people knowing each other's passwords. The one thing that would eliminate most of the need is this:
In Windows, the "Advanced" login pull-out (the one that displays the domain) should also have a second username field. With it, you could log in as one user with another user's password, provided that the second user is an administrator or has been authorized in some fashion. This would help us install software and test that it works as the appropriate user, without either (A) requiring the users to stay lurking around while we work or (B) making them give us their passwords.
If Windows and Oracle both did this, we could say to our users "never give anyone your password; there's no reason for anyone but you to ever know it" and actually mean it.
Whenever I design an authentication system, I do this. Cyrus SASL supports this idea; they call it separating authentication and authorization identifiers.
Yes, for this reason, if I were designing an SQL replacement, NULL would not remain as it is. I would probably replace it with two values, UNKNOWN and INAPPLICABLE, corresponding to the two cases you described. In fact, Dr. Codd, the father of relational algebra, suggested having multiple types of NULL. (There might even have been more than two. I don't remember what the others were.)
I might also introduce keywords POSSIBLY and CERTAINLY that collapse tri-state logic (true, false, maybe) into boolean logic. Thus, POSSIBLY(a = 5) would be true when a is UNKNOWN but CERTAINLY(a = 5) would be false.
Date advocates a different approach - no NULL at all. Instead, he has some sort of parallel table structure; a row in one table for the value being present and in another for the value being absent. With some more complex way of constraining it so there would be no contradictory information in the tables. I don't like this approach - having no NULLs seems simpler than having two, but not once you add in the weirdness of contraints. And not once you realize many tables have multiple nullable columns. Joining so many tables together would get ridiculous quickly.
In practice NULL seems to not be a huge problem for me. Occasionally a field can either unknown or inapplicable, and I need to distinguish between the two; I have to do a kludgy thing with another field and a CHECK constraint. But for the most part, it's just an extra half second of thought when writing the logic, which isn't too bad. But it does trip newcomers. It would be worth fixing if you were designing a new relational query language from scratch.
I also ride out farther from the curb. I generally don't ride as far as the middle of the lane (unless I'm riding side-by-side with someone else), but I'll always be at least a quarter of the way out. There's nothing worse than having an idiot driver only a few inches away from hitting you with his mirror on one side, the curb a few inches away on the other, and a giant pothole coming up. So I ensure that never happens.
There are a couple other good reasons to ride farther out into the lane:
It makes you more noticeable to oncoming traffic. Behind hit from behind is what most people worry about, but statistically, it's less likely to happen than seeing the car that hit you. Typically, they're turning and cut you off, not realizing that bikes go faster than 10 mph.
Being farther away from parked cars reduces your risk of being doored.
Also, if I'm not using up the whole lane when I'm riding, I certainly do when I stop at the lights. Even if there's a bike lane, I'll often pull out of it so no car pulls up alongside. Cars do dangerous things when they start out alongside me; they'll pull just barely ahead of me and turn, cutting me off. Plus, you're naturally a bit wobbly when you're starting out, shifting your balance and clipping in to the pedals. Not a good time to have less space than usual.
I took a bicycle touring class last semester (hey, free credit hour) and they recommended doing this also. It really works - use up more of the lane and cars will realize they should be moving outside of the lane to pass you.
And to the people who say this is more dangerous - I don't believe that. The Crash-Type Manual For Bicyclists says in the "Motorist Overtaking - Misjudging Passing Space" that "almost 1 out of 5 bicyclists were on the shoulder or in a bike lane." That seems out of proportion to me. People rarely ride on the shoulder (see below) and bicycle lanes aren't that common.
As far as riding on the shoulder goes, no one actually does that around here. First of all, it doesn't even apply to in-town riding - there is no shoulder. Secondly, outside town the shoulder is usually a really crappy surface. I'm not taking my road bike on that.
It requires a connection back to the originating MTA. Slow.
The information returned would be useless - my machine would always say "postfix". Unless you're talking about a new identd linked with the mail server. But that's not what RFC1413 says. It says the "owner of that connection" - that's always going to be postfix.
It includes no provision for telling if the machine shouldn't be sending this message at all.
A good SASL setup, along with SPF, does far, far more for authenticated email. My machine has this: it rejects any inbound email claiming to be from one of my user's domains unless SASL-authenticated as that user. And has SPF records so other servers can reject messages from these domains unless they come from my server. Thus, it's very difficult to forge an email from my users' domains to a server with SPF checking enabled.
Again, NAT does not enhance security. It just doesn't. I don't understand why people think it does.
(Hey, Dustin.)
Sure, you're right that it is the stateful firewall that provides the protection.
BUT: Home firewalls are so widespread only because NAT requires one. The shortage of IPs has created a situation in which it simply does not work to have more than one machine behind a connection unless there is a firewall there. If not for this, they'd just build a switch into cable modems and be done with it. And virtually all broadband-connected Windows PCs would be zombies.
Furthermore, NAT a stateful firewall. Most of the software firewall packages for Windows are not stateful. In fact, they're horribly confusing in that their dialogs for manipulating rules say "connections" when they mean "packets". You're never going to tell from the packaging or help files if a software firewall is stateful or not. With NAT, you know it is, because it wouldn't work otherwise.
I don't agree with what the original poster seemed to be saying - that it's a net benefit that we have this IP address shortage. But I do recognize that it has improved security in this way.
This means that poorly written posts that have valid points are not necessarily ignored...they are quite often embellished so that the validity of points raised by good thinker is strengthened by those who are good writers.
Maybe. But I think that if your rhetorical skills are not as good, you will need more compelling ideas than otherwise to attract the attention of even that single good writer. If your ideas are only moderately interesting or your writing only moderately bad, no one will not bother to rephrase/restructure your thoughts. And people will miss out on your thoughts. Good writers have an easier time, though the effect you describe mitigates this somewhat.
An English teacher of mine once compared poor grammar/spelling to having food stuck in your teeth. You can still communicate, but it can often distract people from your message and deter them from listening.
I think my English teacher was right. As my grammar nazi post may have shown, even a tiny error can be distracting. I actually wrote that before reading the rest of your post. If something had happened between, the tiny error might have been partially responsible for my never having heard your argument.
Seems like there are (at least) four major points in this article:
Rhetorical skills should be taught independently of literature analysis.
I agree. I've always felt this way, but one experience cemented this for me. In my first semester of college, I took Principles of Chemistry I and Accelerated Rhetoric simultaneously. In the rhetoric class, we wrote the mostly usual pointless essays about things no one cares about. I was struck with how little effect any of these essays had, as though they were called persuasive essays, they never advocated any real action, much less succeeded in persuading someone to undertake it. And even when we did write about a decent topic (one area was politics; I ripped apart some stupid Republican's campaign speech), we did it badly. Looking back on the revisions my rhetoric teacher forced me to do, my essay continued to get worse. Her obsession with the standardized format destroyed the terseness of my work.
In contrast, I wrote a persuasive essay to the professors of the chemistry class. My thesis was that he software we used for homework assignments was no good and should be scrapped. It was one of the proudest moments of my college career, because I succeeded completely. They not only made these homework assignments optional mid-semester, but also forwarded my complaints to the designers of the software. (Who were surprisingly receptive.)
I realized I had learned much more about persuasive writing from convincing the chemistry professors than I had from the rhetoric class.
The format of a standard essay is overly constrictive.
In general terms, I agree. He's right that the conclusion doesn't add much, except in a persuasive argument: stating the argument to a "jury" who may have half-forgotten what you were saying at that point. Another thing that specifically bothers me is that rhetoric teachers are violently opposed to non-prose elements. I like to intersperse lists of items into my work. Most people skim, not read. If you don't help them skim well, they just won't understand what you're saying.
Essays should share a search for truth, rather than defending a pre-established position. (A refinement of #2.)
I do not agree. A search for truth is an extremely valuable and underrepresented format, yes. But persuasive essays are valuable, too. Often in life, we write for someone who generally trusts us to make decisions but may have some additional input or at least know what's going on. I might write to my boss why I chose a particular software package. He's primarily interested in what I chose. The reasons are secondary. If he sees a priority of mine that's completely different than his, he'll mention it. That might lead him to contest the final choice. But generally, he'll go along with what I'd said. If he'd had time to follow all the permutations of my research, he would have done it himself. Thus, I often write in a sort of inverse pyramid structure. (As I learned in a journalism class long, long ago.)
Write things which are surprising to you.
I agree; these surprising insights lead to great writing. But I don't think you should exclusively do this. Many things which you do not find surprising still need to be said. If I'm writing for exposition (how to use a piece of software), I'll point out the normal as well as the weird. I might even give short treatment to the weird because I want people to know the basics before confusing them.
Hey, since we're discussing grammar, I'd thought I'd point out this minor flaw:
The thing is, the people who are poor spellers, have poor grammar and who use poor organizational skills don't matter so much on the internet.
Your list has what I've heard called "improper parallelism". There may be another name for it (anyone? what's it called?), but here's the idea: divide your list up into the words that are common between all the elements and the ones that are different. You should be able to follow the common part followed by any single element. In your sentence:
the people who:
are poor spellers
have poor grammar
who use poor organizational skills
When combined with the prefix, each becomes:
the people who are poor spellers
the people who have poor grammar
the people who who use poor organizational skills
So you've got an extra "who" at the beginning of the third element. You can just take it out. ("The people who are poor spellers, have poor grammar, and use poor organizational skills") Or you can add a who to the middle one; then it would divide up differently:
the people:
who are poor spellers
who have poor grammar
who use poor organizational skills
("The people who are poor spellers, who have poor grammar, and who use poor organizational skills")
For brevity, taking out the word is preferable to adding another. But either would be correct.
Sorry for the long explanation of a single-word error, but I wanted to illustrate the more general principle. I see this error a lot, and it grates on me.
(And now, someone will inevitably point out a grammar or spelling error in this post. Go ahead.)
From what I remember they are working on allowing you to access it all via POP.
I hope that you mean IMAP, given that POP doesn't support the following features which would be essential for fast access to a large (up to 1 GiB) mailbox:
unique IDs for messages, which allow quick synchronization of local caches without redownloading the contents of old messages
fetching individual MIME parts (getting the body text seperately from the 100MiB of attachments that your mom sent because she doesn't know how to scale/compress images)
server-side searching
tagged commands for pipelining
These are the main reasons IMAP is suitable for disconnected access and POP is not. There are other advantages to IMAP, too:
multiple folders
notification of new messages (through the IDLE extension)
POP has no advantage for the user. For the administrator/developer, it may have a slight advantage in that it's simpler. But these complexities are hidden from the user; it is quite seamless.
As for countries like Iran, Hussein's Iraq, Pakistan, etc, they were broken up for a reason. Very simply: we can't trust them as far as we can kick them. September 11 only proves that. It doesn't stop us from being friendly and trying to help these countries out, but you can bet your ass that the US and UN are not looking to allow them nuclear weapons!
Except we created their hatred. It does not justify acts like September 11th, but if you want the hatred to go away, you need to acknowledge its cause. Read All the Shah's Men. (I'm reading it now.) Here's the short version:
Around 1900 (IIRC), the Shah of Iran granted Britain exclusive rights to Iran's natural gas and oil
In 1908, the British discovered lots and lots of oil. They started making heaps of money.
At some point (forgot), that Shah lost power because of all the concessions he'd granted to foreign powers, sending Iran into poverty
In 1951, the prime minister reversed the concession and nationalized the oil mining
The British promptly tried to convince Truman to help them overthrow the prime minister; they failed. (At this point, Iran got along well with America. They hated the British for exploiting them.)
In 1953, they successfully convinced Eisenhour that Iran was full of pinko bastards and we should overthrow the prime minister and their democracy, increasing the Shah's power. We failed the first time, making America's involvement painfully obvious.
In 1978, they overthrew the Shah...and their resentment at that regime grew into (righteous, some would say) anger toward America.
Now with this little history lesson, maybe it's a little more clear to you why American presidents who say things like "regime change" are unpopular in the Middle East.
There will always be groups like al Qaida that hate America. But we can change the fact that many in the Middle East are sympathetic to their hatred, if not their methods. But it's a matter of staying out of places we don't belong. Or when we do poke our head in, making sure that we change things for the better.
We will get nowhere by flaunting our ignorance or by twisting the affairs of other nation's to our short-sighted benefit with impunity.
Another trick a friend did - Pulled all the decals off the bike - made it non descript. I've seen folks go as far as spraying the bike with primer, just to make it ugly!! (and yes, this was a nice bike)
Definitely effective. I don't have the heart to do that myself. (Or to simply take a cheap bike around campus, another suggestion.)
Consumer reports-type organizations and which-buy type magazines test locks every once in a while to see how long it takes a seasoned professional to open it - look for the ones that take 10 minutes to open (no lock is invulnerable), rather than 10 seconds.
Thanks for the information. I might check those reviews out if I end up leaving a bike out overnight again.
The best solution for taking notes (other than perhaps a tablet PC) is a cheap laptop.
The biggest problem with using a computer to take notes is duplicating diagrams and equations quickly. In physics classes, these are the entirety of your notes. Equations you can sort of do if you're good with TeX, but the effort involved might distract you from the material. Diagrams are almost impossible to keep up with.
The majority of the time, I take notes with a paper and pencil. If I whip out my laptop in class, it's because I'm not real interested in what the professor is saying. (Going to class and amusing yourself like this is a lot better than not going...you'll at least find out about assignments and tests and whatnot.)
PDAs are wretched for taking notes on.
Agreed. Work bought me one for a project, so I took a few notes while I was playing with my new toy. They're completely indecipherable. It's so awkward to keep your hand off the display while writing with the tiny stylus that my mediocre handwriting became awful. And if I had used the on-screen keyboard or Grafiti, I would have had problems keeping up.
PDAs are more useful for displaying information than entering it. Or if you do enter information, there should be very little of it, in a rigid format.
Live in the dorms a year or two. You'll meet people. You'll also get food made for you three times a day. (It'll probably be bad food, but when you have to make it for yourself you'll appreciate even that.)
If you live in an apartment, pick one decently far off-campus and not in a huge apartment building. It's cheaper, you'll get some exercise commuting, and it'll be much easier to study. (Loud, drunk people make it hard to sleep or study.)
Learn about each professor before you take a class from him/her. Often the classes can be completely different based on the professor. And if you discover you can't stand one...drop it and take it later from a different professor. Better to take a little longer than to both torture yourself and get a bad grade.
Learn about opportunities for gifted students early. I'm doing an independent programming project now for a few semester hours; the kind of thing I was doing before and getting no credit for. (And occupying enough of my time with to cause problems with my grades in other classes.) This way's better. I wish I'd known sooner; I would have done something like it every semester.
If you hate your major, switch, the sooner the better. Torturing yourself like this leads to bad grades, lost sleep, and general feelings of misery.
Build some time into your schedule to talk to professors during their office hours, and make a habit of it.
Make a point of meeting at least a person or two in every one of your classes. It's much easier to stay motivated if you do homework together. (And I don't mean copying; I mean doing it in the same room at the same time and occasionally working together when you're both stuck on a problem.) Plus, if you miss class, you can find out what's going on...at least get notification of an upcoming test/quiz/assignment.
Don't let the bureaucratic flunkies get you down. (Universities are filled with them, and they're disgruntled and unhelpful.) If you need something and they tell you something is impossible or a long shot...take it anyway. Write a letter to someone higher up the chain. Be polite but not wishy-washy; let them know exactly what you want them to do for you and why. And they might look on you more kindly if you show a little vision and look beyond just your problem to see how it could be avoided for other people.
I'm glad to see someone bring this up. I've never had a piece of electronic equipment stolen, and neither have any of my friends...but bikes are another story. I've had some problems (wheels and frame vandalized, a stolen wheel, a stolen seat, once a whole bike stolen which I miraculously got back), and I know several people who have had multiple bikes stolen. I've got some hard-earned advice on the subject:
Use a U-lock. Nothing else will do at any time of the day or night.
Make sure the lock goes through the bike rack, the frame of the bike, and the front wheel. Every time.
Never leave any bike within a mile of a bar at night (or along the major treks home). If it's not stolen, it will be vandalized. Drunken assholes do stupid things.
If your bike is expensive (or looks expensive), take it into your dorm room / apartment at night. (Some leases forbid this. Get permission or do it anyway. I think landlords are concerned about people riding bikes around inside the building or something. They don't seem to understand that you have to take the bike in with you if you care about it.) This sounds like a pain, but it's not too bad. I got pretty used to carrying my bike up four flights of stairs every night last year. (And this year I'm on the first floor.)
If you don't take it in with you at night, at least lock the back wheel with a second U-lock. (Just leave the second one locked to the rack when you're not there.)
Look around the rack you lock it on, especially at night. Are there seatless / wheel-less bikes attached? Solitary wheels? Then you might think about going elsewhere. Also check for places where the rack itself has been cut. Try to lock it to a thicker portion (like the top bar in some cases).
Take out the quick-release seat and put in a bolt instead. Or one of those seat guard things. It obviously won't stop someone determined, but it will stop people from casually grabbing your seat while staggering home from the bars.
Of course, adjust your level of paranoia by your dependence on your bike and its price. I bike everywhere and my bike tends to be one of the better ones on whatever bike rack I lock it to. When I ride my road bike, it's usually the most expensive bike on the surrounding few racks. (Low-end road bike...but a lot of college students have super-cheap mountains.)
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They use these junk findings to convince the public of things, though.
Any findings that have not stood up to peer review should be discredited as such. That's the whole point of the article: that journalists are giving undue attention to bad science.
Indeed.
[Falsified] results won't be repeatable in independent experimentation. That's also where science works.
That's true, but it takes more digging to discover that later experiments do not support earlier conclusions. That's way beyond what journalists are doing today.
I had to do some research to find out about this, but it is a little different. Millikan turned out to be right.
Not really. Millikan asked an important question and created a great experiment to find it. But his numeric value for e/m_e was too low. Possibly because he cherry-picked the data, possibly because his value for the viscosity of air was off, etc. For whatever reason, his answer was off. What you don't hear about as often is how subsequent experiments slowly diverged from his:
That's from Cargo Cult Science by Feynman. (Who is known in a few scientific circles himself. ;)
That's how science is supposed to work. And often, it does. But there are places that will only continue to provide funding if they like the conclusions. And there are ways findings can be publicized without peer review. And there are cases where scientists have been deceived by their expectations or even falsified their data. Consider the controversy surrounding the Millikan oil drop experiment - claims that he cherry-picked his data to line up with what he thought the experiment was. And how if you plot other scientists' subsequent experiments through time, you'll discover that you can plot a trendline from Millikan's number to the current accepted value. That's because they treated values divergent from the then-accepted ones as more suspect. A lot of lessons to be learned there about how to properly do science.
And even Steven Hawking can be wrong.
Of course. But I'm not sure about your specific example - I heard somewhere that he made that bet as sort of a consolation prize. "Well, at least if I turn out to be wrong, I'll get this money." I'm not sure that he ever changed his mind. (I don't care enough to find out for sure.)
That would concern me if there were any reproducible evidence that RF radiation harms humans. Since there isn't, I'll just take it to mean that the thing has good reception.
Sorry to break it to you, but we have Nokia phones here, too. I don't remember why I didn't like their UI, but it probably had to do with the address book. If you didn't get it the first time, I'm a bit picky about that area of functionality.
If they neglected the basic calculator functions while adding the new features, I expect we would generally say that. See my sibling post to yours for specifics of why I like my simple phone, but broadly it's because it has a good UI that makes it possible to make calls, see who has called me, etc. with few button presses. That's not true of a lot of the fancier models.
The phone's gotta be CDMA + analog for me to use it. CDMA is what we've got around here, and if I wander around Iowa, sometimes there's only analog service. If I'm 30 miles out on a bike ride through Amish country and crash, I want to be able to call home.
Plus my phone was cheaper. $50 after rebate. I think if you sign up at the right time, they give it away.
If you drop it down an elevator shaft while it's open or something, yeah. But when it's closed, I don't think that will be a problem. (Never has been.) You're right about the external display - the VX4400 has one, though. How does the automatic keylock work? Idle time?
So, for example, if you didn't want Jeff Melloy to call you, you would enter him as " Jeff Melloy". Then he will show up at the end of the list. Give him a "no ring" ringtone and you won't even notice when he calls, usually.
Hehe. Who is this? Did you follow the link to his site on my webpage, or have I met you?
That's a good call. My phone seems to sort spaces to the front, but I just did something similar.
But does have:
- A prefix search of your contact list one button away from the home screen. Some phones hide this away, and it's the most important feature. Other phones I've seen have a substring search - if you hit 'C', you get every entry with a C in it, rather than moving to the ones starting with C. And this one lets you enter more than one letter in your search; some start a new search if you enter a second letter. Handy if you have lots of numbers.
- Several phone numbers for each entry: Home, Home2, Office, Office2, Mobile, Mobile2, Pager, Fax, Fax2, None. Handy; for a lot of people I have an apartment number, a parents' house, a cell phone, and an office number. My last phone only let me enter three numbers per contact, and I had to name one of those something completely inappropriate. (Calling the parents' house a "Fax" number or something.) I wish it let you customize the labels, but oh well. The only phones I've seen that do that are these huge Motorola things.
- A flip cover. Protects the display, provides longer battery life by allowing the display to shut off, and makes good UI sense - never worry about forgetting the key lock and dialing numbers from your pocket.
- A speakerphone. Handy if you have to call tech support and end up on hold forever.
- Analog service.
- Good battery life.
- Caller ID-based ring tones, so you can know who's calling right away. (And they're downloadable, I think.)
- A "recent calls" thing a button away. Hit send-send from the home and you call the last person in your dialed, received, or missed calls.
- An alarm clock. The only non-phone tool I use all the time. Handier than a true alarm clock because you can set it quickly with the numeric keypad. Plus the act of flipping open the phone and hitting the button is a little less reflexive than hitting a huge snooze button, so it's more likely to wake me up.
- A speed dial, one two or three digits. Either hold down the last one or hit send. I don't use it much, though - I can never remember which number is which.
It's a good phone and fits me well. LG really has the best UI. My only real complaints are:It has a few other features (schedule, voice memo, notepad, ez tip calc, full calculator, world clock) that I never use but someone else might find helpful. And a couple stupid "my pictures" / sounds / animations things. Also voice dialing.
I don't see any way to block numbers at the phone level, though. Sorry. Similarly, it'd be nice if a phone could have contact entries that don't show up in the main phonebook. I admit it, I've got a few phone numbers in there that I keep only to know I shouldn't answer the phone if they call. I want to see the name on the caller ID, but I don't want to have to scroll past it. I'm picky about the number of button presses to make a phone call. It has contact groups, but the main phonebook always shows all groups. You have to hit several more buttons to see just one.
Because Fedora Core 3 hasn't been released yet. If you go to the Fedora website, you'll see Fedora Core 3 Test 3 and Fedora Core 2. So...how do these people have Fedora Core 3, given that it doesn't exist?
At work, I've gotten used to the necessity of people knowing each other's passwords. The one thing that would eliminate most of the need is this:
In Windows, the "Advanced" login pull-out (the one that displays the domain) should also have a second username field. With it, you could log in as one user with another user's password, provided that the second user is an administrator or has been authorized in some fashion. This would help us install software and test that it works as the appropriate user, without either (A) requiring the users to stay lurking around while we work or (B) making them give us their passwords.
If Windows and Oracle both did this, we could say to our users "never give anyone your password; there's no reason for anyone but you to ever know it" and actually mean it.
Whenever I design an authentication system, I do this. Cyrus SASL supports this idea; they call it separating authentication and authorization identifiers.
I might also introduce keywords POSSIBLY and CERTAINLY that collapse tri-state logic (true, false, maybe) into boolean logic. Thus, POSSIBLY(a = 5) would be true when a is UNKNOWN but CERTAINLY(a = 5) would be false.
Date advocates a different approach - no NULL at all. Instead, he has some sort of parallel table structure; a row in one table for the value being present and in another for the value being absent. With some more complex way of constraining it so there would be no contradictory information in the tables. I don't like this approach - having no NULLs seems simpler than having two, but not once you add in the weirdness of contraints. And not once you realize many tables have multiple nullable columns. Joining so many tables together would get ridiculous quickly.
In practice NULL seems to not be a huge problem for me. Occasionally a field can either unknown or inapplicable, and I need to distinguish between the two; I have to do a kludgy thing with another field and a CHECK constraint. But for the most part, it's just an extra half second of thought when writing the logic, which isn't too bad. But it does trip newcomers. It would be worth fixing if you were designing a new relational query language from scratch.
There are a couple other good reasons to ride farther out into the lane:
Also, if I'm not using up the whole lane when I'm riding, I certainly do when I stop at the lights. Even if there's a bike lane, I'll often pull out of it so no car pulls up alongside. Cars do dangerous things when they start out alongside me; they'll pull just barely ahead of me and turn, cutting me off. Plus, you're naturally a bit wobbly when you're starting out, shifting your balance and clipping in to the pedals. Not a good time to have less space than usual.
I took a bicycle touring class last semester (hey, free credit hour) and they recommended doing this also. It really works - use up more of the lane and cars will realize they should be moving outside of the lane to pass you.
And to the people who say this is more dangerous - I don't believe that. The Crash-Type Manual For Bicyclists says in the "Motorist Overtaking - Misjudging Passing Space" that "almost 1 out of 5 bicyclists were on the shoulder or in a bike lane." That seems out of proportion to me. People rarely ride on the shoulder (see below) and bicycle lanes aren't that common.
As far as riding on the shoulder goes, no one actually does that around here. First of all, it doesn't even apply to in-town riding - there is no shoulder. Secondly, outside town the shoulder is usually a really crappy surface. I'm not taking my road bike on that.
A good SASL setup, along with SPF, does far, far more for authenticated email. My machine has this: it rejects any inbound email claiming to be from one of my user's domains unless SASL-authenticated as that user. And has SPF records so other servers can reject messages from these domains unless they come from my server. Thus, it's very difficult to forge an email from my users' domains to a server with SPF checking enabled.
(Hey, Dustin.)
Sure, you're right that it is the stateful firewall that provides the protection.
BUT: Home firewalls are so widespread only because NAT requires one. The shortage of IPs has created a situation in which it simply does not work to have more than one machine behind a connection unless there is a firewall there. If not for this, they'd just build a switch into cable modems and be done with it. And virtually all broadband-connected Windows PCs would be zombies.
Furthermore, NAT a stateful firewall. Most of the software firewall packages for Windows are not stateful. In fact, they're horribly confusing in that their dialogs for manipulating rules say "connections" when they mean "packets". You're never going to tell from the packaging or help files if a software firewall is stateful or not. With NAT, you know it is, because it wouldn't work otherwise.
I don't agree with what the original poster seemed to be saying - that it's a net benefit that we have this IP address shortage. But I do recognize that it has improved security in this way.
Wow. I can't believe I didn't notice that confusing sentence. Thanks.
Maybe. But I think that if your rhetorical skills are not as good, you will need more compelling ideas than otherwise to attract the attention of even that single good writer. If your ideas are only moderately interesting or your writing only moderately bad, no one will not bother to rephrase/restructure your thoughts. And people will miss out on your thoughts. Good writers have an easier time, though the effect you describe mitigates this somewhat.
An English teacher of mine once compared poor grammar/spelling to having food stuck in your teeth. You can still communicate, but it can often distract people from your message and deter them from listening.
I think my English teacher was right. As my grammar nazi post may have shown, even a tiny error can be distracting. I actually wrote that before reading the rest of your post. If something had happened between, the tiny error might have been partially responsible for my never having heard your argument.
I agree. I've always felt this way, but one experience cemented this for me. In my first semester of college, I took Principles of Chemistry I and Accelerated Rhetoric simultaneously. In the rhetoric class, we wrote the mostly usual pointless essays about things no one cares about. I was struck with how little effect any of these essays had, as though they were called persuasive essays, they never advocated any real action, much less succeeded in persuading someone to undertake it. And even when we did write about a decent topic (one area was politics; I ripped apart some stupid Republican's campaign speech), we did it badly. Looking back on the revisions my rhetoric teacher forced me to do, my essay continued to get worse. Her obsession with the standardized format destroyed the terseness of my work.
In contrast, I wrote a persuasive essay to the professors of the chemistry class. My thesis was that he software we used for homework assignments was no good and should be scrapped. It was one of the proudest moments of my college career, because I succeeded completely. They not only made these homework assignments optional mid-semester, but also forwarded my complaints to the designers of the software. (Who were surprisingly receptive.)
I realized I had learned much more about persuasive writing from convincing the chemistry professors than I had from the rhetoric class.
In general terms, I agree. He's right that the conclusion doesn't add much, except in a persuasive argument: stating the argument to a "jury" who may have half-forgotten what you were saying at that point. Another thing that specifically bothers me is that rhetoric teachers are violently opposed to non-prose elements. I like to intersperse lists of items into my work. Most people skim, not read. If you don't help them skim well, they just won't understand what you're saying.
I do not agree. A search for truth is an extremely valuable and underrepresented format, yes. But persuasive essays are valuable, too. Often in life, we write for someone who generally trusts us to make decisions but may have some additional input or at least know what's going on. I might write to my boss why I chose a particular software package. He's primarily interested in what I chose. The reasons are secondary. If he sees a priority of mine that's completely different than his, he'll mention it. That might lead him to contest the final choice. But generally, he'll go along with what I'd said. If he'd had time to follow all the permutations of my research, he would have done it himself. Thus, I often write in a sort of inverse pyramid structure. (As I learned in a journalism class long, long ago.)
I agree; these surprising insights lead to great writing. But I don't think you should exclusively do this. Many things which you do not find surprising still need to be said. If I'm writing for exposition (how to use a piece of software), I'll point out the normal as well as the weird. I might even give short treatment to the weird because I want people to know the basics before confusing them.
Hey, since we're discussing grammar, I'd thought I'd point out this minor flaw:
Your list has what I've heard called "improper parallelism". There may be another name for it (anyone? what's it called?), but here's the idea: divide your list up into the words that are common between all the elements and the ones that are different. You should be able to follow the common part followed by any single element. In your sentence:
When combined with the prefix, each becomes:
So you've got an extra "who" at the beginning of the third element. You can just take it out. ("The people who are poor spellers, have poor grammar, and use poor organizational skills") Or you can add a who to the middle one; then it would divide up differently:
("The people who are poor spellers, who have poor grammar, and who use poor organizational skills")
For brevity, taking out the word is preferable to adding another. But either would be correct.
Sorry for the long explanation of a single-word error, but I wanted to illustrate the more general principle. I see this error a lot, and it grates on me.
(And now, someone will inevitably point out a grammar or spelling error in this post. Go ahead.)
I hope that you mean IMAP, given that POP doesn't support the following features which would be essential for fast access to a large (up to 1 GiB) mailbox:
These are the main reasons IMAP is suitable for disconnected access and POP is not. There are other advantages to IMAP, too:
POP has no advantage for the user. For the administrator/developer, it may have a slight advantage in that it's simpler. But these complexities are hidden from the user; it is quite seamless.
Except we created their hatred. It does not justify acts like September 11th, but if you want the hatred to go away, you need to acknowledge its cause. Read All the Shah's Men. (I'm reading it now.) Here's the short version:
Now with this little history lesson, maybe it's a little more clear to you why American presidents who say things like "regime change" are unpopular in the Middle East.
There will always be groups like al Qaida that hate America. But we can change the fact that many in the Middle East are sympathetic to their hatred, if not their methods. But it's a matter of staying out of places we don't belong. Or when we do poke our head in, making sure that we change things for the better.
We will get nowhere by flaunting our ignorance or by twisting the affairs of other nation's to our short-sighted benefit with impunity.
Definitely effective. I don't have the heart to do that myself. (Or to simply take a cheap bike around campus, another suggestion.)
Consumer reports-type organizations and which-buy type magazines test locks every once in a while to see how long it takes a seasoned professional to open it - look for the ones that take 10 minutes to open (no lock is invulnerable), rather than 10 seconds.
Thanks for the information. I might check those reviews out if I end up leaving a bike out overnight again.
The biggest problem with using a computer to take notes is duplicating diagrams and equations quickly. In physics classes, these are the entirety of your notes. Equations you can sort of do if you're good with TeX, but the effort involved might distract you from the material. Diagrams are almost impossible to keep up with.
The majority of the time, I take notes with a paper and pencil. If I whip out my laptop in class, it's because I'm not real interested in what the professor is saying. (Going to class and amusing yourself like this is a lot better than not going...you'll at least find out about assignments and tests and whatnot.)
PDAs are wretched for taking notes on.
Agreed. Work bought me one for a project, so I took a few notes while I was playing with my new toy. They're completely indecipherable. It's so awkward to keep your hand off the display while writing with the tiny stylus that my mediocre handwriting became awful. And if I had used the on-screen keyboard or Grafiti, I would have had problems keeping up.
PDAs are more useful for displaying information than entering it. Or if you do enter information, there should be very little of it, in a rigid format.
I'm glad to see someone bring this up. I've never had a piece of electronic equipment stolen, and neither have any of my friends...but bikes are another story. I've had some problems (wheels and frame vandalized, a stolen wheel, a stolen seat, once a whole bike stolen which I miraculously got back), and I know several people who have had multiple bikes stolen. I've got some hard-earned advice on the subject:
Of course, adjust your level of paranoia by your dependence on your bike and its price. I bike everywhere and my bike tends to be one of the better ones on whatever bike rack I lock it to. When I ride my road bike, it's usually the most expensive bike on the surrounding few racks. (Low-end road bike...but a lot of college students have super-cheap mountains.)