This is (one of) the reason(s) I started getting Wi-Fi capable phones. Plus I only have to have my wireless router configured. Seems like the better solution than a separate antenna system. Of course not every service supports UMA capability - or at least not on every phone that could have it.
The US is in the middle of a decades long push to test students into knowledge and schools into, for lack of a better word, success. The result is students who give even less of $hit (where that is possible), teachers who teach how to take tests (and not how to be a creative and intelligent thinker), teachers who are terrified that their job security is determined by unmotivated students, and administrators that care about only one thing (test scores for their school) and how to game the system enough so that they don't lose their job.
The real solution to the problem of schooling, if there ever was a problem, is with parents. It is up to parents to instill in their children a respect for education, a thirst for knowledge, and the beginnings of creativity.
Tests to most students (and adults) feel like punishment. They undermine the educational process (they are necessary when we treat degrees as a certificate of knowledge so we will never be entirely free of them). Using them as a method of motivating students is akin to using beatings to train a dog: you don't get a well trained dog, what you get is a terrified mass of useless dog.
I think c64_love was just pointing out that the way a question is asked skews the results. A survey taker can make subtle changes in wording and have a huge effect -- the example given being not-so-subtle could be expected to skew effects substantially.
Yup. Because the PC is dying man! It's been dying for THIRTY FUCKING YEARS NOW! You'd think it'd have the good grace to have kicked off long ago and made way for a more compact, less powerful, less configurable, less open, complete cluster-fuck of a platform like smart phones or something. You know, something that can be locked down against their own users. Something you can charge through the nose and out the ass for development tools and support for.
Right. I mean I might spend $100-400 of my money on a phone or laptop type device or two (and another for the wife) and our family will likely own at most one tv-type device and one gaming device for a combined total of at most $800. I buy the devices and I use them for 15 years or until they break whichever comes first. But when I ask my company to plunk down a $3000 chunk of change every 4-5 years for a work machine it will be a pc. I don't see this fact changing in my lifetime. Maybe I'm just not seeing the light...
A book rep stopping by my office last month was asking why I'm not using their textbook for my course like the other instructors at the school. I told him that I looked up what they were charging at our bookstore and decided that that was at least $100 more than the useful value to the students. Then I said I was unimpressed that a professor of the caliber that Stewart is supposed to be took upwards of 7 iterations to apparently get Calculus right, I mentioned that if anything the last four editions should have been at least half the cost of the first 3.
He asked what book I was using and I said "none". He was floored. I explained that I write detailed notes to the class and put them on a wiki page I maintain for the course. Students then go in and can even edit the notes (if they find a typo) and maintain their own pages worth of examples which they maintain in groups of four. Overall the students have a textbook that is: an ebook, covers class, freely links to other material, includes videos relevant to the class, includes program files and examples, includes links to what the other students in the class are doing. And the total cost to the students is free, the cost to the department is just the 10 year old computer I rescued from a storage closet to host the wiki on.
Best part is next time I teach the course the wiki notes will be largely done and I'll just be able to focus on adding to them. Plus I'll have all the old students pages worth of notes and examples to include as needed.
He was stunned and just quietly slipped out of my office while I was showing him all the pages I had written.
While I'm not an expert, I speculate that potential applications would include: using a similar model to study cilial action in human lungs or gut; developing of advanced fabrics which shed water more efficiently; developing algorithms for robotics (I'm thinking in particular military applications) to dry themselves in the wild. The beauty of science to me is that someone answers what appears to be a relatively innocuous and useless question and often can't tell where it might lead. We (often) can't just dive in and answer the most difficult question first, we start with a simple model of a related phenomena and then build up to the real (and useful) examples. I like this problem here, because in practice it does seem that biological systems have spent the eons developing the best solutions to complicated problems (basically through trial and error) so they have a model whose solution agrees with the one found by the biological system. I see it as a win, science has advanced, even if it was only a micro-step.
I agree. Tenure gives the freedom to take risks in both teaching and research. The net result is a higher quality of both. It is also a form of non-monetized benefit. I'm curious what the writer thinks would take its place if not tuition monies: myself, certainly with the lack of freedom to do my job as I know it should be done and despite the bitching of the lazy students that make up 80 percent of my classes would be demanding substantially more salary or finding other places to work. I can be treated like shit and make money in plenty of other professions.
Sure I have colleagues I'd love to have the ability to force to work at least half as hard as I do, but not if that means giving up the ability to place demands on my students to do work.
My wife got her teeth checked by Dr. Pane for a long time. It would have been more poetic if the hygenist was named Pane, but still gave me a giggle every time I heard it.
You can put a packing strap across your matress to secure your feet for full range crunches and reverse crunches. No friend needed. Mine runs under the matress and in the morning I snug it down and slip my legs under for my routine.
I don't expect society to drop by and solve all my problems. I solve my own problems. Probably so do you. Right? Why can't these guys do the same? You'd think it would be easier to find a circle of like-minded old people, than to wait for the whole society to reorganize itself to solve their problem.
I don't know why they don't, but there are plenty that don't help themselves. The truly sad part is that (in my experience with ambulance "freq. fliers") every tenth call is an actual medical emergency for them; so you can't even (ethically anyway) start cutting back on their priority. They often have quite honest and severe chronic (if not always critical) medical problems. Sure you can say, "Then they shouldn't get emergency service even when they need it", but once it is your mother or father suffering from depression what do you think? Depression is a disease, it is not something you can just will yourself out of.
I think the solution is multi-generational households, society got away from these somehow and one of the outcomes is a number of elderly people with problems. Economically such arrangements are starting to make more and more sense. However we may have lost the social skills needed to make such situations work. In my own case it is only a matter of time before one or both sets of parents will be living with or extremely close to my wife and I, there are just to many health and money issues for us to deal with and having three households increases the problems.
Long walks with a dog. Solitary, at your pace. and the dog has many other benifits to your life (just owning one has been shown to lower your blood pressure).
Do Burpees (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burpee )
Developed by the other class of people who stay in a small room for much of their day.
Get into a habit of doing a set when you wake up and another at night. I started them because of a long series of traveling where I needed a way to get an effecient workout done in a hotel room.
I supplement these with biking to work and long walks with my dog.
Many "frequent fliers" with ambulance services are just lonely and depressed elderly people who need someone to talk to. I would guess many 911(or 999 as the case may be) time wasters (as opposed to pranksters) have the same issues. It would be nice if society could find a way to reknit the social fabric that used to help these people.
...Or to stop reporting the thefts. Would you rather know at once if your data is stolen, or find out only in the rare instance when a company is discovered through external forces, well after the fact, to have lost data?
My own solution for sensitive work data (I'm in academics so this is basically students' grades and letters of reference) is to keep the data on the network drive owned by my school, only manipulate it on the computer in my office, and keep the hard copies locked in a file cabinet in my office. In addition files are encrypted and some garbage encrypted files with similar names to the grade books are mixed in. Once the seven year window is open the copies both hard and soft are destroyed although an exam or two may survive with the name inked out. The main tenet being that at no point is a copy of the grade book outside of a secured area that is the responsibility of the school to keep secure.
I would love to see the companies I deal with treat my data with such respect, but I just don't see a way to force it on them without at the same time giving them an incentive to sit on a loss.
There is a group of people who already do the majority of their publishing with a non-office like program. Many scientists write using LaTex or a variant. We do large collaborative projects with people scattered throughout the world at different institutions, we travel often, and our work need not (at least for those of us at public institutions) be kept very secure. Since Google docs started I've been writing them email begging for a Latex processor to be included. There are some online LaTex processors up and running, and while interesting they still have some problems which I had hoped google would try to fix.
Air Force / Navy
Be sure to ask them to pay off some of your student loans and do your homework before signing. This career path is batting about 0.500 with my friends, 2 have found good employment after doing a small stint, 1 is on a long term career path in the AF, and 3 have had major difficulties finding work after discharge (although in these cases I find it hard to lay all the blame on the military).
They can't keep a database of ballistic fingerprints of every handgun being sold. This would actually be useful with technology that is 20+ years old and could eliminate the lottery that law enforcement currently faces when they turn up a suspicious handgun.
I was incredibly anti-gun until I started visiting Mexico. As far as I can tell citizens are not allowed to even own ammunition much less a weapon to put it into (please correct me, most of this information is based off the warnings at the airports and consulate websites). Yet crime there seems to basically be gun based. In Mexico city there are police armed to the teeth standing in front of banks and money changing shops...
Probably part of the problem is that the Northern neighbor of Mexico oozes handguns across the border but still it seemed kind of ridiculous that ordinary citizens are basically left hanging.
He makes statements about treatments, causes, and outcomes as if they were God given truths proven to the world beyond all doubt. In truth medicine seems to this mathematician as a field governed sooley by statistical correlation with next to no concern over (a) what is the actual cause is, (b) testing the hypothesized cause in any meaningful way. I've read study after study that goes through a wonderful presented statistical analysis to conclude that such and such drug works well at treating such and such symptom; they then close with a couple of paragraphs as to why (they think) the drug is working often not using an qualifiers such as "we don't know but our guess is..." or "it would be nice to find out if it is...."
To the vast majority of practicing physicians I've met "cause" just doesn't seem to be the important question. Which I think is why things happen like my pharmacist declaring that two drugs prescribed by my doctor are going to cancel each others effects or why I take a drug to treat a painful toenail and end up with bleeding in my stomach.
You reminded me: The one thing I would change in fact would be to eliminate the food service entirely. From my perspective it just increases the chance that I will be woken from my sleep during the flight, from the airlines perspective it is just an added expense which increases the risk of injury to passengers and crew and doesn't actually do anything to help get the passengers to their destination, which in the end is what we've paid for.
I hear alot about how bad air travel is, but I don't see it. I fly about six times a year and have been for the last decade. The only increased hassle I have noticed is with the TSA checkpoints and those have basically remained consistent for the last five years (I now plan a stop at a drug store into my first day at my destination, big deal). My planes arrive within an hour of their scheduled time, okay so they aren't usually on-time, but if it is important for me to get there at a certain I time I plan accordingly. In particular if I stand to lose money if I'm late I arrive quite a bit early. I've lost one bag in my decade of flying and while it did take a week to get back to me, it didn't really matter because there wasn't anything important in it: because any fool knows you carry the important stuff with you or better yet leave it at home.
The biggest hassles have been caused by weather but I'm hardly going to declare air-travel defunct because I have problems for three months a year.
I'll check out the book because it sounds interesting, but I think the claim that Air travel is really that bad is just hype from the media, i.e. a few bad stories blown out of proportion, together with the same angry people I see driving on our roads just looking for something and someone to be upset with.
A number of island nations are going to be underwater in a few years. A properly designed floating man-made island system might give them the ability to continue functioning as independent nations rather than just disappearing altogether.
And to you naysayers who have been pointing out that these Seasteads will be to small to defend themselves from aggressive nations and will have to import basically everything, the island nations of the indian, atlantic, and pacific oceans are basically in the same position. With only a few exceptions they seem to remain relatively unmolested and viable (other than sea level rise). Mainly through tourism.
I think it is only the Asbestos lobby that claims that fiber glass is 'as dangerous' as asbestos. Basically fiber glass is an irritant to your lungs and will cause chronic problems that may take many years to recover from. In my own experience it was fiber glass getting into my skin that caused the worst problems*. There is a hazardous material data sheet that appears with fiber glass products in a manufacturing setting, but cancer caused by them is mostly unheard of.
* spent a summer cutting fiber glass insulation panels for thermal and noise insulation in aplliances. We would wear a HEPA mask and coveralls with duct taped ankles and wrists; and had to vent the room to the outside.
Use them as control terminals (one for each room, maybe in the wall somewhere) and servers for your houses living controls: thermostat, phone, tv, music, lighting, and maybe some web-cams and other security features, to name the big ones I'd want.
Slashdot Mirror
This is (one of) the reason(s) I started getting Wi-Fi capable phones. Plus I only have to have my wireless router configured. Seems like the better solution than a separate antenna system. Of course not every service supports UMA capability - or at least not on every phone that could have it.
That's the basic problem. Actually this is problem in a number of government run systems.
The US is in the middle of a decades long push to test students into knowledge and schools into, for lack of a better word, success. The result is students who give even less of $hit (where that is possible), teachers who teach how to take tests (and not how to be a creative and intelligent thinker), teachers who are terrified that their job security is determined by unmotivated students, and administrators that care about only one thing (test scores for their school) and how to game the system enough so that they don't lose their job.
The real solution to the problem of schooling, if there ever was a problem, is with parents. It is up to parents to instill in their children a respect for education, a thirst for knowledge, and the beginnings of creativity.
Tests to most students (and adults) feel like punishment. They undermine the educational process (they are necessary when we treat degrees as a certificate of knowledge so we will never be entirely free of them). Using them as a method of motivating students is akin to using beatings to train a dog: you don't get a well trained dog, what you get is a terrified mass of useless dog.
I think c64_love was just pointing out that the way a question is asked skews the results. A survey taker can make subtle changes in wording and have a huge effect -- the example given being not-so-subtle could be expected to skew effects substantially.
Yup. Because the PC is dying man! It's been dying for THIRTY FUCKING YEARS NOW! You'd think it'd have the good grace to have kicked off long ago and made way for a more compact, less powerful, less configurable, less open, complete cluster-fuck of a platform like smart phones or something. You know, something that can be locked down against their own users. Something you can charge through the nose and out the ass for development tools and support for.
Right. I mean I might spend $100-400 of my money on a phone or laptop type device or two (and another for the wife) and our family will likely own at most one tv-type device and one gaming device for a combined total of at most $800. I buy the devices and I use them for 15 years or until they break whichever comes first. But when I ask my company to plunk down a $3000 chunk of change every 4-5 years for a work machine it will be a pc. I don't see this fact changing in my lifetime. Maybe I'm just not seeing the light...
A book rep stopping by my office last month was asking why I'm not using their textbook for my course like the other instructors at the school. I told him that I looked up what they were charging at our bookstore and decided that that was at least $100 more than the useful value to the students. Then I said I was unimpressed that a professor of the caliber that Stewart is supposed to be took upwards of 7 iterations to apparently get Calculus right, I mentioned that if anything the last four editions should have been at least half the cost of the first 3.
He asked what book I was using and I said "none". He was floored. I explained that I write detailed notes to the class and put them on a wiki page I maintain for the course. Students then go in and can even edit the notes (if they find a typo) and maintain their own pages worth of examples which they maintain in groups of four. Overall the students have a textbook that is: an ebook, covers class, freely links to other material, includes videos relevant to the class, includes program files and examples, includes links to what the other students in the class are doing. And the total cost to the students is free, the cost to the department is just the 10 year old computer I rescued from a storage closet to host the wiki on.
Best part is next time I teach the course the wiki notes will be largely done and I'll just be able to focus on adding to them. Plus I'll have all the old students pages worth of notes and examples to include as needed.
He was stunned and just quietly slipped out of my office while I was showing him all the pages I had written.
While I'm not an expert, I speculate that potential applications would include: using a similar model to study cilial action in human lungs or gut; developing of advanced fabrics which shed water more efficiently; developing algorithms for robotics (I'm thinking in particular military applications) to dry themselves in the wild. The beauty of science to me is that someone answers what appears to be a relatively innocuous and useless question and often can't tell where it might lead. We (often) can't just dive in and answer the most difficult question first, we start with a simple model of a related phenomena and then build up to the real (and useful) examples. I like this problem here, because in practice it does seem that biological systems have spent the eons developing the best solutions to complicated problems (basically through trial and error) so they have a model whose solution agrees with the one found by the biological system. I see it as a win, science has advanced, even if it was only a micro-step.
I agree. Tenure gives the freedom to take risks in both teaching and research. The net result is a higher quality of both. It is also a form of non-monetized benefit. I'm curious what the writer thinks would take its place if not tuition monies: myself, certainly with the lack of freedom to do my job as I know it should be done and despite the bitching of the lazy students that make up 80 percent of my classes would be demanding substantially more salary or finding other places to work. I can be treated like shit and make money in plenty of other professions.
Sure I have colleagues I'd love to have the ability to force to work at least half as hard as I do, but not if that means giving up the ability to place demands on my students to do work.
My wife got her teeth checked by Dr. Pane for a long time. It would have been more poetic if the hygenist was named Pane, but still gave me a giggle every time I heard it.
You can put a packing strap across your matress to secure your feet for full range crunches and reverse crunches. No friend needed. Mine runs under the matress and in the morning I snug it down and slip my legs under for my routine.
I don't expect society to drop by and solve all my problems. I solve my own problems. Probably so do you. Right? Why can't these guys do the same? You'd think it would be easier to find a circle of like-minded old people, than to wait for the whole society to reorganize itself to solve their problem.
I don't know why they don't, but there are plenty that don't help themselves. The truly sad part is that (in my experience with ambulance "freq. fliers") every tenth call is an actual medical emergency for them; so you can't even (ethically anyway) start cutting back on their priority. They often have quite honest and severe chronic (if not always critical) medical problems. Sure you can say, "Then they shouldn't get emergency service even when they need it", but once it is your mother or father suffering from depression what do you think? Depression is a disease, it is not something you can just will yourself out of.
I think the solution is multi-generational households, society got away from these somehow and one of the outcomes is a number of elderly people with problems. Economically such arrangements are starting to make more and more sense. However we may have lost the social skills needed to make such situations work. In my own case it is only a matter of time before one or both sets of parents will be living with or extremely close to my wife and I, there are just to many health and money issues for us to deal with and having three households increases the problems.
Long walks with a dog. Solitary, at your pace. and the dog has many other benifits to your life (just owning one has been shown to lower your blood pressure).
Do Burpees (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burpee ) Developed by the other class of people who stay in a small room for much of their day. Get into a habit of doing a set when you wake up and another at night. I started them because of a long series of traveling where I needed a way to get an effecient workout done in a hotel room. I supplement these with biking to work and long walks with my dog.
Many "frequent fliers" with ambulance services are just lonely and depressed elderly people who need someone to talk to. I would guess many 911(or 999 as the case may be) time wasters (as opposed to pranksters) have the same issues. It would be nice if society could find a way to reknit the social fabric that used to help these people.
...Or to stop reporting the thefts. Would you rather know at once if your data is stolen, or find out only in the rare instance when a company is discovered through external forces, well after the fact, to have lost data?
My own solution for sensitive work data (I'm in academics so this is basically students' grades and letters of reference) is to keep the data on the network drive owned by my school, only manipulate it on the computer in my office, and keep the hard copies locked in a file cabinet in my office. In addition files are encrypted and some garbage encrypted files with similar names to the grade books are mixed in. Once the seven year window is open the copies both hard and soft are destroyed although an exam or two may survive with the name inked out. The main tenet being that at no point is a copy of the grade book outside of a secured area that is the responsibility of the school to keep secure.
I would love to see the companies I deal with treat my data with such respect, but I just don't see a way to force it on them without at the same time giving them an incentive to sit on a loss.
There is a group of people who already do the majority of their publishing with a non-office like program. Many scientists write using LaTex or a variant. We do large collaborative projects with people scattered throughout the world at different institutions, we travel often, and our work need not (at least for those of us at public institutions) be kept very secure. Since Google docs started I've been writing them email begging for a Latex processor to be included. There are some online LaTex processors up and running, and while interesting they still have some problems which I had hoped google would try to fix.
Air Force / Navy Be sure to ask them to pay off some of your student loans and do your homework before signing. This career path is batting about 0.500 with my friends, 2 have found good employment after doing a small stint, 1 is on a long term career path in the AF, and 3 have had major difficulties finding work after discharge (although in these cases I find it hard to lay all the blame on the military).
They can't keep a database of ballistic fingerprints of every handgun being sold. This would actually be useful with technology that is 20+ years old and could eliminate the lottery that law enforcement currently faces when they turn up a suspicious handgun.
I was incredibly anti-gun until I started visiting Mexico. As far as I can tell citizens are not allowed to even own ammunition much less a weapon to put it into (please correct me, most of this information is based off the warnings at the airports and consulate websites). Yet crime there seems to basically be gun based. In Mexico city there are police armed to the teeth standing in front of banks and money changing shops...
Probably part of the problem is that the Northern neighbor of Mexico oozes handguns across the border but still it seemed kind of ridiculous that ordinary citizens are basically left hanging.
He makes statements about treatments, causes, and outcomes as if they were God given truths proven to the world beyond all doubt. In truth medicine seems to this mathematician as a field governed sooley by statistical correlation with next to no concern over (a) what is the actual cause is, (b) testing the hypothesized cause in any meaningful way. I've read study after study that goes through a wonderful presented statistical analysis to conclude that such and such drug works well at treating such and such symptom; they then close with a couple of paragraphs as to why (they think) the drug is working often not using an qualifiers such as "we don't know but our guess is..." or "it would be nice to find out if it is ...."
To the vast majority of practicing physicians I've met "cause" just doesn't seem to be the important question. Which I think is why things happen like my pharmacist declaring that two drugs prescribed by my doctor are going to cancel each others effects or why I take a drug to treat a painful toenail and end up with bleeding in my stomach.
You reminded me: The one thing I would change in fact would be to eliminate the food service entirely. From my perspective it just increases the chance that I will be woken from my sleep during the flight, from the airlines perspective it is just an added expense which increases the risk of injury to passengers and crew and doesn't actually do anything to help get the passengers to their destination, which in the end is what we've paid for.
I hear alot about how bad air travel is, but I don't see it. I fly about six times a year and have been for the last decade. The only increased hassle I have noticed is with the TSA checkpoints and those have basically remained consistent for the last five years (I now plan a stop at a drug store into my first day at my destination, big deal). My planes arrive within an hour of their scheduled time, okay so they aren't usually on-time, but if it is important for me to get there at a certain I time I plan accordingly. In particular if I stand to lose money if I'm late I arrive quite a bit early. I've lost one bag in my decade of flying and while it did take a week to get back to me, it didn't really matter because there wasn't anything important in it: because any fool knows you carry the important stuff with you or better yet leave it at home.
The biggest hassles have been caused by weather but I'm hardly going to declare air-travel defunct because I have problems for three months a year.
I'll check out the book because it sounds interesting, but I think the claim that Air travel is really that bad is just hype from the media, i.e. a few bad stories blown out of proportion, together with the same angry people I see driving on our roads just looking for something and someone to be upset with.
A number of island nations are going to be underwater in a few years. A properly designed floating man-made island system might give them the ability to continue functioning as independent nations rather than just disappearing altogether.
And to you naysayers who have been pointing out that these Seasteads will be to small to defend themselves from aggressive nations and will have to import basically everything, the island nations of the indian, atlantic, and pacific oceans are basically in the same position. With only a few exceptions they seem to remain relatively unmolested and viable (other than sea level rise). Mainly through tourism.
I think it is only the Asbestos lobby that claims that fiber glass is 'as dangerous' as asbestos. Basically fiber glass is an irritant to your lungs and will cause chronic problems that may take many years to recover from. In my own experience it was fiber glass getting into my skin that caused the worst problems*. There is a hazardous material data sheet that appears with fiber glass products in a manufacturing setting, but cancer caused by them is mostly unheard of.
* spent a summer cutting fiber glass insulation panels for thermal and noise insulation in aplliances. We would wear a HEPA mask and coveralls with duct taped ankles and wrists; and had to vent the room to the outside.
Use them as control terminals (one for each room, maybe in the wall somewhere) and servers for your houses living controls: thermostat, phone, tv, music, lighting, and maybe some web-cams and other security features, to name the big ones I'd want.