On the other hand, WWTBAM questions have a limited answer pool whereas Jeopardy! questions are generally open-ended. Also, much of the information that can help you in Jeopardy! questions are concealed (often with some sort of joke) in the category and clue, which would be hard to parse. Oftentimes an entirely-right answer might just not fit a category, and the category is phrased such that it is not horribly straightforward literally.
With some google-fu, I bet it would be very possible to make a bot that would do well on WWTBAM with no real AI because of the limited response pool.
I'm afraid I don't entirely see where you're coming from. LaTeX is not showing its age in lack of version control (indeed, many recently-developed software packages have none), it's showing its philosophy. LaTeX has plain text source files, not some special format, which has many advantages and disadvantages. These files have to be managed externally, such as by subversion, as you note. Both LaTeX and subversion are nerd-friendly and have some learning curve issues.
LyX...I do not think is a good option. As someone gets deep into it, they are going to hit advanced issues as they want to do various things. Howeverâ"unlike straight LaTeX usersâ"they have no experience navigating LaTeX syntax to enter stuff. I suspect that people too early hit problems with LyX, and this has been what I've discovered helping people with their documents.
If the learning curve isn't worth it for your application, the other option is Word, I suspect.
I hear that Word now has a good deal of version control features (should be lots about them in this thread and plenty of other places), maybe not quite up to what you want, but up to some level. More importantly, you say this is academic writing and if you're going to submit stuff to conferences or journals, most require Word or LaTeX, and in my field at least all journals and many conferences allow either.
Something more obscure isn't going to be worth it. I'd really want to go with LaTeX because, well, I'm a big fan, but if you don't, using System X that no one's ever heard of isn't a great alternative.
The class is about problem solving, not problem creating.
Seriously though, spreadsheet programs make it too easy to start punching crap in, and makes it too easy to write something that you haven't thought through. If you realise there's a better way later, it's hard to refactor compared to a traditional programming language.
Python seems like a good enough idea to me (if the teacher is proficient). It is high-level enough to focus on the problem solving element, you don't typically go through a separate compilation and execution procedure, and can even run the interactive interpreter and play with stuff. There are libraries so that students can do all sorts of things they can imagine, and especially enthusiastic students can do *really* cool stuff.
OP, if the teacher has few requirements on the course, break it down into several-week projects that solve different kinds of problems using the same language. Do some screenscraping with BeautifulSoup. Do something mathy at their level with math, numpy, or sympy. Do something cool with PyGame. The key part is the same in all of these--breaking down a problem into its various essential chunks.
Python makes sense to a degree, but its trademark The Whitespace Thing might prove especially frustrating, as adolescents tend to pay little attention to subtlety, so I could imagine the somewhat-subtlety of indentation could be problematic. Maybe I'm wrong; this is untested.
In general, I like the idea of using a clean, interpreted language like python. If a compiled language is used, the interface used should make that automatic. Still, playing with an interactive session might be invaluable.
Hmm. All three of those work fine in Python. The meaning of x, y, and z would affect how I stored my variables, but I would probably use something like your first option (though I would probably add spaces around the operator). I would also use something like that in C and maybe even PHP. I would only use your most pythonic solution if x, y, and z should be thought of together in some way. If really wanted to save space, I would go with the top solution of x, y, and z don't relate in some way.
Shorter does not mean better. x,y,z = 1,2,3 does not make source code clearer, as you defend meaningful whitespace as doing.
One more remark I meant to make in the first place:
Generating PDFs is very important today. However, if you wish to submit things to journals and conferences, it seems like they all demand either LaTeX source or MS Word files. I don't know how flexible they would be if you didn't have one of those formats to give them.
I'm sorry you've gotten tired of LaTeX, but I really don't have a replacement to offer you. I am very interested in typography and have come to the conclusion that LaTeX is really the best system for typesetting scientific documents.
Some people recommended desktop publishing software like InDesign or Quark. These sorts of programs will give you well-typeset math and text and will generate text, but do not shine at automation.
If you've used LaTeX so long, I'm surprised you're still having all sorts of problems like you describe. Image insertion isn't all that hardâ"the formats supported are clear and conversion isn't too hard. (The compiler should really know how to do conversion for you, I agree, but that does not make it hard to know how to use the software.) Yes, creating a new document class is pretty advanced stuff, but, well, that is an advanced task. You do need to know commands for anything you want to do, but at the end of the day, you don't need to know all that many to get by fine. When you don't, the answer is usually a very quick search away.
You claim that LaTeX is stuck in the 80s with "the compiler metaphor" and "weird font technology." I wish to defend (La)TeX a bit. The compiler metaphor is even to today fairly necessary for what LaTeX does. To do the same sort of processing would result in a laggy-to-unworkable WYSIWYG display. And as to the font technology and all the little quirks where TeX does things its own way and not in a more standard way, I give TeX a lot of slack. It has out-survived a lot of technologies rising and falling. From a user perspective, that means your TeX will always be there. It's a dangerous thing to get in bed with new technology; when you marry the technology of today, you may be a widow tomorrow.
I'm sorry I cannot help you more. It really sounds like the closest thing to what you want is a word processor like Word, but you don't want to hear that (nor do I want to tell you it).
Does anyone with a lick of sense actually give their real name to a free web-based service?
Sure, plenty of us do! My name is Mike Graham. This isn't a secret. I tell people my name all the time. This full name is in my email addresses and plenty of other places.
If I wanted privacy in the form of anonymity, I would not be using that name. And that's fine; that's my prerogative. But I'm not doing anything nonsensical when I use my real name for things.
Google did not get what they wanted when they were ordered to give Viacom the logs. However, they got what they were wanting when they reached the agreement to anonymise the logs. In that sense, they won the agreement.
If you run your own mail server just make sure you configure it to drop any emails destined to more than a few recipients and possibly also drop the recipient list into BCC if there are more than one listed. As a remark, this would be really bad. There are times it is very useful to have a conversation with a group of people using "Reply to All".
I suppose you could say that after a dozen recipients it should drop to BCC and be more reasonable. That still doesn't really solve the poster's problem. I don't think his boss is going to make the same mistake and send out the list so publicly even if he does use it to Spam.
GP was correct in claiming "Umm, we don't even know if a magnetic monopole exists. Currently, theory is the only place you can find one." It is correct that the theory regarded as describing the universe correctly (div(B)=0; dB/dt + curl(E) = 0) discounts magnetic monopoles, but magnetic monopoles have certainly been theorised before. Because we've not observed magnetic monopoles, we generally don't use those theories, but I believe they are even fairly well-explored.
Early adopters pay more. That's how it works. When your manufacturer releases a new product a year later that's cheaper, you have no, no place to complain.
The iPhone wasn't unsubsidised by contracts when it first came out. Yes, you could walk into the store, buy an iPhone, and walk out, no strings attached. However, Apple and AT&T knew what you were going to do with it and counted on that when pricing their products.
I agree that the internet is a big deal. The web allows information to be much more easily spread than past technologies. However, I stand by what I was sayingâ"earlier technologies could have killed journals as we know them, yet we came to our current system, presumably thinking it was better than an even more democratic one.
The journals are not needed. There should be no censorship at all except for cases of criminal behavior. Whoa! Censorship? That isn't what is going on. A publication can choose to print or not to print what you have to say, and it is not censorship.
People are free to write articles that are not worth the paper they are printed on. Anyone has the right not to print them on their paper.
Everything should be published and the worldwide market of ideas is the right mechanism to decide what to retain and what to reject. That is why the internet is so important for the cross-pollination of ideas. Money is no object. Almost anybody and everybody who has access to a computer and the internet can publish their work, free of charge. Survival of the fittest. It is a beautiful thing. I've been encountering this basic attitude a lot lately and have yet to really engage a strong supporter. One thing that has occurred to me a lot through this is that the internet is not unique. We have seen the democratisation of knowledge for centuries. Printing has long been fairly trivial in cost compared to the prices spent to accomplish research much of the time, so our excuse for the journal system we currently have cannot reasonably be that we were not able to publish everything everyone wanted to--that technology is not new.
I think we must have this system because we thought it was a good idea to set it up. If I'm right, why exactly? Were we right? Have things changed?
With this method, there isn't anything to find, unless I'm totally misunderstanding it. Or rather, there's nothing to notice.
Plain cryptography is something like having a locked safe sitting in a room. It might not be easy to get into, but you know it when you see it. This is like having a safe behind a painting. You don't notice that there is anything being kept away from you.
No. The real reason is due to campaign contribution limits. If a programmer would normally make $100/hr decides to donate more than 23 hours of his time to the project, he would be in violation. You would also have the problem of the prohibition of foreign national donations.
Do you have any example of this sort of issue happening? A lot of people volunteer many, many hours to help political campaign. They don't get the costs of their time knocking on doors or putting up posters to their contribution limits, do they?
Slashdot Mirror
On the other hand, WWTBAM questions have a limited answer pool whereas Jeopardy! questions are generally open-ended. Also, much of the information that can help you in Jeopardy! questions are concealed (often with some sort of joke) in the category and clue, which would be hard to parse. Oftentimes an entirely-right answer might just not fit a category, and the category is phrased such that it is not horribly straightforward literally.
With some google-fu, I bet it would be very possible to make a bot that would do well on WWTBAM with no real AI because of the limited response pool.
Silly computer scientists and your overloaded acronyms.
I'm afraid I don't entirely see where you're coming from. LaTeX is not showing its age in lack of version control (indeed, many recently-developed software packages have none), it's showing its philosophy. LaTeX has plain text source files, not some special format, which has many advantages and disadvantages. These files have to be managed externally, such as by subversion, as you note. Both LaTeX and subversion are nerd-friendly and have some learning curve issues.
LyX...I do not think is a good option. As someone gets deep into it, they are going to hit advanced issues as they want to do various things. Howeverâ"unlike straight LaTeX usersâ"they have no experience navigating LaTeX syntax to enter stuff. I suspect that people too early hit problems with LyX, and this has been what I've discovered helping people with their documents.
If the learning curve isn't worth it for your application, the other option is Word, I suspect.
I hear that Word now has a good deal of version control features (should be lots about them in this thread and plenty of other places), maybe not quite up to what you want, but up to some level. More importantly, you say this is academic writing and if you're going to submit stuff to conferences or journals, most require Word or LaTeX, and in my field at least all journals and many conferences allow either.
Something more obscure isn't going to be worth it. I'd really want to go with LaTeX because, well, I'm a big fan, but if you don't, using System X that no one's ever heard of isn't a great alternative.
The class is about problem solving, not problem creating.
Seriously though, spreadsheet programs make it too easy to start punching crap in, and makes it too easy to write something that you haven't thought through. If you realise there's a better way later, it's hard to refactor compared to a traditional programming language.
Python seems like a good enough idea to me (if the teacher is proficient). It is high-level enough to focus on the problem solving element, you don't typically go through a separate compilation and execution procedure, and can even run the interactive interpreter and play with stuff. There are libraries so that students can do all sorts of things they can imagine, and especially enthusiastic students can do *really* cool stuff.
OP, if the teacher has few requirements on the course, break it down into several-week projects that solve different kinds of problems using the same language. Do some screenscraping with BeautifulSoup. Do something mathy at their level with math, numpy, or sympy. Do something cool with PyGame. The key part is the same in all of these--breaking down a problem into its various essential chunks.
Incidentally, there's already several funny parody videos involving the "I'm Linux" guy that have been circulating for a good while now. YouTube it!
Python makes sense to a degree, but its trademark The Whitespace Thing might prove especially frustrating, as adolescents tend to pay little attention to subtlety, so I could imagine the somewhat-subtlety of indentation could be problematic. Maybe I'm wrong; this is untested.
In general, I like the idea of using a clean, interpreted language like python. If a compiled language is used, the interface used should make that automatic. Still, playing with an interactive session might be invaluable.
I guess that doesn't really conclude anything.
Hmm. All three of those work fine in Python. The meaning of x, y, and z would affect how I stored my variables, but I would probably use something like your first option (though I would probably add spaces around the operator). I would also use something like that in C and maybe even PHP. I would only use your most pythonic solution if x, y, and z should be thought of together in some way. If really wanted to save space, I would go with the top solution of x, y, and z don't relate in some way.
Shorter does not mean better. x,y,z = 1,2,3 does not make source code clearer, as you defend meaningful whitespace as doing.
Heck Romeo married when he was 16, and that was customary at that time.
Romeo Montague?
Where the set amount is exactly one page.
One more remark I meant to make in the first place:
Generating PDFs is very important today. However, if you wish to submit things to journals and conferences, it seems like they all demand either LaTeX source or MS Word files. I don't know how flexible they would be if you didn't have one of those formats to give them.
Hi javierzinho.
I'm sorry you've gotten tired of LaTeX, but I really don't have a replacement to offer you. I am very interested in typography and have come to the conclusion that LaTeX is really the best system for typesetting scientific documents.
Some people recommended desktop publishing software like InDesign or Quark. These sorts of programs will give you well-typeset math and text and will generate text, but do not shine at automation.
If you've used LaTeX so long, I'm surprised you're still having all sorts of problems like you describe. Image insertion isn't all that hardâ"the formats supported are clear and conversion isn't too hard. (The compiler should really know how to do conversion for you, I agree, but that does not make it hard to know how to use the software.) Yes, creating a new document class is pretty advanced stuff, but, well, that is an advanced task. You do need to know commands for anything you want to do, but at the end of the day, you don't need to know all that many to get by fine. When you don't, the answer is usually a very quick search away.
You claim that LaTeX is stuck in the 80s with "the compiler metaphor" and "weird font technology." I wish to defend (La)TeX a bit. The compiler metaphor is even to today fairly necessary for what LaTeX does. To do the same sort of processing would result in a laggy-to-unworkable WYSIWYG display. And as to the font technology and all the little quirks where TeX does things its own way and not in a more standard way, I give TeX a lot of slack. It has out-survived a lot of technologies rising and falling. From a user perspective, that means your TeX will always be there. It's a dangerous thing to get in bed with new technology; when you marry the technology of today, you may be a widow tomorrow.
I'm sorry I cannot help you more. It really sounds like the closest thing to what you want is a word processor like Word, but you don't want to hear that (nor do I want to tell you it).
Good luck!
Does anyone with a lick of sense actually give their real name to a free web-based service?
Sure, plenty of us do! My name is Mike Graham. This isn't a secret. I tell people my name all the time. This full name is in my email addresses and plenty of other places.
If I wanted privacy in the form of anonymity, I would not be using that name. And that's fine; that's my prerogative. But I'm not doing anything nonsensical when I use my real name for things.
The data are extremely numerous. They are going to need a geek to transform the data into something the lawyers can look at.
Google did not get what they wanted when they were ordered to give Viacom the logs. However, they got what they were wanting when they reached the agreement to anonymise the logs. In that sense, they won the agreement.
I don't know exactly why he's taking such things on the plane, but I know personally I fly with no checked baggage as often as I can.
This is an interesting issue to discuss, but TFA seems to have virtually no content.
GP was correct in claiming "Umm, we don't even know if a magnetic monopole exists. Currently, theory is the only place you can find one." It is correct that the theory regarded as describing the universe correctly (div(B)=0; dB/dt + curl(E) = 0) discounts magnetic monopoles, but magnetic monopoles have certainly been theorised before. Because we've not observed magnetic monopoles, we generally don't use those theories, but I believe they are even fairly well-explored.
Early adopters pay more. That's how it works. When your manufacturer releases a new product a year later that's cheaper, you have no, no place to complain.
The iPhone wasn't unsubsidised by contracts when it first came out. Yes, you could walk into the store, buy an iPhone, and walk out, no strings attached. However, Apple and AT&T knew what you were going to do with it and counted on that when pricing their products.
I agree that the internet is a big deal. The web allows information to be much more easily spread than past technologies. However, I stand by what I was sayingâ"earlier technologies could have killed journals as we know them, yet we came to our current system, presumably thinking it was better than an even more democratic one.
Works fine for me. It's an impressive day if Google got slashdotted.
Plain cryptography is something like having a locked safe sitting in a room. It might not be easy to get into, but you know it when you see it. This is like having a safe behind a painting. You don't notice that there is anything being kept away from you.