While strictly speaking [computers] do carry out mathematical operations, that's not what most people use them for.
But calculation is not mathematics, either - or, more precisely, it is not mathematics as practiced by mathematicians doing mathematics. Calculation is what scientists, engineers, econometricians and so forth do when they apply the results of mathematics to issues in their own fields.
I agree that the current practice of programming is not much like either of these things. Where mathematics (in the applied sense) plays an important part in the development of software (e.g. cryptography, signal processing), the mathematics is generally applied to the problem before coding starts.
In the case of the big bang theory, you have some properties of the universe that are predicted by the theory, such as the presence of the background radiation and the uniformity of mass distribution, among others, that are predicted to exist in a universe where a "big bang" occurs.
Except you've put the cart before the horse. The background radiation was observed... Big Bang was constructed as a theory specifically to explain those observed properties of the universe. It doesn't predict them.
Alpher and Herman predicted the background radiation as a consequence of the big bang in 1948. It wasn't until 1964 that Penzias and Wilson discovered it.
Alpher also showed that the big bang correctly predicts the relative abundance of the light isotopes in the universe. While these were known before the big bang theory was formulated, there is no horse-cart reversal in calling this a prediction, as the big bang theory was developed from a different set of observations that are unrelated to isotope abundances.
The isotope-abundance calculation and the discovery of the background radiation were instrumental in the acceptance of the big bang theory. There are those, myself included, who think that Alpher was a good deal more deserving of a Nobel prize than Penzias and Wilson, who had no idea what caused the radiation they had stumbled upon, and did not figure it out for themselves.
Truly teaching the controversy would be the creationists' worst nightmare, as the controversy actually happened in the nineteenth century and ended in a complete rout of the creationists.
The history of the real controversy can - and should - be taught without any changes to laws or regulations.
To the author and everyone who agrees with him: show us how it's done. A truly effective alternative will receive a lot of attention, but just claiming it should be so doesn't count for much.
First we need to ensure that everyone is competent in analytical reasoning and the ability to communicate clearly and accurately in human language.
I have bad news for you. Natural languages aren't any good at all for communicating clearly or accurately. Every single natural language is about nuance, and feelings, and innuendo, and multiple layers and multiple audiences and a whole host of dreck. Accurate descriptions of the world are not any part of natural language. Hence, mathematical language and programming language. We had to invent entirely artificial languages to even come close to your desire.
You are mistaken. Natural languages can be used to communicate clearly and accurately, as is unequivocally demonstrated by the global corpus of scientific papers. Furthermore, the global corpus of mathematical knowledge is by no means entirely, or even predominantly, in formal mathematical notation.
Natural language can also be used in the other ways you list, because it is much more expressive than mathematical language, which in turn is more expressive than programming languages. This is understood by mathematicians and scientists, and even by a majority of computer scientists, I believe.
This expressive power inevitably means there is considerable opportunity for abuse, or 'dreck' as you put it. This, combined with natural language's overarching importance, is why teaching how to use it properly is a priority.
So what's wrong with teaching programming, again?
Accurate communication depends not only on the sender's ability to state his intent clearly, but also the receiver's ability to understand clearly-expressed information. If you had that ability, you would have realized that my statement about priorities is not predicated on there being anything wrong in teaching programming. On the other hand, perhaps your failing here is in the area of analytical reasoning? This is an indication of why I have grouped the two together as a priority in education.
The IDDP's own reports on this project do not describe it as having reached the mantle. Other reports described it as having reached a magma chamber within the upper crust.
Deceptive advertising is fraud. Don't "regulate" -- prosecute them for fraud if they're committing fraud. If they're not, then leave them the hell alone.
Advertising that is merely deceptive is not, legally speaking, fraud. If you would like it to be, that will require more regulation.
That's why we need more people using languages like this: http://haxe.org/
It seems as if have seen a hundred new languages, all allegedly solving the problem of programming, and none of them succeeding. That's because the difficult problems are not at the level of syntax.
Does anybody else... not dislike facebook? To be honest, I don't get why it's so in vogue to declare one's hatred for facebook.
Speaking for myself, I have no issue with social networking itself. It's the company's relentless assault on privacy, and in particular, its practice of retroactively weakening the respect for privacy in its of terms of service, that keeps me away.
While I would not be disappointed if this were true, the whole thing seems to be predicated on a dubious analogy. What is playing the role of the immune system here? In the case of MySpace, Facebook seems to have played that role.
point is you don't even need synchronized flapping to have benefit in a V formation, the reason for the V formation is not to have syncronized flapping, it's just an additional benefit
Have you ever been in a discussion where some Dunning-Kruger type tries to make a big deal over something that everyone else knows perfectly well, and who has failed to notice that the discussion has gone beyond that point? That's the role that you are playing here, as are the AC who started this thread and everyone who thought it was insightful.
The point of the study, and the thing that makes it newsworthy, is that it demonstrates that birds are capable of extracting energy from the unsteady flow created by flapping. Neither theory nor experiment showing that there is a benefit in steady flow settle the questions of whether it could, let alone is, being used by birds.
Unfortunately, sloppy science education has given a simplistic idea of how the scientific method works. Ideas do not get accepted merely because they are plausible.
Nope. The burden of proof is on the person who made the claim.
So your proof of that claim is?
Where the burden of proof lies is ultimately decided by a majority of the interested third parties. You can claim anything is unproven, but no-one has to take it seriously.
The Columbia crew were dead men walking the moment the foam damaged the tiles.
Your reply prompted me to look into the CAIB report and comments on it, and as a result I think you are probably - but not definitely - right. One commentator pointed out that the last chance to definitely save the crew passed by in the evaluation of the previous foam strike (it was foam, not ice as I mistakenly wrote before), when it was decided not to elevate foam strikes to the status of a potentially catastrophic risk.
What's special about Norco that they get their very own law in the vehicle code? Are their horses especially fragile?
From cityTownInfo.com: 'The city has an animal oriented community and is, to date, one of the few California cities where horses are used as alternate modes of transportation.'
Though it calls itself a city, it is just another tiny suburb of Greater LA.
I was taught as child in the 60s and in 70s this was popular science fair homemade wind tunnel experiment.
Did these science-fair experiments demonstrate the specific contribution of synchronized flapping? Even if they did, this claims to be the first experiment to show that birds flap synchronously with sufficient precision to benefit from it.
I was thinking along the same lines, except that I would say 'relational' rather than 'SQL' because SQL is neither the only nor the ideal implementation of the relational model.
In one significant way they are different, however. Part of Codd's insight was that the deductive power of his model should be less than Turing-complete, so that issues of undecidability don't arise (triggers were not part of Codd's model.) This restriction made automatic query optimization and reasonable transaction times feasible, while those (relatively few) problems requiring the power of a Turing machine could be handled in a Turing-equivalent host language.
In contrast, the proponents of 'reactive programming' seem to be wandering into the realm of logic programming, which has been around for at least 4 decades (Prolog), without giving any indication that they are aware of its pitfalls.
I was about to add 4) Unstable cycles - the formula your program represents may not be satisfiable, in which case it can never settle down to a consistent set of values.
If that is the case, however, then either your problem is not solvable or your model of it is faulty, and the program implementing it would be wrong whether it used reactive programming or not.
This suggests a partial solution to the synchronicity problem: whenever the event queue is empty, you have a consistent solution. This is OK for spreadsheets, but it seems to raise problems for a multiuser database with concurrent updates.
Also interestingly, when IBM representatives speak to experts, they never call Watson an AI. I have observed that several times now. So IBM does understand clearly what they have in Watson and what not.
When IBM marketing speaks to the less-informed, however, they show no such restraint. I have just heard a radio ad touting this initiative, in which they use the phrase 'cognitive intelligence - that is, computers that think'.
Slashdot Mirror
While strictly speaking [computers] do carry out mathematical operations, that's not what most people use them for.
But calculation is not mathematics, either - or, more precisely, it is not mathematics as practiced by mathematicians doing mathematics. Calculation is what scientists, engineers, econometricians and so forth do when they apply the results of mathematics to issues in their own fields.
I agree that the current practice of programming is not much like either of these things. Where mathematics (in the applied sense) plays an important part in the development of software (e.g. cryptography, signal processing), the mathematics is generally applied to the problem before coding starts.
In the case of the big bang theory, you have some properties of the universe that are predicted by the theory, such as the presence of the background radiation and the uniformity of mass distribution, among others, that are predicted to exist in a universe where a "big bang" occurs.
Except you've put the cart before the horse. The background radiation was observed... Big Bang was constructed as a theory specifically to explain those observed properties of the universe. It doesn't predict them.
Alpher and Herman predicted the background radiation as a consequence of the big bang in 1948. It wasn't until 1964 that Penzias and Wilson discovered it.
Alpher also showed that the big bang correctly predicts the relative abundance of the light isotopes in the universe. While these were known before the big bang theory was formulated, there is no horse-cart reversal in calling this a prediction, as the big bang theory was developed from a different set of observations that are unrelated to isotope abundances.
The isotope-abundance calculation and the discovery of the background radiation were instrumental in the acceptance of the big bang theory. There are those, myself included, who think that Alpher was a good deal more deserving of a Nobel prize than Penzias and Wilson, who had no idea what caused the radiation they had stumbled upon, and did not figure it out for themselves.
Truly teaching the controversy would be the creationists' worst nightmare, as the controversy actually happened in the nineteenth century and ended in a complete rout of the creationists.
The history of the real controversy can - and should - be taught without any changes to laws or regulations.
To the author and everyone who agrees with him: show us how it's done. A truly effective alternative will receive a lot of attention, but just claiming it should be so doesn't count for much.
First we need to ensure that everyone is competent in analytical reasoning and the ability to communicate clearly and accurately in human language.
I have bad news for you. Natural languages aren't any good at all for communicating clearly or accurately. Every single natural language is about nuance, and feelings, and innuendo, and multiple layers and multiple audiences and a whole host of dreck. Accurate descriptions of the world are not any part of natural language. Hence, mathematical language and programming language. We had to invent entirely artificial languages to even come close to your desire.
You are mistaken. Natural languages can be used to communicate clearly and accurately, as is unequivocally demonstrated by the global corpus of scientific papers. Furthermore, the global corpus of mathematical knowledge is by no means entirely, or even predominantly, in formal mathematical notation.
Natural language can also be used in the other ways you list, because it is much more expressive than mathematical language, which in turn is more expressive than programming languages. This is understood by mathematicians and scientists, and even by a majority of computer scientists, I believe.
This expressive power inevitably means there is considerable opportunity for abuse, or 'dreck' as you put it. This, combined with natural language's overarching importance, is why teaching how to use it properly is a priority.
So what's wrong with teaching programming, again?
Accurate communication depends not only on the sender's ability to state his intent clearly, but also the receiver's ability to understand clearly-expressed information. If you had that ability, you would have realized that my statement about priorities is not predicated on there being anything wrong in teaching programming. On the other hand, perhaps your failing here is in the area of analytical reasoning? This is an indication of why I have grouped the two together as a priority in education.
First we need to ensure that everyone is competent in analytical reasoning and the ability to communicate clearly and accurately in human language.
The IDDP's own reports on this project do not describe it as having reached the mantle. Other reports described it as having reached a magma chamber within the upper crust.
This doesn't require any more regulation.
Deceptive advertising is fraud. Don't "regulate" -- prosecute them for fraud if they're committing fraud. If they're not, then leave them the hell alone.
Advertising that is merely deceptive is not, legally speaking, fraud. If you would like it to be, that will require more regulation.
That's why we need more people using languages like this: http://haxe.org/
It seems as if have seen a hundred new languages, all allegedly solving the problem of programming, and none of them succeeding. That's because the difficult problems are not at the level of syntax.
Does anybody else... not dislike facebook? To be honest, I don't get why it's so in vogue to declare one's hatred for facebook.
Speaking for myself, I have no issue with social networking itself. It's the company's relentless assault on privacy, and in particular, its practice of retroactively weakening the respect for privacy in its of terms of service, that keeps me away.
While I would not be disappointed if this were true, the whole thing seems to be predicated on a dubious analogy. What is playing the role of the immune system here? In the case of MySpace, Facebook seems to have played that role.
point is you don't even need synchronized flapping to have benefit in a V formation, the reason for the V formation is not to have syncronized flapping, it's just an additional benefit
Have you ever been in a discussion where some Dunning-Kruger type tries to make a big deal over something that everyone else knows perfectly well, and who has failed to notice that the discussion has gone beyond that point? That's the role that you are playing here, as are the AC who started this thread and everyone who thought it was insightful.
The point of the study, and the thing that makes it newsworthy, is that it demonstrates that birds are capable of extracting energy from the unsteady flow created by flapping. Neither theory nor experiment showing that there is a benefit in steady flow settle the questions of whether it could, let alone is, being used by birds.
Unfortunately, sloppy science education has given a simplistic idea of how the scientific method works. Ideas do not get accepted merely because they are plausible.
Nope. The burden of proof is on the person who made the claim.
So your proof of that claim is?
Where the burden of proof lies is ultimately decided by a majority of the interested third parties. You can claim anything is unproven, but no-one has to take it seriously.
I realize that it is on loan from Google.
The Columbia crew were dead men walking the moment the foam damaged the tiles.
Your reply prompted me to look into the CAIB report and comments on it, and as a result I think you are probably - but not definitely - right. One commentator pointed out that the last chance to definitely save the crew passed by in the evaluation of the previous foam strike (it was foam, not ice as I mistakenly wrote before), when it was decided not to elevate foam strikes to the status of a potentially catastrophic risk.
A glasshole demonstrates that there is some substance behind the term. I hope they take the device away from her.
What's special about Norco that they get their very own law in the vehicle code? Are their horses especially fragile?
From cityTownInfo.com:
'The city has an animal oriented community and is, to date, one of the few California cities where horses are used as alternate modes of transportation.'
Though it calls itself a city, it is just another tiny suburb of Greater LA.
"clearly" a huge distraction? Got anything to back up that claim? Yeah I doubt it.
Clearly the burden of proof is on you, as clearly there is the potential for distraction.
So a legal GPS is an illegal monitor as well?
Good point - being legal doesn't make it right.
from what i remember the worker bees warned against a launch due to ice and whatever but the bosses said to launch
Then, on Columbia's last mission, the managers ignored the engineers' concerns over the ice impact that had occurred on launch.
I was taught as child in the 60s and in 70s this was popular science fair homemade wind tunnel experiment.
Did these science-fair experiments demonstrate the specific contribution of synchronized flapping? Even if they did, this claims to be the first experiment to show that birds flap synchronously with sufficient precision to benefit from it.
non-constructive cynicism passes as insightful here?
Troll.
I was thinking along the same lines, except that I would say 'relational' rather than 'SQL' because SQL is neither the only nor the ideal implementation of the relational model.
In one significant way they are different, however. Part of Codd's insight was that the deductive power of his model should be less than Turing-complete, so that issues of undecidability don't arise (triggers were not part of Codd's model.) This restriction made automatic query optimization and reasonable transaction times feasible, while those (relatively few) problems requiring the power of a Turing machine could be handled in a Turing-equivalent host language.
In contrast, the proponents of 'reactive programming' seem to be wandering into the realm of logic programming, which has been around for at least 4 decades (Prolog), without giving any indication that they are aware of its pitfalls.
I was about to add 4) Unstable cycles - the formula your program represents may not be satisfiable, in which case it can never settle down to a consistent set of values.
If that is the case, however, then either your problem is not solvable or your model of it is faulty, and the program implementing it would be wrong whether it used reactive programming or not.
This suggests a partial solution to the synchronicity problem: whenever the event queue is empty, you have a consistent solution. This is OK for spreadsheets, but it seems to raise problems for a multiuser database with concurrent updates.
Also interestingly, when IBM representatives speak to experts, they never call Watson an AI. I have observed that several times now. So IBM does understand clearly what they have in Watson and what not.
When IBM marketing speaks to the less-informed, however, they show no such restraint. I have just heard a radio ad touting this initiative, in which they use the phrase 'cognitive intelligence - that is, computers that think'.