I am ecstatic, it's one of those rare moments when I do "get the reference" in a US-centric discussion forum! (I'm in EEU, the Established European Universe)
Just imagine a 40TB HDD starting developing bad sectors... and then RAID arrays crashing... I really can't handle even thinking about it. I think that the use of tape backup systems for those pesky 10-14 TB disks will soon become mandatory in every home.
I plan to use this as my next desktop after Win7 x64, since it seems MS is not propagating the Win10 security patches to 7 and 8. I'm running it in a VM and so far it seems very promising. Snappy, small memory requirements and the added bonuses of almost no telemetry, no spyware and no Cortana.
The main reason I decided to migrate is that Win7 is no more viable for me. I find that the shift to monthly security updates have worsened the update situation. My current Windows 7 x64 just refuses to install the September update (KB4038777) and there is no cure for it, as currently there is no definitive solution but an in-place reinstall (been searching for a week now trying all procedures found in MS and other forums). When the updates were isolated patches one could troubleshoot the offending one, but now with the monthly updates it's an all-or-nothing deal - if it doesn't want to play along you're doomed. Given the number of people having the issue (just search error code 80073701 kb4038777 and see) I predict that Win7 will slowly but inevitably fade away due to the inability to patch it properly.
Copyright varies according to each publisher's T&Cs. The usual model is that the content of the paper generally remains the author's copyright, while the particular format (i.e. the typesetting done by the journals, the pagination, formatting, their logos etc.) belongs to the journals. This is not just a relic from the days the journals existed only on printed format, when even photocopying the articles was in principle an infringement. Having typeset almost 20 conference proceedings volumes myself as well as several science books, I know first hand that the work is a complete PITA and that the journals should be somehow compensated. But I strongly object against the publishing houses acting like patent trolls. The academic publishing activity is a self-sustaining system where everybody needs everybody else: without researchers' output the journals wouldn't exist, and without journals the researchers would lose the main metric of their work which ensures their academic progress. This is a circle that has reached an equilibrium almost a century ago, and has significant inertia to be changed by isolated cases of court trials.
I'm not against readers paying some reasonable fee (of course not the USD 50-100 per artice I have encountered), even if the research is publicly funded. The publishers should somehow be compensated, not just because they are businesses and employ people that have to be paid, but mainly because they coordinate the peer-reviewing process, which is vital for the progress of science, as vital as as Sourgeforge or Github is to the IT community.
Several solutions exist to ensure publishers and researchers survive the digital age. For example, the universities in my country have formed an alliance and they collectively made reasonable deals with several publishers, so that all our (public) universities, including more than a hundred thousand students have access to the most important titles. I consider it a fair deal.
The claims of the publishers (advised by their lawyers of course) are a bit exaggerated. For those not familiar with ResearchGate (RG), it is primarily a database for academics a researchers and not a general purpose social media site like e.g. Google+ or LinkedIn. Each member can enter a profile, their domains of expertise, links to their published papers, and upload published and non-published papers.
Researchers having the slightest clue about what copyright is according to journals, and the legal trouble they might get into, take special care and upload versions of their paper which are not copyrighted (usually meaning not the versions typeset by the journals and containing their logos), like the pdf export of their WinWord or LaTeX manuscripts. Of course, most researchers prefer the easy way and upload the pdf versions as distributed by the publishers to their digital journal subscribers, an action which can be considered and probably is a copyright infringement. So the whole case has similarities with the war against torrent sites, the difference being that the allegedly infringing materials are uploaded by their respective authors.
In addition, the papers are not "freely available" as claimed, but accessible only to members of RG. This detail of course may not be important from a legal standpoint, since theoretically anybody can become a member. However, the common meaning of "freely available" is free as in Slashdot, where all content is available to everybody, no subscription required.
Finally, I have not seen any advertisement in any of the 1-2 emails per week I get from RG and I don't see any browsing their website. Just go to their front page https://www.researchgate.net/ and you will see no ads, only quotes by newspapers and magazines praising their work. Can this be considered as advertisement? Not unless ResearchGate is actually being paid by Forbes, New York Times, Bloomberg, Reuters or Science Magazine to use their quotes.
It's going to be a long legal battle involving all the known and unknown legal gray areas and precedents, and unfortunately RG is probably going to be treated worse than Kim DotCom. Sad days for Science and more generally, the human quest for knowledge. Let's hope the Universities, Colleges and Research Centers worldwide (who do profit from the free publicity from RG) will take a side and not prefer to stay neutral.
I'm all for Open Courses, especially when the Universities, Professors and Research are funded by the state (I'm not talking for US only). However, IMO the issue is, what should the priorities for self-learners be?
Math is considered as the language of science, but sometimes I wonder whether open courses on human relationships, empathy, self-help and helping each other (i.e. things that our parents taught us and are seldom, if ever touched upon by today's parents), and most importantly, detoxification from technology (I'm thinking of the billions of man-hours spent on texting, sexting and the so-called "social networking") might be more important for today's youth.
This had totally escaped me, you are right. In the article on SSD, Wikipedia states "SandForce controllers compress the data prior to sending it to the flash memory. This process may result in less writing and higher logical throughput, depending on the compressibility of the data."
Provided we find cures for Alzheimer's and other brain degenerative diseases, I wouldn't object living for another 100-200 years, preferably wearing young woman's bodies.
It's not a shame to be greedy and to want to make money. That's our religion after all (capitalism). It's a shame, maybe even a crime, to do it by exploiting children's thirst for knowledge.
If it was possible to "standardize curricula" based on "state of the art" educational principles in order to minimize "costs", it would have already have been done 50 years ago, not only across US states, but across countries and continents too.
If you come to think about it, the Sciences (Physics, Astronomy, Chemistry, Biology, Maths, Geology, etc) are universal. The only differentiating subjects are language and to an extent, history. So the globalization, standardization and "canning" of knowledge to teach in schools, even in universities, is feasible.
The first company that will patent and produce The Bible for such a globalized curriculum will become as rich as the Church. Pearson is one such candidate.
Is the famous USA educational system becoming the pinnacle of consumerism? Where pupils need only to consume hi-calorie concentrate food canned in hi-tech tablets and evaluated only by pressing their fat fingers on multiple choice questions check-boxes?
"Question 1: The rectangular machine you have in your hand at this very moment and reading this question on is: a) a tablet b) a computer c) a calculator d) a PC e) an iPad"
Please mod this man +1 informative. I have not posted in months but I cannot but admire the accuracy and simplicity of this post. Please note that these channels also are the ones broadcasting a lot of turkish soap operas, which seem to be the official state ideology vehicle in recent years. If the state channel was the one broadcasting the Suleiman series, I'd expect more than three million people protesting in Athens today and several more millions across the country.
PS. Please forgive all the greeks posting as ACs in this thread, due to the past week's revelations we all are in super paranoid mode.
Some preliminary thoughts, after having read the full research article:
It is a provocative study and it's going to be either totally ignored (because the author is just a PhD student in a non-technological discipline) or really stir the waters of educational research (just take into account the hundreds of books, tens of journals and thousands of research papers arguing about the benefits of IT in the curriculum).
One weakness of the study that will definitely be used against the author is that he (and, not surprisingly, the interviewees) seem to confuse instructional technology with information technology - these two "IT" are not the same. As an educator, I firmly believe that PowerPoint presentations (except when embedding animations/video) are totally equivalent to plain old overhead transparencies or even 35mm film slides - they are static images and are definitely not Information technology, just because a computer and a data projector are needed to project them.
Another more important criticism is that the author did not seem to investigate (or mention) the professors' insights about the potential learning benefits of using IT. From what I understood by reading the paper, the teachers seem to implicitly or explicitly believe that IT has no useful aspects beyond the motivation of the students (to keep them from falling asleep during class). Apart from the fact that such responses could be argued to be a sign that the sample is biased, the major question is, are the students actually learning better/more by using IT or not? IMO teaching cannot be separated from learning. Therefore, I'd like to know explicitly what these professors think the learning outcomes of IT are, and if possible, interview some of their students too to see if they consider they are benefiting from such technologies.
Finally, I think that four disciplines and 42 teachers are a very very small sample of the USA (and global) academia. However, the data presented should be very alarming to those universities (or secondary schools) that plan providing their students with free iPads just because they are offered free or at a bargain nobody can deny.
I think you are confusing the TEM (electron transmission) microscope that operates with the help of an electron beam, with an AFM (atomic force microscope) which does indeed use a needle and can displace atoms on the surface of a material.
Slashdot Mirror
At last I understood what the butterfly effect is! You are a genius!
I am ecstatic, it's one of those rare moments when I do "get the reference" in a US-centric discussion forum! (I'm in EEU, the Established European Universe)
Star Trek: Discovery S01E04. Spores, physics, biology, quanta, evil, yes. Dust specs - no.
I paid $0 to learn all this - I'm a Clingon pirate.
Apparently this was part of their to-do list. The moment the # of vulnerabilities exceeded 1,000,000 the list lost meaning and got abandoned.
They really kept this database on an internet-facing PC?
Just imagine a 40TB HDD starting developing bad sectors... and then RAID arrays crashing... I really can't handle even thinking about it. I think that the use of tape backup systems for those pesky 10-14 TB disks will soon become mandatory in every home.
I plan to use this as my next desktop after Win7 x64, since it seems MS is not propagating the Win10 security patches to 7 and 8. I'm running it in a VM and so far it seems very promising. Snappy, small memory requirements and the added bonuses of almost no telemetry, no spyware and no Cortana.
The main reason I decided to migrate is that Win7 is no more viable for me. I find that the shift to monthly security updates have worsened the update situation. My current Windows 7 x64 just refuses to install the September update (KB4038777) and there is no cure for it, as currently there is no definitive solution but an in-place reinstall (been searching for a week now trying all procedures found in MS and other forums). When the updates were isolated patches one could troubleshoot the offending one, but now with the monthly updates it's an all-or-nothing deal - if it doesn't want to play along you're doomed. Given the number of people having the issue (just search error code 80073701 kb4038777 and see) I predict that Win7 will slowly but inevitably fade away due to the inability to patch it properly.
I'm not optimistic this cpu would be allowed to be mass-produced, since it appears it won't have any of backdoors the Intel and AMD ones have.
I'm taking the conservative approach: If it's legal it's free speech. Otherwise the advertisers wouldn't risk posting said info.
I can't accept that "if it's free speech it's legal" approach. Otherwise speech promoting violence and hatred would be legal.
Copyright varies according to each publisher's T&Cs. The usual model is that the content of the paper generally remains the author's copyright, while the particular format (i.e. the typesetting done by the journals, the pagination, formatting, their logos etc.) belongs to the journals. This is not just a relic from the days the journals existed only on printed format, when even photocopying the articles was in principle an infringement. Having typeset almost 20 conference proceedings volumes myself as well as several science books, I know first hand that the work is a complete PITA and that the journals should be somehow compensated. But I strongly object against the publishing houses acting like patent trolls. The academic publishing activity is a self-sustaining system where everybody needs everybody else: without researchers' output the journals wouldn't exist, and without journals the researchers would lose the main metric of their work which ensures their academic progress. This is a circle that has reached an equilibrium almost a century ago, and has significant inertia to be changed by isolated cases of court trials.
I'm not against readers paying some reasonable fee (of course not the USD 50-100 per artice I have encountered), even if the research is publicly funded. The publishers should somehow be compensated, not just because they are businesses and employ people that have to be paid, but mainly because they coordinate the peer-reviewing process, which is vital for the progress of science, as vital as as Sourgeforge or Github is to the IT community.
Several solutions exist to ensure publishers and researchers survive the digital age. For example, the universities in my country have formed an alliance and they collectively made reasonable deals with several publishers, so that all our (public) universities, including more than a hundred thousand students have access to the most important titles. I consider it a fair deal.
The claims of the publishers (advised by their lawyers of course) are a bit exaggerated. For those not familiar with ResearchGate (RG), it is primarily a database for academics a researchers and not a general purpose social media site like e.g. Google+ or LinkedIn. Each member can enter a profile, their domains of expertise, links to their published papers, and upload published and non-published papers.
Researchers having the slightest clue about what copyright is according to journals, and the legal trouble they might get into, take special care and upload versions of their paper which are not copyrighted (usually meaning not the versions typeset by the journals and containing their logos), like the pdf export of their WinWord or LaTeX manuscripts. Of course, most researchers prefer the easy way and upload the pdf versions as distributed by the publishers to their digital journal subscribers, an action which can be considered and probably is a copyright infringement. So the whole case has similarities with the war against torrent sites, the difference being that the allegedly infringing materials are uploaded by their respective authors.
In addition, the papers are not "freely available" as claimed, but accessible only to members of RG. This detail of course may not be important from a legal standpoint, since theoretically anybody can become a member. However, the common meaning of "freely available" is free as in Slashdot, where all content is available to everybody, no subscription required.
Finally, I have not seen any advertisement in any of the 1-2 emails per week I get from RG and I don't see any browsing their website. Just go to their front page https://www.researchgate.net/ and you will see no ads, only quotes by newspapers and magazines praising their work. Can this be considered as advertisement? Not unless ResearchGate is actually being paid by Forbes, New York Times, Bloomberg, Reuters or Science Magazine to use their quotes.
It's going to be a long legal battle involving all the known and unknown legal gray areas and precedents, and unfortunately RG is probably going to be treated worse than Kim DotCom. Sad days for Science and more generally, the human quest for knowledge. Let's hope the Universities, Colleges and Research Centers worldwide (who do profit from the free publicity from RG) will take a side and not prefer to stay neutral.
Yes, and it's called Slashdot Grammar Nazis Open Courses (SGNOC).
(By the way, the correct syntax is "Are there any free ..." or "Is there any free ...").
I'm all for Open Courses, especially when the Universities, Professors and Research are funded by the state (I'm not talking for US only). However, IMO the issue is, what should the priorities for self-learners be?
Math is considered as the language of science, but sometimes I wonder whether open courses on human relationships, empathy, self-help and helping each other (i.e. things that our parents taught us and are seldom, if ever touched upon by today's parents), and most importantly, detoxification from technology (I'm thinking of the billions of man-hours spent on texting, sexting and the so-called "social networking") might be more important for today's youth.
This had totally escaped me, you are right. In the article on SSD, Wikipedia states "SandForce controllers compress the data prior to sending it to the flash memory. This process may result in less writing and higher logical throughput, depending on the compressibility of the data."
..it would be news if "users and developers" dared say something even slightly bad about a new Apple OS.
You mean weather the personal distinctiveness resides in the upper or lower head?
Provided we find cures for Alzheimer's and other brain degenerative diseases, I wouldn't object living for another 100-200 years, preferably wearing young woman's bodies.
It's not a shame to be greedy and to want to make money. That's our religion after all (capitalism). It's a shame, maybe even a crime, to do it by exploiting children's thirst for knowledge.
If it was possible to "standardize curricula" based on "state of the art" educational principles in order to minimize "costs", it would have already have been done 50 years ago, not only across US states, but across countries and continents too.
If you come to think about it, the Sciences (Physics, Astronomy, Chemistry, Biology, Maths, Geology, etc) are universal. The only differentiating subjects are language and to an extent, history. So the globalization, standardization and "canning" of knowledge to teach in schools, even in universities, is feasible.
The first company that will patent and produce The Bible for such a globalized curriculum will become as rich as the Church. Pearson is one such candidate.
Is the famous USA educational system becoming the pinnacle of consumerism? Where pupils need only to consume hi-calorie concentrate food canned in hi-tech tablets and evaluated only by pressing their fat fingers on multiple choice questions check-boxes?
"Question 1: The rectangular machine you have in your hand at this very moment and reading this question on is:
a) a tablet
b) a computer
c) a calculator
d) a PC
e) an iPad"
Please mod this man +1 informative. I have not posted in months but I cannot but admire the accuracy and simplicity of this post. Please note that these channels also are the ones broadcasting a lot of turkish soap operas, which seem to be the official state ideology vehicle in recent years. If the state channel was the one broadcasting the Suleiman series, I'd expect more than three million people protesting in Athens today and several more millions across the country.
PS. Please forgive all the greeks posting as ACs in this thread, due to the past week's revelations we all are in super paranoid mode.
Of course I meant "provocative" in the title, sorry :-\
Some preliminary thoughts, after having read the full research article:
It is a provocative study and it's going to be either totally ignored (because the author is just a PhD student in a non-technological discipline) or really stir the waters of educational research (just take into account the hundreds of books, tens of journals and thousands of research papers arguing about the benefits of IT in the curriculum).
One weakness of the study that will definitely be used against the author is that he (and, not surprisingly, the interviewees) seem to confuse instructional technology with information technology - these two "IT" are not the same. As an educator, I firmly believe that PowerPoint presentations (except when embedding animations/video) are totally equivalent to plain old overhead transparencies or even 35mm film slides - they are static images and are definitely not Information technology, just because a computer and a data projector are needed to project them.
Another more important criticism is that the author did not seem to investigate (or mention) the professors' insights about the potential learning benefits of using IT. From what I understood by reading the paper, the teachers seem to implicitly or explicitly believe that IT has no useful aspects beyond the motivation of the students (to keep them from falling asleep during class). Apart from the fact that such responses could be argued to be a sign that the sample is biased, the major question is, are the students actually learning better/more by using IT or not? IMO teaching cannot be separated from learning. Therefore, I'd like to know explicitly what these professors think the learning outcomes of IT are, and if possible, interview some of their students too to see if they consider they are benefiting from such technologies.
Finally, I think that four disciplines and 42 teachers are a very very small sample of the USA (and global) academia. However, the data presented should be very alarming to those universities (or secondary schools) that plan providing their students with free iPads just because they are offered free or at a bargain nobody can deny.
Could you please elaborate why private universities would not use any free educational materials? Is it somehow prohibited by US laws?
Wouldn't such a "commercial entity" like to cut a significant cost by opting to teach e.g. LibreOffice instead of MSOffice?
I think you are confusing the TEM (electron transmission) microscope that operates with the help of an electron beam, with an AFM (atomic force microscope) which does indeed use a needle and can displace atoms on the surface of a material.
Where has this world come to? Are we so ashamed to explain BASIC code that we have to post anonymously? What comes next, Newtonian mechanics?