Yeah, worse - the attitude of most of those people is part of the problem he is talking about.
Imagine if they were teachers and some kid in their class says they believe in creationism.
Do you know some of those people (including Dawkins) have said Reiss should not have his current job just because he happens to have a religion:
Zoologist Richard Dawkins, a Royal Society fellow, said: 'A clergyman in charge of education for the country's leading scientific organisation - it's a Monty Python sketch.'
"'I warned the president of the Royal Society that his [Reiss] was a dangerous appointment a year ago. I did not realise just how dangerous it would turn out to be,' said Kroto, a Royal Society fellow, and winner of the 1996 Nobel Prize for Chemistry. "
Do listen to the interview - it's a downloadable mp3.
"Is it currently standard practice for a science instructor to drag a creationist students into the street and shoot them through the lungs?"
No, if some of the teachers are like the slashdotters here, it'll be standard practice to talk about the Flying Spaghetti Monster, and/or ridicule creationists. Those Nobel Laureates are not much better.
He's seriously trying to educate people, and that he's right that those approaches won't work well.
You can prove you are right, all while not reaching and teaching your student. While that may be enjoyable for your ego, it does no good for your student.
I think the Guardian wrote the headline and blurb:
"Science lessons should tackle creationism and intelligent design Teachers need to accommodate the differing world views of students from Jewish, Christian or Muslim backgrounds - which means openly discussing creationism and intelligent design as alternatives to evolutionary theory"
And I believe the actual stuff Reiss said is the stuff that follows that.
We've seen the "bad summary" stuff before on Slashdot:).
So either the Guardian misread, or they are up to mischief.
I've even downloaded the mp3 that's linked and I don't hear what the Atheists are getting uptight about.
Obviously their uproar is not based on evidence, but on faith;).
I think he actually deserves an apology. It's amazing the reaction he got.
What next, are they going to burn down churches because of what he said? Just because someone happens to mention creationism in the same breath as science classes?
They're starting to behave like religious nutters too.
"Creationism can profitably be seen not as a simple misconception that careful science teaching can correct. Rather, a student who believes in creationism has a non-scientific way of seeing the world, and one very rarely changes one's world view as a result of a 50-minute lesson, however well taught."
Seems very reasonable to me.
If you do things the wrong way, you can prove you are right, but teach nothing.
If you teach nothing, you do not have a science class.
The uproar over what he said appears to be rather unscientific.
Re:I don't know if I fully agree with that
on
Fire Your IT Boss
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· Score: 1
You may not know anything about medicine, but you can always get a 2nd or 3rd opinion from other places - doesn't have to be doctors from the same "hospital":).
If you're not stupid it doesn't have to take very long before you figure out which doctors really know their stuff.
You might even be able to rank them in rough order of competency.
So I think it's more of general competence than technical competence. While they might be somewhat correlated, it doesn't mean that someone who lacks technical competence in some field is going to be a bad manager in a different field.
It's clear engineers (and IT people) don't know much about managing as well;).
Too bad a lot of them get "promoted" into management roles.
It's like a good zerg being promoted to Starcraft player. He might be the best zerg there is, but he could still suck at starcraft.
Whereas a good starcraft player might not know the finer details of being a zerg, just has to know - it typically takes X zergs to beat Y tanks. We don't have X, so we need something extra help from something else.
BTW I don't play starcraft - just seems like too much work:).
Re:I don't know if I fully agree with that
on
Fire Your IT Boss
·
· Score: 1
He might actually be a good coder just lacks focus. So as a manager you provide focus.
If he's any good it'll be a waste to get rid of him just because his manager is crap.
Some people need to be yelled at and some shouldn't be yelled at (I know one who seriously says he should be yelled at in order for him to be really productive, and I think he is being truthful). BTW do the yelling (or gun pointing or whatever;) ) in private, it is usually counterproductive to have it done in public.
When you're a middle manager, after you "unwrap" your team, surprise, surprise it's not a perfect team. Guess what, that's often all you have to work with for now.
It's like coaches for sports. You can even have all that talent, and a good coach can still make a difference. You can have some "star player" that tends to not pass, so you have to yell at him to pass (when appropriate). Then there might be some talented idiot who keeps trying slamdunk when there are more appropriate alternatives.
Yeah I agree, a good middle manager deserves their pay. And they don't need to know how to code anymore than a manager in charge of construction needs to know the details on how to make cement. Sure it does help give you some credibility (and cuts down the "learning what your team can do" time), BUT at the end of the day, you're a manager.
I am currently not a manager. When I was a coder I didn't need my managers to know how to code. They just need to know how to manage.
Trouble is there are lots of managers who don't really know how to manage stuff.
For example: if you are a manager and your coders give you estimates for completing their tasks, you do NOT take the estimates and pass them straight to your boss!
Your bosses don't really care about how long it takes. They want to know _when_. Then they can make PR announcements, make promises to customers, creditors etc.
So if you pass your teams estimates straight to your boss you are NOT doing your job. And that is one less reason for your boss to have you around.
You are supposed to figure out which coders tend to overestimate and which underestimate (Oh that'll take 5 minutes... yeah right and 3 weeks of rewriting and debugging before it's finally really stable for production), and which don't have a clue. If you have any brains and people skills, you can figure that out without even knowing how to code a single line.
Then you can figure out how much time it'll actually take them. Then you also try to figure out what OTHER stuff your bosses will want your team to do in the future, and then after factoring all that in with a margin of safety, you tell your bosses _when_.
If you do that well, and your bosses have a clue, they will start trusting you, and not have to make up stuff on their own. And your team will start trusting you as well.
I have seen managers add stuff for their team to be done "Immediately" and then they expect that the "internal" deadlines for the other stuff to not be changed. They have often screwed up and told their bosses it will be done by "internal deadline", so there is no spare capacity.
When you do stuff like that, if your team has a clue, they'll stop telling you the truth and start padding their estimates. This means lower productivity - stuff takes longer to do.
And that is one of the reasons why a team under a good manager can be so much more productive than a "average" one.
A good coder can be magnitudes more productive than a poor one, it is not so different for a team under a good manager.
You as a manager can try to blame your boss for giving you 20% extra work and not being happy that you want to change the deadline. But hey, if it's just 20%, it's YOUR fault. Remember, you're supposed to _manage_ stuff. In contrast if it's > 100% more work, the average CEO isn't that stupid - they know something has got to give, if they still want you to take the fall for it, you don't really want to continue working for them.
Being a middle manager means you have to deal with crap from both top and bottom, and try to not let it cause big problems:).
Reminds me of this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DDTLo-nDsUQ
Crazy car driver.
I think the bus driver in that accident should have just braked in a straight line and not swerved, even if he hits the car - if he slows down enough the people in the car should be ok.
If not well too bad - esp if the driver had died I'd have called it suicide;).
It's also likely there are fewer people in the car than in the bus.
Why were so many of those creatures so big, and what is stopping creatures from getting to those sizes now?
What has changed?
While it's easier to spot fossils of huge animals, I don't think that's the only thing - I mean just look at the largest land animal now. It's small compared to the stuff back then.
There are actually more details I didn't bother going into.
The groups will be created by google, based on how users rate search results. And users could also rate the groups from their own POV.
People who go "omgponies!" will be placed in one group.
You can choose to see the POV of the omgponies group, but your votes will only be considered as part of the omgponies group if you really do vote like them. If you and a whole bunch of your "accounts" vote a bit like that but add spammy stuff, and enough of the omgponies bunch actually don't like the spammy stuff, then it splits - you end up with two groups - omgponies and omgponieswithspam.
Think of it as a more advanced "People who liked XYZ, also liked PQR".
Of course this may not be such a good thing for building unity in the world.
The hard core Democrats may never ever see results from the POV of the Republicans.
Maybe they can split the search ranks into finite manageable groups of people.
Basically if you manually pick or are auto-assigned the "Left Wing Slashdotter" group, you will get that sort of ranking for queries.
Whereas if you are in "OMG ponies!" group, you will get a different sort of ranking for queries.
And if you're in the "SEO optimization group", you and all the spammers can fight amongst yourselves to push up your sites in your own group.
I think it's actually doable. While it'll take a fair bit of processing and storage, Google has plenty of that.
Though there are 6 billion people in the world, I believe the diversity for search is not that high.
I was thinking of doing something like this for a review site (where people can "summary review" almost anything, and people can then change their POVs to any of the various emergent review groups), but I never got around to it. By summary review - one very short blurb and then a rating.
So what if there really was a black hole that fell towards the center of the earth? Wouldn't it slow down as it gathered mass and so eventually end up staying near the core?
What would the rate of mass consumption be? If it's not that high, presumably the earth would stay as it is for quite a long time.
Maybe there are already black holes in the Earth's core.
"I ask sincerely - Can anyone tell me why it makes good long- or short-term financial sense to put human beings on Mars?"
It depends on which human being.
I've been proposing a "Vote Off The Planet" reality TV show. People can vote to send candidates on one way or return trips. Votes for return trips will cost more.
Now depending on the candidate selected to send to Mars (and the type of trip), there could actually be long term positive impact on the world financials.
Even if said human is unfortunate enough to not make it to Mars successfully.
IMO, it is a waste at the moment to send humans to Yet Another Gravity Well - whether it's the Moon or Mars. They should focus on building better space stations, and work towards space stations that can build more space stations (via mining asteroids etc), and thus a reasonably self sustaining space colony.
Gravity is overrated. Given a space station with a large enough rotation radius (using tethers?), you can simulate it well enough without the coriolis stuff being such a big issue.
Sending people to Mars at this point of time is like a baby trying to jump before the baby is able to stand on its own two feet. Learn to "stand" next to the safety of Earth. Once you can mine asteroids and be fairly self sustaining, you can go to Mars or most places in the solar system.
Sending people to the Moon (again) is not a much better idea.
1) They got reelected. 2) Their friends got lots of money from the Iraq war (which had little to do with 9/11, but they still managed to attack Iraq anyway). When you have stuff like 1 billion of _cash_ just go missing, it makes you wonder doesn't it? A billion here and there, it all adds up to trillions. 3) What are the odds the "inept" Gov gets elected back in? If people can honestly say less than 30% then sure the Gov is inept, otherwise guess who really are the inept ones?
Perhaps you're assuming the leaders of the US Gov are working for the USA.
Who is a bigger enemy of the US people? The US Gov or the Al Qaeda? Who has cost the USA more, and caused more damage?
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, worse - the attitude of most of those people is part of the problem he is talking about.
Imagine if they were teachers and some kid in their class says they believe in creationism.
Do you know some of those people (including Dawkins) have said Reiss should not have his current job just because he happens to have a religion:
Zoologist Richard Dawkins, a Royal Society fellow, said: 'A clergyman in charge of education for the country's leading scientific organisation - it's a Monty Python sketch.'
"'I warned the president of the Royal Society that his [Reiss] was a dangerous appointment a year ago. I did not realise just how dangerous it would turn out to be,' said Kroto, a Royal Society fellow, and winner of the 1996 Nobel Prize for Chemistry. "
It's just making Ubuntu more familiar to ex-Windows users.
Blindly clicking through meaningless and offensive EULAs is standard practice in the Windows world.
Do listen to the interview - it's a downloadable mp3.
"Is it currently standard practice for a science instructor to drag a creationist students into the street and shoot them through the lungs?"
No, if some of the teachers are like the slashdotters here, it'll be standard practice to talk about the Flying Spaghetti Monster, and/or ridicule creationists. Those Nobel Laureates are not much better.
He's seriously trying to educate people, and that he's right that those approaches won't work well.
You can prove you are right, all while not reaching and teaching your student. While that may be enjoyable for your ego, it does no good for your student.
I think the Guardian wrote the headline and blurb:
:).
;).
"Science lessons should tackle creationism and intelligent design
Teachers need to accommodate the differing world views of students from Jewish, Christian or Muslim backgrounds - which means openly discussing creationism and intelligent design as alternatives to evolutionary theory"
And I believe the actual stuff Reiss said is the stuff that follows that.
We've seen the "bad summary" stuff before on Slashdot
So either the Guardian misread, or they are up to mischief.
I've even downloaded the mp3 that's linked and I don't hear what the Atheists are getting uptight about.
Obviously their uproar is not based on evidence, but on faith
It could take far longer than 60 seconds to read and understand what he said, after all we're talking about slashdotters and Nobel Laureates.
It's far easier to issue a fatwa on him, excommunicate him, etc.
Oh yeah and try to get him fired too :).
Meanwhile, to protest Reiss's inflamatory opinion you may wish to blow up a church:
http://www.inflatablechurch.com/
Worse. Go read _everything_ he said here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/blog/2008/sep/11/michael.reiss.creationism
I think he actually deserves an apology. It's amazing the reaction he got.
What next, are they going to burn down churches because of what he said? Just because someone happens to mention creationism in the same breath as science classes?
They're starting to behave like religious nutters too.
From the link ( http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/blog/2008/sep/11/michael.reiss.creationism ), here's what he said:
"Creationism can profitably be seen not as a simple misconception that careful science teaching can correct. Rather, a student who believes in creationism has a non-scientific way of seeing the world, and one very rarely changes one's world view as a result of a 50-minute lesson, however well taught."
Seems very reasonable to me.
If you do things the wrong way, you can prove you are right, but teach nothing.
If you teach nothing, you do not have a science class.
The uproar over what he said appears to be rather unscientific.
You may not know anything about medicine, but you can always get a 2nd or 3rd opinion from other places - doesn't have to be doctors from the same "hospital" :).
If you're not stupid it doesn't have to take very long before you figure out which doctors really know their stuff.
You might even be able to rank them in rough order of competency.
So I think it's more of general competence than technical competence. While they might be somewhat correlated, it doesn't mean that someone who lacks technical competence in some field is going to be a bad manager in a different field.
It's clear engineers (and IT people) don't know much about managing as well ;).
:).
Too bad a lot of them get "promoted" into management roles.
It's like a good zerg being promoted to Starcraft player. He might be the best zerg there is, but he could still suck at starcraft.
Whereas a good starcraft player might not know the finer details of being a zerg, just has to know - it typically takes X zergs to beat Y tanks. We don't have X, so we need something extra help from something else.
BTW I don't play starcraft - just seems like too much work
He might actually be a good coder just lacks focus. So as a manager you provide focus.
;) ) in private, it is usually counterproductive to have it done in public.
:).
If he's any good it'll be a waste to get rid of him just because his manager is crap.
Some people need to be yelled at and some shouldn't be yelled at (I know one who seriously says he should be yelled at in order for him to be really productive, and I think he is being truthful). BTW do the yelling (or gun pointing or whatever
When you're a middle manager, after you "unwrap" your team, surprise, surprise it's not a perfect team. Guess what, that's often all you have to work with for now.
It's like coaches for sports. You can even have all that talent, and a good coach can still make a difference. You can have some "star player" that tends to not pass, so you have to yell at him to pass (when appropriate). Then there might be some talented idiot who keeps trying slamdunk when there are more appropriate alternatives.
I'm glad I'm not a manager at the moment
Yeah I agree, a good middle manager deserves their pay. And they don't need to know how to code anymore than a manager in charge of construction needs to know the details on how to make cement. Sure it does help give you some credibility (and cuts down the "learning what your team can do" time), BUT at the end of the day, you're a manager.
:).
I am currently not a manager. When I was a coder I didn't need my managers to know how to code. They just need to know how to manage.
Trouble is there are lots of managers who don't really know how to manage stuff.
For example: if you are a manager and your coders give you estimates for completing their tasks, you do NOT take the estimates and pass them straight to your boss!
Your bosses don't really care about how long it takes. They want to know _when_. Then they can make PR announcements, make promises to customers, creditors etc.
So if you pass your teams estimates straight to your boss you are NOT doing your job. And that is one less reason for your boss to have you around.
You are supposed to figure out which coders tend to overestimate and which underestimate (Oh that'll take 5 minutes... yeah right and 3 weeks of rewriting and debugging before it's finally really stable for production), and which don't have a clue. If you have any brains and people skills, you can figure that out without even knowing how to code a single line.
Then you can figure out how much time it'll actually take them. Then you also try to figure out what OTHER stuff your bosses will want your team to do in the future, and then after factoring all that in with a margin of safety, you tell your bosses _when_.
If you do that well, and your bosses have a clue, they will start trusting you, and not have to make up stuff on their own. And your team will start trusting you as well.
I have seen managers add stuff for their team to be done "Immediately" and then they expect that the "internal" deadlines for the other stuff to not be changed. They have often screwed up and told their bosses it will be done by "internal deadline", so there is no spare capacity.
When you do stuff like that, if your team has a clue, they'll stop telling you the truth and start padding their estimates. This means lower productivity - stuff takes longer to do.
And that is one of the reasons why a team under a good manager can be so much more productive than a "average" one.
A good coder can be magnitudes more productive than a poor one, it is not so different for a team under a good manager.
You as a manager can try to blame your boss for giving you 20% extra work and not being happy that you want to change the deadline. But hey, if it's just 20%, it's YOUR fault. Remember, you're supposed to _manage_ stuff. In contrast if it's > 100% more work, the average CEO isn't that stupid - they know something has got to give, if they still want you to take the fall for it, you don't really want to continue working for them.
Being a middle manager means you have to deal with crap from both top and bottom, and try to not let it cause big problems
It's called this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operant_conditioning_chamber
That's what many of those games are :)
Yeah I don't live in the USA and I get really crap pings to most game servers which are usually located in the USA.
"70 hours though is even at minimum wage ($6.55) $500 or so"
:).
That's why stuff is made in China
And that's why stuff like my radio controlled heli costs less than USD20.
Reminds me of this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DDTLo-nDsUQ
;).
Crazy car driver.
I think the bus driver in that accident should have just braked in a straight line and not swerved, even if he hits the car - if he slows down enough the people in the car should be ok.
If not well too bad - esp if the driver had died I'd have called it suicide
It's also likely there are fewer people in the car than in the bus.
Yeah it does sound unsafe to me.
I've been thinking how about "just don't do that then"?
After all, placing stuff on railway tracks can derail a train and kill people. Doesn't even have to be anything fancy.
Someone could just as easily pour motor oil on a dangerous bend and get people killed.
As a species we really have to start growing up.
If technology continues improving, the amount of power the average individual is able to wield is likely to increase dramatically.
So the alternatives are grow up, or lose freedoms (not good), or experience "some random idiot thinks it's funny to kill everybody" (also not good).
The odds are we're doomed, but who knows we might get lucky.
Why were so many of those creatures so big, and what is stopping creatures from getting to those sizes now?
What has changed?
While it's easier to spot fossils of huge animals, I don't think that's the only thing - I mean just look at the largest land animal now. It's small compared to the stuff back then.
Does it support vlan trunking/tags? IIRC vmware didn't use to support vlan stuff properly.
There are actually more details I didn't bother going into.
The groups will be created by google, based on how users rate search results. And users could also rate the groups from their own POV.
People who go "omgponies!" will be placed in one group.
You can choose to see the POV of the omgponies group, but your votes will only be considered as part of the omgponies group if you really do vote like them. If you and a whole bunch of your "accounts" vote a bit like that but add spammy stuff, and enough of the omgponies bunch actually don't like the spammy stuff, then it splits - you end up with two groups - omgponies and omgponieswithspam.
Think of it as a more advanced "People who liked XYZ, also liked PQR".
Of course this may not be such a good thing for building unity in the world.
The hard core Democrats may never ever see results from the POV of the Republicans.
It all depends on how it's done.
Maybe they can split the search ranks into finite manageable groups of people.
Basically if you manually pick or are auto-assigned the "Left Wing Slashdotter" group, you will get that sort of ranking for queries.
Whereas if you are in "OMG ponies!" group, you will get a different sort of ranking for queries.
And if you're in the "SEO optimization group", you and all the spammers can fight amongst yourselves to push up your sites in your own group.
I think it's actually doable. While it'll take a fair bit of processing and storage, Google has plenty of that.
Though there are 6 billion people in the world, I believe the diversity for search is not that high.
I was thinking of doing something like this for a review site (where people can "summary review" almost anything, and people can then change their POVs to any of the various emergent review groups), but I never got around to it. By summary review - one very short blurb and then a rating.
Well if you ever open one of those infamous interdimensional rifts it'll take more than a few beers to cover that ;).
You can do something similar to screen with VNC. But I don't think you can do just a single X client.
So what if there really was a black hole that fell towards the center of the earth? Wouldn't it slow down as it gathered mass and so eventually end up staying near the core?
What would the rate of mass consumption be? If it's not that high, presumably the earth would stay as it is for quite a long time.
Maybe there are already black holes in the Earth's core.
"I ask sincerely - Can anyone tell me why it makes good long- or short-term financial sense to put human beings on Mars?"
It depends on which human being.
I've been proposing a "Vote Off The Planet" reality TV show. People can vote to send candidates on one way or return trips. Votes for return trips will cost more.
Now depending on the candidate selected to send to Mars (and the type of trip), there could actually be long term positive impact on the world financials.
Even if said human is unfortunate enough to not make it to Mars successfully.
IMO, it is a waste at the moment to send humans to Yet Another Gravity Well - whether it's the Moon or Mars. They should focus on building better space stations, and work towards space stations that can build more space stations (via mining asteroids etc), and thus a reasonably self sustaining space colony.
Gravity is overrated. Given a space station with a large enough rotation radius (using tethers?), you can simulate it well enough without the coriolis stuff being such a big issue.
Sending people to Mars at this point of time is like a baby trying to jump before the baby is able to stand on its own two feet. Learn to "stand" next to the safety of Earth. Once you can mine asteroids and be fairly self sustaining, you can go to Mars or most places in the solar system.
Sending people to the Moon (again) is not a much better idea.
Ineptitude?
By what measure?
1) They got reelected.
2) Their friends got lots of money from the Iraq war (which had little to do with 9/11, but they still managed to attack Iraq anyway). When you have stuff like 1 billion of _cash_ just go missing, it makes you wonder doesn't it? A billion here and there, it all adds up to trillions.
3) What are the odds the "inept" Gov gets elected back in? If people can honestly say less than 30% then sure the Gov is inept, otherwise guess who really are the inept ones?
Perhaps you're assuming the leaders of the US Gov are working for the USA.
Who is a bigger enemy of the US people? The US Gov or the Al Qaeda? Who has cost the USA more, and caused more damage?