There's a very easy rebuttal to the Libertarian argument that government employees' personal lives shouldn't be regulated at least a little: it affects the teachers' professional relationships with their students and how they interact with them. Wouldn't you want the same policies applied to politicians to prevent them from developing relationships with that one nice guy who just so happens to be a lobbyist for a major kitten-puppy-bunny murder conglomerate? The potential for corruption is somewhat reduced in the case of a teacher with students, but educators are still the public face of the school and can destroy its reputation (and budget) by such misbehaviour. Any highly interpersonal job with such high visibility should demand some professionalism in its employees' conduct.
It's stated on page 4 of the document, section E, article 1, just after the (a). The provision that communication over personal accounts may not occur between teachers and students is subject to an exception in the case of relatives.
Eh... Neither of them should have said that, actually. It's an outgroup, nothing more. It's no closer than we are. It lets us interpolate a bit better, but without more knowledge of the species it interacted with historically it's not very useful. This is just another case of mainstream journalism not understanding something scientific and trying to make something useful out of it. There are species of yeast that are just as divergent from each other!
Nah, we already know what fruit the Tree of Life gave. It's the banana—haven't you seen the totally informative and 100% factual explanation of how perfect it is?
...
...
I eagerly await to see how many moderators and respondents do not realise that this post is sarcastic.
And to ruin all of the surprise: it's believed to be about a billion years removed from other known protists. That's about the same age as multicellular life. Archaea are more distant from us than these protists.
This is more baseless conjecture than anything, but its blend of unusual genes most likely suggests that it is the sole (optimized) survivor of a larger ecosystem of similar strains, which may have exchanged DNA through some horizontal gene transfer mechanism in the past. The relatedness to a distant organism in Tibet implies that at least one of these species was once geographically ubiquitous, or spread through some other means, and may have blended into its surroundings there.
The measurement of the organism's "age" is based on the sequence of an extremely conserved gene that codes for a part of a very important cell component, the ribosome. That measurement reflects how many times the sequence has been altered since it last matched a suspected common ancestor with its nearest relatives. The researchers never said that it's been essentially the same organism for a billion years (although it looks that way in the summary and MSNBC article); since they only analysed live samples, not fossilized ones, there's no way of knowing (and I'd be sceptical about any claims that said we could sequence billion-year-old DNA.) At any rate, analytical genomics shows us that for the sequence to stay the same for so long, the environment would have to be completely static and the genes very specifically optimised, which was almost certainly not the case due to historical climate trends. The rate of sequence change is very reliable on a large scale.
There is a bit of justification for price gaps on that scale, though, especially for physical objects. I was working at a bookstore when the parity occurred in 2008. Transit costs and higher store operations costs play a role in it, since the books are published in the US, and both property taxes and minimum wage are (generally) higher here. Also, as far as I know, most publishers just got books with new covers printed that only had the Canadian prices on them. You'll still get royally screwed over for $20 to $30 per hardcover if you shop at Chapters-Indigo-Coles.
Okay. I'll roll with it—but I still feel like the difference in approach reflects some more fundamental difference from the canonical examples of good SF.
That sounds about right. I guess since the field is so tightly tied to the study of historical accounts (flawed as they may be) it's considered a thoughtcrime by reformers, presentists, and Newspeak enthusiasts.
Oh god, my second-year physiology textbook was a disaster. It was the only book I've ever had that included citations interwoven in the text. Without a doubt, it convinced me more than anything that I didn't want to study medical informatics. The books are written that way because physiologists feel the need to show off. It's an incredibly arrogant move, cast under the veil of preparing students for the experience they'll have in med school or PhD work, that to my knowledge has never benefited anyone.
Well, generally hard SF involves looking at how the changes of the future (or the peculiar anomalies) shape that human interaction, to some extent. In TNG and Voyager the use of the science fictiony elements as props is much more blatant, and often even an outright MacGuffin while the story proceeds to tell a tale that has nothing to do with that context. It's fiction, and there's speculative science, but the two don't quite fit together that well a lot of the time.
Yeah, Tapestry is probably my favourite Q episode and easily one of the strongest episodes in the whole franchise, not counting the really incredible DS9 pieces like In The Pale Moonlight (a title which has the distinction of being the only Batman reference in all of Star Trek.)
You've hit the nail on the head about characterization, though. 80s/90s/00s Star Trek was at its core a human drama, just in the context of science fiction. Ron D. Moore once said in an interview that in some episodes the writers didn't even write the actual technobabble; they just put the word 'tech' in the script and a science consultant filled it in before shooting. That's a major reason why so many episodes are resolved with one-hit deflector dish wonders; they didn't really work on integrating the sf into the story. There are lots of great counterexamples to this (one early Voyager episode is about a ride in a space elevator), but they're way too few in number.
That is indeed a pretty solid synopsis of "All Good Things". It should be emphasized though that the episode was completely paradoxical: the anomaly only started manifesting in the first place because the beam was fired to fix it. At the time it was hailed as a really strong Star Trek episode, but going back to it after watching seven seasons of the HMS Reset Button (Voyager), it's obvious that the writers were completely daft.
Being the sort of compulsive student of many fields in question, I would honestly argue that there are mixed benefits. Learning ability is improved because you've been exposed to more fundamental concepts (and are better at seeing new angles, because that's a skill you've developed), but actually turning around and applying that knowledge takes more practice. The associative nature of human memory means that when you're trying to recall something under pressure, you have a higher tendency to stumble onto spurious knowledge—you remember a lot of things from other fields and areas that get in the way. In addition, having a breadth of knowledge can actually be a source of frustration when studying depth in a very narrow area, as the lack of variety in the topics being discussed becomes frustrating; behold, the misery of the student with the general degree who can't decide what he or she wants to do with his or her life.
(And to any who would make cynical remarks along the lines of "maybe you're just stupid," I don't think you're doing cognitive psychology any benefits by implying that there is some group of superhuman with infinite retentive ability that deserves exclusive consideration.)
Of this I am aware! And they are even used formally in many contexts because it's more convenient, even though we don't have the theoretical underpinning to justify them properly. Personally, I think I would've been more comfortable in a first-year calculus course that used them instead because they seem more intuitive.
A reference text by definition doesn't "help" explain things; it describes them and leaves it up to the student to parse the content. My experience with my CS, math, and biology textbooks has been that they spend an absolute ton of time trying to explain the concepts in them as thoroughly as possible, using the most accessible analogies and descriptions they can. They're much easier to digest than a pure description would be—perhaps you just got the bad pick from the barrel if your books are just questions?
Slashdot Mirror
There's a very easy rebuttal to the Libertarian argument that government employees' personal lives shouldn't be regulated at least a little: it affects the teachers' professional relationships with their students and how they interact with them. Wouldn't you want the same policies applied to politicians to prevent them from developing relationships with that one nice guy who just so happens to be a lobbyist for a major kitten-puppy-bunny murder conglomerate? The potential for corruption is somewhat reduced in the case of a teacher with students, but educators are still the public face of the school and can destroy its reputation (and budget) by such misbehaviour. Any highly interpersonal job with such high visibility should demand some professionalism in its employees' conduct.
It's stated on page 4 of the document, section E, article 1, just after the (a). The provision that communication over personal accounts may not occur between teachers and students is subject to an exception in the case of relatives.
Okay, that's a relief. I thought as much. So how do you feel about Clojure?
It's a different meaning of the word.
Break out those keys little buddy, after all that excitement, I could really go for a 14-dollar bottle of cashews!
Eh... Neither of them should have said that, actually. It's an outgroup, nothing more. It's no closer than we are. It lets us interpolate a bit better, but without more knowledge of the species it interacted with historically it's not very useful. This is just another case of mainstream journalism not understanding something scientific and trying to make something useful out of it. There are species of yeast that are just as divergent from each other!
...actually, terrifyingly, humans can be involved in horizontal gene transfer, too. So sorry about your nice clean object model.
Nah, we already know what fruit the Tree of Life gave. It's the banana—haven't you seen the totally informative and 100% factual explanation of how perfect it is?
...
...
I eagerly await to see how many moderators and respondents do not realise that this post is sarcastic.
Yeah, it still uses EBCDIC for pretty much everything, like most protists.
Here's the paper.
And to ruin all of the surprise: it's believed to be about a billion years removed from other known protists. That's about the same age as multicellular life. Archaea are more distant from us than these protists.
This is more baseless conjecture than anything, but its blend of unusual genes most likely suggests that it is the sole (optimized) survivor of a larger ecosystem of similar strains, which may have exchanged DNA through some horizontal gene transfer mechanism in the past. The relatedness to a distant organism in Tibet implies that at least one of these species was once geographically ubiquitous, or spread through some other means, and may have blended into its surroundings there.
The measurement of the organism's "age" is based on the sequence of an extremely conserved gene that codes for a part of a very important cell component, the ribosome. That measurement reflects how many times the sequence has been altered since it last matched a suspected common ancestor with its nearest relatives. The researchers never said that it's been essentially the same organism for a billion years (although it looks that way in the summary and MSNBC article); since they only analysed live samples, not fossilized ones, there's no way of knowing (and I'd be sceptical about any claims that said we could sequence billion-year-old DNA.) At any rate, analytical genomics shows us that for the sequence to stay the same for so long, the environment would have to be completely static and the genes very specifically optimised, which was almost certainly not the case due to historical climate trends. The rate of sequence change is very reliable on a large scale.
There is a bit of justification for price gaps on that scale, though, especially for physical objects. I was working at a bookstore when the parity occurred in 2008. Transit costs and higher store operations costs play a role in it, since the books are published in the US, and both property taxes and minimum wage are (generally) higher here. Also, as far as I know, most publishers just got books with new covers printed that only had the Canadian prices on them. You'll still get royally screwed over for $20 to $30 per hardcover if you shop at Chapters-Indigo-Coles.
Q. How many Apple Newton users does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
A. Faux. There to eat lemons, axe gravy soup.
Okay. I'll roll with it—but I still feel like the difference in approach reflects some more fundamental difference from the canonical examples of good SF.
It looks like he's got quite a lot of oversized change, actually...
That sounds about right. I guess since the field is so tightly tied to the study of historical accounts (flawed as they may be) it's considered a thoughtcrime by reformers, presentists, and Newspeak enthusiasts.
Oh god, my second-year physiology textbook was a disaster. It was the only book I've ever had that included citations interwoven in the text. Without a doubt, it convinced me more than anything that I didn't want to study medical informatics. The books are written that way because physiologists feel the need to show off. It's an incredibly arrogant move, cast under the veil of preparing students for the experience they'll have in med school or PhD work, that to my knowledge has never benefited anyone.
Well, generally hard SF involves looking at how the changes of the future (or the peculiar anomalies) shape that human interaction, to some extent. In TNG and Voyager the use of the science fictiony elements as props is much more blatant, and often even an outright MacGuffin while the story proceeds to tell a tale that has nothing to do with that context. It's fiction, and there's speculative science, but the two don't quite fit together that well a lot of the time.
I had suspected as much. Pretend my post was just a quantum repost, then.
Yeah, Tapestry is probably my favourite Q episode and easily one of the strongest episodes in the whole franchise, not counting the really incredible DS9 pieces like In The Pale Moonlight (a title which has the distinction of being the only Batman reference in all of Star Trek.)
You've hit the nail on the head about characterization, though. 80s/90s/00s Star Trek was at its core a human drama, just in the context of science fiction. Ron D. Moore once said in an interview that in some episodes the writers didn't even write the actual technobabble; they just put the word 'tech' in the script and a science consultant filled it in before shooting. That's a major reason why so many episodes are resolved with one-hit deflector dish wonders; they didn't really work on integrating the sf into the story. There are lots of great counterexamples to this (one early Voyager episode is about a ride in a space elevator), but they're way too few in number.
Not quite. It's:
Top-posting.
No, what?
Do you know what the worst practice on Usenet is?
That is indeed a pretty solid synopsis of "All Good Things". It should be emphasized though that the episode was completely paradoxical: the anomaly only started manifesting in the first place because the beam was fired to fix it. At the time it was hailed as a really strong Star Trek episode, but going back to it after watching seven seasons of the HMS Reset Button (Voyager), it's obvious that the writers were completely daft.
Apparently not. Thanks for the update.
Being the sort of compulsive student of many fields in question, I would honestly argue that there are mixed benefits. Learning ability is improved because you've been exposed to more fundamental concepts (and are better at seeing new angles, because that's a skill you've developed), but actually turning around and applying that knowledge takes more practice. The associative nature of human memory means that when you're trying to recall something under pressure, you have a higher tendency to stumble onto spurious knowledge—you remember a lot of things from other fields and areas that get in the way. In addition, having a breadth of knowledge can actually be a source of frustration when studying depth in a very narrow area, as the lack of variety in the topics being discussed becomes frustrating; behold, the misery of the student with the general degree who can't decide what he or she wants to do with his or her life.
(And to any who would make cynical remarks along the lines of "maybe you're just stupid," I don't think you're doing cognitive psychology any benefits by implying that there is some group of superhuman with infinite retentive ability that deserves exclusive consideration.)
Of this I am aware! And they are even used formally in many contexts because it's more convenient, even though we don't have the theoretical underpinning to justify them properly. Personally, I think I would've been more comfortable in a first-year calculus course that used them instead because they seem more intuitive.
A reference text by definition doesn't "help" explain things; it describes them and leaves it up to the student to parse the content. My experience with my CS, math, and biology textbooks has been that they spend an absolute ton of time trying to explain the concepts in them as thoroughly as possible, using the most accessible analogies and descriptions they can. They're much easier to digest than a pure description would be—perhaps you just got the bad pick from the barrel if your books are just questions?