If you're an oncologist and find a cure using your employer's resources, then your employer also has first dibs on the cure
Please try re-reading my post: I was specifically addressing things created/acquired/done without the employer's resources or on one's own time, which an employee just happens to use to do his job better.
If a teaching contract or grant actually pays for a prof to create teaching materials, the employer obviously gets to stipulate terms on the materials. If they expect you to show up to class with all of that stuff all prepared already (as most universities do) and don't pay you for the time or resources to develop them, they don't get the same rights over your created work.
You provide a service, for pay, just like a doctor, or lawyer or barista.
Not everything you do while working is part of that "service" -- you may develop skills or tools, or even buy literal tools, perhaps on your own time. Just because it helps you do your job better doesn't mean it's bundled into what you're paid for.
Unless his practice or hospital paid for a doctor's stethoscope or white coat, I don't think the employer gets to keep them when he leaves. Or, if a doctor developed his own methodology for diagnosis and wrote some sort of software that aided him on his own time, the hospital doesn't get to keep it, license it, and claim copyright on it -- even if the doctor successfully used it while providing his "service."
If a university explicitly pays for development of course materials, obviously they can specify terms for their use. But as someone who has taken jobs as a lecturer in the past where the number of employment hours and such are explicitly spelled out, I can tell you that universities often explicitly only pay for "contact hours" (time in classroom) and perhaps assessment. There is no way that you could ever develop materials to teach a course in the time you are being paid for... you're expected to come prepared with those "tools" to do the job.
The degree program offered by most universities is one that says that a person has progressed through a series of steps and followed a prescription (recipe) and is good for being a cog in a bigger machine.
What you're describing is a "trade school" and/or "certification program." Somewhere around 60-70 years ago universities realized that they could make more money off the middle class if they started offering "practical" programs. Before that, and even up to a few decades ago, one could legitimately go to college and major in whatever -- English lit., history, philosophy -- and then expect to step out the door and find various jobs in the corporate world that had little to do with those majors.
The idea of a "university" is literally that you are exposed to the "universe" of knowledge, and by encountering ideas from a broad set of perspectives, you will develop critical thinking skills to approach a broad variety of problems. The "concentration" (or, later, "major") was just a way to focus study and realize the potential for more advanced problems in a particular field. There's a reason why traditional technical colleges have names like "Institute of Technology" instead of "university" -- they weren't seen to expose students to a wide knowledge base like other traditional liberal arts schools.
I'd personally be much happier if we just expunged this sham of "higher education" and put such programs into trade schools and apprenticeship programs where they'd be more effectively taught.
As for my specific example from my undergraduate experience, I took a variety of engineering courses and independent thought was definitely required and encouraged. If you didn't actually learn to think on your own, you'd never pass, because exams always consisted mostly of problems that were unlike anything you had ever seen before. Even in my giant freshman physics classes, the small sections were always taught by regular professors, each of whom had their own spin on the material -- and small sections were largely about students asking more advanced questions and trying to understand the underlying material, rather than just doing some sort of rote exercise or standard problem set for the entire time.
I realize that most colleges/universities are not like this, and there are various reasons why we've ended up where we are. But moving to a situation where there's even greater standardization will just make our current university system even worse by removing any remnants of individual attention or distinctiveness in ideas.
One main difference is that teachers/professors are required to essentially do a very similar thing over and over and over again from semester to semester and year to year.
In other words it's repetitive and doesn't require much new work after you've taught the course a couple of times.
Only if you're an absolutely TERRIBLE teacher. Every group of students is different. Also, as culture changes over the years, students change. You need to adapt. But the more "tools" you have in your teaching "toolbox," the easier it is to reinvent the course from year to year... that's true.
But if you want to have a debate about salary: Traditionally, professors are paid on the basis of contact hours -- the actual time they spend in the classroom -- and perhaps for assessment. They are often explicitly not paid for all the time it takes to develop a curriculum/syllabus and prepare materials (something that is often made clear in lecture appointments, where sometimes you aren't considered "full-time" unless you're teaching an absurd number of courses), which is often the reason why junior professors in their first few years are completely overwhelmed with teaching. The things they are really being paid for (aside from showing up to lecture, mostly research, advising, committee work, etc.) are what get them tenure. Developing good teaching materials has often been explicitly excluded by most universities as a priority -- a trend that I actually regard as incredibly unfortunate.
If universities actually awarded tenure based on teaching and specified that developing good teaching materials was something useful and required for the job, I'd be more happy to say that it's "part of the job." But that's not what most faculty at most schools are told when they are hired. (Perhaps unfortunately.)
For some MOOCs, universities are actually giving specific grants for their development (again pointing out how this isn't a normal part of compensation). In that case, it makes a lot more sense for universities to retain rights.
1) Find the "best" professor for each class in the world, buy the rights to his materials and make that "The" foo-101 course,
2) Refocus the in-person college experience around classes that actually involve thought rather than rote
How about instead we remove any such courses from all college curricula altogether? Maybe put them in a trade school or something where they belong.
If you're taking a course at a university that only involves "rote" learning and doesn't "actually involve thought," either the teacher is bad or the course shouldn't be taught at a university.
Now, with MOOCs, universities are claiming ownership over much of the course materials created.
Boo hoo, you mean they might have to live under the same system as us peasants?
It might seem obvious that employers should get to keep materials created by their employees. On the other hand, teaching is a specific kind of job with requirements a little different from many where this sort of copyrightable material is created.
One main difference is that teachers/professors are required to essentially do a very similar thing over and over and over again from semester to semester and year to year. It's not like they're creating custom code to solve a particular problem once or writing a specific set of documents for a company to deal with a particular problem.
They are instead creating materials that will allow them to do their job better again and again from year to year. In a way, I think it's more like "tools" for your trade. Every prof in a particular field has his/her "tools" for teaching the intro courses in that field, just a like a carpenter carries his tools from job to job to build a similar kind of deck on a different house.
I'm not saying the universities shouldn't claim any ownership -- in many cases of the big MOOCs nowadays, the universities are investing lots of money specifically to create these sorts of things, and that should be taken into consideration.
But in other cases, professors have spent years of their own time making their own online materials getting no special funding for their extra effort -- which may have gone far beyond those profs who did not adopt online teaching as early.
And effectively we're penalizing those who tried to innovate by saying -- "Those who kept the crappy handout and offline textbook model can take that stuff with them to their new job as usual (which can actually serve as a great point to build online materials in the future), but those who innovated and used cool new educational materials in an online setting will lose those if they ever leave their job."
Actually, I forsee a change in courses over the next few years, where the teaching material is a collaboration of those instructors creating the classes. [...] And open source courses will invariably be more complete than closed courses offered from a singular professor.
You're probably right in terms of what will happen.
Any teacher that can be replaced by a computer, should be.
However, when we get to the point that most university curricula are exactly the same and using the same exact materials, we've lost a huge point of academic inquiry -- which is in part about individuality and creativity.
When I was an undergraduate, the department of my major was ranked as one of the best departments in the world for my major. I was explicitly told that if I wanted to go to graduate school in my field, I shouldn't apply there, despite the fact that they were also the highest-ranked in graduate studies.
Why? Because it was seen as two strikes against any applicant. The faculty rightly recognized that you only get new ideas when you get to talk with people who understand things differently... and students who were taught by you at your university are much less likely to have completely different perspectives on the field.
Yes, we already have some standardization with common textbooks, etc. But the distinctive teaching and approaches used by each professor can really bring out different ideas and responses from students. On a larger scale, those differences ultimately lead to new ideas emerging when a student taught by prof A argues with a student taught by prof B in graduate school.
I'm happy to see collaboration to create good course materials for intro classes, but I definitely think we'll take a huge step backward intellectually if all of these courses effectively become "the same" at every college.
Serfdom might be a good term, except that under traditional serfdom the lord of the manor had some reciprocal obligations to the serf.
I don't know, professors have at least some recognized professional obligations for graduate students. For example, they are expected to write reasonable recommendation letters, a task that can be quite time-consuming.
A few years back, I knew this prof who was denied tenure at a major university. He was on the job market, and essentially ended up applying for the same jobs his graduate students and recent Ph.D.'s were applying for. Word got around that he was actually writing crappy recommendation letters for his own students (either because he wanted to look better or because he was just stressed and out of time while doing his own job hunt), and the academic community in the field didn't look kindly on him... it took him another few years to finally find a position, despite being highly qualified.
Of course, recommendation letters are supposed to be confidential, but particularly in small fields, word can get around if you aren't holding up your obligation to your students correctly.
I've participated in a few 'MOOC's in the past, and have thought about a few more. The ones up until now all seem to be adaptations of courses offered by universities, and using the university's name recognition and NOT the professor's to attract students. It would be interesting to see how many people would be attracted to a class by "Dr. Joe Schmoe" and not "XXX 200 from Harvard University as taught by Dr. Joe Schmoe".
It's not a question of "advertising" a course (though with some famous professors it might occasionally be).
The point is that the professor is preparing his/her own version of a course, making all the materials, and now the university will claim ownership over all of it. In years past, when a professor taught "History of Western Philosophy" or whatever at university X, he/she designed a syllabus, made up his/her course materials, etc. Then, if the professor had to move to another university for whatever reason, he/she would take those materials and offer "History of Western Philosophy" at university Y, essentially with the same stuff (perhaps modified a bit to curriculum standards at university Y).
Now, with MOOCs, universities are claiming ownership over much of the course materials created. So, if a professor leaves university X, university X could still keep using all that stuff for the course. Professor X might not even be able to use the stuff he/she created at university Y, since it may be under copyright, etc.
Obviously this is not a clear issue, since the work done for university X was done while the professor was an employee there, so I get how the university can claim some ownership.
On the other hand, for lots of early-adopter profs with online materials, they have invested a lot of their own time and energy doing something that hasn't been immediately adopted everywhere at minor universities. If they do all the work to make their own distinctive courses but then can't take that work with them if they have to move to university Y, it really can hurt their teaching ability at a new job.
While this is a really nice story, and I like a lot about it, I also have heard conflicting stories from parents and grandparents about people in the age of radio who always "had to listen to their show" and the neighbor guy who was holed up every evening "listening to the game" (generally baseball).
Obviously there were a lot of social changes that played into the trends you describe, and television played a role. But the story you tell is oversimplified... when I grew up (in the era of tv), for example, I didn't watch tv every night -- and when I did, it was more likely to be at a neighbors' house while hanging out and socializing. I'm not saying I had the most common experience, but it was possible to sit at home and be antisocial while listening to the radio before tv, just as it was possible to treat communal tv watching as another social activity (like going to the movies).
There's also lots of other stuff to blame for the cultural trends you mention other than tv. (I say this as someone who rarely watches it these days.)
2. Keep social network data private, more importantly don't post anything sensitive.
Are you serious? How about "don't participate in an online social network"?
Just knowing your set of friends or contacts is enough to extrapolate a huge amount of information about you. So, even if the ONLY data you provide a social network is your friends, that's already a LOT of information.
The classic study on this was probably about five years ago now, where someone showed how it was possible to predict (to a reasonably high degree of certainty) whether you were gay or not using just your list of friends.
More recently, it's been shown how easy it is to guess Social Security numbers -- for people of certain ages -- with just things like a birthplace (often same as home town) and approximate birth date, which can often be extrapolated just from a friend list. ("He's friends with a bunch of people all from the same town, and they're all about the same age -- probably high school friends, therefore....")
Of course, the NSA probably can figure out your SS#, birthdate, birthplace, and similar information without going to any trouble. But the point is that you can often be significantly profiled on a social network even if you never post anything and only accept friend requests from people you know.
Absolutely. I'm aware of all of this. I still don't think that makes any of what I said false or wrong. Just because tasters think a $5 wine tastes better when it's described as a $100 bottle doesn't affect the proportion of bad cheap wines vs. bad expensive wines. I can only remember one or two occasions where I've been served a moderate or expensive wine without knowing the price ahead of time and thought, "This is TERRIBLE!" I can remember dozens of occasions where I've been served a cheap wine without knowing the price and thought, "This is TERRIBLE!"
I'm not going to claim that my experience is solid evidence of anything. But I do think there is a higher proportion of terrible wines at lower price-points.
I'm assuming that part of your post was reacting to my claim that I sometimes will pay a premium price because of my previous good experiences with something. This has nothing to do with claiming that these expensive liquors are always better than cheaper ones or even that their tastes are unique.
But let's say that I like the taste of a particular kind of single-malt scotch or bourbon or whatever, and I find out after I've tasted it that it costs $60 or $70 for a bottle. (This has happened to me a lot -- I've gone to tasting parties, had people buy me drinks at bars, etc., having no idea about the cost of the item in question.)
For a few of these liquors, where a bottle probably lasts me over a year, spending the $60 is worth it, because I already know the taste is what I like. I could spend a few hundred dollars sampling other cheap whiskies looking for something I like as much for $20 or $30 per bottle, but why should I? It's not cost effective if I've found what I like.
My reason for buying a few premium priced liquors is almost always because I discovered something I liked, usually without knowing the price ahead of time, and I want that consistency of taste. I'll also do the same in repeatedly buying a $5 bottle of wine that I know I like... it has nothing to do with expensive vs. cheap.
So the result of the experiment is NOT that professional tasters are quacks (at least most of them) but rather that the visual sense and the power of suggestion trumps the rather weak senses of taste and smell.
I don't think that professional tasters are "quacks" necessarily, but I do think that numerous experiments seem to indicate that their palettes are nowhere near as discriminating as they claim.
I completely agree that various other things can trump your sense of taste -- change the coloring, put a cheap wine in an expensive bottle, tell people a wine is made from grape X when it's actually grape Y, etc. Experiments have shown that these things seem to make it difficult for tasters to come up with rational or consistent results.
Do that test again and TELL them that the wines are manipulated to an identical color. That'll give you an example of how humans are able to ignore a specific sense.
Yeah, one of the studies actually took two IDENTICAL glasses of wine and just tinted one. The red one was given remarkably different taste descriptors (like red wines)... even though it was identical to the white one. Not one taster identified it as a white wine.
Now, you're right, maybe if we did some sort of other experiment where we told people about manipulation, maybe the results would be slightly different. Given all I've read about this issue, I still doubt that wine experts would be able to do as well as they think they can.
But even if under some ideal conditions tasters might be able to make consistent judgments, the study I cited before shows that tasters still only tend to narrow down quality to within an 8-point range out of the 20-point rating system on average.
That might be better than chance, but it's not very detailed. And given that a lot of this can be influenced significantly by saying the wine is "expensive" or changing the color or circumstances of drinking, etc., it's not a lot of information at all.
I'm not saying that tasters can't taste something. The question is: can they taste well enough to justify a difference in wine price between $2 for a bottle vs. $200 for a bottle? Given the evidence, I don't think their opinions are worth anywhere near that much.
For the opinion of experts with such inexact skills, I'll usually pay $1 or $2 more. If I see a bottle that has been highly rated by someone or some organization I like, I may pay a dollar or two more over just taking a chance on another wine without that endorsement. In certain circumstances, I've paid maybe $5 more. I've rarely ended up with something terrible when I've taken such advice, and that's about the only reason I do it... to avoid horribly bad wine, not to actually find "good" wine.
The only times I've paid more than that for an expert opinion on wine is when I was seeking to get a bottle to give as a gift or to take to dinner, and I was asking an opinion from an expert so that my gift would appear to be something accepted "by the experts." At no point have I actually thought that I was guaranteed to get significantly better quality by doing so.
So -- I agree with most things you've said. And I agree that experts taste something. I just don't think their opinions are anywhere near exact enough to justify the kind of price increases that accompany high ratings.
I think there were clearly political elements in the way the Supreme Court handled this case, including granting cert in the first place, granting an early stay on the recount in progress, and in the procedural decision not to ultimately let the Florida Supreme Court decide the remedy. Your assertions about things like "They said it should only be applicable to the present case" are standard Democratic talking points which indicate a superficial understanding of the ruling... much more so than my arguments.
But this has nothing to do with the points I made before. As for the argument that the "conservative" justices used "liberal" arguments, first off I refuse to accept the idea that there is such a deep political division on the court in the first place. The majority of decisions they make show no clear ideological divisions (either unanimous or 8-1). Even among the 5-4 rulings, roughly 1/3 of them tend to be divided in ways that are different from the assuming "ideological factions." (I'm not going to bother looking up the detailed stats on the Rehnquist court at that time, so my numbers may be slightly off here...)
Are there political leanings? Sure. But I'm concerned that justice is ultimately done, more so than what the motivations of the court are. In the case of Bush v. Gore, two "liberal" justices clearly didn't buy the standard "liberal" arguments you cite. If you're going to argue for political motivations, it seems that it goes for both sides in this case... which perhaps it does.
But in the end, whatever anyone's motivations were, I have to agree with the ruling that the recounts that were going on were fundamentally unfair and unlikely to improve the accuracy of the result. Were they "un-Constitutional"? I don't know, but legally they should have been stopped by someone.
Should there have been a better recount done? Yeah, probably. Was the Florida court wrong in setting a deadline and thus making those recounts impossible? Maybe, but I don't know Florida law very well.
In the end, although I was not happy with the result of the election, I blame that on a multitude of factors, not just the possible motivations of a court who at least partly was trying to protect the integrity of the voting process and to count votes fairly.
How about instead of ranting endlessly about irrelevant points you accept the statistical truth that first-past-the-post voting systems favour two-party rule?
You know, there's a reason the US is the only civilized country to use such a ridiculously flawed system.
I was responding to arguments made by another poster. Unfortunately, the standard narrative about these events is so pervasive that it takes quite a lot of information to argue against them.
As for your point, of course our system is dumb. I completely agree. But it's a little irrelevant. Even if our system is flawed and favors 2-party rule, it does not mean that it is impossible to elect someone from a third party. That unusual situation is the only case where we might be able to effect real change. But the major two parties would like people to believe third party votes are a waste (and even evil) and thus put out disinformation to discourage anyone from ever considering voting for a 3rd party.
By the way, I say all of this as someone who actually appreciates liquor of various sorts. I'm not at all trying to claim that all wines (or all whiskies or whatever) taste the same -- obviously they don't. And there are plenty of cases where I've paid a premium price for a liquor whose taste I like because of previous experiences.
But in the realm of wine, I don't think there's good evidence that expensive wines are actually "better" on an objective scale; in fact, many studies suggest the contrary. Perhaps there is a somewhat smaller probability of terrible wine when buying something expensive, but that's hardly enough to say you can't find some cheaper wines that are just as "good."
I'm not a wine snob, but I know there are certain things that sometimes you *can't* replicate. [...] I'd argue that fine liquors -- wines, whiskeys, etc... fall into that category. I'd say it's almost an art form.
Detailed studies of professional wine judges in blind tastings have shown that prizes from contest to contest are so random that they might as well be picked from a hat. And the average professional judge, tasting the same wine on consecutive days, would on average only be able to narrow the rating to within 8 points on a 20-point scale.
Other studies have even shown that professional tasters often fare pretty poorly even in tests like, "Taste 3 wines, tell me which 2 are identical," or that when given white wines dyed with red food coloring, they start spouting out the nonsense about "flavor notes" and "nose" that would be appropriate for red wines rather than whites.
Given this information, it's pretty clear that even the so-called "expert palettes" don't know what the hell they're talking about.
So, I'm going to go out on a limb and say that it's pretty likely chemists could master the subtle art of getting a wine result that could satisfy even most professional judges in a blind test.
George W. Bush may well have been a terrible President. The world may have been a better place had he not been President.
But you're reciting the stupid mythology made up by the Democratic party 13 years later.
Well, we did have 8 years of President Bush as a result of a third party candidate bleeding votes away from Gore...
Newsflash: Gore and Bush both made numerous decisions during their campaign that had greater impacts than anything Nader ever did. Blaming the loss of an election on a 3rd party is just buying into the two-party BS rhetoric that's trying to trick you into voting for them.
Just for one example, take the Democrats in Florida who voted for Bush. Approximately 12% of registered Florida Democrats voted for Bush -- roughly 200,000 voters. This is a significantly larger number than all of Nader's votes combined, including Democrats, Republicans, and independents who voted for him.
When a greater number of your own party defects to vote for "the other guy" than all of the 3rd party voters combined, I don't think you get to blame the 3rd party voters. You blame the guy who lost for not being a better candidate and for failing to convince members OF HIS OWN PARTY to vote for him. You blame the voters who actually voted for Bush. The 3rd party voters were a much smaller effect than anything done by the two major parties here.
(Granted, Bush was more the GOP members of the Supreme Court being corrupt and helping Bush out,
Good lord. This nonsense again. The actual situation is complicated, and thus the Democratic spindoctors have convinced people like you of a false narrative even 13 years later. Here's what actually happened.
The Supreme Court ruled 7-2 (including two "liberal" justices) that the recount in Florida had Constitutional problems. The only place where the five "conservatives" come into it is in the remedy. The five "conservatives" looked at a ruling by the liberal Florida Supreme Court just made a few days earlier, where the Florida Supreme Court interpreted state law to say that all recounts should be finished by date X. Given what the liberal Florida court said, the US Supreme Court decided that it was impossible to complete a recount according to Florida law since it was already date X.
Now, from a technical legal procedural standpoint, the appropriate thing to do here would have been to send the case back to Florida and let the Florida court say, "Yeah, we can't do any more recounts now," even though they had already effectively set the date. Instead, the US Supreme Court set the remedy themselves, which is a bit unusual.
Nevertheless, the US Supreme Court then remanded the case back to Florida. The Florida Supreme Court could have turned around and said, "Well, no, actually our ruling didn't mean to set date X." The Florida court did no such thing.
Gore's lawyers could have requested another hearing and made arguments that Florida law didn't say that and the Florida Supreme Court's ruling on date X was wrong. Gore's lawyers did no such thing.
A week or two later, instead, the Florida Supreme Court actually dismissed the case, thereby officially ending any recounts. The US Supreme Court did NOT "decide the election" or even officially "end" it.
Given that Gore and the liberal Florida court didn't contest the US Supreme Court's citation of the Florida court's ruling about date X, we can safely assume that Gore and Florida didn't think there was any legal argument to stand on in disputing the US Supreme Court's ruling.
In other words, while there were a couple procedural oddities about the actions in this case, the actual liberal parties involved chose not to contest the ruling... and, in fact, it was originally the liberal Florida court's interpretation of Florida law that set the deadline the US Supreme Court followed.
Absolutely. MIT doesn't get to define "hack" for the culture at large. However, MIT does have its own distinctive culture, and it has its own sets of terms, phrases, and special meanings (just like Slashdot).
MIT does get to define what the term "hack" means when used on its own campus, as long as its own communal culture agrees on it.
And thus, when an MIT president speaks to MIT students, he might be expected to use the term "hack" in that sense. There is nothing inherently "wrong" with this, nor is there anything wrong with someone trying to explain this distinctive culture and terminology to others... others can then freely choose whether or not this unusual meaning is of any use to them or not.
This, by the way, is exactly how meanings of words evolve over time. If everyone always used words in the same way, word meanings would never change. History shows they do. That's a fact of life.
If you and I have different dictionaries, we have less progress; More wasted time building a conversion table, clarifying the symbolics of communication.
Anyone who has spent time trying to translate something with subtle meaning from one language to another realizes that each language has a distinctive set of circumscribed and interconnecting meanings that are difficult to render in another language. In essence, different languages actually can produce different ideas and different knowledge, just because of the way words connect to each other.
There are certainly benefits to a universal standard for communication. But there are also benefits from letting smaller groups develop their own distinctive cultures and even distinctive languages, because by doing so, they may end up making connections, distinctions,and even discoveries not possible (or at least unlikely) in another language.
I'd still need MS Office for each time it turns out a feature of a spreadsheet/document/macro that I have to work with isn't compatible with LibreOffice.
In other words, "I use MS Office because everyone else does, not because it's actually better."
The alternatives work well for one person, but things tend to fall apart when collaborators use different programs.
Agreed. But this is not an argument in favor of Windows or Microsoft products. It's just stating the reality that MS Office became dominant first, and now businesses find themselves shelling out gazillions of dollars just to maintain that "compatibility" with other business users, when they could have 97% of the functionality with free software... if only everyone could just shift at the same time....
(For the record, I'm not a LibreOffice fan. But I honestly don't think 99% of business users would lose anything if they moved to its spreadsheet over Excel, assuming the compatibility issue were solved. It's only those few power users who make use of all of the advanced features that make Excel a bloated mess who actually benefit from Excel.)
So, the president of MIT was urging MIT students to pull clever practical jokes?
Umm, no.
That's stupid or he meant something different. Presumably he meant "hack" in the same way that people who have been actually involved with computers understand it: exploring the possibilities of a system (often including some that the inventor never intended) for the sake of discovery and in some cases using those discoveries to create unique and innovative outcomes.
Yep. That's actually what it means at MIT too, except the origin isn't necessarily only in computers. A "hacker" at MIT is one who explores in general -- often finding ways into the deep tunnels of the sub-basements in campus buildings or on the roofs and domes, seeking what goes on in the bowels and secret places of MIT.
The famous "hacks" at MIT are merely a side-effect of that exploring culture. It's only because hackers have such intimate knowledge of the buildings and systems on campus that they could manage to put a police car on the great dome, etc.
At MIT, "hacking" has the exact connotation of positive exploration that you describe. On the other hand, when the term became known to a wider culture at a point where computers were still mysterious and somewhat scary, a "hacker" was seen primarily in a negative light -- someone who knew "too much" about things he wasn't "supposed to."
So, the broader culture saw hackers as criminals. Technically, at MIT, they are too. (Last time I heard, students get fined if found on the roofs of buildings, for example.) But the cardinal rule of the MIT movement is non-destructive exploration for the sake of knowledge.
Unless you are willing to re-do all the important scientific experiments ever done yourself, then you have to trust that other people did them correctly and reported them correctly, and also if their reasoning is beyond you, that their reasoning was valid. So from a personal perspective, it requires trust and belief in the work of others.
It requires trust, it does not require belief - there are two different things.
I think you're looking for a distinction that isn't as strong in practical terms as you'd like to claim. In certain places (like on Slashdot), the word "belief" only tends to be associated with religious belief or other wacko ideas that couldn't possibly be true. But that's just not how we use the word "belief" in normal everyday language.
(1) a state or habit of mind in which trust or confidence is placed in some person or thing
(2) something believed; especially : a tenet or body of tenets held by a group
(3) conviction of the truth of some statement or the reality of some being or phenomenon especially when based on examination of evidence
Each of these definitions seem to work fine with the idea of "scientific belief": the trust and confidence in the scientific method, the aspect of a (scientific) community which has a shared set of commonly accepted ideas, and the idea that "truth" as far as it exists requires supporting evidence.
From a practical standpoint, a scientist needs to assume on an everyday basis that the underlying research in his/her field is an accurate representation of reality. (I'll avoid the word "truth," since I know everyone's wary of it, but that's also a practical assumption, even if philosophically, we always say we're just talking about "theories.")
Trying to claim that you somehow have trust in the scientific method but don't believe in its results is sophistry. What does that mean? "I trust what my priest/minister/rabbi/sage/witchdoctor says, but I don't believe it." What would that mean? "I trust what physicists say about general relativity, but I don't believe it." Same question.
The only time you'd ever utter a statement like that is if you actually didn't really trust the authority -- you thought the physicists were well-intentioned, perhaps honest and hard workers with integrity, but ultimately idiots who very likely could have messed something up.
Even if you don't believe dictionary definitions, belief is simply a manifestation of trust in a set of ideas. The history of science also clearly has cases where this trust/belief was misplaced, and very intelligent scientists found it very hard to doubt established theories even in the case of contrary evidence. Sometimes they were bull-headed, but often they were just human...
Humans who couldn't actually carry out further research and make scientific progress unless they believed in the likely accuracy (and even "truth"?) of research that came before them.
P.S. I'm NOT at all saying there is no difference between science and religion. There clearly is. But this particular vocabulary fight is ridiculous and doesn't accord with the actual everyday use of the word "belief."
Please read the thread before commenting ignorantly. I was responding to someone who clearly doesn't understand that the apparent weightlessness of the astronauts is caused by the same phenomenon as those on the vomit comet -- namely, a trajectory of free fall. The GP seems to think that gravity is significantly less on the ISS, which is obviously not true (as I pointed out in another post).
You and everything on them are still under the effects of gravity, you're just falling at the same rate as the craft.
Why is this modded up? The astronauts on the space station are also falling at the same rate as the craft. They are just falling with the correct trajectory (i.e., enough horizontal velocity) that the vertical component of their fall takes them around the earth. Please look up the definition of "orbit."
Sure, but at the end of the day, the effect of gravity diminishes with distance, something that might work on the plane may not then have "enough" of a gravitational pull to make it work on the ISS.
You do understand that BOTH the astronauts in the space station and people on the plane are in free fall, right?? They may be accelerating at slightly different rates, but they cannot be aware of the difference in acceleration, since there is no force pushing back in either case... as there would be on the earth's surface for example. Objects can't be aware of the different acceleration either.
YOu can see this with fire, when a match is struck on the plane it'll look the same as on the surface, but when done on the ISS, it behaves differently.
Given that NASA itself does experiments with flames with the assumption that they behave similarly on these planes as in space, it's pretty clear that you're talking nonsense.
Slashdot Mirror
If you're an oncologist and find a cure using your employer's resources, then your employer also has first dibs on the cure
Please try re-reading my post: I was specifically addressing things created/acquired/done without the employer's resources or on one's own time, which an employee just happens to use to do his job better.
If a teaching contract or grant actually pays for a prof to create teaching materials, the employer obviously gets to stipulate terms on the materials. If they expect you to show up to class with all of that stuff all prepared already (as most universities do) and don't pay you for the time or resources to develop them, they don't get the same rights over your created work.
You provide a service, for pay, just like a doctor, or lawyer or barista.
Not everything you do while working is part of that "service" -- you may develop skills or tools, or even buy literal tools, perhaps on your own time. Just because it helps you do your job better doesn't mean it's bundled into what you're paid for.
Unless his practice or hospital paid for a doctor's stethoscope or white coat, I don't think the employer gets to keep them when he leaves. Or, if a doctor developed his own methodology for diagnosis and wrote some sort of software that aided him on his own time, the hospital doesn't get to keep it, license it, and claim copyright on it -- even if the doctor successfully used it while providing his "service."
If a university explicitly pays for development of course materials, obviously they can specify terms for their use. But as someone who has taken jobs as a lecturer in the past where the number of employment hours and such are explicitly spelled out, I can tell you that universities often explicitly only pay for "contact hours" (time in classroom) and perhaps assessment. There is no way that you could ever develop materials to teach a course in the time you are being paid for... you're expected to come prepared with those "tools" to do the job.
The degree program offered by most universities is one that says that a person has progressed through a series of steps and followed a prescription (recipe) and is good for being a cog in a bigger machine.
What you're describing is a "trade school" and/or "certification program." Somewhere around 60-70 years ago universities realized that they could make more money off the middle class if they started offering "practical" programs. Before that, and even up to a few decades ago, one could legitimately go to college and major in whatever -- English lit., history, philosophy -- and then expect to step out the door and find various jobs in the corporate world that had little to do with those majors.
The idea of a "university" is literally that you are exposed to the "universe" of knowledge, and by encountering ideas from a broad set of perspectives, you will develop critical thinking skills to approach a broad variety of problems. The "concentration" (or, later, "major") was just a way to focus study and realize the potential for more advanced problems in a particular field. There's a reason why traditional technical colleges have names like "Institute of Technology" instead of "university" -- they weren't seen to expose students to a wide knowledge base like other traditional liberal arts schools.
I'd personally be much happier if we just expunged this sham of "higher education" and put such programs into trade schools and apprenticeship programs where they'd be more effectively taught.
As for my specific example from my undergraduate experience, I took a variety of engineering courses and independent thought was definitely required and encouraged. If you didn't actually learn to think on your own, you'd never pass, because exams always consisted mostly of problems that were unlike anything you had ever seen before. Even in my giant freshman physics classes, the small sections were always taught by regular professors, each of whom had their own spin on the material -- and small sections were largely about students asking more advanced questions and trying to understand the underlying material, rather than just doing some sort of rote exercise or standard problem set for the entire time.
I realize that most colleges/universities are not like this, and there are various reasons why we've ended up where we are. But moving to a situation where there's even greater standardization will just make our current university system even worse by removing any remnants of individual attention or distinctiveness in ideas.
One main difference is that teachers/professors are required to essentially do a very similar thing over and over and over again from semester to semester and year to year.
In other words it's repetitive and doesn't require much new work after you've taught the course a couple of times.
Only if you're an absolutely TERRIBLE teacher. Every group of students is different. Also, as culture changes over the years, students change. You need to adapt. But the more "tools" you have in your teaching "toolbox," the easier it is to reinvent the course from year to year... that's true.
But if you want to have a debate about salary: Traditionally, professors are paid on the basis of contact hours -- the actual time they spend in the classroom -- and perhaps for assessment. They are often explicitly not paid for all the time it takes to develop a curriculum/syllabus and prepare materials (something that is often made clear in lecture appointments, where sometimes you aren't considered "full-time" unless you're teaching an absurd number of courses), which is often the reason why junior professors in their first few years are completely overwhelmed with teaching. The things they are really being paid for (aside from showing up to lecture, mostly research, advising, committee work, etc.) are what get them tenure. Developing good teaching materials has often been explicitly excluded by most universities as a priority -- a trend that I actually regard as incredibly unfortunate.
If universities actually awarded tenure based on teaching and specified that developing good teaching materials was something useful and required for the job, I'd be more happy to say that it's "part of the job." But that's not what most faculty at most schools are told when they are hired. (Perhaps unfortunately.)
For some MOOCs, universities are actually giving specific grants for their development (again pointing out how this isn't a normal part of compensation). In that case, it makes a lot more sense for universities to retain rights.
1) Find the "best" professor for each class in the world, buy the rights to his materials and make that "The" foo-101 course,
2) Refocus the in-person college experience around classes that actually involve thought rather than rote
How about instead we remove any such courses from all college curricula altogether? Maybe put them in a trade school or something where they belong.
If you're taking a course at a university that only involves "rote" learning and doesn't "actually involve thought," either the teacher is bad or the course shouldn't be taught at a university.
Now, with MOOCs, universities are claiming ownership over much of the course materials created.
Boo hoo, you mean they might have to live under the same system as us peasants?
It might seem obvious that employers should get to keep materials created by their employees. On the other hand, teaching is a specific kind of job with requirements a little different from many where this sort of copyrightable material is created.
One main difference is that teachers/professors are required to essentially do a very similar thing over and over and over again from semester to semester and year to year. It's not like they're creating custom code to solve a particular problem once or writing a specific set of documents for a company to deal with a particular problem.
They are instead creating materials that will allow them to do their job better again and again from year to year. In a way, I think it's more like "tools" for your trade. Every prof in a particular field has his/her "tools" for teaching the intro courses in that field, just a like a carpenter carries his tools from job to job to build a similar kind of deck on a different house.
I'm not saying the universities shouldn't claim any ownership -- in many cases of the big MOOCs nowadays, the universities are investing lots of money specifically to create these sorts of things, and that should be taken into consideration.
But in other cases, professors have spent years of their own time making their own online materials getting no special funding for their extra effort -- which may have gone far beyond those profs who did not adopt online teaching as early.
And effectively we're penalizing those who tried to innovate by saying -- "Those who kept the crappy handout and offline textbook model can take that stuff with them to their new job as usual (which can actually serve as a great point to build online materials in the future), but those who innovated and used cool new educational materials in an online setting will lose those if they ever leave their job."
Actually, I forsee a change in courses over the next few years, where the teaching material is a collaboration of those instructors creating the classes. [...] And open source courses will invariably be more complete than closed courses offered from a singular professor.
You're probably right in terms of what will happen.
Any teacher that can be replaced by a computer, should be.
However, when we get to the point that most university curricula are exactly the same and using the same exact materials, we've lost a huge point of academic inquiry -- which is in part about individuality and creativity.
When I was an undergraduate, the department of my major was ranked as one of the best departments in the world for my major. I was explicitly told that if I wanted to go to graduate school in my field, I shouldn't apply there, despite the fact that they were also the highest-ranked in graduate studies.
Why? Because it was seen as two strikes against any applicant. The faculty rightly recognized that you only get new ideas when you get to talk with people who understand things differently... and students who were taught by you at your university are much less likely to have completely different perspectives on the field.
Yes, we already have some standardization with common textbooks, etc. But the distinctive teaching and approaches used by each professor can really bring out different ideas and responses from students. On a larger scale, those differences ultimately lead to new ideas emerging when a student taught by prof A argues with a student taught by prof B in graduate school.
I'm happy to see collaboration to create good course materials for intro classes, but I definitely think we'll take a huge step backward intellectually if all of these courses effectively become "the same" at every college.
Serfdom might be a good term, except that under traditional serfdom the lord of the manor had some reciprocal obligations to the serf.
I don't know, professors have at least some recognized professional obligations for graduate students. For example, they are expected to write reasonable recommendation letters, a task that can be quite time-consuming.
A few years back, I knew this prof who was denied tenure at a major university. He was on the job market, and essentially ended up applying for the same jobs his graduate students and recent Ph.D.'s were applying for. Word got around that he was actually writing crappy recommendation letters for his own students (either because he wanted to look better or because he was just stressed and out of time while doing his own job hunt), and the academic community in the field didn't look kindly on him... it took him another few years to finally find a position, despite being highly qualified.
Of course, recommendation letters are supposed to be confidential, but particularly in small fields, word can get around if you aren't holding up your obligation to your students correctly.
I've participated in a few 'MOOC's in the past, and have thought about a few more. The ones up until now all seem to be adaptations of courses offered by universities, and using the university's name recognition and NOT the professor's to attract students. It would be interesting to see how many people would be attracted to a class by "Dr. Joe Schmoe" and not "XXX 200 from Harvard University as taught by Dr. Joe Schmoe".
It's not a question of "advertising" a course (though with some famous professors it might occasionally be).
The point is that the professor is preparing his/her own version of a course, making all the materials, and now the university will claim ownership over all of it. In years past, when a professor taught "History of Western Philosophy" or whatever at university X, he/she designed a syllabus, made up his/her course materials, etc. Then, if the professor had to move to another university for whatever reason, he/she would take those materials and offer "History of Western Philosophy" at university Y, essentially with the same stuff (perhaps modified a bit to curriculum standards at university Y).
Now, with MOOCs, universities are claiming ownership over much of the course materials created. So, if a professor leaves university X, university X could still keep using all that stuff for the course. Professor X might not even be able to use the stuff he/she created at university Y, since it may be under copyright, etc.
Obviously this is not a clear issue, since the work done for university X was done while the professor was an employee there, so I get how the university can claim some ownership.
On the other hand, for lots of early-adopter profs with online materials, they have invested a lot of their own time and energy doing something that hasn't been immediately adopted everywhere at minor universities. If they do all the work to make their own distinctive courses but then can't take that work with them if they have to move to university Y, it really can hurt their teaching ability at a new job.
While this is a really nice story, and I like a lot about it, I also have heard conflicting stories from parents and grandparents about people in the age of radio who always "had to listen to their show" and the neighbor guy who was holed up every evening "listening to the game" (generally baseball).
Obviously there were a lot of social changes that played into the trends you describe, and television played a role. But the story you tell is oversimplified... when I grew up (in the era of tv), for example, I didn't watch tv every night -- and when I did, it was more likely to be at a neighbors' house while hanging out and socializing. I'm not saying I had the most common experience, but it was possible to sit at home and be antisocial while listening to the radio before tv, just as it was possible to treat communal tv watching as another social activity (like going to the movies).
There's also lots of other stuff to blame for the cultural trends you mention other than tv. (I say this as someone who rarely watches it these days.)
2. Keep social network data private, more importantly don't post anything sensitive.
Are you serious? How about "don't participate in an online social network"?
Just knowing your set of friends or contacts is enough to extrapolate a huge amount of information about you. So, even if the ONLY data you provide a social network is your friends, that's already a LOT of information.
The classic study on this was probably about five years ago now, where someone showed how it was possible to predict (to a reasonably high degree of certainty) whether you were gay or not using just your list of friends.
More recently, it's been shown how easy it is to guess Social Security numbers -- for people of certain ages -- with just things like a birthplace (often same as home town) and approximate birth date, which can often be extrapolated just from a friend list. ("He's friends with a bunch of people all from the same town, and they're all about the same age -- probably high school friends, therefore....")
Of course, the NSA probably can figure out your SS#, birthdate, birthplace, and similar information without going to any trouble. But the point is that you can often be significantly profiled on a social network even if you never post anything and only accept friend requests from people you know.
Absolutely. I'm aware of all of this. I still don't think that makes any of what I said false or wrong. Just because tasters think a $5 wine tastes better when it's described as a $100 bottle doesn't affect the proportion of bad cheap wines vs. bad expensive wines. I can only remember one or two occasions where I've been served a moderate or expensive wine without knowing the price ahead of time and thought, "This is TERRIBLE!" I can remember dozens of occasions where I've been served a cheap wine without knowing the price and thought, "This is TERRIBLE!"
I'm not going to claim that my experience is solid evidence of anything. But I do think there is a higher proportion of terrible wines at lower price-points.
I'm assuming that part of your post was reacting to my claim that I sometimes will pay a premium price because of my previous good experiences with something. This has nothing to do with claiming that these expensive liquors are always better than cheaper ones or even that their tastes are unique.
But let's say that I like the taste of a particular kind of single-malt scotch or bourbon or whatever, and I find out after I've tasted it that it costs $60 or $70 for a bottle. (This has happened to me a lot -- I've gone to tasting parties, had people buy me drinks at bars, etc., having no idea about the cost of the item in question.)
For a few of these liquors, where a bottle probably lasts me over a year, spending the $60 is worth it, because I already know the taste is what I like. I could spend a few hundred dollars sampling other cheap whiskies looking for something I like as much for $20 or $30 per bottle, but why should I? It's not cost effective if I've found what I like.
My reason for buying a few premium priced liquors is almost always because I discovered something I liked, usually without knowing the price ahead of time, and I want that consistency of taste. I'll also do the same in repeatedly buying a $5 bottle of wine that I know I like... it has nothing to do with expensive vs. cheap.
So the result of the experiment is NOT that professional tasters are quacks (at least most of them) but rather that the visual sense and the power of suggestion trumps the rather weak senses of taste and smell.
I don't think that professional tasters are "quacks" necessarily, but I do think that numerous experiments seem to indicate that their palettes are nowhere near as discriminating as they claim.
I completely agree that various other things can trump your sense of taste -- change the coloring, put a cheap wine in an expensive bottle, tell people a wine is made from grape X when it's actually grape Y, etc. Experiments have shown that these things seem to make it difficult for tasters to come up with rational or consistent results.
Do that test again and TELL them that the wines are manipulated to an identical color. That'll give you an example of how humans are able to ignore a specific sense.
Yeah, one of the studies actually took two IDENTICAL glasses of wine and just tinted one. The red one was given remarkably different taste descriptors (like red wines)... even though it was identical to the white one. Not one taster identified it as a white wine.
Now, you're right, maybe if we did some sort of other experiment where we told people about manipulation, maybe the results would be slightly different. Given all I've read about this issue, I still doubt that wine experts would be able to do as well as they think they can.
But even if under some ideal conditions tasters might be able to make consistent judgments, the study I cited before shows that tasters still only tend to narrow down quality to within an 8-point range out of the 20-point rating system on average.
That might be better than chance, but it's not very detailed. And given that a lot of this can be influenced significantly by saying the wine is "expensive" or changing the color or circumstances of drinking, etc., it's not a lot of information at all.
I'm not saying that tasters can't taste something. The question is: can they taste well enough to justify a difference in wine price between $2 for a bottle vs. $200 for a bottle? Given the evidence, I don't think their opinions are worth anywhere near that much.
For the opinion of experts with such inexact skills, I'll usually pay $1 or $2 more. If I see a bottle that has been highly rated by someone or some organization I like, I may pay a dollar or two more over just taking a chance on another wine without that endorsement. In certain circumstances, I've paid maybe $5 more. I've rarely ended up with something terrible when I've taken such advice, and that's about the only reason I do it... to avoid horribly bad wine, not to actually find "good" wine.
The only times I've paid more than that for an expert opinion on wine is when I was seeking to get a bottle to give as a gift or to take to dinner, and I was asking an opinion from an expert so that my gift would appear to be something accepted "by the experts." At no point have I actually thought that I was guaranteed to get significantly better quality by doing so.
So -- I agree with most things you've said. And I agree that experts taste something. I just don't think their opinions are anywhere near exact enough to justify the kind of price increases that accompany high ratings.
I think there were clearly political elements in the way the Supreme Court handled this case, including granting cert in the first place, granting an early stay on the recount in progress, and in the procedural decision not to ultimately let the Florida Supreme Court decide the remedy. Your assertions about things like "They said it should only be applicable to the present case" are standard Democratic talking points which indicate a superficial understanding of the ruling... much more so than my arguments.
But this has nothing to do with the points I made before. As for the argument that the "conservative" justices used "liberal" arguments, first off I refuse to accept the idea that there is such a deep political division on the court in the first place. The majority of decisions they make show no clear ideological divisions (either unanimous or 8-1). Even among the 5-4 rulings, roughly 1/3 of them tend to be divided in ways that are different from the assuming "ideological factions." (I'm not going to bother looking up the detailed stats on the Rehnquist court at that time, so my numbers may be slightly off here...)
Are there political leanings? Sure. But I'm concerned that justice is ultimately done, more so than what the motivations of the court are. In the case of Bush v. Gore, two "liberal" justices clearly didn't buy the standard "liberal" arguments you cite. If you're going to argue for political motivations, it seems that it goes for both sides in this case... which perhaps it does.
But in the end, whatever anyone's motivations were, I have to agree with the ruling that the recounts that were going on were fundamentally unfair and unlikely to improve the accuracy of the result. Were they "un-Constitutional"? I don't know, but legally they should have been stopped by someone.
Should there have been a better recount done? Yeah, probably. Was the Florida court wrong in setting a deadline and thus making those recounts impossible? Maybe, but I don't know Florida law very well.
In the end, although I was not happy with the result of the election, I blame that on a multitude of factors, not just the possible motivations of a court who at least partly was trying to protect the integrity of the voting process and to count votes fairly.
How about instead of ranting endlessly about irrelevant points you accept the statistical truth that first-past-the-post voting systems favour two-party rule?
You know, there's a reason the US is the only civilized country to use such a ridiculously flawed system.
I was responding to arguments made by another poster. Unfortunately, the standard narrative about these events is so pervasive that it takes quite a lot of information to argue against them.
As for your point, of course our system is dumb. I completely agree. But it's a little irrelevant. Even if our system is flawed and favors 2-party rule, it does not mean that it is impossible to elect someone from a third party. That unusual situation is the only case where we might be able to effect real change. But the major two parties would like people to believe third party votes are a waste (and even evil) and thus put out disinformation to discourage anyone from ever considering voting for a 3rd party.
By the way, I say all of this as someone who actually appreciates liquor of various sorts. I'm not at all trying to claim that all wines (or all whiskies or whatever) taste the same -- obviously they don't. And there are plenty of cases where I've paid a premium price for a liquor whose taste I like because of previous experiences.
But in the realm of wine, I don't think there's good evidence that expensive wines are actually "better" on an objective scale; in fact, many studies suggest the contrary. Perhaps there is a somewhat smaller probability of terrible wine when buying something expensive, but that's hardly enough to say you can't find some cheaper wines that are just as "good."
I'm not a wine snob, but I know there are certain things that sometimes you *can't* replicate. [...] I'd argue that fine liquors -- wines, whiskeys, etc... fall into that category. I'd say it's almost an art form.
Detailed studies of professional wine judges in blind tastings have shown that prizes from contest to contest are so random that they might as well be picked from a hat. And the average professional judge, tasting the same wine on consecutive days, would on average only be able to narrow the rating to within 8 points on a 20-point scale.
Other studies have even shown that professional tasters often fare pretty poorly even in tests like, "Taste 3 wines, tell me which 2 are identical," or that when given white wines dyed with red food coloring, they start spouting out the nonsense about "flavor notes" and "nose" that would be appropriate for red wines rather than whites.
Given this information, it's pretty clear that even the so-called "expert palettes" don't know what the hell they're talking about.
So, I'm going to go out on a limb and say that it's pretty likely chemists could master the subtle art of getting a wine result that could satisfy even most professional judges in a blind test.
George W. Bush may well have been a terrible President. The world may have been a better place had he not been President.
But you're reciting the stupid mythology made up by the Democratic party 13 years later.
Well, we did have 8 years of President Bush as a result of a third party candidate bleeding votes away from Gore...
Newsflash: Gore and Bush both made numerous decisions during their campaign that had greater impacts than anything Nader ever did. Blaming the loss of an election on a 3rd party is just buying into the two-party BS rhetoric that's trying to trick you into voting for them.
Just for one example, take the Democrats in Florida who voted for Bush. Approximately 12% of registered Florida Democrats voted for Bush -- roughly 200,000 voters. This is a significantly larger number than all of Nader's votes combined, including Democrats, Republicans, and independents who voted for him.
When a greater number of your own party defects to vote for "the other guy" than all of the 3rd party voters combined, I don't think you get to blame the 3rd party voters. You blame the guy who lost for not being a better candidate and for failing to convince members OF HIS OWN PARTY to vote for him. You blame the voters who actually voted for Bush. The 3rd party voters were a much smaller effect than anything done by the two major parties here.
(Granted, Bush was more the GOP members of the Supreme Court being corrupt and helping Bush out,
Good lord. This nonsense again. The actual situation is complicated, and thus the Democratic spindoctors have convinced people like you of a false narrative even 13 years later. Here's what actually happened.
The Supreme Court ruled 7-2 (including two "liberal" justices) that the recount in Florida had Constitutional problems. The only place where the five "conservatives" come into it is in the remedy. The five "conservatives" looked at a ruling by the liberal Florida Supreme Court just made a few days earlier, where the Florida Supreme Court interpreted state law to say that all recounts should be finished by date X. Given what the liberal Florida court said, the US Supreme Court decided that it was impossible to complete a recount according to Florida law since it was already date X.
Now, from a technical legal procedural standpoint, the appropriate thing to do here would have been to send the case back to Florida and let the Florida court say, "Yeah, we can't do any more recounts now," even though they had already effectively set the date. Instead, the US Supreme Court set the remedy themselves, which is a bit unusual.
Nevertheless, the US Supreme Court then remanded the case back to Florida. The Florida Supreme Court could have turned around and said, "Well, no, actually our ruling didn't mean to set date X." The Florida court did no such thing.
Gore's lawyers could have requested another hearing and made arguments that Florida law didn't say that and the Florida Supreme Court's ruling on date X was wrong. Gore's lawyers did no such thing.
A week or two later, instead, the Florida Supreme Court actually dismissed the case, thereby officially ending any recounts. The US Supreme Court did NOT "decide the election" or even officially "end" it.
Given that Gore and the liberal Florida court didn't contest the US Supreme Court's citation of the Florida court's ruling about date X, we can safely assume that Gore and Florida didn't think there was any legal argument to stand on in disputing the US Supreme Court's ruling.
In other words, while there were a couple procedural oddities about the actions in this case, the actual liberal parties involved chose not to contest the ruling... and, in fact, it was originally the liberal Florida court's interpretation of Florida law that set the deadline the US Supreme Court followed.
and G
You don't get to define hack. Culture does.
Absolutely. MIT doesn't get to define "hack" for the culture at large. However, MIT does have its own distinctive culture, and it has its own sets of terms, phrases, and special meanings (just like Slashdot).
MIT does get to define what the term "hack" means when used on its own campus, as long as its own communal culture agrees on it.
And thus, when an MIT president speaks to MIT students, he might be expected to use the term "hack" in that sense. There is nothing inherently "wrong" with this, nor is there anything wrong with someone trying to explain this distinctive culture and terminology to others... others can then freely choose whether or not this unusual meaning is of any use to them or not.
This, by the way, is exactly how meanings of words evolve over time. If everyone always used words in the same way, word meanings would never change. History shows they do. That's a fact of life.
If you and I have different dictionaries, we have less progress; More wasted time building a conversion table, clarifying the symbolics of communication.
Anyone who has spent time trying to translate something with subtle meaning from one language to another realizes that each language has a distinctive set of circumscribed and interconnecting meanings that are difficult to render in another language. In essence, different languages actually can produce different ideas and different knowledge, just because of the way words connect to each other.
There are certainly benefits to a universal standard for communication. But there are also benefits from letting smaller groups develop their own distinctive cultures and even distinctive languages, because by doing so, they may end up making connections, distinctions,and even discoveries not possible (or at least unlikely) in another language.
I'd still need MS Office for each time it turns out a feature of a spreadsheet/document/macro that I have to work with isn't compatible with LibreOffice.
In other words, "I use MS Office because everyone else does, not because it's actually better."
The alternatives work well for one person, but things tend to fall apart when collaborators use different programs.
Agreed. But this is not an argument in favor of Windows or Microsoft products. It's just stating the reality that MS Office became dominant first, and now businesses find themselves shelling out gazillions of dollars just to maintain that "compatibility" with other business users, when they could have 97% of the functionality with free software... if only everyone could just shift at the same time....
(For the record, I'm not a LibreOffice fan. But I honestly don't think 99% of business users would lose anything if they moved to its spreadsheet over Excel, assuming the compatibility issue were solved. It's only those few power users who make use of all of the advanced features that make Excel a bloated mess who actually benefit from Excel.)
So, the president of MIT was urging MIT students to pull clever practical jokes?
Umm, no.
That's stupid or he meant something different. Presumably he meant "hack" in the same way that people who have been actually involved with computers understand it: exploring the possibilities of a system (often including some that the inventor never intended) for the sake of discovery and in some cases using those discoveries to create unique and innovative outcomes.
Yep. That's actually what it means at MIT too, except the origin isn't necessarily only in computers. A "hacker" at MIT is one who explores in general -- often finding ways into the deep tunnels of the sub-basements in campus buildings or on the roofs and domes, seeking what goes on in the bowels and secret places of MIT.
The famous "hacks" at MIT are merely a side-effect of that exploring culture. It's only because hackers have such intimate knowledge of the buildings and systems on campus that they could manage to put a police car on the great dome, etc.
At MIT, "hacking" has the exact connotation of positive exploration that you describe. On the other hand, when the term became known to a wider culture at a point where computers were still mysterious and somewhat scary, a "hacker" was seen primarily in a negative light -- someone who knew "too much" about things he wasn't "supposed to."
So, the broader culture saw hackers as criminals. Technically, at MIT, they are too. (Last time I heard, students get fined if found on the roofs of buildings, for example.) But the cardinal rule of the MIT movement is non-destructive exploration for the sake of knowledge.
That's what the MIT president was talking about.
Unless you are willing to re-do all the important scientific experiments ever done yourself, then you have to trust that other people did them correctly and reported them correctly, and also if their reasoning is beyond you, that their reasoning was valid. So from a personal perspective, it requires trust and belief in the work of others.
It requires trust, it does not require belief - there are two different things.
I think you're looking for a distinction that isn't as strong in practical terms as you'd like to claim. In certain places (like on Slashdot), the word "belief" only tends to be associated with religious belief or other wacko ideas that couldn't possibly be true. But that's just not how we use the word "belief" in normal everyday language.
Take a look at Merriam-Webster's definitions for "belief":
Each of these definitions seem to work fine with the idea of "scientific belief": the trust and confidence in the scientific method, the aspect of a (scientific) community which has a shared set of commonly accepted ideas, and the idea that "truth" as far as it exists requires supporting evidence.
From a practical standpoint, a scientist needs to assume on an everyday basis that the underlying research in his/her field is an accurate representation of reality. (I'll avoid the word "truth," since I know everyone's wary of it, but that's also a practical assumption, even if philosophically, we always say we're just talking about "theories.")
Trying to claim that you somehow have trust in the scientific method but don't believe in its results is sophistry. What does that mean? "I trust what my priest/minister/rabbi/sage/witchdoctor says, but I don't believe it." What would that mean? "I trust what physicists say about general relativity, but I don't believe it." Same question.
The only time you'd ever utter a statement like that is if you actually didn't really trust the authority -- you thought the physicists were well-intentioned, perhaps honest and hard workers with integrity, but ultimately idiots who very likely could have messed something up.
Even if you don't believe dictionary definitions, belief is simply a manifestation of trust in a set of ideas. The history of science also clearly has cases where this trust/belief was misplaced, and very intelligent scientists found it very hard to doubt established theories even in the case of contrary evidence. Sometimes they were bull-headed, but often they were just human...
Humans who couldn't actually carry out further research and make scientific progress unless they believed in the likely accuracy (and even "truth"?) of research that came before them.
P.S. I'm NOT at all saying there is no difference between science and religion. There clearly is. But this particular vocabulary fight is ridiculous and doesn't accord with the actual everyday use of the word "belief."
Please read the thread before commenting ignorantly. I was responding to someone who clearly doesn't understand that the apparent weightlessness of the astronauts is caused by the same phenomenon as those on the vomit comet -- namely, a trajectory of free fall. The GP seems to think that gravity is significantly less on the ISS, which is obviously not true (as I pointed out in another post).
You and everything on them are still under the effects of gravity, you're just falling at the same rate as the craft.
Why is this modded up? The astronauts on the space station are also falling at the same rate as the craft. They are just falling with the correct trajectory (i.e., enough horizontal velocity) that the vertical component of their fall takes them around the earth. Please look up the definition of "orbit."
Sure, but at the end of the day, the effect of gravity diminishes with distance, something that might work on the plane may not then have "enough" of a gravitational pull to make it work on the ISS.
You do understand that BOTH the astronauts in the space station and people on the plane are in free fall, right?? They may be accelerating at slightly different rates, but they cannot be aware of the difference in acceleration, since there is no force pushing back in either case... as there would be on the earth's surface for example. Objects can't be aware of the different acceleration either.
YOu can see this with fire, when a match is struck on the plane it'll look the same as on the surface, but when done on the ISS, it behaves differently.
Given that NASA itself does experiments with flames with the assumption that they behave similarly on these planes as in space, it's pretty clear that you're talking nonsense.