A straightforward sentence can be decomposed into morphemes, whose meanings combined produces the meaning of the sentence.
This isn't really true, though naive models of language often operate under this kind of fiction. The reality is that the core lexicon of any language often contains hundreds or thousands of words whose meanings can change in all sorts of subtle ways depending on context. Look up most of the 100 most common words in English, for example, and many of them will have dozens (or in a few cases even hundreds) of meanings, some just minor shades or related meanings, and others greatly varying to the point that it's really counterproductive to think of the word as having a single atomistic "meaning."
In adult Tamarian, on the other hand, just about every utterance is an opaque figure of speech.
Which leads to the question of how exactly they learned to talk in the first place. How did they teach children the mythos which would give them all the potential shades of meaning for the word "Darmok" if they had no "basic language" to convey these stories in? Even if you want to argue that some idioms were so common that they were used even to teach children, then that implies that some idioms would become standardized and would really mean something quite specific except in unusual cases -- in essence, the metaphorical meaning ceases to be useful in most contexts, and the denotative meaning becomes the primary one.
If such a "basic language" or at least a set of denotative idioms existed to communicate basic ideas to children, so they could even learn the metaphorical language, it then brings up the question of why the aliens wouldn't try this with the Enterprise when other communication failed.
(Additionally, it brings up a stability problem in the Tamarian lexicon -- it seems unlikely that if a "basic language" to teach fundamental meanings and mythos stories to children existed that the Tamarian metaphorical language would continue as the main communication method except in ceremonial situations or something like that. Surely the "basic language" would creep into everyday speech, and it's hard to imagine if it did, that the universal translator wouldn't be able to pick parts of it up... even accepting the relatively bogus model of atomistic word meanings that you're assuming.)
Yes, but nearly all languages can be broken down into reusable words.
Yeah, actually that's a myth, and part of the reason why machine translation is still in its infancy. Language is simply NOT composed of atomistic words which contain well-defined meanings, that are then strung together according to some abstract grammatical rules. It just doesn't work like that, and you realize that if you begin to think about it for a moment. Meaning resides in all sorts of contextual information, and most words really can't be pinned down in their exact meaning unless you put them into an actual English sentence. If you string together words based on the "dictionary metaphor" of atomistic meaning, you might get something that sounds like a foreigner speaking terribly, full of errors that would be obvious to a native speaker, but nothing like real fluency.
The "dictionary metaphor" works reasonably well for rare words. "Lugubrious," for example, usually means roughly the same thing in most contexts, because it's a rare word. But even a word like that still has shades of meaning: it always means mournful or gloomy, but if often carries a connotation of exaggeration or excessiveness... though not always.
Now compare a word like that to a common English word like "set," which literally has hundreds of different shades of meaning dependent on context. Do you seriously think a universal translator could determine the meaning without having an understanding not just of an atomistic word "set" and its possible meanings, but the entire phrase around it, probably the entire sentence, and maybe even an entire paragraph?
The idea is that in this language the metaphors wildly change meaning depending on the context in which they were spoken. Say that in the context of clothes "being a Samantha" is someone who dresses fabulously, while in the context of sex "being a Samantha" means being a slut. So the would be diplomat tries to say "Your dress looks fabulous" but without the correct contextual clues the universal translator will say "You are such a slut" instead.
This is simply your failure to imagine a normal English word which could have such a range of meanings (and many do, dependent on context). Many if not most of the words in the core central lexicon (say, the most common 1000 words or so in English) have greatly divergent connotations depending on context. Even in cases where the central meaning of the word is roughly constant, it has all sorts of different implications depending on the idiomatic context you put it in. (And even the tone with which it is spoken, or the body language accompanying it, etc.)
A conversation becomes an irreducible complexity because taking away one sentence or one word changes the meaning of everything else being said, so it can't deduct what it is they're saying by looking at common phrases nor can it express any new sentences
We already really have that, which is why translation based on simply stringing together meanings of individual words fails so badly. It's also the reason why Google has made greater strides in improving translation by forgetting about supposed meanings of individual words and instead trying to match larger patterns and idioms. It's still not perfect, but it's a much better approach than the flawed "dictionary metaphor," which is useful for learning obscure words (which is why dictionaries were originally created), but terrible for understanding the core of any language.
Now, maybe through some sort of magical technology, "universal translation" could be implemented in the future. But it makes absolutely no sense that it would fail only once in this particular episode because of words whose meaning depends on context.
And even if you accept that this language really was more excessive than most, you have to then question: how the devil did those people ever learn to talk? How did they learn who Darmok was, so they they could
in addition to a short Month Zero containing only new year's day
Epagomenal days wreak havoc on "monthly" billing cycles (see: Coptic calendar, Mayan calendar, et al.). This is why the Julian and Gregorian bissextile day is explicitly a part of February.
In other words, we can't have something simple, but need to adopt a stupid very complex system (which requires us to memorize a freakin' poem to remember how long months are) to accommodate the fiction of a standard "billing month." (Why exactly?)
and a single leap year day every four years (with the exception of every 128 years).
The Gregorian calendar design explicitly rejected more precise intercalation cycles in favor of numbers that were easier to remember (i.e. more user friendly). Hell, the quadrennial bissextile cycle introduced by the Julian calendar got screwed up in Augustus Caesar's own lifetime. Never underestimate the need for simplicity.
In other words, we need to accept the fiction of an inaccurate placement of bissextile days which will ultimately cause the calendar to drift, because we need a simple system.
In case you haven't noticed, you are offering completely inconsistent justifications, using whatever logic is necessary to maintain the status quo.
By the way, I'm pretty sure your billing software would work just as easily with 13 standard month lengths, and a day grafted on (as a fiction) to a neighboring month for billing or whatever, just as we already do with leap day. And the reason the Julian calendar got screwed up has to do with an ambiguity in Roman counting about whether to count "inclusively" (i.e., including the starting and ending points) or not. We don't have that problem nowadays, and with modern technology and advance notice, it would be easy to implement non-leap-day years whenever necessary to be more accurate, just as we deal with leap seconds.
The real reason for many of your quibbles is simply because we have a standard time system and nobody wants to change it.
Yeah, but luckily when it comes to calendars we can be saved by people that implement 13 equal months with 14 unequal months that are claimed to be 13, except when you have to talk about the 14th, which they think they can hide by numbering it 0.
Yes, exactly! Every four years I always celebrate that special month called FebruArch, which falls on one day between February and March. Most of those idiots in the world think they can hide the 13th true month, but we of the secret Bissextile Society know there aren't really 12 months in the Gregorian calendar. Obviously there are 13 months, but those calendar people in charge don't want to talk about it. [/sarcasm]
You can't just say that because someone is a student in a school that you can create rules that extend past the schoolhouse door and empower you to utilize coercive force (police power) to enforce them.
No more homework then?
Teacher: "If you don't do the tasks I require you to do while not at school, you will fail this class, which will slow your education and put a bad mark on your transcript that will follow you for years in your career."
Sounds like "coercive force" applied to activities required "past the schoolhouse door" to me.
Don't get me wrong -- I'm NOT at all defending the school here. And I actually think kids these days have too much homework. But surely it is necessary sometimes for schools to have requirements for what students can do (and perhaps even cannot do) off campus, in order for them to function as good students when they are on campus. Those cases should have clearly defined limits, but they do need to exist.
"Evidence-based medicine" is simply branding aimed at people who are ignorant of science.
No, it's not. Read the link.
If you have any understanding of how science (and therefore the world) works, evidence-based medicine is in amusing or annoying redundant phrase.
Yeah, unfortunately that isn't true. A lot of clinical practice is based on tradition and outmoded ideas. There is a movement which has grown significantly just in the past couple decades seeking to validate these methods and discard ones that we actually don't have real evidence for. So, unfortunately the people you are accusing of not having "any understanding of how science (and therefore the world) works" are actually practicing physicians. Hence, the emphasis on this subdiscipline.
That the phrase exists at all shows how badly we've failed at scientific education.
Nope -- it's a recognition that some problems are frankly very hard for science to solve precisely, which is the reason why a lot of unvetted traditional medical practices hang around for so long.
There are in fact opponents of the "evidence-based medicine" movement, who are NOT homeopathic weirdos. Many of them are doctors and researchers who recognize that humans are still very good at solving complex problems and synthesizing information about individual cases, and it's often hard to quantify such judgments numerically when making a clinical diagnosis or recommendation for treatment. Personally, I think a lot of times this is just an excuse for "But I wanna keep doing it the old way, because I think it works!" but I also think they have a legitimate methodological point.
What you're showing here is ignorance of how science actually works in the real world, which is often quite messy... particularly when you're dealing with decisions that may risk people's lives (and therefore can be difficult to test the "accepted wisdom) combined with individual complex systems like human bodies to treat. Data analysis in such situations in hard, but I admire the "evidence-based" people for trying.
Sorry but no, you're an idiot for trying to pretend that fraud like Homeopathy is equivalent to real medicine just because people have had to start using the phrase "evidence-based medicine" to point out the fact that real medicine is based on evidence.
Where did I "pretend that fraud like Homeopathy is equivalent to real medicine"? Citation please!
I was pointing out that medicine is not like physics. It's harder to model things, and it's very easy for doctors to draw misleading conclusions from inadequate data. Thus, lots of "traditional" medicine that is still accepted clinical practice can be based on tradition, authority, what doctors are taught or what they think "good doctors do," or anecdotal evidence.
"Evidence-based medicine" is not some meaningless term for standard medicine -- it's a field that has grown significantly in the past 25 years or so in an attempt to separate tradition and "accepted wisdom" in medicine from provable fact. There are in fact detractors in the field of standard medicine, who think that "evidence-based medicine" is NOT the way to go. These people are generally not homeopathic weirdos: they point out significant methodological issues with applying certain kinds of research paradigms to medical advice that is supposed to be designed to treat individuals.
This in no way defends other types of quackery. It points out that our actual practice of "medicine" is still struggling in places to incorporate reliable methodologies based on vetted, statistically rigorous evidence.
If you prefer, we could just distinguish "real medicine" from "pretend medicine"... Of course individual practioners use a mix of the two, particularly when there's no real treatment for a diagnosed condition that is either untreatable or harmless. That in no way makes pretending a full-time substitute for evidence.
It has nothing to do with what I "prefer." And if you think I'm trying to defend quackery, you're very mistaken.
And if you think the "pretend medicine" or whatever you want to call it is simply limited to cases "when there's no real treatment for a diagnosed condition that is either untreatable or harmless," I suggest you actually READ the Wikipedia article I linked to. This is not just about placebo effects or something -- it's about overcoming long-standing biases that physicians have about what they "think" works in various situations (because of tradition, what they were taught, what "good doctors" do, etc.), where sometimes there is a better alternative available or sometimes what they think works doesn't, in fact, work at all.
nope. You get that because the media reports on 1 study when they think that 1 study will get viewers. They never look at the body of research. That's for most of it.
I don't know what your background is, but I've spent time reading lots of actual research studies in some of the major medical debates, and I can assure you that there are plenty of situations where there's lots of crap in published journals too, which gives rise to this media attention. And a lot of those studies make all sorts of claims in their discussion sections, hoping to get attention -- "body of research" be damned.
Also, hate to burst your bubble -- but lots of researchers actually want that attention and actively court that media attention through exaggerated press releases, etc. It helps bring the grant money in.
I'm not saying the media isn't complicit in this, but if you think some random CNN reporters are trolling around in obscure medical journals looking for some new exaggerated news item, you're mistaken. Unless it's a major journal, they often find this stuff in press releases actively promoting the research.
The other part of that is science learns something unexpected and the previous 'bad' for you' statement becomes more nuanced.
Yeah, that's the way science is supposed to work. But when there are numerous potential methodological and statistical flaws, a lot of times these studies are just replacing some problematic research with some other problematic research that is biased in some other way (by subject selection criteria, data collection criteria, data analysis choices and interpretation, etc.).
Meh. That's not really true. There's a reason there's an entire field called evidence-based medicine, which from its very name makes it distinct from just plain-old normal "medicine."
There's plenty of hokum peddled by physicians, too. Lots of clinical decisions are based on "gut feelings" and tradition. And let's not even get into the multitude of embarrassing medical debates where various new drugs or foods or practices were widely accepted and then shown to be even more harmful than the things they replaced (which were originally thought to be harmful or unhealthy).
Spend some time sifting through all of the research on some medical topic at some point, and it quickly becomes clear that lots of medical conclusions are based on studies with serious flaws (either methodological or statistical), which is why you end up getting the "X is bad for you! Don't do/eat/use X!" one year and "X is good for you! Do it all the time!" the next year crap.
Don't get me wrong -- medical research is hard. Human bodies are very complex systems. And the kind of blind randomized studies necessary to evaluate medical practices (particularly "accepted" practices, which are assumed to already work) are often (1) expensive, (2) potentially unethical, since they might involve denying someone treatment that is assumed to be necessary for good health and/or exposing people to dangerous practices, (3) really difficult to control for all potential variables. And even if you managed to construct some sort of artificial laboratory situation where you could really isolate a variable, it may have questionable real-world applicability once the subjects head back out into the messiness of real life.
It doesn't mean we should throw up our hands and give up, but there is significant room for improvement in everyday "medicine," based on things that are ACTUALLY proven to work, hence "evidence-based" medicine.
When a researcher can say, âoeThat was our best hypothesis at the time, and this was the most accurately we could represent the data,â then it should stand as a legitimate publication.
Unfortunately, in many cases when people say this, what they often mean is: "This was the best a posteriori hypothesis we could come up with after trying out dozens of random correlations in our data to find something that could appear to be significant, and this was the most accurately we could represent the data after trying a couple dozen statistical measures to find something to make our minor 'blip' look more interesting."
In other words, it may well be a statistical fluke, but, hey, it is a "legitimate" way to represent the data.
All Iâ(TM)m saying is that we need to be careful to not create an environment where publication of preliminary work is discouraged in any way or where honest mistakes can hurt the career of an honest researcher.
Uhh, "honest mistakes" arguably should hurt the career of a researcher. If I'm an engineer designing a bridge, and I screw up my calculations, and the bridge falls down, my career should suffer. If I'm a researcher and I make a significant mistake collecting data or analyzing it properly or whatever, my career should similarly suffer.
"Honest mistakes" should NOT be punished as strongly as "dishonest" ones, but if you accumulate more than a couple significant "honest mistakes" in print, maybe people should start judging you.
I think perhaps what you really mean here is NOT that a researcher makes an "honest mistake," but rather that a particular experiment or set of research wasn't able to or designed to find some minor flaw -- not because of incompetence, but because technology or knowledge or whatever hadn't yet progressed to the point where anyone would think to look at things that way.
Basically, if a researcher screws up by not taking into account something already known (like misuse of stats or bad data analysis or bad methodology), that's a mistake -- but a researcher can't be expected to take into account that information when it isn't actually part of standard methodologies or whatever yet.
That would put a damper on science in general. The bar for retraction should be very high and require solid evidence of intentional wrongdoing.
I agree. The bar for actual retraction should be very high. But in this electronic age, the bar for significant corrections or qualifications which could be appended to an existing electronic document for actual "honest mistakes" should be lower -- it should be standard practice.
And, frankly, even if the research isn't mistaken, but is later superseded by more advances, we should start thinking about how to attach references to those sorts of things too -- lawyers do it when drafting a statute that replaces a previous one, to avoid confusion. Scientists should figure out a mechanism to do the same.
You may have a different opinion on those issues and you have a right to that, but you dont have a right to force me to agree.
Absolutely. I acknowledged that in both of my replies to you. My main beef was mainly with the lack of respect and civility -- you want to disagree? Fine. But in doing so, you accused GP of being like hardware manufacturers who deliberately sought to confuse people, and implicitly dismissed the citations of major international standards organizations who advocate the GP's position. You wanna have a different opinion? Fine. But there's no reason to go around insulting people, particularly when they cite evidence for their position.
And the fact remains that the word "kilobyte" and symbols like K, KB, kB, etc. are often used to mean different things in "binary" situations today. It is not unambiguous, nor a simple decimal/binary divide. You know why SI originally was so helpful? Not just for standardizing things internationally or for avoiding weird conversions. Also because people actually used different units to measure the same thing, often depending on the application or profession (volume measured in different units by winemakers vs beermakers vs farmers, for example). Moreover, they often used the same name for different size units in different professions or different countries or different circumstances.
The inconsistent situation in the use of "kilo" etc. is PRECISELY the thing that thing like SI were designed to prevent. And most countries in the world eventually figured out that using unambiguous terms and standardized units was worth the annoyance involved in adopting new ideas. The idea that we should have a different set of prefixes for binary powers is not a priori stupid, and there right now is not a great clear other solution for disambiguation, particularly for those not educated in the many different cases of prefix usage conventions in electronic systems.
You appear to believe that argument from authority trumps sense. You have it backwards.
First off, I was merely pointing out that GP's statements were factually accurate, and therefore did not deserve ridicule. I said you have the choice to ignore those recommendations by standards organizations if you want. Go ahead. But if you want to argue from a system of logic rather than authority, you may want to reconsider your methods.
Secondly, you have it backwards and believe in some mythical authority that never was consistent. If you actually were correct about 1024 being used in ALL cases of binary standards, you might at least have a leg to stand on. But that's simply not the case -- the system is inconsistently applied and has been from the start.
To put it another way, even if you got every committee of busy-bodies on the planet to agree that 2+2=3, they and you would still be wrong.
Not if I were running a "three-legged race"! You see: even 2+2 depends on context! See what I did there? That's your logic in a nutshell. But the situations that 2+2=3 are relatively rare and hard to define as a specific class, so we all agree to be CONSISTENT and accept that 2+2=4 as a DEFINITION, and regard the "three-legged race" as a different thing, not something that trumps the standard definition of 2+2=4. Binary prefixes are needed enough that we need a system to reference them, and one has been defined. Just about everyone in the "biz" these days is aware of it. What's your excuse?
The only problem was hard disk manufacturers and their BS propaganda. No one else uses their definition.
Well, only them and just about every international standards body that actually defines units, including engineering and electronics bodies (e.g. IEEE, JEDEC still allows something like the old 1024 standard, but notes it is deprecated).
Also, various other hardware manufacturers, various software (e.g. many Linux commands), data transfer rates and other things measured in bits rather than bytes, etc., etc.
But in most circumstances it's not that helpful to start throwing around obscure terms for the sake of avoiding the slim possibility of misinterpretation.
"Slim possibility"? Seriously? Some hardware types use the 1024 definition, while others use the 1000 definition. When talking about data transfer speed and other contexts "kilo" means 1000. (Bits, despite being the ultimate binary unit, seem to come in 1000s, while groups of 8 of them come in 1024s -- why?) Some software and OSes use 1024 (e.g. Windows); others use 1000 (e.g. many commands in Linux).
Yes, it's possible to navigate all these conflicting standards to have a general sense of when the prefix means one thing or the other. But it's hardly unambiguous to say "kilobyte" without knowing the context, and if you think otherwise, you're either ignorant or in denial. It would be much more efficient for the prefix always just to mean the same thing... and basically all international standards bodies agree.
Why is it so hard for you aspyrons to understand that the meaning of a word is often dependent on context?
Well, maybe because almost all the international standards organizations actually agree that there's a single meaning now (even though they disagreed in the past).
In a decimal context, kilo means 1000. In a binary context, it means 1024. Most of the people that pretend to have difficulty understanding this are actually making money from their 'confusion' - what's your excuse?
Look, what the GP said was factually accurate:
the IEEE, ISO and SI standards all agree that kilobyte means 1000 bytes, and megabyte means 1000000 bytes.
The IEC adopted these in 1998, leading to full adoption by the IEEE in 2005. SI explicitly defines kilo ONLY to mean 1000, and though bytes are not technically SI units, they regard any other use of the prefixes as incorrect.
The only large body that has endorsed the use of your system in the past decade is JEDEC, though they insist on capital letters, i.e., K, M, and G, instead of the standard SI lower-case. So, a kilobyte (kB) to them is actually 1000 bytes, while a Kilobyte (KB or K) is 1024.
Recently, if you read even JEDEC's standards from 2012, you'll note that they quote the IEEE standards and say the older style "frequently leads to confusion and is deprecated."
So, I don't know about the GP, but my "excuse" for following standard SI style is that basically all international standards bodies agree that "kilo" means 1000, and if you want to have a term for 1024, you should use something else.
Now, the reality of the world is that many hardware manufacturers and such still retain older deprecated usages. But GP's statement was basically accurate. There's no reason to go around insulting people when they state factual information.
You want to keep using a standard that has confused people for decades when the international standards organizations deprecate it because it's confusing? That's your choice. But what's your excuse for attacking people?
If everyone had a degree society would be much more efficient and productive.
[Citation needed.]
There is never a downside to more education (except maybe the cost).
There's rarely a downside to education. But there are plenty of potential downsides to additional schooling. (Plenty of schools offer a very poor education, and there are plenty of ways to gain educational without extra years in school.) Downsides for schooling: For society at large, decreased productivity in lost years in the workforce, for example. For individuals, lost income and productivity during those years, which might be more helpful for families and such in many circumstances. (Keep in mind that there are significant numbers of people who don't finish degrees, and thus go into debt and don't even get the credential.)
And some people really just aren't capable of higher-level thought and reasoning. Unless you want "degrees" to be awarded for random skills acquisition, rather than any "higher education" (which, it seems, is where college is going)... but at that point, you'd probably be better off with on-the-job training and apprenticeships, rather than traditional schooling.
Continue to hold the student accountable. They're the ones that were too stupid to go to a college and get a degree for a job good enough to pay it off. And too stupid to figure out debt v/s income ratios. And maybe their parents if they were involved in the stupid decision to send their kids to college without a means to pay for it.
Your repetition of the phrase "too stupid" seems to imply some sort of innate cognitive dysfunction.
But I think what you really mean is that they don't have the necessary experience and skills to evaluate basic financial math decisions, right? I mean, except for the small percentage of people with actual cognitive impairments, most people should be able to figure this out, right?
So, then you have to ask yourself: how is it that we require students generally to take 11-12 years of mathematics in this country, but they somehow graduate without basic financial math skills to survive in the world?
I taught high school math and science for a few years, so I know the curriculum and debates first-hand. I can tell you about the 140 or so students I was teaching my first year -- mostly high-school juniors and seniors in algebra II (likely the last math class they would ever take in their lives for most). And one day I tried giving them a simple application problem involving compound interest: only 2 out of the 140 students actually knew what compound interest was.
According to the state-mandated curriculum, I had no time to teach them the basics of math that would help them to survive in the real world, but at that point I decided I needed to carve out a few weeks and do at least a little of that... even if it meant some of the scores on our official testing would be a little lower. I can tell you that most teachers probably don't even have time or initiative to do that.
So... with situations like this, you have to ask yourself: how can we expect these "too stupid" students to evaluate basic financial situations when they don't even know fundamental ideas like compound interest, let alone how it might apply to loans or investments or whatever?
Of course, I agree with you that some of the blame should be placed on the students and their parents. But I do think we need to recognize that we require kids to spend over a decade in public schools, and many of them are leaving without fundamental numerical skills to make decisions in the real world.
So are they really "too stupid" or were they just never taught basic numeracy?
My older family members, for instance, like to change the font to a very large size, something that is not possible if the publisher spends too much effort getting the typesetting just right and freezing it in instead of allowing the device to do it on the fly.
Absolutely. I just wish some ebook formats and readers adopted something like a LaTeX convention, which could allow text sections to be reformatted in a beautiful, elegant, and typographically sensitive manner with minimal fuss. Despite my previous post, I personally cannot stand reading normal ebooks, due to poor typography. (I prefer PDFs, if I have to.) But I know I'm in the minority....
Well, we are talking about keeping historical books around, in form as close to the originals as possible, right?
Well, my impression of TFA was that we were talking about recent books (20th century) which were out-of-print or unavailable -- not "historical" preservation. And it's about making such texts available to a mass-market audience for purchase. It's not about annotating manuscripts or some sort of academic analysis of manuscripts from hundreds of years ago.
Also, TEI keeps the semantics around, not just the fact that sentence such-and-such is printed in Garamond.
I don't understand. Your first sentence says you want to keep the "form as close to the originals as possible" but now you want to add tags, metadata, and semantic information which was not present in the original texts. Which one is it?
I'm not saying that TEI is bad -- I'm saying it's actually about adding information to make old texts more navigable and superimposing a particular type of analysis on them, not just preserving things in original form. Most people who just want to buy a copy of a book from 1990 in an ebook form don't care about some complex set of metadata that could be used for linguistic analysis or something. They just want the text, retypeset in an electronic form.
But you can always go down the lossy road and re-typeset it for whatever reason
Methinks you do not know what "lossy" means. In the case of preserving old books in electronic format, the full "non-lossy" version would be something like a set of full-color images, showing all details of page layout, font usage, spacing, placement of figures and images, etc. (Even there, for old manuscripts you might want to preserve binding information, gathering structure, etc. which would be lost in just a set of images.) That's desireable for analysis of a manuscript or something very old where reconstructing the exact layout of things is important.
Retypesetting the text is "lossy," in that it loses layout, typesetting, and pagination information -- but, for most people with standard books, they care more about the text than the layout. Also, it's helpful to process texts in this way for electronic formats, because it allows readers to take advantage of tools in readers like changing font size or other layout options.
What you're talking about with TEI is just as "lossy" as retypesetting (though some elements of page layout can be preserved, if desired), but you're also talking about adding in information that wasn't present in the original text. Kinda like ripping an mp3 track off of a vinyl record, and then recording some optional commentary over top of it: "If you listen here, you can hear the bridge, followed by a return to the refrain with backup vocals," etc.
TEI has its place, but I'm not sure it's particularly relevant to the simple idea of making ebooks available from books that may have been published a couple decades ago.
I was still in college and I graduated in 96 so it had to be pre-1996.
Wow -- your last post said "mid to late 80s" and now it could have been up to 1996. That's more than a decade, and you can't be more accurate about when you bought what you said was your first hard drive?
There is a lot of missing the point on this thread.
Not really sure why you replied to my post, then. You seem to have complaints about other people's ideas, which I didn't actually express. That said, I do have a few things to respond to you:
This problem goes down to the core of the social and psychological problems and tradeoffs that happen in GUI and application design, web design, and any other system that is accessed by members of the general public.
Somewhere there is a manager yelling at a designer because "it's hard to use" because there were complaints from users that they "just put in there password" and "why should I do that again?" when they were making a series of purchases.
Yes, I get that. I think almost everyone here got that before your post. You want to make this out to be some sort of simple story about GUI and app design, and making trade-offs. That's great.
However, you're avoiding one critical different here: This has to do with MONEY, and the ability to take more of it from people.
Any person who is designing a system that makes the taking of money less transparent to the user is, frankly, EVIL. Whether that is the programmers' intention or not, the company trying to make money will be very happy with such decisions -- because they are EVIL.
I completely agree with you that this was a good idea, and it probably was meant to solve a very practical problem. But anything that allows you to accidentally spend more money online (it's not just kids who might not realize how much easier it is to buy things for 30 minutes after a password entry), or which allows you to be parted from your money without a standard confirmation process is a serious design decision, not to be flippantly taken on the way you describe.
People who don't buy a lot of apps and such will rarely notice the lack of a password dialogue, so they expect it generally happens. When you change that behavior, it needs to be made explicit and transparent to the user -- and they should be given an easy way to override such behavior.
Everyone here always complains about how everything should be "opt-in." You shouldn't just automatically get spammed or whatever unless you explicitly authorize it. That is ten times more important when money is involved. Amazon wants to offer a "one-click" purchasing system that avoids confirmation of a lot of details -- fine, but make it opt-in. Google wants to allow you to buy apps without authorization for some period of time -- fine, but make it explicitly opt-in, or at a minimum, put an easy check-box to opt-out.
People are thinking this is deliberate by Google? Bah. Google isn't 100% non-evil, but I don't buy that.
Do I think this idea was originally thought up with evil intentions to steal money from people? No. But when someone suggested this as a way to make it easier for people to avoid repetitively entering passwords, you can bet your life someone in management or accounting saw dollar signs. Because the easier you make it to buy something, the more people will buy. Did they set out to fraudulently take lots of people's money? Probably not. But were they happy that they made it easier for people and kids to rack up greater charges?... yeah, you can bet they were... and maybe enough not to fix the problem immediately, even if they had a few complaints (given that Apple faced a similar lawsuit not too long ago).
No, Google designed a system that would be a compromise between security and usability since some people would obviously go bat shit if they had to enter their password every time.
No -- you're setting up a false dichotomy. Google could have easily put a little check box or something in the password dialog saying "Remember password to authorize ALL purchases for the next 30 minutes?" kinda like the "keep me logged in" box on webmail accounts or something. That would solve your problem AND make very clear what was happening to users.
After the whole Apple nonsense regarding the exact same issue, that would be at least a minimal attempt to clarify things to users.
That a parent gave this to their child and did not properly supervise them is the parents fault.
That's true. But, in fairness, I'm having trouble thinking of other toys for kids where you can say "Here kid - play this game with the Smurfs," and 30 minutes later accumulate a $300 bill for Smurfberries or whatever.
The parents should have paid closer attention, but the normal assumption when you buy a toy at the toy store is that it won't suck hundreds of dollars from your wallet AFTER you buy it for your kid. Many kids apps today are deliberately designed to exploit the cluelessness of parents and kids to make money this exact way.
his Big Bang idea was damn good and more importantly, his model is just like what we have now
Yeah, not so much. From the summary of his model as described in the paper:
Similarly, lumen is emitted from the second perfected sphere, sweeps up matter until there is further rarefaction and compression leading to a third perfected sphere. This continues until the ninth sphere, that of the moon, whose lumen emission is not sufficient to completely perfect the spheres of the elements (fire, air, water, earth) and these thus do not allow circular motion, which pertains only to perfect bodies, but just radial motion, and the latter two have the attribute of weight, due to their extremal density and compression.
It's a BIG stretch to say that anything about his cosmological theory has much in common with ours. By that measure, we might as well point out that Ptolemy's model of the solar system was "damn good" and "just like ours" (or Copernicus's) because it happened to have planets and a sun in it... forget about how anything in the model works or the philosophy underneath it.
for his model to work the way he specified it, he would need a very narrow band of parameters. He didn't know it back then, but by changing the parameters he would have had massively different implementations that are quite amusing.
No, not really. If we make a number of assumptions in translating his ideas into math, most of which he didn't specify, then we end up with a model (partly imagined by the authors) which has some of these properties.
Don't get me wrong: as someone who does research involving the history of science, I find this guy's ideas very interesting for what they say about medieval philosophy and "science." And this article is interesting for trying sort out what a worked-out model would look like in modern science.
But let's not try to pretend that what this project came up with is really just an implementation of a medieval model, nor that this has anything significant in common with modern cosmology.
But part of the issue is that many students need significantly more repetition to get things
I disagree, because they're *not* getting them. They're just memorizing information. I honestly don't believe it's necessary or effective to have a student do the same thing over and over again in order to get them to understand something; I think it's misleading, in fact.
Do you have kids? If not, have you ever been around a small child? How the heck do you think most people learn to talk, to walk, to read, etc.? Sorry, but repetition is essential for any skill acquisition. Toddlers often learn to read by reading the exact same words in the exact same books dozens or even hundreds of times. Generally, it's a better idea to keep introducing the same word many times in multiple contexts, but repetition is essential -- and in the process, generalized skills acquisition happens. Before you know it, kids begin to sound out related words with similar weird spellings, etc.
I'll grant you that many mathematics textbooks and many teachers focus too much on stuff that's too repetitive, rather than making use of more variety in problems.
And even though you dismissed my concern about how you and I absorb things quickly as a "different" problem, it's not. Some toddlers are smarter than others and have greater abilities at abstraction -- they can be exposed to a particular idea or thing just a few times, and they immediately get it. Others have to do things dozens or hundreds of times to acquire the same skill.
You happen to be in the small subset of people who "get" things quickly. Congratulations. But thinking that repetition isn't an essential part of the learning process for the vast majority of people is, frankly, a bit delusional. There are all sorts of tricks that good teachers have employed for thousands of years to make that repetition more interesting or enjoyable for kids, but it's the main way most kids acquire actual skills.
(3) Also, sometimes the algorithm IS the goal. For >99% of people in the world, math is only useful as a tool
That mentality is the problem. That's why rote memorization and mindless repetition are used so often.
Look, have fun enjoying the advanced world of math for yourself. It's fun to play in; it really is. But the vast majority of people in the world simply lack the cognitive skills or discipline or interest to get to that level... and that is NOT some great failing in the educational system. It's just accepting the fact that people are different, have different skills, and have different interests.
Believe it or not, as a teacher I spent a great deal of time doing the very things you seem to value. I worked together with a couple other teachers to do a complete redesign of the intro algebra curriculum in a school district which would use lots of interesting exploratory activities, multimedia materials, etc. to get away from "traditional" approaches to math. I also taught "conceptual physics" courses to high school kids for a few years, designing open-ended exploratory experiments with very little intense math or drilling in traditional "problems."
But guess what -- these courses were deliberately designed for the 80-90% of kids who actually didn't need facility in math or algebra or mathematical physics. They would never use it in their lives, so spending time doing the algorithms would be stupid and a waste of their time. Instead, kids might go on after doing a "conceptual algebra" course to take a general math elective (rather than algebra II or whatever), which would in fact involve a lot of fairly repetitive scenarios to prepare them for math usage in the real world -- e.g., designing a budget, evaluating loan and mortgage terms, calculating savings and investment returns, etc. Those sorts of problems do actually require a certain kind of "algorithmic literacy" and fluency in certa
Slashdot Mirror
A straightforward sentence can be decomposed into morphemes, whose meanings combined produces the meaning of the sentence.
This isn't really true, though naive models of language often operate under this kind of fiction. The reality is that the core lexicon of any language often contains hundreds or thousands of words whose meanings can change in all sorts of subtle ways depending on context. Look up most of the 100 most common words in English, for example, and many of them will have dozens (or in a few cases even hundreds) of meanings, some just minor shades or related meanings, and others greatly varying to the point that it's really counterproductive to think of the word as having a single atomistic "meaning."
In adult Tamarian, on the other hand, just about every utterance is an opaque figure of speech.
Which leads to the question of how exactly they learned to talk in the first place. How did they teach children the mythos which would give them all the potential shades of meaning for the word "Darmok" if they had no "basic language" to convey these stories in? Even if you want to argue that some idioms were so common that they were used even to teach children, then that implies that some idioms would become standardized and would really mean something quite specific except in unusual cases -- in essence, the metaphorical meaning ceases to be useful in most contexts, and the denotative meaning becomes the primary one.
If such a "basic language" or at least a set of denotative idioms existed to communicate basic ideas to children, so they could even learn the metaphorical language, it then brings up the question of why the aliens wouldn't try this with the Enterprise when other communication failed.
(Additionally, it brings up a stability problem in the Tamarian lexicon -- it seems unlikely that if a "basic language" to teach fundamental meanings and mythos stories to children existed that the Tamarian metaphorical language would continue as the main communication method except in ceremonial situations or something like that. Surely the "basic language" would creep into everyday speech, and it's hard to imagine if it did, that the universal translator wouldn't be able to pick parts of it up... even accepting the relatively bogus model of atomistic word meanings that you're assuming.)
Yes, but nearly all languages can be broken down into reusable words.
Yeah, actually that's a myth, and part of the reason why machine translation is still in its infancy. Language is simply NOT composed of atomistic words which contain well-defined meanings, that are then strung together according to some abstract grammatical rules. It just doesn't work like that, and you realize that if you begin to think about it for a moment. Meaning resides in all sorts of contextual information, and most words really can't be pinned down in their exact meaning unless you put them into an actual English sentence. If you string together words based on the "dictionary metaphor" of atomistic meaning, you might get something that sounds like a foreigner speaking terribly, full of errors that would be obvious to a native speaker, but nothing like real fluency.
The "dictionary metaphor" works reasonably well for rare words. "Lugubrious," for example, usually means roughly the same thing in most contexts, because it's a rare word. But even a word like that still has shades of meaning: it always means mournful or gloomy, but if often carries a connotation of exaggeration or excessiveness... though not always.
Now compare a word like that to a common English word like "set," which literally has hundreds of different shades of meaning dependent on context. Do you seriously think a universal translator could determine the meaning without having an understanding not just of an atomistic word "set" and its possible meanings, but the entire phrase around it, probably the entire sentence, and maybe even an entire paragraph?
The idea is that in this language the metaphors wildly change meaning depending on the context in which they were spoken. Say that in the context of clothes "being a Samantha" is someone who dresses fabulously, while in the context of sex "being a Samantha" means being a slut. So the would be diplomat tries to say "Your dress looks fabulous" but without the correct contextual clues the universal translator will say "You are such a slut" instead.
This is simply your failure to imagine a normal English word which could have such a range of meanings (and many do, dependent on context). Many if not most of the words in the core central lexicon (say, the most common 1000 words or so in English) have greatly divergent connotations depending on context. Even in cases where the central meaning of the word is roughly constant, it has all sorts of different implications depending on the idiomatic context you put it in. (And even the tone with which it is spoken, or the body language accompanying it, etc.)
A conversation becomes an irreducible complexity because taking away one sentence or one word changes the meaning of everything else being said, so it can't deduct what it is they're saying by looking at common phrases nor can it express any new sentences
We already really have that, which is why translation based on simply stringing together meanings of individual words fails so badly. It's also the reason why Google has made greater strides in improving translation by forgetting about supposed meanings of individual words and instead trying to match larger patterns and idioms. It's still not perfect, but it's a much better approach than the flawed "dictionary metaphor," which is useful for learning obscure words (which is why dictionaries were originally created), but terrible for understanding the core of any language.
Now, maybe through some sort of magical technology, "universal translation" could be implemented in the future. But it makes absolutely no sense that it would fail only once in this particular episode because of words whose meaning depends on context.
And even if you accept that this language really was more excessive than most, you have to then question: how the devil did those people ever learn to talk? How did they learn who Darmok was, so they they could
in addition to a short Month Zero containing only new year's day
Epagomenal days wreak havoc on "monthly" billing cycles (see: Coptic calendar, Mayan calendar, et al.). This is why the Julian and Gregorian bissextile day is explicitly a part of February.
In other words, we can't have something simple, but need to adopt a stupid very complex system (which requires us to memorize a freakin' poem to remember how long months are) to accommodate the fiction of a standard "billing month." (Why exactly?)
and a single leap year day every four years (with the exception of every 128 years).
The Gregorian calendar design explicitly rejected more precise intercalation cycles in favor of numbers that were easier to remember (i.e. more user friendly). Hell, the quadrennial bissextile cycle introduced by the Julian calendar got screwed up in Augustus Caesar's own lifetime. Never underestimate the need for simplicity.
In other words, we need to accept the fiction of an inaccurate placement of bissextile days which will ultimately cause the calendar to drift, because we need a simple system.
In case you haven't noticed, you are offering completely inconsistent justifications, using whatever logic is necessary to maintain the status quo.
By the way, I'm pretty sure your billing software would work just as easily with 13 standard month lengths, and a day grafted on (as a fiction) to a neighboring month for billing or whatever, just as we already do with leap day. And the reason the Julian calendar got screwed up has to do with an ambiguity in Roman counting about whether to count "inclusively" (i.e., including the starting and ending points) or not. We don't have that problem nowadays, and with modern technology and advance notice, it would be easy to implement non-leap-day years whenever necessary to be more accurate, just as we deal with leap seconds.
The real reason for many of your quibbles is simply because we have a standard time system and nobody wants to change it.
Yeah, but luckily when it comes to calendars we can be saved by people that implement 13 equal months with 14 unequal months that are claimed to be 13, except when you have to talk about the 14th, which they think they can hide by numbering it 0.
Yes, exactly! Every four years I always celebrate that special month called FebruArch, which falls on one day between February and March. Most of those idiots in the world think they can hide the 13th true month, but we of the secret Bissextile Society know there aren't really 12 months in the Gregorian calendar. Obviously there are 13 months, but those calendar people in charge don't want to talk about it. [/sarcasm]
You can't just say that because someone is a student in a school that you can create rules that extend past the schoolhouse door and empower you to utilize coercive force (police power) to enforce them.
No more homework then?
Teacher: "If you don't do the tasks I require you to do while not at school, you will fail this class, which will slow your education and put a bad mark on your transcript that will follow you for years in your career."
Sounds like "coercive force" applied to activities required "past the schoolhouse door" to me.
Don't get me wrong -- I'm NOT at all defending the school here. And I actually think kids these days have too much homework. But surely it is necessary sometimes for schools to have requirements for what students can do (and perhaps even cannot do) off campus, in order for them to function as good students when they are on campus. Those cases should have clearly defined limits, but they do need to exist.
"Evidence-based medicine" is simply branding aimed at people who are ignorant of science.
No, it's not. Read the link.
If you have any understanding of how science (and therefore the world) works, evidence-based medicine is in amusing or annoying redundant phrase.
Yeah, unfortunately that isn't true. A lot of clinical practice is based on tradition and outmoded ideas. There is a movement which has grown significantly just in the past couple decades seeking to validate these methods and discard ones that we actually don't have real evidence for. So, unfortunately the people you are accusing of not having "any understanding of how science (and therefore the world) works" are actually practicing physicians. Hence, the emphasis on this subdiscipline.
That the phrase exists at all shows how badly we've failed at scientific education.
Nope -- it's a recognition that some problems are frankly very hard for science to solve precisely, which is the reason why a lot of unvetted traditional medical practices hang around for so long.
There are in fact opponents of the "evidence-based medicine" movement, who are NOT homeopathic weirdos. Many of them are doctors and researchers who recognize that humans are still very good at solving complex problems and synthesizing information about individual cases, and it's often hard to quantify such judgments numerically when making a clinical diagnosis or recommendation for treatment. Personally, I think a lot of times this is just an excuse for "But I wanna keep doing it the old way, because I think it works!" but I also think they have a legitimate methodological point.
What you're showing here is ignorance of how science actually works in the real world, which is often quite messy... particularly when you're dealing with decisions that may risk people's lives (and therefore can be difficult to test the "accepted wisdom) combined with individual complex systems like human bodies to treat. Data analysis in such situations in hard, but I admire the "evidence-based" people for trying.
Sorry but no, you're an idiot for trying to pretend that fraud like Homeopathy is equivalent to real medicine just because people have had to start using the phrase "evidence-based medicine" to point out the fact that real medicine is based on evidence.
Where did I "pretend that fraud like Homeopathy is equivalent to real medicine"? Citation please!
I was pointing out that medicine is not like physics. It's harder to model things, and it's very easy for doctors to draw misleading conclusions from inadequate data. Thus, lots of "traditional" medicine that is still accepted clinical practice can be based on tradition, authority, what doctors are taught or what they think "good doctors do," or anecdotal evidence.
"Evidence-based medicine" is not some meaningless term for standard medicine -- it's a field that has grown significantly in the past 25 years or so in an attempt to separate tradition and "accepted wisdom" in medicine from provable fact. There are in fact detractors in the field of standard medicine, who think that "evidence-based medicine" is NOT the way to go. These people are generally not homeopathic weirdos: they point out significant methodological issues with applying certain kinds of research paradigms to medical advice that is supposed to be designed to treat individuals.
This in no way defends other types of quackery. It points out that our actual practice of "medicine" is still struggling in places to incorporate reliable methodologies based on vetted, statistically rigorous evidence.
If you prefer, we could just distinguish "real medicine" from "pretend medicine"... Of course individual practioners use a mix of the two, particularly when there's no real treatment for a diagnosed condition that is either untreatable or harmless. That in no way makes pretending a full-time substitute for evidence.
It has nothing to do with what I "prefer." And if you think I'm trying to defend quackery, you're very mistaken.
And if you think the "pretend medicine" or whatever you want to call it is simply limited to cases "when there's no real treatment for a diagnosed condition that is either untreatable or harmless," I suggest you actually READ the Wikipedia article I linked to. This is not just about placebo effects or something -- it's about overcoming long-standing biases that physicians have about what they "think" works in various situations (because of tradition, what they were taught, what "good doctors" do, etc.), where sometimes there is a better alternative available or sometimes what they think works doesn't, in fact, work at all.
nope. You get that because the media reports on 1 study when they think that 1 study will get viewers. They never look at the body of research. That's for most of it.
I don't know what your background is, but I've spent time reading lots of actual research studies in some of the major medical debates, and I can assure you that there are plenty of situations where there's lots of crap in published journals too, which gives rise to this media attention. And a lot of those studies make all sorts of claims in their discussion sections, hoping to get attention -- "body of research" be damned.
Also, hate to burst your bubble -- but lots of researchers actually want that attention and actively court that media attention through exaggerated press releases, etc. It helps bring the grant money in.
I'm not saying the media isn't complicit in this, but if you think some random CNN reporters are trolling around in obscure medical journals looking for some new exaggerated news item, you're mistaken. Unless it's a major journal, they often find this stuff in press releases actively promoting the research.
The other part of that is science learns something unexpected and the previous 'bad' for you' statement becomes more nuanced.
Yeah, that's the way science is supposed to work. But when there are numerous potential methodological and statistical flaws, a lot of times these studies are just replacing some problematic research with some other problematic research that is biased in some other way (by subject selection criteria, data collection criteria, data analysis choices and interpretation, etc.).
Once it's been proven to work?
Medicine.
Meh. That's not really true. There's a reason there's an entire field called evidence-based medicine, which from its very name makes it distinct from just plain-old normal "medicine."
There's plenty of hokum peddled by physicians, too. Lots of clinical decisions are based on "gut feelings" and tradition. And let's not even get into the multitude of embarrassing medical debates where various new drugs or foods or practices were widely accepted and then shown to be even more harmful than the things they replaced (which were originally thought to be harmful or unhealthy).
Spend some time sifting through all of the research on some medical topic at some point, and it quickly becomes clear that lots of medical conclusions are based on studies with serious flaws (either methodological or statistical), which is why you end up getting the "X is bad for you! Don't do/eat/use X!" one year and "X is good for you! Do it all the time!" the next year crap.
Don't get me wrong -- medical research is hard. Human bodies are very complex systems. And the kind of blind randomized studies necessary to evaluate medical practices (particularly "accepted" practices, which are assumed to already work) are often (1) expensive, (2) potentially unethical, since they might involve denying someone treatment that is assumed to be necessary for good health and/or exposing people to dangerous practices, (3) really difficult to control for all potential variables. And even if you managed to construct some sort of artificial laboratory situation where you could really isolate a variable, it may have questionable real-world applicability once the subjects head back out into the messiness of real life.
It doesn't mean we should throw up our hands and give up, but there is significant room for improvement in everyday "medicine," based on things that are ACTUALLY proven to work, hence "evidence-based" medicine.
When a researcher can say, âoeThat was our best hypothesis at the time, and this was the most accurately we could represent the data,â then it should stand as a legitimate publication.
Unfortunately, in many cases when people say this, what they often mean is: "This was the best a posteriori hypothesis we could come up with after trying out dozens of random correlations in our data to find something that could appear to be significant, and this was the most accurately we could represent the data after trying a couple dozen statistical measures to find something to make our minor 'blip' look more interesting."
In other words, it may well be a statistical fluke, but, hey, it is a "legitimate" way to represent the data.
All Iâ(TM)m saying is that we need to be careful to not create an environment where publication of preliminary work is discouraged in any way or where honest mistakes can hurt the career of an honest researcher.
Uhh, "honest mistakes" arguably should hurt the career of a researcher. If I'm an engineer designing a bridge, and I screw up my calculations, and the bridge falls down, my career should suffer. If I'm a researcher and I make a significant mistake collecting data or analyzing it properly or whatever, my career should similarly suffer.
"Honest mistakes" should NOT be punished as strongly as "dishonest" ones, but if you accumulate more than a couple significant "honest mistakes" in print, maybe people should start judging you.
I think perhaps what you really mean here is NOT that a researcher makes an "honest mistake," but rather that a particular experiment or set of research wasn't able to or designed to find some minor flaw -- not because of incompetence, but because technology or knowledge or whatever hadn't yet progressed to the point where anyone would think to look at things that way.
Basically, if a researcher screws up by not taking into account something already known (like misuse of stats or bad data analysis or bad methodology), that's a mistake -- but a researcher can't be expected to take into account that information when it isn't actually part of standard methodologies or whatever yet.
That would put a damper on science in general. The bar for retraction should be very high and require solid evidence of intentional wrongdoing.
I agree. The bar for actual retraction should be very high. But in this electronic age, the bar for significant corrections or qualifications which could be appended to an existing electronic document for actual "honest mistakes" should be lower -- it should be standard practice.
And, frankly, even if the research isn't mistaken, but is later superseded by more advances, we should start thinking about how to attach references to those sorts of things too -- lawyers do it when drafting a statute that replaces a previous one, to avoid confusion. Scientists should figure out a mechanism to do the same.
You may have a different opinion on those issues and you have a right to that, but you dont have a right to force me to agree.
Absolutely. I acknowledged that in both of my replies to you. My main beef was mainly with the lack of respect and civility -- you want to disagree? Fine. But in doing so, you accused GP of being like hardware manufacturers who deliberately sought to confuse people, and implicitly dismissed the citations of major international standards organizations who advocate the GP's position. You wanna have a different opinion? Fine. But there's no reason to go around insulting people, particularly when they cite evidence for their position.
And the fact remains that the word "kilobyte" and symbols like K, KB, kB, etc. are often used to mean different things in "binary" situations today. It is not unambiguous, nor a simple decimal/binary divide. You know why SI originally was so helpful? Not just for standardizing things internationally or for avoiding weird conversions. Also because people actually used different units to measure the same thing, often depending on the application or profession (volume measured in different units by winemakers vs beermakers vs farmers, for example). Moreover, they often used the same name for different size units in different professions or different countries or different circumstances.
The inconsistent situation in the use of "kilo" etc. is PRECISELY the thing that thing like SI were designed to prevent. And most countries in the world eventually figured out that using unambiguous terms and standardized units was worth the annoyance involved in adopting new ideas. The idea that we should have a different set of prefixes for binary powers is not a priori stupid, and there right now is not a great clear other solution for disambiguation, particularly for those not educated in the many different cases of prefix usage conventions in electronic systems.
You appear to believe that argument from authority trumps sense. You have it backwards.
First off, I was merely pointing out that GP's statements were factually accurate, and therefore did not deserve ridicule. I said you have the choice to ignore those recommendations by standards organizations if you want. Go ahead. But if you want to argue from a system of logic rather than authority, you may want to reconsider your methods.
Secondly, you have it backwards and believe in some mythical authority that never was consistent. If you actually were correct about 1024 being used in ALL cases of binary standards, you might at least have a leg to stand on. But that's simply not the case -- the system is inconsistently applied and has been from the start.
To put it another way, even if you got every committee of busy-bodies on the planet to agree that 2+2=3, they and you would still be wrong.
Not if I were running a "three-legged race"! You see: even 2+2 depends on context! See what I did there? That's your logic in a nutshell. But the situations that 2+2=3 are relatively rare and hard to define as a specific class, so we all agree to be CONSISTENT and accept that 2+2=4 as a DEFINITION, and regard the "three-legged race" as a different thing, not something that trumps the standard definition of 2+2=4. Binary prefixes are needed enough that we need a system to reference them, and one has been defined. Just about everyone in the "biz" these days is aware of it. What's your excuse?
The only problem was hard disk manufacturers and their BS propaganda. No one else uses their definition.
Well, only them and just about every international standards body that actually defines units, including engineering and electronics bodies (e.g. IEEE, JEDEC still allows something like the old 1024 standard, but notes it is deprecated).
Also, various other hardware manufacturers, various software (e.g. many Linux commands), data transfer rates and other things measured in bits rather than bytes, etc., etc.
But in most circumstances it's not that helpful to start throwing around obscure terms for the sake of avoiding the slim possibility of misinterpretation.
"Slim possibility"? Seriously? Some hardware types use the 1024 definition, while others use the 1000 definition. When talking about data transfer speed and other contexts "kilo" means 1000. (Bits, despite being the ultimate binary unit, seem to come in 1000s, while groups of 8 of them come in 1024s -- why?) Some software and OSes use 1024 (e.g. Windows); others use 1000 (e.g. many commands in Linux).
Yes, it's possible to navigate all these conflicting standards to have a general sense of when the prefix means one thing or the other. But it's hardly unambiguous to say "kilobyte" without knowing the context, and if you think otherwise, you're either ignorant or in denial. It would be much more efficient for the prefix always just to mean the same thing... and basically all international standards bodies agree.
Why is it so hard for you aspyrons to understand that the meaning of a word is often dependent on context?
Well, maybe because almost all the international standards organizations actually agree that there's a single meaning now (even though they disagreed in the past).
In a decimal context, kilo means 1000. In a binary context, it means 1024. Most of the people that pretend to have difficulty understanding this are actually making money from their 'confusion' - what's your excuse?
Look, what the GP said was factually accurate:
the IEEE, ISO and SI standards all agree that kilobyte means 1000 bytes, and megabyte means 1000000 bytes.
The IEC adopted these in 1998, leading to full adoption by the IEEE in 2005. SI explicitly defines kilo ONLY to mean 1000, and though bytes are not technically SI units, they regard any other use of the prefixes as incorrect.
The only large body that has endorsed the use of your system in the past decade is JEDEC, though they insist on capital letters, i.e., K, M, and G, instead of the standard SI lower-case. So, a kilobyte (kB) to them is actually 1000 bytes, while a Kilobyte (KB or K) is 1024.
Recently, if you read even JEDEC's standards from 2012, you'll note that they quote the IEEE standards and say the older style "frequently leads to confusion and is deprecated."
So, I don't know about the GP, but my "excuse" for following standard SI style is that basically all international standards bodies agree that "kilo" means 1000, and if you want to have a term for 1024, you should use something else.
Now, the reality of the world is that many hardware manufacturers and such still retain older deprecated usages. But GP's statement was basically accurate. There's no reason to go around insulting people when they state factual information.
You want to keep using a standard that has confused people for decades when the international standards organizations deprecate it because it's confusing? That's your choice. But what's your excuse for attacking people?
If everyone had a degree society would be much more efficient and productive.
[Citation needed.]
There is never a downside to more education (except maybe the cost).
There's rarely a downside to education. But there are plenty of potential downsides to additional schooling. (Plenty of schools offer a very poor education, and there are plenty of ways to gain educational without extra years in school.) Downsides for schooling: For society at large, decreased productivity in lost years in the workforce, for example. For individuals, lost income and productivity during those years, which might be more helpful for families and such in many circumstances. (Keep in mind that there are significant numbers of people who don't finish degrees, and thus go into debt and don't even get the credential.)
And some people really just aren't capable of higher-level thought and reasoning. Unless you want "degrees" to be awarded for random skills acquisition, rather than any "higher education" (which, it seems, is where college is going)... but at that point, you'd probably be better off with on-the-job training and apprenticeships, rather than traditional schooling.
Continue to hold the student accountable. They're the ones that were too stupid to go to a college and get a degree for a job good enough to pay it off. And too stupid to figure out debt v/s income ratios. And maybe their parents if they were involved in the stupid decision to send their kids to college without a means to pay for it.
Your repetition of the phrase "too stupid" seems to imply some sort of innate cognitive dysfunction.
But I think what you really mean is that they don't have the necessary experience and skills to evaluate basic financial math decisions, right? I mean, except for the small percentage of people with actual cognitive impairments, most people should be able to figure this out, right?
So, then you have to ask yourself: how is it that we require students generally to take 11-12 years of mathematics in this country, but they somehow graduate without basic financial math skills to survive in the world?
I taught high school math and science for a few years, so I know the curriculum and debates first-hand. I can tell you about the 140 or so students I was teaching my first year -- mostly high-school juniors and seniors in algebra II (likely the last math class they would ever take in their lives for most). And one day I tried giving them a simple application problem involving compound interest: only 2 out of the 140 students actually knew what compound interest was.
According to the state-mandated curriculum, I had no time to teach them the basics of math that would help them to survive in the real world, but at that point I decided I needed to carve out a few weeks and do at least a little of that... even if it meant some of the scores on our official testing would be a little lower. I can tell you that most teachers probably don't even have time or initiative to do that.
So... with situations like this, you have to ask yourself: how can we expect these "too stupid" students to evaluate basic financial situations when they don't even know fundamental ideas like compound interest, let alone how it might apply to loans or investments or whatever?
Of course, I agree with you that some of the blame should be placed on the students and their parents. But I do think we need to recognize that we require kids to spend over a decade in public schools, and many of them are leaving without fundamental numerical skills to make decisions in the real world.
So are they really "too stupid" or were they just never taught basic numeracy?
My older family members, for instance, like to change the font to a very large size, something that is not possible if the publisher spends too much effort getting the typesetting just right and freezing it in instead of allowing the device to do it on the fly.
Absolutely. I just wish some ebook formats and readers adopted something like a LaTeX convention, which could allow text sections to be reformatted in a beautiful, elegant, and typographically sensitive manner with minimal fuss. Despite my previous post, I personally cannot stand reading normal ebooks, due to poor typography. (I prefer PDFs, if I have to.) But I know I'm in the minority....
Well, we are talking about keeping historical books around, in form as close to the originals as possible, right?
Well, my impression of TFA was that we were talking about recent books (20th century) which were out-of-print or unavailable -- not "historical" preservation. And it's about making such texts available to a mass-market audience for purchase. It's not about annotating manuscripts or some sort of academic analysis of manuscripts from hundreds of years ago.
Also, TEI keeps the semantics around, not just the fact that sentence such-and-such is printed in Garamond.
I don't understand. Your first sentence says you want to keep the "form as close to the originals as possible" but now you want to add tags, metadata, and semantic information which was not present in the original texts. Which one is it?
I'm not saying that TEI is bad -- I'm saying it's actually about adding information to make old texts more navigable and superimposing a particular type of analysis on them, not just preserving things in original form. Most people who just want to buy a copy of a book from 1990 in an ebook form don't care about some complex set of metadata that could be used for linguistic analysis or something. They just want the text, retypeset in an electronic form.
But you can always go down the lossy road and re-typeset it for whatever reason
Methinks you do not know what "lossy" means. In the case of preserving old books in electronic format, the full "non-lossy" version would be something like a set of full-color images, showing all details of page layout, font usage, spacing, placement of figures and images, etc. (Even there, for old manuscripts you might want to preserve binding information, gathering structure, etc. which would be lost in just a set of images.) That's desireable for analysis of a manuscript or something very old where reconstructing the exact layout of things is important.
Retypesetting the text is "lossy," in that it loses layout, typesetting, and pagination information -- but, for most people with standard books, they care more about the text than the layout. Also, it's helpful to process texts in this way for electronic formats, because it allows readers to take advantage of tools in readers like changing font size or other layout options.
What you're talking about with TEI is just as "lossy" as retypesetting (though some elements of page layout can be preserved, if desired), but you're also talking about adding in information that wasn't present in the original text. Kinda like ripping an mp3 track off of a vinyl record, and then recording some optional commentary over top of it: "If you listen here, you can hear the bridge, followed by a return to the refrain with backup vocals," etc.
TEI has its place, but I'm not sure it's particularly relevant to the simple idea of making ebooks available from books that may have been published a couple decades ago.
I was still in college and I graduated in 96 so it had to be pre-1996.
Wow -- your last post said "mid to late 80s" and now it could have been up to 1996. That's more than a decade, and you can't be more accurate about when you bought what you said was your first hard drive?
Must have been one hell of a college experience.
There is a lot of missing the point on this thread.
Not really sure why you replied to my post, then. You seem to have complaints about other people's ideas, which I didn't actually express. That said, I do have a few things to respond to you:
This problem goes down to the core of the social and psychological problems and tradeoffs that happen in GUI and application design, web design, and any other system that is accessed by members of the general public.
Somewhere there is a manager yelling at a designer because "it's hard to use" because there were complaints from users that they "just put in there password" and "why should I do that again?" when they were making a series of purchases.
Yes, I get that. I think almost everyone here got that before your post. You want to make this out to be some sort of simple story about GUI and app design, and making trade-offs. That's great.
However, you're avoiding one critical different here: This has to do with MONEY, and the ability to take more of it from people.
Any person who is designing a system that makes the taking of money less transparent to the user is, frankly, EVIL. Whether that is the programmers' intention or not, the company trying to make money will be very happy with such decisions -- because they are EVIL.
I completely agree with you that this was a good idea, and it probably was meant to solve a very practical problem. But anything that allows you to accidentally spend more money online (it's not just kids who might not realize how much easier it is to buy things for 30 minutes after a password entry), or which allows you to be parted from your money without a standard confirmation process is a serious design decision, not to be flippantly taken on the way you describe.
People who don't buy a lot of apps and such will rarely notice the lack of a password dialogue, so they expect it generally happens. When you change that behavior, it needs to be made explicit and transparent to the user -- and they should be given an easy way to override such behavior.
Everyone here always complains about how everything should be "opt-in." You shouldn't just automatically get spammed or whatever unless you explicitly authorize it. That is ten times more important when money is involved. Amazon wants to offer a "one-click" purchasing system that avoids confirmation of a lot of details -- fine, but make it opt-in. Google wants to allow you to buy apps without authorization for some period of time -- fine, but make it explicitly opt-in, or at a minimum, put an easy check-box to opt-out.
People are thinking this is deliberate by Google? Bah. Google isn't 100% non-evil, but I don't buy that.
Do I think this idea was originally thought up with evil intentions to steal money from people? No. But when someone suggested this as a way to make it easier for people to avoid repetitively entering passwords, you can bet your life someone in management or accounting saw dollar signs. Because the easier you make it to buy something, the more people will buy. Did they set out to fraudulently take lots of people's money? Probably not. But were they happy that they made it easier for people and kids to rack up greater charges?... yeah, you can bet they were... and maybe enough not to fix the problem immediately, even if they had a few complaints (given that Apple faced a similar lawsuit not too long ago).
No, Google designed a system that would be a compromise between security and usability since some people would obviously go bat shit if they had to enter their password every time.
No -- you're setting up a false dichotomy. Google could have easily put a little check box or something in the password dialog saying "Remember password to authorize ALL purchases for the next 30 minutes?" kinda like the "keep me logged in" box on webmail accounts or something. That would solve your problem AND make very clear what was happening to users.
After the whole Apple nonsense regarding the exact same issue, that would be at least a minimal attempt to clarify things to users.
That a parent gave this to their child and did not properly supervise them is the parents fault.
That's true. But, in fairness, I'm having trouble thinking of other toys for kids where you can say "Here kid - play this game with the Smurfs," and 30 minutes later accumulate a $300 bill for Smurfberries or whatever.
The parents should have paid closer attention, but the normal assumption when you buy a toy at the toy store is that it won't suck hundreds of dollars from your wallet AFTER you buy it for your kid. Many kids apps today are deliberately designed to exploit the cluelessness of parents and kids to make money this exact way.
his Big Bang idea was damn good and more importantly, his model is just like what we have now
Yeah, not so much. From the summary of his model as described in the paper:
Similarly, lumen is emitted from the second perfected sphere, sweeps up matter until there is further rarefaction and compression leading to a third perfected sphere. This continues until the ninth sphere, that of the moon, whose lumen emission is not sufficient to completely perfect the spheres of the elements (fire, air, water, earth) and these thus do not allow circular motion, which pertains only to perfect bodies, but just radial motion, and the latter two have the attribute of weight, due to their extremal density and compression.
It's a BIG stretch to say that anything about his cosmological theory has much in common with ours. By that measure, we might as well point out that Ptolemy's model of the solar system was "damn good" and "just like ours" (or Copernicus's) because it happened to have planets and a sun in it... forget about how anything in the model works or the philosophy underneath it.
for his model to work the way he specified it, he would need a very narrow band of parameters. He didn't know it back then, but by changing the parameters he would have had massively different implementations that are quite amusing.
No, not really. If we make a number of assumptions in translating his ideas into math, most of which he didn't specify, then we end up with a model (partly imagined by the authors) which has some of these properties.
Don't get me wrong: as someone who does research involving the history of science, I find this guy's ideas very interesting for what they say about medieval philosophy and "science." And this article is interesting for trying sort out what a worked-out model would look like in modern science.
But let's not try to pretend that what this project came up with is really just an implementation of a medieval model, nor that this has anything significant in common with modern cosmology.
But part of the issue is that many students need significantly more repetition to get things
I disagree, because they're *not* getting them. They're just memorizing information. I honestly don't believe it's necessary or effective to have a student do the same thing over and over again in order to get them to understand something; I think it's misleading, in fact.
Do you have kids? If not, have you ever been around a small child? How the heck do you think most people learn to talk, to walk, to read, etc.? Sorry, but repetition is essential for any skill acquisition. Toddlers often learn to read by reading the exact same words in the exact same books dozens or even hundreds of times. Generally, it's a better idea to keep introducing the same word many times in multiple contexts, but repetition is essential -- and in the process, generalized skills acquisition happens. Before you know it, kids begin to sound out related words with similar weird spellings, etc.
I'll grant you that many mathematics textbooks and many teachers focus too much on stuff that's too repetitive, rather than making use of more variety in problems.
And even though you dismissed my concern about how you and I absorb things quickly as a "different" problem, it's not. Some toddlers are smarter than others and have greater abilities at abstraction -- they can be exposed to a particular idea or thing just a few times, and they immediately get it. Others have to do things dozens or hundreds of times to acquire the same skill.
You happen to be in the small subset of people who "get" things quickly. Congratulations. But thinking that repetition isn't an essential part of the learning process for the vast majority of people is, frankly, a bit delusional. There are all sorts of tricks that good teachers have employed for thousands of years to make that repetition more interesting or enjoyable for kids, but it's the main way most kids acquire actual skills.
(3) Also, sometimes the algorithm IS the goal. For >99% of people in the world, math is only useful as a tool
That mentality is the problem. That's why rote memorization and mindless repetition are used so often.
Look, have fun enjoying the advanced world of math for yourself. It's fun to play in; it really is. But the vast majority of people in the world simply lack the cognitive skills or discipline or interest to get to that level... and that is NOT some great failing in the educational system. It's just accepting the fact that people are different, have different skills, and have different interests.
Believe it or not, as a teacher I spent a great deal of time doing the very things you seem to value. I worked together with a couple other teachers to do a complete redesign of the intro algebra curriculum in a school district which would use lots of interesting exploratory activities, multimedia materials, etc. to get away from "traditional" approaches to math. I also taught "conceptual physics" courses to high school kids for a few years, designing open-ended exploratory experiments with very little intense math or drilling in traditional "problems."
But guess what -- these courses were deliberately designed for the 80-90% of kids who actually didn't need facility in math or algebra or mathematical physics. They would never use it in their lives, so spending time doing the algorithms would be stupid and a waste of their time. Instead, kids might go on after doing a "conceptual algebra" course to take a general math elective (rather than algebra II or whatever), which would in fact involve a lot of fairly repetitive scenarios to prepare them for math usage in the real world -- e.g., designing a budget, evaluating loan and mortgage terms, calculating savings and investment returns, etc. Those sorts of problems do actually require a certain kind of "algorithmic literacy" and fluency in certa