Correct the data for laterality (right hand preference in majority of the population), then maybe the results will be interesting. Even then, the explanation is bull. Unlike sight, the auditory system doesn't work cross-hemispherically. Sound from the right side is carried by the auditory nerve into the right portion of the temporal lobe.
It depends a lot on the nature of the class, so there's no one-size-fits-all answer for when tools like graphing calculators or WA should be allowed. In first year calculus, when you're learning how to integrate, a program that can do symbolic integration isn't an appropriate tool. On the other hand, for a first class in ODEs, the integration is the least essential part of the process and so the right tools make it easier to focus on whats really important. Yes, I know WA can solve diff eq's too, but that's just an example. Just requiring that work be shown isn't always sufficient, since it's an important skill in mathematics to understand how to get a solution, even when you can't immediately see what the solution is. So I don't think it's unreasonable for graphing calculators or things like Wolfram Alpha to be disallowed for certain classes.
That being said, labelling it academic misconduct is pretty unreasonable. I look at it in the same as recommended homework problems: it's just a suggestion, but come exam time it's your funeral. Back to the first year calculus example, I remember the syllabus explicitly saying that all problem sets were to be completed independently and without computer aids. No one really did that, and the TAs didn't even try to enforce it. In university, formal evaluation carries most of the weight in grading. The people who just copied off of other people or the internet had a smooth ride until the first test.
They're not trying to hide their proceedings. As other people have noted, there's a Canadian cable channel called CPAC devoted to airing parliamentary proceedings. The point isn't that they don't want the videos to be seen, from what I gather it's more about having them taken out of context, etc. Not that I agree with it, I still think it's stupid. But that doesn't mean it's OK to misrepresent the issue.
Christodoulides's team's work could be combined with his to help aim the laser pulses and plasma channels at specific targets, such as clouds, although he points out that the laser pulses can also be guided using mirrors. "But it would be fun to see curved lightning discharges," he says.
This article is cool up until the lightning bit. As the quote from TFA shows, there's absolutely no connection between the curved lasers and the technique for triggering lighting. As far as generating an ion channel goes, the curved laser does nothing a straight laser can't. The only connection between the otherwise completely disconnected bits of research is that the lightning guy commented on the curved laser stuff and essentially said that while using mirrors is more feasible in his project, using curved lasers would look cool.
Everytime someone comes up with an interesting discovery in science, people invariably ask what it's good for. Ditto for math. The problem is that a lot (most?) research is done for its own sake, to discover new things, rather than having any particular application in mind. History has shown that applications tend to come later, and in the places you least expect it, so it pays to just be curious. People thought group theory was just weird abstract shit until someone figured out how to use it in applied chemistry.
It's said when the need to immediately justify every new discovery has gotten to the point where an article needs to include a completely contrived and ridiculous application just to placate people.
when Jagex banned all IPs connected to gold selling, "they lost 10 per cent of their membership...there were four million players, there are now two million players, of which less than one million actually subscribe."
Lost 10%...went from four million to two million players. Maybe someone should have spent less time playing WoW and more time doing their school work...
I agree, with one reservation. If Rep. Doogan discovered the blogger's identity using channels that would be available to anyone, then he was well within his rights to "oust him"...otherwise, you're effectively arguing that Mudflats' right to anonymity trumps Doogan's right to free speech. However, if he used his position as a government official to access information not available to the general public, then his actions were an abuse of power.
I know that's what it's saying. That's why I said, "It's about the way things currently work, and how that means researchers really don't want to go pissing off either the people giving them money or the people who currently print their results." Right now, there isn't a mainstream open alternative- MIT's move is an attempt to change that, and I hope it works. All I'm saying is exactly what the article is saying- in the present circumstances, researchers need to be careful about choosing sides.
Thank you. I was just going to post something about how this shouldn't be tagged "fail". It isn't a "failed" experiment. It's an experiment that yielded a negative result, which can be just as useful, if less flashy and exciting, than a positive one.
After all, faculty are completely reliant on both parties involved: the funding agencies pay for their work, and publishers ensure that it finds an audience. Obviously, this puts the faculty in no position to negotiate.
That's what I was referring to. What you're saying is valid, but really has nothing to do with what I said. The point is, right now published journals are the most reliable way to get exposure. People trust peer review. The fact the subscription-based peer review system could operate under open access policies doesn't change the fact that right now, for the most part, it doesn't. This isn't about what system would theoretically be best for researchers. It's about the way things currently work, and how that means researchers really don't want to go pissing off either the people giving them money or the people who currently print their results. That, and how, given the dilemma, I don't believe there's any way everyone could have possibly agreed, despite how nice the message sent by "unanimously agreed" sounds.
As much as I congratulate MIT on this, I'd be interested to see the official vote tally. MIT's faculty is rather largeish, and the article itself says that faculty are caught in the middle between the need for funding and the need for exposure. There's no way in hell that vote was unanimous. Sounds more like the motion passed by a simple majority, someone introduced one of those silly, "Motion to declare the outcome of this vote unanimous," motions, which was then passed by the same people. That's just speculation, but seriously...not one single dissenter on the entire faculty? No way.
The researchers plan to connect several chips to create a circuit with a billion neurons
So an individual chip has 200,000 neurony-type things...and so they require 5000 of them. This is an application of the word "several" I'm not familiar with.
We describe the position/velocity of electrons as a probability distribution because we cannot directly measure this without knocking the electron out of its orbit.
Actually, we describe electrons as a probability distribution because doing so generates predictions that match up with reality to the best of our measurements. That's it. You're talking about the "hidden variables" interpretation of QM, that just because we can't measure the (somewhat ironically named) "observables" generated by the Schrodinger Equation, that doesn't mean their values aren't deterministically determined. And that's perfectly fine, except that that is just an interpretation of quantum mechanics, which is exactly what Conway and Kochen's paper is about: the implications of different interpretations of QM. There are many interpretations of what quantum mechanics actually "means", what the deeper significance of the empirical equations is. Some of them try do away with the "spooky" possibilities like true randomness and action-at-a-distance, such as your view, and others which take the opposite approach (like Penrose). However, thus far no experiment has been able to prove one interpretation over another (though people have tried), and there are many people who think the whole "deeper meaning" question is a question for meta-physics.
Anyways, I'm ranting. The point is, your statement makes an unproven assumption, and so, as unintentionally post-modern as this is going to sound, your view is no more valid than the grandparent's.
The problem is it's a very fuzzy line between what's general enough, and what's to specific to the case at hand. If there there was relevant case law that could influence the jurors one way or another, it should have been presented during the case. It's not their job to search out helpful little tidbits. And from a purely practical standpoint, if you allow jurors internet access but say they can only access certain kinds of information, cases would become endlessly bogged down with calls for a mistrial as lawyers try to argue why such-and-such bit of info that was obtained by juror x hit a little too close to home.
It would be nice if there were a mechanism for jurors to request, and obtain, information they believe to be relevant("We are deciding a traffic case, could we get a street map and some pictures of the area in the jury room"); but hitting wikipedia on your phone isn't it.
Even that wouldn't fly. If there was information to be gained that could influence the jurors' judment, then the defense or prosecution should have presented them during the case. The idea of "admissible evidence" is extremely important, and prevents all kinds of abuses that would otherwise occur. So, the jury gets what the judge says they can have, and what the lawyers think is pertinent to their case. Jurors aren't investigators. It isn't their job to actively try to "find the facts", regardless of whether or not the information has been vetted first. They listen, and decide.
That's the fundamental problem here, and that's why I think all the people saying things like "the courts just need to get with the times" are wrong (I know you said you're against the whole internet P.I. thing, I'm just segueing now). I really don't believe this is case of old ways of doing things that have to catch up with modern technology. This is no different then the practice of sequestering in high profile cases where access to the media could influence a juror. The only difference is that, because of the scope of the internet, a trial or a defendent doesn't have to be famous in order to get information with it. If anything, I think the old rules need to be made more rigorous now that it's so much easier for outside influence to affect a juror.
What with all the fallout, the Facebook team has decided to revert to the old ToS until they can finish re-writing what they think will be less offensive new terms. Here's the blog post:
http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=54746167130
I agree with you, I just get a little annoyed when people say things that make it sound like piracy is a natural and defendable consequence of the actions of the industry, ie "industry greed". It's true, there are definitely measures companies could take to try to minimize piracy, ie making great products that people will think are worth the cost. But at the end of the day, there's no reason why anyone has to have (insert hot name game title here), and so citing industry greed is just dumb.
That's kind of a non sequitur. I didn't say people pirate because they don't have money. I said people just don't like spending money, and so there will always be people in every income bracket who will go to any length to avoid doing so.
Pocket Gamer takes a look at how piracy affects the Nintendo DS console, along with the reasons so many gamers turn to piracy to play their games â" including the slew of inferior games, availability of flash carts and industry greed."
Which sort of leaves out the obvious. People are cheap, and given the choice between having something for money or for free, many opt for free.
Slashdot Mirror
Correct the data for laterality (right hand preference in majority of the population), then maybe the results will be interesting. Even then, the explanation is bull. Unlike sight, the auditory system doesn't work cross-hemispherically. Sound from the right side is carried by the auditory nerve into the right portion of the temporal lobe.
It depends a lot on the nature of the class, so there's no one-size-fits-all answer for when tools like graphing calculators or WA should be allowed. In first year calculus, when you're learning how to integrate, a program that can do symbolic integration isn't an appropriate tool. On the other hand, for a first class in ODEs, the integration is the least essential part of the process and so the right tools make it easier to focus on whats really important. Yes, I know WA can solve diff eq's too, but that's just an example. Just requiring that work be shown isn't always sufficient, since it's an important skill in mathematics to understand how to get a solution, even when you can't immediately see what the solution is. So I don't think it's unreasonable for graphing calculators or things like Wolfram Alpha to be disallowed for certain classes. That being said, labelling it academic misconduct is pretty unreasonable. I look at it in the same as recommended homework problems: it's just a suggestion, but come exam time it's your funeral. Back to the first year calculus example, I remember the syllabus explicitly saying that all problem sets were to be completed independently and without computer aids. No one really did that, and the TAs didn't even try to enforce it. In university, formal evaluation carries most of the weight in grading. The people who just copied off of other people or the internet had a smooth ride until the first test.
...don't have medical drills for that very purpose?
They're not trying to hide their proceedings. As other people have noted, there's a Canadian cable channel called CPAC devoted to airing parliamentary proceedings. The point isn't that they don't want the videos to be seen, from what I gather it's more about having them taken out of context, etc. Not that I agree with it, I still think it's stupid. But that doesn't mean it's OK to misrepresent the issue.
Sorry...that's "sad". Not said.
Christodoulides's team's work could be combined with his to help aim the laser pulses and plasma channels at specific targets, such as clouds, although he points out that the laser pulses can also be guided using mirrors. "But it would be fun to see curved lightning discharges," he says.
This article is cool up until the lightning bit. As the quote from TFA shows, there's absolutely no connection between the curved lasers and the technique for triggering lighting. As far as generating an ion channel goes, the curved laser does nothing a straight laser can't. The only connection between the otherwise completely disconnected bits of research is that the lightning guy commented on the curved laser stuff and essentially said that while using mirrors is more feasible in his project, using curved lasers would look cool.
Everytime someone comes up with an interesting discovery in science, people invariably ask what it's good for. Ditto for math. The problem is that a lot (most?) research is done for its own sake, to discover new things, rather than having any particular application in mind. History has shown that applications tend to come later, and in the places you least expect it, so it pays to just be curious. People thought group theory was just weird abstract shit until someone figured out how to use it in applied chemistry.
It's said when the need to immediately justify every new discovery has gotten to the point where an article needs to include a completely contrived and ridiculous application just to placate people.
Ah. That makes considerably more sense.
when Jagex banned all IPs connected to gold selling, "they lost 10 per cent of their membership...there were four million players, there are now two million players, of which less than one million actually subscribe."
Lost 10%...went from four million to two million players. Maybe someone should have spent less time playing WoW and more time doing their school work...
"Quick! To the Gore-Mobile!"
I agree, with one reservation. If Rep. Doogan discovered the blogger's identity using channels that would be available to anyone, then he was well within his rights to "oust him"...otherwise, you're effectively arguing that Mudflats' right to anonymity trumps Doogan's right to free speech. However, if he used his position as a government official to access information not available to the general public, then his actions were an abuse of power.
I know that's what it's saying. That's why I said, "It's about the way things currently work, and how that means researchers really don't want to go pissing off either the people giving them money or the people who currently print their results." Right now, there isn't a mainstream open alternative- MIT's move is an attempt to change that, and I hope it works. All I'm saying is exactly what the article is saying- in the present circumstances, researchers need to be careful about choosing sides.
Thank you. I was just going to post something about how this shouldn't be tagged "fail". It isn't a "failed" experiment. It's an experiment that yielded a negative result, which can be just as useful, if less flashy and exciting, than a positive one.
After all, faculty are completely reliant on both parties involved: the funding agencies pay for their work, and publishers ensure that it finds an audience. Obviously, this puts the faculty in no position to negotiate.
That's what I was referring to. What you're saying is valid, but really has nothing to do with what I said. The point is, right now published journals are the most reliable way to get exposure. People trust peer review. The fact the subscription-based peer review system could operate under open access policies doesn't change the fact that right now, for the most part, it doesn't. This isn't about what system would theoretically be best for researchers. It's about the way things currently work, and how that means researchers really don't want to go pissing off either the people giving them money or the people who currently print their results. That, and how, given the dilemma, I don't believe there's any way everyone could have possibly agreed, despite how nice the message sent by "unanimously agreed" sounds.
As much as I congratulate MIT on this, I'd be interested to see the official vote tally. MIT's faculty is rather largeish, and the article itself says that faculty are caught in the middle between the need for funding and the need for exposure. There's no way in hell that vote was unanimous. Sounds more like the motion passed by a simple majority, someone introduced one of those silly, "Motion to declare the outcome of this vote unanimous," motions, which was then passed by the same people. That's just speculation, but seriously...not one single dissenter on the entire faculty? No way.
The researchers plan to connect several chips to create a circuit with a billion neurons
So an individual chip has 200,000 neurony-type things...and so they require 5000 of them. This is an application of the word "several" I'm not familiar with.
We describe the position/velocity of electrons as a probability distribution because we cannot directly measure this without knocking the electron out of its orbit.
Actually, we describe electrons as a probability distribution because doing so generates predictions that match up with reality to the best of our measurements. That's it. You're talking about the "hidden variables" interpretation of QM, that just because we can't measure the (somewhat ironically named) "observables" generated by the Schrodinger Equation, that doesn't mean their values aren't deterministically determined. And that's perfectly fine, except that that is just an interpretation of quantum mechanics, which is exactly what Conway and Kochen's paper is about: the implications of different interpretations of QM. There are many interpretations of what quantum mechanics actually "means", what the deeper significance of the empirical equations is. Some of them try do away with the "spooky" possibilities like true randomness and action-at-a-distance, such as your view, and others which take the opposite approach (like Penrose). However, thus far no experiment has been able to prove one interpretation over another (though people have tried), and there are many people who think the whole "deeper meaning" question is a question for meta-physics.
Anyways, I'm ranting. The point is, your statement makes an unproven assumption, and so, as unintentionally post-modern as this is going to sound, your view is no more valid than the grandparent's.
The problem is it's a very fuzzy line between what's general enough, and what's to specific to the case at hand. If there there was relevant case law that could influence the jurors one way or another, it should have been presented during the case. It's not their job to search out helpful little tidbits. And from a purely practical standpoint, if you allow jurors internet access but say they can only access certain kinds of information, cases would become endlessly bogged down with calls for a mistrial as lawyers try to argue why such-and-such bit of info that was obtained by juror x hit a little too close to home.
It would be nice if there were a mechanism for jurors to request, and obtain, information they believe to be relevant("We are deciding a traffic case, could we get a street map and some pictures of the area in the jury room"); but hitting wikipedia on your phone isn't it.
Even that wouldn't fly. If there was information to be gained that could influence the jurors' judment, then the defense or prosecution should have presented them during the case. The idea of "admissible evidence" is extremely important, and prevents all kinds of abuses that would otherwise occur. So, the jury gets what the judge says they can have, and what the lawyers think is pertinent to their case. Jurors aren't investigators. It isn't their job to actively try to "find the facts", regardless of whether or not the information has been vetted first. They listen, and decide.
That's the fundamental problem here, and that's why I think all the people saying things like "the courts just need to get with the times" are wrong (I know you said you're against the whole internet P.I. thing, I'm just segueing now). I really don't believe this is case of old ways of doing things that have to catch up with modern technology. This is no different then the practice of sequestering in high profile cases where access to the media could influence a juror. The only difference is that, because of the scope of the internet, a trial or a defendent doesn't have to be famous in order to get information with it. If anything, I think the old rules need to be made more rigorous now that it's so much easier for outside influence to affect a juror.
YANAL
The user can hump 200lb with relative ease while marching in a HULC
So...many...jokes...
What with all the fallout, the Facebook team has decided to revert to the old ToS until they can finish re-writing what they think will be less offensive new terms. Here's the blog post: http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=54746167130
err...(insert end of italics tag after "has"...)
I agree with you, I just get a little annoyed when people say things that make it sound like piracy is a natural and defendable consequence of the actions of the industry, ie "industry greed". It's true, there are definitely measures companies could take to try to minimize piracy, ie making great products that people will think are worth the cost. But at the end of the day, there's no reason why anyone has to have (insert hot name game title here), and so citing industry greed is just dumb.
That's kind of a non sequitur. I didn't say people pirate because they don't have money. I said people just don't like spending money, and so there will always be people in every income bracket who will go to any length to avoid doing so.
Pocket Gamer takes a look at how piracy affects the Nintendo DS console, along with the reasons so many gamers turn to piracy to play their games â" including the slew of inferior games, availability of flash carts and industry greed."
Which sort of leaves out the obvious. People are cheap, and given the choice between having something for money or for free, many opt for free.