Math is notably better on this score than the other sciences. I can think of other mathematicians who did a 180 and had to say "I was wrong", within a few days of a major publication, due to to critical objections. I can't think of any like that for natural sciences.
Predictably. Anyone waiting all weekend, and watching the brief/terse statement on Monday, could see that his heart was totally not into it. Especially considering his willingness to attack anything else that moves under the sun at the drop of a hat.
Thank you President Trump for your honesty & courage to tell the truth about #Charlottesville & condemn the leftist terrorists in BLM/Antifa https://twitter.com/NBCNews/status/897554574663442432
I have a good friend, who is himself German, with a full-time faculty position at a top U.S. university in CS. Last summer he taught in Germany as part of an exchange program. He himself came back basically blown away by the different level of preparation and maturity of the German students.
My take is that German universities actually maintain legitimate entrance standards. All college costs are paid by the government, there isn't a free-market race to the bottom, and the only people accepted are high-quality and expected to actually take responsibility and succeed at the work. Vocational programs exist for other types of jobs. Different schools are attended after the age of 10 based on whether someone is headed for college or not (contrast with the U.S. where "tracking" is anathema in education since about 25 years ago).
In addition, I must point out that German math educators, even K-6 equivalent, are highly prepared (like maybe 8 years of training), respected, well-compensated, and tenured by the government. This is in contrast to math in the U.S. which is taught from K-6 by non-experts who are actually the least capable of math, least knowledgeable, poorly trained, have the highest levels of math anxiety (which has been shown to rub off on students), little support, and high turnover in a typical American meat-grinder context. As a community-college math teacher, I suspect that this rotten foundation in math from K-6 is the single biggest problem with American education.
It is argued that formal verifications of programs, no matter how obtained, will not play the same key role in the development of computer science and software engineering as proofs do in mathematics. Furthermore the absence of continuity, the inevitability of change, and the complexity of specification of significantly many real programs make the formal verification process difficult to justify and manage. It is felt that ease of formal verification should not dominate program language design.
De Millo, Richard A., Richard J. Upton, and Alan J. Perlis. "Social processes and proofs of theorems and programs." The mathematical intelligencer 3.1 (1980): 31-40. (Reprinted from Communications of the ACM, Vol. 22, No. 5, May 1979.)
I teach introductory C++ programming courses at a large, urban community college. Getting students to be able to read and write the syntax reliably is itself a major challenge (e.g., poor initial reading/writing skills, never encountered programming before, about half not native English readers, etc.). So at numerous points during the course I ask for the class as a whole to direct my coding at the lectern for some simple problem. "What should I type here?" And of course, we need some recognized way to verbalize that.
The OP touches on the toughest nut I've found in that regard -- that there's no agreed-upon way to pronounce the symbols for C++ stream insertion/extraction operators (e.g., the OP mentions that he just leaves those uniquely silent). Notice that I'm talking about the typographical symbols here, not the name of the C++ operator. E.g.: For the C++ "and" operator, you type the symbol "double-ampersand". But if a student were to say, "insertion operator", and I said, "and how do we type that on the keyboard?", there is surprisingly no agreement in what that symbol is.
Knowledge and experiments need reproducibility. If Alice finds/asserts some fact, then Bob needs to be able to find it or establish it in the same way, or he won't be convinced. If information is "personalized" such that different people see different things, this will foil reproducibility. No one will believe anyone else. No one will be able to find/confirm what anyone else is talking about. Everyone will be in a little Matrix-like silo being unable to talk to others.
We already have this problem with customized ads on walled-garden social-media sites. We can't ascertain what political advertising or propaganda is being seen by our fellow citizens. We can't verify that apartment or job listings are violating nondiscrimination laws or not.
Look, as a community-college educator in a different part of the country (and who participates in academic conferences on this sort of thing): it's none of that. It's a desperate cry for help at the fact that most students sit glassy-eyed through the entirety of their K-12 and now community college years, having no idea why they should bother trying at any of it. No one fails classes anymore. Effectively no one fails to get a high school diploma. No one is denied placement at a community college ("open admissions"). And yet 80% of the people who get into community college are basically illiterate and innumerate, and can't pass even 6th-grade arithmetic or language tests. High school diplomas are pretty much worthless today. I have students who are sincerely astounded that the answer to "Is it possible to fail a class even when I have perfect attendance?" is "Yes".
The people who lobby for this kind of thing want people to not starve to death because they can't support themselves. They want high school to mean something, so they go grasping for something like this. They want more people to graduate community college because that's correlated with higher income for those people (yes, there's a whole slew of criticisms to be made around that).
You can legitimately think that this is a bad idea. I do. But the 5-score conspiracy theories about it here in this Slashdot thread are truly faked-Moon-landing, anti-vaxer quality.
The study linked in the OP has nothing to do with fabricated-media posts; rather, it's about what social-media gets censored by the Chinese government (namely, calls to action and not mere criticism). In fact, the abstract of the linked study is entirely different from what's allegedly quoted in the OP. The linked abstract is actually this:
We offer the first large scale, multiple source analysis of the outcome of what may be the most extensive effort to selectively censor human expression ever implemented. To do this, we have devised a system to locate, download, and analyze the content of millions of social media posts originating from nearly 1,400 different social media services all over China before the Chinese government is able to find, evaluate, and censor (i.e., remove from the Internet) the large subset they deem objectionable. Using modern computer-assisted text analytic methods that we adapt to and validate in the Chinese language, we compare the substantive content of posts censored to those not censored over time in each of 85 topic areas. Contrary to previous understandings, posts with negative, even vitriolic, criticism of the state, its leaders, and its policies are not more likely to be censored. Instead, we show that the censorship program is aimed at curtailing collective action by silencing comments that represent, reinforce, or spur social mobilization, regardless of content. Censorship is oriented toward attempting to forestall collective activities that are occurring now or may occur in the future --- and, as such, seem to clearly expose government intent.
Yes, users should have complex (high entropy) passwords. No, requiring one digit and special character does not accomplish that. And no, requiring regular password changes does not accomplish that.
There is now a mountain of evidence that those ideas do the exact opposite.
"I occasionally get ads for stuff I am actually interested in."
I have seriously never understood this apology for ad-based services. You honestly like ads intruding on your workflow while you're trying to do something else? Instead of a push-messaging model, wouldn't it be better to have a pull-messaging model where, on the day you want or need X, you search for "product X" and you get a fair and objective listing of available X's on the market from which to compare?
No, Europe has never had a problem with Jews. No one's ever accused them of being separatist, not sufficiently Christian, "doesn't integrate". No one's every been able to whip up a crowd into heinous hateful action against the Jews.
This right-wing agitprop is just racism du jour. Discouragingly, apparently it will never end. A boot stomping a human face forever.
Based on what? He's never held public office and my very-left French partner (who campaigned hard for Hillary) has been calling him "nothing but a wet noodle".
"People are realising that inheritance is not the be-all and end-all... They're realising that deep inheritance hierarchies often lead to complex code which is tricky to understand exactly what code is going to execute when..."
I'm pretty sure it was 1990 when one of my professors said, "We used to worry about spaghetti GOTOs; now we have to worry about spaghetti inheritance".
Of course you're correct about all that. But let me add some perspective to the America-firsters position, because it is, in its horrible way, at least partly consistent.
The majority of tourism dollars and employment go to the coastal, well-to-do, cosmopolitan, educated, liberal cities. The fact that alt-right anti-visitor policies are going to cripple the tourism industry isn't a bug to our regressive political thinkers; it's a feature. The fact that the coastal cities, the educated people, the cosmopolitan culture, the LBGTQ-friendly places, the colleges that receive foreign students, will be in a shambles is expressly among the things that they desire. Arguing that fact will not dissuade them; it will actually reinforce how wonderful these policies are.
Reuters version -- "applicants who have ever been present in territory controlled by the Islamic State" * (link) Verge version -- "applicants who have ever visited ISIS-controlled territory" (link) Parent version -- "applications from people who like to hang out with ISIS" (above)
* Comprised in the majority of citizens who were victims, prisoners, kidnapped, abused, forced slaves and wives, i.e., any brown-skinned refugees.
"It's hard to find much of a precedent for Uber's losses. Webvan and Kozmo.com—two now-defunct phantoms of the original dot-com boom—lost just over $1 billion combined in their short lifetimes. Amazon.com Inc. is famous for losing money while increasing its market value, but its biggest loss ever totaled $1.4 billion in 2000. Uber exceeded that number in 2015 and is on pace to do it again this year [2016]."
It's a funny example, because I have exactly one post-it note with coding info over my desk -- the syntax to find the length of different strings & array types.
Likewise: One of my last interviews in my gaming career, an interviewer (producer) asked me to convert a string of ASCII digits to an integer value. I did happen to remember the algorithm directly from my machine architecture class (which I feel is quite memorable). Didn't believe me when I said it's actually more efficient to walk in the forwards direction through the string and multiply by 10 at each step (he maintained you had to search to the end of the string for the lowest place-value, the walk back right-to-left). I even walked through an example to show him correct result and total operations -- still didn't believe me. No job offer, left the industry.
Well... "it has no other interpretation" is a bit strong. Capital Pi is of course used as the multiple product symbol (like capital sigma for sums).
More on-topic, lower case pi can get used for different purposes in mathematics. The one I'm most familiar with is the population proportion in statistical work.
"Reality is, for Trump business ventures Net Neutrality is a huge plus and as such it would be really dumb to cripple his and his families future business interests."
"This is through-and-through FUD. To best of my knowledge Trump is rather anti-media, and all big players that would benefit from NN repeal are also happen to be media."
A major problem is that practically no teachers in U.S. elementary schools actually understand math (and so they teach the emergency fall-back of remember this nonsense). Education majors in the U.S. have perennially had the lowest qualifications of anyone entering college, and the highest rating for math dislike/anxiety. They're effectively self-selected for lack of mathematical understanding. I talked to a guy who used to run a middle school, and he said that he had no hope or even desire of getting math experts into the system, because they couldn't possibly be good with young kids.
There was an excellent article by Patricia Clark Kenschaft in the Notices of AMS (2005), on how she observed this functioning at both poor and wealthy schools, and concluded that most people who got math in elementary school must have some outside/home resource to make that happen. (Link)
Slashdot Mirror
Math is notably better on this score than the other sciences. I can think of other mathematicians who did a 180 and had to say "I was wrong", within a few days of a major publication, due to to critical objections. I can't think of any like that for natural sciences.
Predictably. Anyone waiting all weekend, and watching the brief/terse statement on Monday, could see that his heart was totally not into it. Especially considering his willingness to attack anything else that moves under the sun at the drop of a hat.
NY Times, Aug-15, 4:30 PM:
A Combative Trump Criticizes ‘Alt-Left’ Groups in Charlottesville
David Duke, Aug-15, 4:45 PM:
Thank you President Trump for your honesty & courage to tell the truth about #Charlottesville & condemn the leftist terrorists in BLM/Antifa https://twitter.com/NBCNews/status/897554574663442432
I have a good friend, who is himself German, with a full-time faculty position at a top U.S. university in CS. Last summer he taught in Germany as part of an exchange program. He himself came back basically blown away by the different level of preparation and maturity of the German students.
My take is that German universities actually maintain legitimate entrance standards. All college costs are paid by the government, there isn't a free-market race to the bottom, and the only people accepted are high-quality and expected to actually take responsibility and succeed at the work. Vocational programs exist for other types of jobs. Different schools are attended after the age of 10 based on whether someone is headed for college or not (contrast with the U.S. where "tracking" is anathema in education since about 25 years ago).
http://www.history.didaktik.mathematik.uni-wuerzburg.de/meg/weidiga1.html
In addition, I must point out that German math educators, even K-6 equivalent, are highly prepared (like maybe 8 years of training), respected, well-compensated, and tenured by the government. This is in contrast to math in the U.S. which is taught from K-6 by non-experts who are actually the least capable of math, least knowledgeable, poorly trained, have the highest levels of math anxiety (which has been shown to rub off on students), little support, and high turnover in a typical American meat-grinder context. As a community-college math teacher, I suspect that this rotten foundation in math from K-6 is the single biggest problem with American education.
In Germany: http://www.history.didaktik.mathematik.uni-wuerzburg.de/meg/matheda4.html
In the U.S.: http://www.madmath.com/2016/02/hembree-on-math-anxiety.html
For some reason this company with no business model reminds me of the CueCat.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CueCat
It is argued that formal verifications of programs, no matter how obtained, will not play the same key role in the development of computer science and software engineering as proofs do in mathematics. Furthermore the absence of continuity, the inevitability of change, and the complexity of specification of significantly many real programs make the formal verification process difficult to justify and manage. It is felt that ease of formal verification should not dominate program language design.
De Millo, Richard A., Richard J. Upton, and Alan J. Perlis. "Social processes and proofs of theorems and programs." The mathematical intelligencer 3.1 (1980): 31-40. (Reprinted from Communications of the ACM, Vol. 22, No. 5, May 1979.)
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF03023394
I like those, and they're helpfully on-topic. Thank you for sharing that!
I teach introductory C++ programming courses at a large, urban community college. Getting students to be able to read and write the syntax reliably is itself a major challenge (e.g., poor initial reading/writing skills, never encountered programming before, about half not native English readers, etc.). So at numerous points during the course I ask for the class as a whole to direct my coding at the lectern for some simple problem. "What should I type here?" And of course, we need some recognized way to verbalize that.
The OP touches on the toughest nut I've found in that regard -- that there's no agreed-upon way to pronounce the symbols for C++ stream insertion/extraction operators (e.g., the OP mentions that he just leaves those uniquely silent). Notice that I'm talking about the typographical symbols here, not the name of the C++ operator. E.g.: For the C++ "and" operator, you type the symbol "double-ampersand". But if a student were to say, "insertion operator", and I said, "and how do we type that on the keyboard?", there is surprisingly no agreement in what that symbol is.
Asked this on Stack Overflow a few months ago, to no good resolution: How do you read the... and... symbols out loud?
Knowledge and experiments need reproducibility. If Alice finds/asserts some fact, then Bob needs to be able to find it or establish it in the same way, or he won't be convinced. If information is "personalized" such that different people see different things, this will foil reproducibility. No one will believe anyone else. No one will be able to find/confirm what anyone else is talking about. Everyone will be in a little Matrix-like silo being unable to talk to others.
We already have this problem with customized ads on walled-garden social-media sites. We can't ascertain what political advertising or propaganda is being seen by our fellow citizens. We can't verify that apartment or job listings are violating nondiscrimination laws or not.
Look, as a community-college educator in a different part of the country (and who participates in academic conferences on this sort of thing): it's none of that. It's a desperate cry for help at the fact that most students sit glassy-eyed through the entirety of their K-12 and now community college years, having no idea why they should bother trying at any of it. No one fails classes anymore. Effectively no one fails to get a high school diploma. No one is denied placement at a community college ("open admissions"). And yet 80% of the people who get into community college are basically illiterate and innumerate, and can't pass even 6th-grade arithmetic or language tests. High school diplomas are pretty much worthless today. I have students who are sincerely astounded that the answer to "Is it possible to fail a class even when I have perfect attendance?" is "Yes".
The people who lobby for this kind of thing want people to not starve to death because they can't support themselves. They want high school to mean something, so they go grasping for something like this. They want more people to graduate community college because that's correlated with higher income for those people (yes, there's a whole slew of criticisms to be made around that).
You can legitimately think that this is a bad idea. I do. But the 5-score conspiracy theories about it here in this Slashdot thread are truly faked-Moon-landing, anti-vaxer quality.
The study linked in the OP has nothing to do with fabricated-media posts; rather, it's about what social-media gets censored by the Chinese government (namely, calls to action and not mere criticism). In fact, the abstract of the linked study is entirely different from what's allegedly quoted in the OP. The linked abstract is actually this:
We offer the first large scale, multiple source analysis of the outcome of what may be the most extensive effort to selectively censor human expression ever implemented. To do this, we have devised a system to locate, download, and analyze the content of millions of social media posts originating from nearly 1,400 different social media services all over China before the Chinese government is able to find, evaluate, and censor (i.e., remove from the Internet) the large subset they deem objectionable. Using modern computer-assisted text analytic methods that we adapt to and validate in the Chinese language, we compare the substantive content of posts censored to those not censored over time in each of 85 topic areas. Contrary to previous understandings, posts with negative, even vitriolic, criticism of the state, its leaders, and its policies are not more likely to be censored. Instead, we show that the censorship program is aimed at curtailing collective action by silencing comments that represent, reinforce, or spur social mobilization, regardless of content. Censorship is oriented toward attempting to forestall collective activities that are occurring now or may occur in the future --- and, as such, seem to clearly expose government intent.
But these issues are not logically related.
Yes, users should have complex (high entropy) passwords. No, requiring one digit and special character does not accomplish that. And no, requiring regular password changes does not accomplish that.
There is now a mountain of evidence that those ideas do the exact opposite.
"I occasionally get ads for stuff I am actually interested in."
I have seriously never understood this apology for ad-based services. You honestly like ads intruding on your workflow while you're trying to do something else? Instead of a push-messaging model, wouldn't it be better to have a pull-messaging model where, on the day you want or need X, you search for "product X" and you get a fair and objective listing of available X's on the market from which to compare?
LOL "There's never been a problem with Jews".
No, Europe has never had a problem with Jews. No one's ever accused them of being separatist, not sufficiently Christian, "doesn't integrate". No one's every been able to whip up a crowd into heinous hateful action against the Jews.
This right-wing agitprop is just racism du jour. Discouragingly, apparently it will never end. A boot stomping a human face forever.
Based on what? He's never held public office and my very-left French partner (who campaigned hard for Hillary) has been calling him "nothing but a wet noodle".
"People are realising that inheritance is not the be-all and end-all... They're realising that deep inheritance hierarchies often lead to complex code which is tricky to understand exactly what code is going to execute when..."
I'm pretty sure it was 1990 when one of my professors said, "We used to worry about spaghetti GOTOs; now we have to worry about spaghetti inheritance".
Of course you're correct about all that. But let me add some perspective to the America-firsters position, because it is, in its horrible way, at least partly consistent.
The majority of tourism dollars and employment go to the coastal, well-to-do, cosmopolitan, educated, liberal cities. The fact that alt-right anti-visitor policies are going to cripple the tourism industry isn't a bug to our regressive political thinkers; it's a feature. The fact that the coastal cities, the educated people, the cosmopolitan culture, the LBGTQ-friendly places, the colleges that receive foreign students, will be in a shambles is expressly among the things that they desire. Arguing that fact will not dissuade them; it will actually reinforce how wonderful these policies are.
Unfortunately, the "critical thinking" buzzword it itself fuzzy and does not have a fixed meaning.
To many people, disbelieving everything they are told IS critical thinking.
What people really need is logical thinking; i.e., teach logic.
Reuters version -- "applicants who have ever been present in territory controlled by the Islamic State" * (link)
Verge version -- "applicants who have ever visited ISIS-controlled territory" (link)
Parent version -- "applications from people who like to hang out with ISIS" (above)
* Comprised in the majority of citizens who were victims, prisoners, kidnapped, abused, forced slaves and wives, i.e., any brown-skinned refugees.
"It's hard to find much of a precedent for Uber's losses. Webvan and Kozmo.com—two now-defunct phantoms of the original dot-com boom—lost just over $1 billion combined in their short lifetimes. Amazon.com Inc. is famous for losing money while increasing its market value, but its biggest loss ever totaled $1.4 billion in 2000. Uber exceeded that number in 2015 and is on pace to do it again this year [2016]."
Bloomberg
It's a funny example, because I have exactly one post-it note with coding info over my desk -- the syntax to find the length of different strings & array types.
Likewise: One of my last interviews in my gaming career, an interviewer (producer) asked me to convert a string of ASCII digits to an integer value. I did happen to remember the algorithm directly from my machine architecture class (which I feel is quite memorable). Didn't believe me when I said it's actually more efficient to walk in the forwards direction through the string and multiply by 10 at each step (he maintained you had to search to the end of the string for the lowest place-value, the walk back right-to-left). I even walked through an example to show him correct result and total operations -- still didn't believe me. No job offer, left the industry.
http://www.madmath.com/2015/12/that-time-i-didnt-get-job.html
Asimov: The Feeling of Power
Well... "it has no other interpretation" is a bit strong. Capital Pi is of course used as the multiple product symbol (like capital sigma for sums).
More on-topic, lower case pi can get used for different purposes in mathematics. The one I'm most familiar with is the population proportion in statistical work.
More: Greek letters used in mathematics, et. al. (pi).
Sure, e.g., here are the first few 5-score comments from the Slashdot thread "How President Trump Could Destroy Net Neutrality" on Nov-10, 2016:
Etc., etc.
A major problem is that practically no teachers in U.S. elementary schools actually understand math (and so they teach the emergency fall-back of remember this nonsense). Education majors in the U.S. have perennially had the lowest qualifications of anyone entering college, and the highest rating for math dislike/anxiety. They're effectively self-selected for lack of mathematical understanding. I talked to a guy who used to run a middle school, and he said that he had no hope or even desire of getting math experts into the system, because they couldn't possibly be good with young kids.
There was an excellent article by Patricia Clark Kenschaft in the Notices of AMS (2005), on how she observed this functioning at both poor and wealthy schools, and concluded that most people who got math in elementary school must have some outside/home resource to make that happen. (Link)