"...realistically the best solution open to the common man is to simply vote with your dollars and leave..."
No, vote with your votes. Political organization and action are the only ways that things get changed. Not passive-aggressive silent non-purchases for a few bucks.
I'll say this: Slashdot is the only place that I ever see anyone praising/welcoming targeted ads, and I'm always mystified by it. For example, when I informed my college computer class just today that Google scans their searches, gmail, etc., for content to serve them targeted ads, the response was uniformly outright horror. Most people both (1) loathe ads, and (2) loathe the idea of companies tracking their behavior, so why anyone would expect them to like both at the same time is beyond me.
FTA: "Acevedo said that in several cases, he thinks department employees were responsible for comments that appeared on sites such as Statesman.com. Officers and civilian workers who were responsible for the comments could face disciplinary action."
Actually, I see more space in the article devoted to this item above. Smells pretty clear to me... what he really wants is to smoke out the whistleblowers, under the guise of "maybe, possibly they're impersonating officers".
I guess I feel sorry for the grandparent poster more than anything else. The guy's got at least 9 spelling/grammatical errors in his post that I could count. He's clearly a bit challenged and his employer's really taking advantage of him.
"I would love to see your reference. Every math PHD and statistics lecturer I have ever heard mention the topic has said essentially the same as I did."
Actually, since you made the positive assertion, you're the one that should provide a citation or reference for your claim.
But nontheless, consider "Strategies for Detecting Outliers in Regression Analysis: An Introductory Primer", Victoria P. Evans, Educational Research Association, 1999 -- "... under the assumption of the Gaussian normal distribution, extreme data points have the potential to occur. To reject points simply because they are extreme is essentially to reject one of the assumptions upon which the regression analysis is based." (p. 18)
Nope, certainly not how it worked at the dairy farm I worked at. Replace all the instances of "Walk out into a field. Stand around and chew on grass all day." with "Go back and get tied up inside the barn" and that's accurate.
That's a dark fucking day. Disney is the rot at the heart of America. I can totally tell the difference in other properties Disney has bought (look at what's been done with the Muppets since they bought). They had a good run, though.
Now watching X-Men: Evolution on Hulu.com, best cartoon ever.
"See, and I've worked for the Military, the State of Idaho, and currently a software company. They all required drug tests to start and the military tested regularly (nearly every month). All of the employers have in the contract that I could be tested at any time with or without reason. My current employer also states that if I am ever convicted of drug use or I test positive, that it is grounds for immediate termination. So, I'm not sure where you live; Amsterdam?"
I live in New York City. Before that, Boston. Before that, Maine. Friends in the financial/insurance industry here in NYC have never mentioned such a thing.
Maybe it's a red-state-vs-blue-state thing. I've seriously never met anyone that said they were subject to such a thing.
"Industries like technology where drug tests are used... Exactly that same sort of thing could happen to you. Let's imagine. Five years ago you tested positive for THC when a random test was required..."
I'd like to know what you're smoking.:) I've worked in agriculture, I've worked in technology, I've worked in academia. I've never been asked by any employer for a drug test. I've never had any prospective employer even suggest drug testing. I've never even *heard of any friend or aquaintance* ever being asked for a drug test by any employer.
I'm sorry that you've been convinced to let yourself be drug tested, and suffer fear from it. But you must understand that you're in a teeny-tiny minority of jobs that ask for that. Just say no.
For me, it's hard to understand because your most highly indented lines wrap off the edge of the window, back to the left margin, wrecking the indentation cues. In an IDE, it sets a limit on how many conbditions you can check before having to scroll around to see the whole function.
I used to work at a company where this was the standard and I was never fond of it.
"So, with all of that, if I were to compete in... professional auto racing (I could have done that but shunned publicity), should I compete as a woman or as a man?"
When the writer of your favorite serial entertainment departs (whether it be novels, comic books, TV, whatever), you need to, as well. Took me a long time to learn that, but: It's dead, Jim.
"Then how come on of my local citizens, who spied a thief trying to steal his car, and hit said thief over the head with a bat to stop him, was arrested by the policy *on his own property*?"
I love how crazy-ass stories like this always come with at least two typographical errors per sentence.
"Unfortunately, there still seems to be no pattern."
Bullshit. The pattern is (most simply) the number that is the circumference of a diameter-1 circle. Or various and sundry Taylor series, etc. Perhaps you mean that it does not repeat, which is a fact known since 1768.
I was actually predicting some numbnut would say that very thing, just not in the article summary itself.
"Or are researchers really skimping on data sets these days? 500ish people in one area? Seriously since when did that constitute a valid data set to base an entire population of 330m people on?"
I'll say it again: That's the single dumbest thing you can say about polling results.
"But, even in something like a math course, open textbooks run into the "staleness" issue. That is, students do the assignments or tests and then the solutions are passed on to the next year's students. Publishers do quite a bit of work to change problems. Do not underestimate the amount of work and editing/QA involved in such an effort... If you think students are lazy these days, you should see the instructors. They demand new end-of-chapter problems, new quizzes, new tests. And they want it all automatically graded electronically. This can't be delivered by open textbooks."
While the first part of your post has some merit, as a college math instructor, this latter part is a somewhat silly critique. Personally, I use Pearson Education's TestGen application heavily. It has test bank question templates, and with one-click it can randomize all the numbers in a specific question. I do this in general on all the tests/quizzes every semester. There's no reason that an open-source application couldn't do the same for math/science tests. I don't care if the book homework answers are available -- in fact, I require my students to check their work against answers in the back before submission for immediate feedback.
Re: "If you think students are lazy these days, you should see the instructors." A defense: Consider that the trend is to replace tenured faculty with part-time adjunct help at much reduced wages. Prior to my current position, in another state, I was making about $20/hour teaching college (counting just in-class time and a similar amount of prep/grading/paperwork time outside; the first semester I was actually working x5 longer to get up to speed). Any additional time spent only reduces my hourly rate, and there's no guarantee for an adjunct that they'll get re-hired for any work (prep time, lecture notes, lab and assignment design) to be reusable in the future. There's court case precedent that adjuncts have no right to overtime pay.
Granted that, for my fellow adjunct's sake, if they're going to be dropped into new classes on the fly with no overtime and no job security, I certainly encourage as much resource/supplement help as possible so they're not totally being abused by the job. They're not lazy, they're scurrying between multiple schools trying to make enough money to live on, and their time is already completely consumed. But in general I don't see that the books or resources need to be updated as frequently as they are (esp. for math, since you called it out in particular); that part is a publisher's racket.
This Is Stupid Even For Idle
on
4-H Prom
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· Score: 1
This is pretty fucking stupid, and just displays the poster's vast ignorance of life outside his basement. Do you know how many tens of thousands of pictures like this are taken at county fairs every year?
Next up: How about we post a picture of a guy smiling next to his computer. Caption: "Look who this guy is boning!"
(Actually... that's not funny, it's kind of mostly true.)
Slashdot Mirror
"...realistically the best solution open to the common man is to simply vote with your dollars and leave..."
No, vote with your votes. Political organization and action are the only ways that things get changed. Not passive-aggressive silent non-purchases for a few bucks.
I'll say this: Slashdot is the only place that I ever see anyone praising/welcoming targeted ads, and I'm always mystified by it. For example, when I informed my college computer class just today that Google scans their searches, gmail, etc., for content to serve them targeted ads, the response was uniformly outright horror. Most people both (1) loathe ads, and (2) loathe the idea of companies tracking their behavior, so why anyone would expect them to like both at the same time is beyond me.
When the original post uses a definite article, "THE classic science-fiction show", that implies that there can be only one.
That's all I've got.
"I'm so not a maths geek, but why is this useful other than being able to say 'hey, we found the first trillion congruent numbers'?"
I came here expecting to see this question, and was not disappointed.
The answer is: "For the same reason that people do crack."
Seriously. www.angrymath.com
FTA: "Acevedo said that in several cases, he thinks department employees were responsible for comments that appeared on sites such as Statesman.com. Officers and civilian workers who were responsible for the comments could face disciplinary action."
Actually, I see more space in the article devoted to this item above. Smells pretty clear to me... what he really wants is to smoke out the whistleblowers, under the guise of "maybe, possibly they're impersonating officers".
I guess I feel sorry for the grandparent poster more than anything else. The guy's got at least 9 spelling/grammatical errors in his post that I could count. He's clearly a bit challenged and his employer's really taking advantage of him.
Overheard in a subway car...
Friend A: "My god, I can't believe I'm turning 20 tomorrow."
Friend B: "Yeah, man, double digits, wow."
"I would love to see your reference. Every math PHD and statistics lecturer I have ever heard mention the topic has said essentially the same as I did."
Actually, since you made the positive assertion, you're the one that should provide a citation or reference for your claim.
But nontheless, consider "Strategies for Detecting Outliers in Regression Analysis: An Introductory Primer", Victoria P. Evans, Educational Research Association, 1999 -- "... under the assumption of the Gaussian normal distribution, extreme data points have the potential to occur. To reject points simply because they are extreme is essentially to reject one of the assumptions upon which the regression analysis is based." (p. 18)
http://www.eric.ed.gov/ERICDocs/data/ericdocs2sql/content_storage_01/0000019b/80/17/48/4a.pdf
"Like all such measures, any value beyond 3 standard deviations is an outlier and can not be considered accurate."
That's completely not true. College lecturer in statistics at CUNY here.
Nope, certainly not how it worked at the dairy farm I worked at. Replace all the instances of "Walk out into a field. Stand around and chew on grass all day." with "Go back and get tied up inside the barn" and that's accurate.
The very last line in the linked article:
"An unreleased follow-up study by Melzer reveals another undesirable result: that violent play can negatively impact a player's opinion of a brand."
http://www.technologyreview.com/business/23336/page2/
"Or are you one of the Slashdot socialists..."
Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?
That's a dark fucking day. Disney is the rot at the heart of America. I can totally tell the difference in other properties Disney has bought (look at what's been done with the Muppets since they bought). They had a good run, though.
Now watching X-Men: Evolution on Hulu.com, best cartoon ever.
Sometimes, it's not just about fun: http://deltasdnd.blogspot.com/2009/05/its-not-just-about-fun.html
"See, and I've worked for the Military, the State of Idaho, and currently a software company. They all required drug tests to start and the military tested regularly (nearly every month). All of the employers have in the contract that I could be tested at any time with or without reason. My current employer also states that if I am ever convicted of drug use or I test positive, that it is grounds for immediate termination. So, I'm not sure where you live; Amsterdam?"
I live in New York City. Before that, Boston. Before that, Maine. Friends in the financial/insurance industry here in NYC have never mentioned such a thing.
Maybe it's a red-state-vs-blue-state thing. I've seriously never met anyone that said they were subject to such a thing.
"Industries like technology where drug tests are used... Exactly that same sort of thing could happen to you. Let's imagine. Five years ago you tested positive for THC when a random test was required..."
I'd like to know what you're smoking. :) I've worked in agriculture, I've worked in technology, I've worked in academia. I've never been asked by any employer for a drug test. I've never had any prospective employer even suggest drug testing. I've never even *heard of any friend or aquaintance* ever being asked for a drug test by any employer.
I'm sorry that you've been convinced to let yourself be drug tested, and suffer fear from it. But you must understand that you're in a teeny-tiny minority of jobs that ask for that. Just say no.
"How is this so hard to understand?"
For me, it's hard to understand because your most highly indented lines wrap off the edge of the window, back to the left margin, wrecking the indentation cues. In an IDE, it sets a limit on how many conbditions you can check before having to scroll around to see the whole function.
I used to work at a company where this was the standard and I was never fond of it.
"So, with all of that, if I were to compete in... professional auto racing (I could have done that but shunned publicity), should I compete as a woman or as a man?"
Aren't all auto racing leagues mixed-gender?
When the writer of your favorite serial entertainment departs (whether it be novels, comic books, TV, whatever), you need to, as well. Took me a long time to learn that, but: It's dead, Jim.
"Then how come on of my local citizens, who spied a thief trying to steal his car, and hit said thief over the head with a bat to stop him, was arrested by the policy *on his own property*?"
I love how crazy-ass stories like this always come with at least two typographical errors per sentence.
"Unfortunately, there still seems to be no pattern."
Bullshit. The pattern is (most simply) the number that is the circumference of a diameter-1 circle. Or various and sundry Taylor series, etc. Perhaps you mean that it does not repeat, which is a fact known since 1768.
I was actually predicting some numbnut would say that very thing, just not in the article summary itself.
"Or are researchers really skimping on data sets these days? 500ish people in one area? Seriously since when did that constitute a valid data set to base an entire population of 330m people on?"
I'll say it again: That's the single dumbest thing you can say about polling results.
http://angrymath.blogspot.com/2009/02/interpreting-polls-angrymath-meditation.html
"But, even in something like a math course, open textbooks run into the "staleness" issue. That is, students do the assignments or tests and then the solutions are passed on to the next year's students. Publishers do quite a bit of work to change problems. Do not underestimate the amount of work and editing/QA involved in such an effort... If you think students are lazy these days, you should see the instructors. They demand new end-of-chapter problems, new quizzes, new tests. And they want it all automatically graded electronically. This can't be delivered by open textbooks."
While the first part of your post has some merit, as a college math instructor, this latter part is a somewhat silly critique. Personally, I use Pearson Education's TestGen application heavily. It has test bank question templates, and with one-click it can randomize all the numbers in a specific question. I do this in general on all the tests/quizzes every semester. There's no reason that an open-source application couldn't do the same for math/science tests. I don't care if the book homework answers are available -- in fact, I require my students to check their work against answers in the back before submission for immediate feedback.
Re: "If you think students are lazy these days, you should see the instructors." A defense: Consider that the trend is to replace tenured faculty with part-time adjunct help at much reduced wages. Prior to my current position, in another state, I was making about $20/hour teaching college (counting just in-class time and a similar amount of prep/grading/paperwork time outside; the first semester I was actually working x5 longer to get up to speed). Any additional time spent only reduces my hourly rate, and there's no guarantee for an adjunct that they'll get re-hired for any work (prep time, lecture notes, lab and assignment design) to be reusable in the future. There's court case precedent that adjuncts have no right to overtime pay.
Granted that, for my fellow adjunct's sake, if they're going to be dropped into new classes on the fly with no overtime and no job security, I certainly encourage as much resource/supplement help as possible so they're not totally being abused by the job. They're not lazy, they're scurrying between multiple schools trying to make enough money to live on, and their time is already completely consumed. But in general I don't see that the books or resources need to be updated as frequently as they are (esp. for math, since you called it out in particular); that part is a publisher's racket.
This is pretty fucking stupid, and just displays the poster's vast ignorance of life outside his basement. Do you know how many tens of thousands of pictures like this are taken at county fairs every year?
Next up: How about we post a picture of a guy smiling next to his computer. Caption: "Look who this guy is boning!"
(Actually... that's not funny, it's kind of mostly true.)