The underlying mechanism here is a way to record actions for later playback. Combine that with multithreading and it provides side-by-side scripting. Various shell environments provide different levels of keystroke recording for playback, for instance in a kiosk mode for demos. As somebody said, this is by no means new - I think there were teletype games with similar features.
How many levels of replication are possible? It would be pretty cool to clone an army of yourself through a few levels of binary replication. Can you save the recorded scripts to use under different circumstances?
I'm confused. Why are we discussing depictions of education in Star Trek as though they actually indicate anything?
I used it as a single example and people replied. I guess I struck a nerve. The point is that imaginative fiction like Star Trek speculates wildly on all sorts of aspects of human civilization. Star Trek in particular isn't about what the future is going to be like, but about issues current since the 60's. They speculate on all sorts of transformative technology like universal translators, subspace communicators, transporters and on and on - and yet from the original series up through the recent movie they never considered any style of education aside from the academy. For instance, why not create a school on the holodeck? One answer might be that all the creative individuals associated with Star Trek over the years recognize that students benefit from actual human contact.
Regarding the rest of your comments, there are increasingly more alternative college options, e.g.: http://www.evergreen.edu/, http://www.pitzer.edu/ or http://hampshire.edu/ There's nothing wrong with appropriate use of technology, but one has reason to be skeptical of corporate motivations when discussing the future of educational institutions.
Most of your response does not address my original posts at all.
A rather limited point of view to assign "original" thoughts to one's own post, and to rate everybody else's as derivative.
Me: How does one discern the goodness of a community?
Arbitrarily. Here's one metric: where can I go to get a physics question answered? Who will answer my physics question fastest and in most detail? I don't think I will find the fastest answer at a university [online or not].
No, you'll simply learn how to answer the question for yourself.
But by all means blog about it after class.
That's some smug attitude you got there
Thanks for demonstrating my point. I wasn't attempting to be smug. Lots of good blogs out there. It would be best if these weren't written during class, and you'll have more to say after class than before. One can infer other's motivations much better in person than online.
I've replied to this thread a few too many times already. I guess I'm taking umbrage at Scott McNealy attempting to undermine the universities - already under severe attack from the lunatic fringe.
Are the best communities the product of local universities or the global village?
How does one discern the goodness of a community? Obviously most here (excluding trolls) value online communities for a range of purposes and filling various niches. The universities have been engaged with network issues since long before there was a network. One of the first uses of the Trans-Atlantic cable in the 19th century was to transmit astronomical telegrams between academic colleagues on either side of the ocean. Online community building has an entire academic cottage industry. I'm chair of an international working group that uses mailing lists, wikis, web sites, skype, etc. to coordinate our activites - but we still meet face-to-face every few months.
Education is a deeply human activity. Even - perhaps especially - tech-oriented subjects benefit from the immediate and committed engagement with other minds. Online forums can imitate this interaction, but can't realize it completely. The article's premise that convenience will win out over fidelity is exactly backwards. It is far more convenient to commit to learning in a classroom with a competent teacher and serious (enough) fellow students - especially if the class size is appropriate to the discussion at hand. Simulating this with poorly placed camera angles and microphones that cut out or with (God forbid) expert systems on the web so degrades the experience as to turn it into an entirely different activity.
This rather tepid article is likely not worth much attention, but it's good for some Sunday morning philosophizing. The premise is that 1) access to content is either high fidelity or high convenience, and that 2) there is an unfilled niche at the high convenience end of the spectrum. This is coming from a purveyor of high cost "enabling" technology.
The first point is rather blatantly obvious. The second appears to be out of touch with current trends. There already are multiple channels to access higher education. In fact, if you don't care about the degree this is the golden age of access to inexpensive and high quality educational opportunities. If you do care about a degree, consider a local community college before corporate vendors like the University of Phoenix. The latter is by no means a cheap degree, BTW.
But the article doesn't address the real question of accreditation. How is a degree from such a "high convenience" vendor going to be worth any more than the same degree from an online diploma factory? It is also naive to think that free curriculum will just appear in a usable form. The internet is full of free access to certain documents - and is completely devoid of free access to other content. A highly skilled practitioner of whatever field is necessary to organize both free and proprietary information into a usable curriculum. What will their motivation be to do this work for free?
The biggest problem is the suggestion that a college campus is "inconvenient". Rather a campus experience is orthogonal to the notion of convenience or inconvenience. Spending four years sequestered with a laptop on your parents' couch is not more convenient - it is merely creepy. College is about experiencing the world and encountering new people, places, ideas and opportunities. You won't find these at home with Judge Judy haranguing a dead-beat dad in the background.
try to find a localized group that can compete with Undernet's #math for opportunities to talk about advanced math. I doubt one exists in the world; I certainly wouldn't expect to find one at arbitrary university.
The internet is at every university already. Campus denizens are overrepresented in many/most/all online forums. It isn't a question of one or the other, but rather of maximizing the benefit from both styles of communication.
Regarding further examples of subjects difficult to convey over the internet, a friend and I taught each other to juggle in grad school. Not only would it be hard to learn such a skill from even the best juggling website (there are many), but the soul of juggling is in passing balls and clubs between partners. This is an example where internet forums are a supplement to local expertise, e.g., http://www.juggling.org/ which evolved out of a pre-web resource. To tie this to academia, I even met Claude Shannon at a campus juggling event: http://www.juggle.org/history/archives/jugmags/34-2/34-2,p20.htm
I'm proctoring a test a week from now. We will check every student's ID. [...] Other people have mentioned actual in-class instruction being useless. As my students are getting ready to take their test, one of the main things I'm noticing is that I can't provide enough one-on-one instruction.
Exactly. Distance learning is most appropriate for those courses that are viable as huge lecture sections where IDs matter. Small classes allow the teacher to get to know the students as individuals. Of course, large lecture classes suffer from their own abrupt shortcomings.
Most of my meetings these days are telecons with South America. Even though the team knows each other well, and even though we have well-assigned roles in the larger project, a telecon is a peculiarly limited medium for communication. Some of this can be improved via better technology, but the human factors would make even a Star Wars quality hologram less than ideal. Of most note a remote meeting or class immediately terminates at the end of the hour. No benefit is realized from follow-on conversations or arguments or trips to the library or gym or lab.
Returning to the business context, David Packard (and others) preached "management by walking around". Imagine translating this to a remote paradigm. Not only would the telepresence technology delete all the positive human contact available through such an approach, it would add a severe whiff of big brother to each cubical into which the boss could suddenly appear remotely.
Starfleet Academy is just the US Naval Academy, adapted for space. Hogwart's is an idealized version of a British school for upper-class pinheads. I don't know how you draw a connection between these and real life.
The authors of such books and the directors of such movies are neither spacemen nor sorcerers. It is an explicit decision to model such dramatic schools against familiar analogues. Each of these fictional universes demonstrates vast imaginative variances from reality in other regards. It is perhaps even more significant what the creators of those universes chose not to embroider. In one way or another this says something about the limits of imagination.
There will never be a real Hogwarts. There already is an Astronauts Academy, whether known by that name or not - in fact, there are several. I would be surprised to find if any of these - now or in the future - were to be conducted remotely. Some education warrants physical travel.
As others have pointed out, this capability has already been embraced by higher education for certain coursework and certain students. It works well for professional certification activities, for instance, where mature students are pursuing specific aims. I took a graduate engineering course with full time students in the classroom and Raytheon engineers connecting via video from their own campus. Tests were remote, but lab exercises required they travel to the campus.
I have been responsible for remote observing capabilities at an astronomical observatory. Astronomers often take very large datasets using fancy cameras with numerous quirky controls. (The controls for the Hubble Space Telescope are at the Space Telescope Science Institute on Earth.) The technology for operating these remotely has been available for 20 years or more - especially given recent advances in network bandwidth. Except for certain niches, however, astronomers still choose to travel to remote mountaintops. There are the advantages of being physically present with the equipment and the staff - and there are also the logistical questions of NOT being present on your college campus and having to get up the following morning to teach your regular courseload.
Conferences are another similar situation. I've attended and been involved in organizing numerous conferences. The one next month is 14 timezones away. Hundreds of people will still make the trip because of the value of talking to people face-to-face, and especially the value of talking to many people simultaneously face-to-face. Video links are also terrible at providing lucky chances for unplanned conversations. I can't count the number of productive partnerships that have germinated over a stale lunch and a cold beer in between sessions.
Consider the Star Fleet Academy (or Hogwarts or the Isle of Roke). If ever there was a situation ripe for distance learning, that is it - and yet through several movies and TV series, book after book, the academy is depicted as a physical location shared by students from diverse planets - literally of every color... One might say that this is a failure of imagination of B-list sci-fi authors. It is perhaps more accurate to say that there is a requirement for a certain level of similar drama from the educational institutions that actually exist today.
The final point is that the business model demands that such distance learning evolves from the brick-and-mortar campuses, not from some entrepreneur with a limited vision. "Customers" (students and their parents) select colleges for many reasons. The expense and the awkwardness of travel are part of the positive factors involved in making the decision. For niche markets the customers will seek value based on brutal economic decisions. For most full-time undergrads, however, the adventure is the whole point. Not much adventure in a videogame education.
Orbitals are not real ! They are mathematical constructs and they are not observables. People think that just because you can calculate something it is real, that is not the case.
That a derived quantity is "just" a calculated approximate model of some part of the universe doesn't mean it isn't real. Forget about orbitals and quantum mechanics, consider planetary orbits and classical mechanics. There is no such thing as a closed elliptical orbit as depicted in the textbooks. All orbits are unclosed.
Physics IS building models. Models are real even if they are incomplete:
It may not be Buzz, but it shares the quality of physical existence with him. (And Buzz is himself not the man he was on the Moon.) The absurdity of Moon-landing deniers lies in the fact that each and every one of us spends our entire life embedded in outer space. Where else would be be? The evolving Earth is far more special a place than just another desiccated Moon.
It has been more fun than usual to read through these comments. A few observations:
Why? is a placeholder for all other questions. In some formal sense, a why question is always badly formed. Imagine sitting on the witness stand and a lawyer tossing such a question of motivation at you. Often the only correct answer is "I don't understand the question". If one is asked, "Did you stab him?", the answer will be one of fact. If asked, "Why did you stab him?", the question is either fallacious - assuming facts not in evidence - or is superfluous.
Why is the sky blue? Ask rather, "Is the sky blue?"
More generally, such a line of questioning reveals a rush to a solution before the problem has been properly posed. "Look at the monkey!" (when pointing at an ape) is not an opportunity for derision, but for refining the problem into a more appropriate form. One might ask in return, "Is that a monkey?" or "What is a monkey?" These questions can then lead to an exploration of taxonomy or semantics or evolution or reading recommendations. (See J. Diamond's "Third Ape" or R. Dawkins' "Ancestor's Tale")
Someone suggested the uselessness of knowledge about cirrus clouds. Cirrus clouds are high altitude ice clouds. Weather fronts arrive as a high altitude wedge of air, forming cirrus. The ability to recognize cirrus clouds is the ability to predict tomorrow's weather.
Someone was wondering about where the "energy" comes from for magnets. Magnets are rather held together (or pushed apart) by electromagnetic forces. Magnets are indeed weird and wonderful, but the more basic issue is distinguishing between the concepts of force (pushing and pushing back), energy (the ability to perform work) and power (the rate that work is being accomplished). A refrigerator magnet will hold up little Johnie's third grade artwork for years without ever expending any energy.
"Where do babies come from?" has been beaten to death, but the underlying facts of sexual reproduction haven't been mentioned at all. Sex is only one form of reproduction - it has been reinvented many times throughout the history of life on earth. Only in mammals and some other species does sex determination have anything to do with X and Y chromosomes. Consider a species that reproduces asexually. What does it mean to call this a species? Species are often delimited by the question of interbreeding. If two amoebas never "do it", what does it mean to assert they belong to the same classification?
Rainbows form when light is refracted through raindrops (http://www.rebeccapaton.net/rainbows/rnbwbmp.gif). Which color is on top? Real rainbows are often doubled (http://billi-jean.com/images/lj/0607/rainbow2.jpg). The secondary rainbow has inverted colors. Rainbows aren't just a sequence of colors in any event - interference fringes form on the indigo side (inside in one case and outside in the other). And the region between the two rainbows is darkened since those are the light rays that were refracted to create the rainbows.
Science is a state of mind. (To borrow a line from Jerzy Kosinski.)
Only in the US can someone burn themselves stupidly with coffee, and blame McDonalds for giving them coffee that hot...
McDonald's didn't get sued only because of scalding hot coffee. They got sued because they sold said coffee in a container that failed - and to an elderly patron at the drive-up window.
Presumably the point here is that America is litigious. But not all lawyers are created equal, and while personal injury lawyers may have their own negative impacts on society, they do represent the little guy against the corporations. Patent lawyers (at least, these days) tend to represent the narrowly conceived self-interest of corporations against each other (or against humanity in general).
Also consider the result of a successful suit. If a personal injury lawsuit is settled in favor of the plaintiff, the defendant is quite likely to modify their business practices to avoid future lawsuits. For example, McDonald's might start handing out coffee in doubled cups at the drive-up window. If a patent lawsuit is successful, however, the defendant may have to drastically modify their business model. More to the point, other entities are similarly enjoined from using the patented technology. If Burger King conducts a drive-up coffee review (as they should) after McDonald's loses the case, BK can choose a completely different mitigation strategy. If one of these XML cases succeeds, however, the result of a broadly conceived decision might be to completely kill XML as a viable technology.
I said: This isn't a solution, it's a self-centered kludge. A solution might have been to lobby strenuously for the abolition of software techniques or for the reform of how they are granted in the U.S.
Make that "abolition of patents on software techniques", although eliminating software entirely might be a more elegant solution...
This isn't a solution, it's a self-centered kludge. A solution might have been to lobby strenuously for the abolition of software techniques or for the reform of how they are granted in the U.S.
Note also that the word "solution" (what Microsoft is in the business of selling) appears exactly twice in that memo. The other mention is about TrueType fonts - a solution developed by another company and presumably used through the grace of a patent exchange.
All games are about breaking the rules. Smart games take this into account and one of the rules is to permit bending the rules.
The essence of poker is to discern tells. The point of pinball is to almost tilt. The gimmick with bricks is to get the ball bouncing to destroy the wall from behind, not to knock down one block at a time. And a modern game that is completely missing the experience of pure exploration (or demented play) demonstrated by Laurie Anderson's Puppet Motel or the Residents' Freak Show (or the Dazzleoids, for that matter, from the Voyager era), can't be much of a game.
Winning is most definitely not the point of playing.
Languages are shaped by cognitive cost. This is what Steven Pinker seems not to get.
Perhaps Pinker (and the rest of us) would get it if you explained what you mean directly, rather than by analogy with Lempel-Ziv.
Burrows-Wheeler would make a better analogy anyway. (Or how about Roberts' Subtractive Dither?)
One of the key insights on language is that Lempel-Ziv compression never transmits the compression dictionary. The dictionary is implied because the compression program and the decompression program share the same dictionary construction heuristic. This is a trick you can pull off only if the two sides of the channel share the same cognitive architecture.
Um - how about redundancy in engineering? Two vendors can build to fit the same requirements (as with the space shuttle computers). What needs to be shared is the external physical model, not the internal architecture. I gather this is what you dislike about Pinker - or rather about Pinker's popular books explaining general concepts of current thinking about language.
Or are you really asserting that when H. sapiens finally meets Marvin the Martian that about all we'll manage to convey is, "Say what?!?"
News for Nerds? The comments appear almost identical to what one would read from any forum other than slashdot - one-third raging right-winger rants about the welfare state, one-third left-wing rants about the social causes of the problem, one-third insults directed at the media. I count just two posters pointing to what seems to be the original source material (http://www.respect.gov.uk/members/article.aspx?id=8678) and maybe a half dozen total (~2%) replies to those messages.
When composing a reply to such articles, people - rather than defending preset opinions about this issue, how about digging up the actual proposal and critiquing it on its merits? This appears to be an extension of some "child protective services" program. What's the alternative to society supporting some form of CPS? CPS already has authority to take your kids away pending judicial review - is that not more draconian than providing at-risk families the choice (apparently) to move into a closely monitored housing unit? How that monitoring occurs is a separate issue - too often technology is seen as a low cost alternative to hiring police or caseworkers.
On the other side of the question, there is a statement of expanding what already seems to be a pilot program to extend to 20,000 "units". (I would refer to these as households, but have no evidence to suggest they function as such.) Presumably each residence has multiple cameras, so this may amount to a few hundred thousand 24/7 camera feeds. Who is going to watch all those cameras? If the data are to be recorded, for how long will the data be archived? This is a huge ongoing expense and describes a job that few qualified people would be willing to take. How will the cameras be protected? Cameras in a house are going to be within reach of the inhabitants to tamper with - or simply repoint to leave rooms or hallways unmonitored. Will there be audio? Will the cameras pan and zoom? Will there be cameras in the bedrooms and bathrooms? Who is going to protect the at-risk children from predators behind the cameras?
Topics on slashdot are not necessarily different than topics on mainstream forums. What distinguishes slashdot from other forums is the quality and point-of-view of the comments. A discussion about our pet topics will often be illuminating and insightful. We should bring the same intellectual rigor to the broader issues facing society.
We have a long way to go before using 30% of earth's surface.
I guess I should be more explicit about the exponential growth of population:
The Earth's biomass scorecard stands at 1900 gigatonnes of carbon. Human flesh is about 18% carbon. Plug the numbers in for exponential growth, and we find that the mass of human flesh will equal the mass of all life on Earth in just 960 years. (I assumed an average human weight of 30 kg, e.g., 67 lbs.)
The mass of the Earth itself is 6x10^24 kg. Plug the numbers in - The mass of human flesh will equal the mass of the Earth in 2700 years. A few millennia more and the mass of human flesh equals the mass of the entire universe - so much for a space-based solution.
The point isn't that we will reach these absurd limits - the point is precisely that we can be sure that we won't. The implication is that something most definitely will change in the next millennium - and it won't be the mathematics. Slowing down compound interest is a vain hope - even a 0.1% growth rate will lead to "peak human" scenarios no less dire within a few centuries.
Our problems were created on Earth and our problems will be solved on Earth.
the amount of densely used areas of earth as a ratio of earth size is very small.
when all the land is packed. there is still the oceans which is what 70% of earth.
We have a long way to go before using 30% of earth's surface.
The paper uses a simulation of likely ET behavior to work back to predictions about constraints on ET prevalence. It is disquieting enough to entertain your suggestion that the human species will (and should) fill Earth up completely - land and sea - but to have any pertinence to the discussion, we would have to ascribe these same corrupt and naively self-centered motivations to all other species.
My point remains to emphasize the importance of the vast separation between stellar systems. Explorers may (I certainly hope will) cross interplanetary and even interstellar distances to nearby stars. Mass travel (even by the proxy of autonomous robotic probes) is orders of magnitude more difficult. Long distance travel - even by proxy - piles completely unwarranted motivational assumptions on top of the daunting technical challenges. The authors, for instance, assume probes capable of autonomous operations for 0.1 Gy and capable of leaving a cosmic post-it note that will survive similarly as long.
Quality of life is more important than quantity of life.
Humanity does not, in the end, grow exponentially.
Only about 1/7 of nations are flat or declining (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_population_growth_rate). It seems unwarranted therefore to discount the 6/7 that are growing as some statistical anomaly. The population of the top 1/7 is doubling at the hellacious rate of about every quarter century.
Wealthy developed nations hit a minimal/no growth point... Developed country after developed country keeps hitting this wall, where the birthrate drops to or below maintenance rate.
You mean developed nations like Moldova, Micronesia and Montenegro? Even the Vatican City is managing a maintenance rate:-)
America stands apart from this, for the time, due largely to immigration.
The U.S. sits comfortably in the middle of the range with many other countries - they can't all be growing due to immigration. North America - as developed a region of the world as any could wish - is well above China, the country with the world's most draconian population policies. Even so, China is growing at a rate to continue to double every century.
However, a good extreme example of this trend is Japan.
Japan is trending just slightly negative at -0.14% Aside from the former Axis powers, one would be hard-pressed to characterize the countries with flat (or very slightly downward) population as "developed". Many are sad and still recovering former Soviet satellites. Extrapolating the small list of current ZPG candidates into a worldwide trend that will halt population growth worldwide half a century from now (and then in perpetuity) is wishful thinking.
The goal is to spawn self-replicating colonies...suppose by the year 2200 we can do it for the GDP equivalent of an aircraft carrier and its support fleet
Why? Who would fund this on Earth or any other planet? What is the economic incentive?
If it was going to have happened, it should already have happened.
Assuming it is both a possible and sufficiently desirable scenario.
The fact that it hasn't happened is an indication that we're the first.
No - it's an indication that the universe is very very large. The gap between hospitable way stations is too large to easily cross. To infer an absence of neighbors from the lack of rusting hulks visible from the road only makes sense if the time necessary to cover the mean distance to the next homestead is shorter than the time for the rust to completely consume all trace of the Oldsmobile that Granny and Jed arrived in.
To get back on topic, it is irrelevant if shipping "excess" humans off-world can solve overpopulation. What is relevant is that the mechanism of exponential growth could potentially allow an entire galaxy to be settled in a (relatively) timely fashion. The result may not be pretty, with a multitude of overpopulated worlds, but it is possible nonetheless.
It is not irrelevant. The assumption here is that we will somehow curb our Malthusian growth planetside, but indulge ourselves from world-to-world. The bottleneck in settling new worlds (even if technically feasible) ensures that the spread of human and non-human species - and their attendant civilizations - will be thoroughly quenched.
The real issue here is that the authors assume that each visit from a probe leaves evidence persisting for a million or even a hundred million years. One can only think that they borrowed this from Kubrick's 2001, because even geological features can become obscured over such timescales. There is also the small question of a multitude of species inevitably developing technology (and the cultural will) sufficient to build probes that will maintain themselves for millions of years in interstellar space far from a source of energy.
Slashdot Mirror
The underlying mechanism here is a way to record actions for later playback. Combine that with multithreading and it provides side-by-side scripting. Various shell environments provide different levels of keystroke recording for playback, for instance in a kiosk mode for demos. As somebody said, this is by no means new - I think there were teletype games with similar features.
How many levels of replication are possible? It would be pretty cool to clone an army of yourself through a few levels of binary replication. Can you save the recorded scripts to use under different circumstances?
I'm confused. Why are we discussing depictions of education in Star Trek as though they actually indicate anything?
I used it as a single example and people replied. I guess I struck a nerve. The point is that imaginative fiction like Star Trek speculates wildly on all sorts of aspects of human civilization. Star Trek in particular isn't about what the future is going to be like, but about issues current since the 60's. They speculate on all sorts of transformative technology like universal translators, subspace communicators, transporters and on and on - and yet from the original series up through the recent movie they never considered any style of education aside from the academy. For instance, why not create a school on the holodeck? One answer might be that all the creative individuals associated with Star Trek over the years recognize that students benefit from actual human contact.
Regarding the rest of your comments, there are increasingly more alternative college options, e.g.: http://www.evergreen.edu/, http://www.pitzer.edu/ or http://hampshire.edu/ There's nothing wrong with appropriate use of technology, but one has reason to be skeptical of corporate motivations when discussing the future of educational institutions.
Most of your response does not address my original posts at all.
A rather limited point of view to assign "original" thoughts to one's own post, and to rate everybody else's as derivative.
Me: How does one discern the goodness of a community?
Arbitrarily. Here's one metric: where can I go to get a physics question answered? Who will answer my physics question fastest and in most detail? I don't think I will find the fastest answer at a university [online or not].
No, you'll simply learn how to answer the question for yourself.
But by all means blog about it after class.
That's some smug attitude you got there
Thanks for demonstrating my point. I wasn't attempting to be smug. Lots of good blogs out there. It would be best if these weren't written during class, and you'll have more to say after class than before. One can infer other's motivations much better in person than online.
I've replied to this thread a few too many times already. I guess I'm taking umbrage at Scott McNealy attempting to undermine the universities - already under severe attack from the lunatic fringe.
Are the best communities the product of local universities or the global village?
How does one discern the goodness of a community? Obviously most here (excluding trolls) value online communities for a range of purposes and filling various niches. The universities have been engaged with network issues since long before there was a network. One of the first uses of the Trans-Atlantic cable in the 19th century was to transmit astronomical telegrams between academic colleagues on either side of the ocean. Online community building has an entire academic cottage industry. I'm chair of an international working group that uses mailing lists, wikis, web sites, skype, etc. to coordinate our activites - but we still meet face-to-face every few months.
Education is a deeply human activity. Even - perhaps especially - tech-oriented subjects benefit from the immediate and committed engagement with other minds. Online forums can imitate this interaction, but can't realize it completely. The article's premise that convenience will win out over fidelity is exactly backwards. It is far more convenient to commit to learning in a classroom with a competent teacher and serious (enough) fellow students - especially if the class size is appropriate to the discussion at hand. Simulating this with poorly placed camera angles and microphones that cut out or with (God forbid) expert systems on the web so degrades the experience as to turn it into an entirely different activity.
But by all means blog about it after class.
This rather tepid article is likely not worth much attention, but it's good for some Sunday morning philosophizing. The premise is that 1) access to content is either high fidelity or high convenience, and that 2) there is an unfilled niche at the high convenience end of the spectrum. This is coming from a purveyor of high cost "enabling" technology.
The first point is rather blatantly obvious. The second appears to be out of touch with current trends. There already are multiple channels to access higher education. In fact, if you don't care about the degree this is the golden age of access to inexpensive and high quality educational opportunities. If you do care about a degree, consider a local community college before corporate vendors like the University of Phoenix. The latter is by no means a cheap degree, BTW.
But the article doesn't address the real question of accreditation. How is a degree from such a "high convenience" vendor going to be worth any more than the same degree from an online diploma factory? It is also naive to think that free curriculum will just appear in a usable form. The internet is full of free access to certain documents - and is completely devoid of free access to other content. A highly skilled practitioner of whatever field is necessary to organize both free and proprietary information into a usable curriculum. What will their motivation be to do this work for free?
The biggest problem is the suggestion that a college campus is "inconvenient". Rather a campus experience is orthogonal to the notion of convenience or inconvenience. Spending four years sequestered with a laptop on your parents' couch is not more convenient - it is merely creepy. College is about experiencing the world and encountering new people, places, ideas and opportunities. You won't find these at home with Judge Judy haranguing a dead-beat dad in the background.
try to find a localized group that can compete with Undernet's #math for opportunities to talk about advanced math. I doubt one exists in the world; I certainly wouldn't expect to find one at arbitrary university.
The internet is at every university already. Campus denizens are overrepresented in many/most/all online forums. It isn't a question of one or the other, but rather of maximizing the benefit from both styles of communication.
Regarding further examples of subjects difficult to convey over the internet, a friend and I taught each other to juggle in grad school. Not only would it be hard to learn such a skill from even the best juggling website (there are many), but the soul of juggling is in passing balls and clubs between partners. This is an example where internet forums are a supplement to local expertise, e.g., http://www.juggling.org/ which evolved out of a pre-web resource. To tie this to academia, I even met Claude Shannon at a campus juggling event: http://www.juggle.org/history/archives/jugmags/34-2/34-2,p20.htm
I'm proctoring a test a week from now. We will check every student's ID. [...] Other people have mentioned actual in-class instruction being useless. As my students are getting ready to take their test, one of the main things I'm noticing is that I can't provide enough one-on-one instruction.
Exactly. Distance learning is most appropriate for those courses that are viable as huge lecture sections where IDs matter. Small classes allow the teacher to get to know the students as individuals. Of course, large lecture classes suffer from their own abrupt shortcomings.
Most of my meetings these days are telecons with South America. Even though the team knows each other well, and even though we have well-assigned roles in the larger project, a telecon is a peculiarly limited medium for communication. Some of this can be improved via better technology, but the human factors would make even a Star Wars quality hologram less than ideal. Of most note a remote meeting or class immediately terminates at the end of the hour. No benefit is realized from follow-on conversations or arguments or trips to the library or gym or lab.
Returning to the business context, David Packard (and others) preached "management by walking around". Imagine translating this to a remote paradigm. Not only would the telepresence technology delete all the positive human contact available through such an approach, it would add a severe whiff of big brother to each cubical into which the boss could suddenly appear remotely.
Starfleet Academy is just the US Naval Academy, adapted for space. Hogwart's is an idealized version of a British school for upper-class pinheads. I don't know how you draw a connection between these and real life.
The authors of such books and the directors of such movies are neither spacemen nor sorcerers. It is an explicit decision to model such dramatic schools against familiar analogues. Each of these fictional universes demonstrates vast imaginative variances from reality in other regards. It is perhaps even more significant what the creators of those universes chose not to embroider. In one way or another this says something about the limits of imagination.
There will never be a real Hogwarts. There already is an Astronauts Academy, whether known by that name or not - in fact, there are several. I would be surprised to find if any of these - now or in the future - were to be conducted remotely. Some education warrants physical travel.
As others have pointed out, this capability has already been embraced by higher education for certain coursework and certain students. It works well for professional certification activities, for instance, where mature students are pursuing specific aims. I took a graduate engineering course with full time students in the classroom and Raytheon engineers connecting via video from their own campus. Tests were remote, but lab exercises required they travel to the campus.
I have been responsible for remote observing capabilities at an astronomical observatory. Astronomers often take very large datasets using fancy cameras with numerous quirky controls. (The controls for the Hubble Space Telescope are at the Space Telescope Science Institute on Earth.) The technology for operating these remotely has been available for 20 years or more - especially given recent advances in network bandwidth. Except for certain niches, however, astronomers still choose to travel to remote mountaintops. There are the advantages of being physically present with the equipment and the staff - and there are also the logistical questions of NOT being present on your college campus and having to get up the following morning to teach your regular courseload.
Conferences are another similar situation. I've attended and been involved in organizing numerous conferences. The one next month is 14 timezones away. Hundreds of people will still make the trip because of the value of talking to people face-to-face, and especially the value of talking to many people simultaneously face-to-face. Video links are also terrible at providing lucky chances for unplanned conversations. I can't count the number of productive partnerships that have germinated over a stale lunch and a cold beer in between sessions.
Consider the Star Fleet Academy (or Hogwarts or the Isle of Roke). If ever there was a situation ripe for distance learning, that is it - and yet through several movies and TV series, book after book, the academy is depicted as a physical location shared by students from diverse planets - literally of every color... One might say that this is a failure of imagination of B-list sci-fi authors. It is perhaps more accurate to say that there is a requirement for a certain level of similar drama from the educational institutions that actually exist today.
The final point is that the business model demands that such distance learning evolves from the brick-and-mortar campuses, not from some entrepreneur with a limited vision. "Customers" (students and their parents) select colleges for many reasons. The expense and the awkwardness of travel are part of the positive factors involved in making the decision. For niche markets the customers will seek value based on brutal economic decisions. For most full-time undergrads, however, the adventure is the whole point. Not much adventure in a videogame education.
Orbitals are not real ! They are mathematical constructs and they are not observables. People think that just because you can calculate something it is real, that is not the case.
That a derived quantity is "just" a calculated approximate model of some part of the universe doesn't mean it isn't real. Forget about orbitals and quantum mechanics, consider planetary orbits and classical mechanics. There is no such thing as a closed elliptical orbit as depicted in the textbooks. All orbits are unclosed.
Physics IS building models. Models are real even if they are incomplete:
http://www.revell.com/catalog/products/buzz_aldrin_rocket_hero.html
It may not be Buzz, but it shares the quality of physical existence with him. (And Buzz is himself not the man he was on the Moon.) The absurdity of Moon-landing deniers lies in the fact that each and every one of us spends our entire life embedded in outer space. Where else would be be? The evolving Earth is far more special a place than just another desiccated Moon.
It has been more fun than usual to read through these comments. A few observations:
Why? is a placeholder for all other questions. In some formal sense, a why question is always badly formed. Imagine sitting on the witness stand and a lawyer tossing such a question of motivation at you. Often the only correct answer is "I don't understand the question". If one is asked, "Did you stab him?", the answer will be one of fact. If asked, "Why did you stab him?", the question is either fallacious - assuming facts not in evidence - or is superfluous.
Why is the sky blue? Ask rather, "Is the sky blue?"
More generally, such a line of questioning reveals a rush to a solution before the problem has been properly posed. "Look at the monkey!" (when pointing at an ape) is not an opportunity for derision, but for refining the problem into a more appropriate form. One might ask in return, "Is that a monkey?" or "What is a monkey?" These questions can then lead to an exploration of taxonomy or semantics or evolution or reading recommendations. (See J. Diamond's "Third Ape" or R. Dawkins' "Ancestor's Tale")
Someone suggested the uselessness of knowledge about cirrus clouds. Cirrus clouds are high altitude ice clouds. Weather fronts arrive as a high altitude wedge of air, forming cirrus. The ability to recognize cirrus clouds is the ability to predict tomorrow's weather.
Someone was wondering about where the "energy" comes from for magnets. Magnets are rather held together (or pushed apart) by electromagnetic forces. Magnets are indeed weird and wonderful, but the more basic issue is distinguishing between the concepts of force (pushing and pushing back), energy (the ability to perform work) and power (the rate that work is being accomplished). A refrigerator magnet will hold up little Johnie's third grade artwork for years without ever expending any energy.
"Where do babies come from?" has been beaten to death, but the underlying facts of sexual reproduction haven't been mentioned at all. Sex is only one form of reproduction - it has been reinvented many times throughout the history of life on earth. Only in mammals and some other species does sex determination have anything to do with X and Y chromosomes. Consider a species that reproduces asexually. What does it mean to call this a species? Species are often delimited by the question of interbreeding. If two amoebas never "do it", what does it mean to assert they belong to the same classification?
Rainbows form when light is refracted through raindrops (http://www.rebeccapaton.net/rainbows/rnbwbmp.gif). Which color is on top? Real rainbows are often doubled (http://billi-jean.com/images/lj/0607/rainbow2.jpg). The secondary rainbow has inverted colors. Rainbows aren't just a sequence of colors in any event - interference fringes form on the indigo side (inside in one case and outside in the other). And the region between the two rainbows is darkened since those are the light rays that were refracted to create the rainbows.
Science is a state of mind. (To borrow a line from Jerzy Kosinski.)
Only in the US can someone burn themselves stupidly with coffee, and blame McDonalds for giving them coffee that hot...
McDonald's didn't get sued only because of scalding hot coffee. They got sued because they sold said coffee in a container that failed - and to an elderly patron at the drive-up window.
Presumably the point here is that America is litigious. But not all lawyers are created equal, and while personal injury lawyers may have their own negative impacts on society, they do represent the little guy against the corporations. Patent lawyers (at least, these days) tend to represent the narrowly conceived self-interest of corporations against each other (or against humanity in general).
Also consider the result of a successful suit. If a personal injury lawsuit is settled in favor of the plaintiff, the defendant is quite likely to modify their business practices to avoid future lawsuits. For example, McDonald's might start handing out coffee in doubled cups at the drive-up window. If a patent lawsuit is successful, however, the defendant may have to drastically modify their business model. More to the point, other entities are similarly enjoined from using the patented technology. If Burger King conducts a drive-up coffee review (as they should) after McDonald's loses the case, BK can choose a completely different mitigation strategy. If one of these XML cases succeeds, however, the result of a broadly conceived decision might be to completely kill XML as a viable technology.
I said: This isn't a solution, it's a self-centered kludge. A solution might have been to lobby strenuously for the abolition of software techniques or for the reform of how they are granted in the U.S.
Make that "abolition of patents on software techniques", although eliminating software entirely might be a more elegant solution...
Bill Gate's quote on the subject: "The solution to this is patent exchanges with large companies and patenting as much as we can." taken from the 1991 memo at http://www.std.com/obi/Bill.Gates/Challenges.and.Strategy
This isn't a solution, it's a self-centered kludge. A solution might have been to lobby strenuously for the abolition of software techniques or for the reform of how they are granted in the U.S.
Note also that the word "solution" (what Microsoft is in the business of selling) appears exactly twice in that memo. The other mention is about TrueType fonts - a solution developed by another company and presumably used through the grace of a patent exchange.
So when does the O'Reilly "Learning XML Patents" book hit the shelves and what animal will grace the cover?
All games are about breaking the rules. Smart games take this into account and one of the rules is to permit bending the rules.
The essence of poker is to discern tells. The point of pinball is to almost tilt. The gimmick with bricks is to get the ball bouncing to destroy the wall from behind, not to knock down one block at a time. And a modern game that is completely missing the experience of pure exploration (or demented play) demonstrated by Laurie Anderson's Puppet Motel or the Residents' Freak Show (or the Dazzleoids, for that matter, from the Voyager era), can't be much of a game.
Winning is most definitely not the point of playing.
I want to thank the original poster for a jaw-droppingly stimulating post.
The original post in this thread was...
"Article contains the terms "ATM Machine" and "PIN Number". Read at your own risk."
Stimulating, yes - judging by the duration of the thread. Jaw-dropping, however, only for those with TMJD Disfunction.
Languages are shaped by cognitive cost. This is what Steven Pinker seems not to get.
Perhaps Pinker (and the rest of us) would get it if you explained what you mean directly, rather than by analogy with Lempel-Ziv.
Burrows-Wheeler would make a better analogy anyway. (Or how about Roberts' Subtractive Dither?)
One of the key insights on language is that Lempel-Ziv compression never transmits the compression dictionary. The dictionary is implied because the compression program and the decompression program share the same dictionary construction heuristic. This is a trick you can pull off only if the two sides of the channel share the same cognitive architecture.
Um - how about redundancy in engineering? Two vendors can build to fit the same requirements (as with the space shuttle computers). What needs to be shared is the external physical model, not the internal architecture. I gather this is what you dislike about Pinker - or rather about Pinker's popular books explaining general concepts of current thinking about language.
Or are you really asserting that when H. sapiens finally meets Marvin the Martian that about all we'll manage to convey is, "Say what?!?"
Would you really prefer "AT Machine" and "PI Number"?
News for Nerds? The comments appear almost identical to what one would read from any forum other than slashdot - one-third raging right-winger rants about the welfare state, one-third left-wing rants about the social causes of the problem, one-third insults directed at the media. I count just two posters pointing to what seems to be the original source material (http://www.respect.gov.uk/members/article.aspx?id=8678) and maybe a half dozen total (~2%) replies to those messages.
When composing a reply to such articles, people - rather than defending preset opinions about this issue, how about digging up the actual proposal and critiquing it on its merits? This appears to be an extension of some "child protective services" program. What's the alternative to society supporting some form of CPS? CPS already has authority to take your kids away pending judicial review - is that not more draconian than providing at-risk families the choice (apparently) to move into a closely monitored housing unit? How that monitoring occurs is a separate issue - too often technology is seen as a low cost alternative to hiring police or caseworkers.
On the other side of the question, there is a statement of expanding what already seems to be a pilot program to extend to 20,000 "units". (I would refer to these as households, but have no evidence to suggest they function as such.) Presumably each residence has multiple cameras, so this may amount to a few hundred thousand 24/7 camera feeds. Who is going to watch all those cameras? If the data are to be recorded, for how long will the data be archived? This is a huge ongoing expense and describes a job that few qualified people would be willing to take. How will the cameras be protected? Cameras in a house are going to be within reach of the inhabitants to tamper with - or simply repoint to leave rooms or hallways unmonitored. Will there be audio? Will the cameras pan and zoom? Will there be cameras in the bedrooms and bathrooms? Who is going to protect the at-risk children from predators behind the cameras?
Topics on slashdot are not necessarily different than topics on mainstream forums. What distinguishes slashdot from other forums is the quality and point-of-view of the comments. A discussion about our pet topics will often be illuminating and insightful. We should bring the same intellectual rigor to the broader issues facing society.
We have a long way to go before using 30% of earth's surface.
I guess I should be more explicit about the exponential growth of population:
The Earth's biomass scorecard stands at 1900 gigatonnes of carbon. Human flesh is about 18% carbon. Plug the numbers in for exponential growth, and we find that the mass of human flesh will equal the mass of all life on Earth in just 960 years. (I assumed an average human weight of 30 kg, e.g., 67 lbs.)
The mass of the Earth itself is 6x10^24 kg. Plug the numbers in - The mass of human flesh will equal the mass of the Earth in 2700 years. A few millennia more and the mass of human flesh equals the mass of the entire universe - so much for a space-based solution.
The point isn't that we will reach these absurd limits - the point is precisely that we can be sure that we won't. The implication is that something most definitely will change in the next millennium - and it won't be the mathematics. Slowing down compound interest is a vain hope - even a 0.1% growth rate will lead to "peak human" scenarios no less dire within a few centuries.
Our problems were created on Earth and our problems will be solved on Earth.
the amount of densely used areas of earth as a ratio of earth size is very small. when all the land is packed. there is still the oceans which is what 70% of earth. We have a long way to go before using 30% of earth's surface.
The paper uses a simulation of likely ET behavior to work back to predictions about constraints on ET prevalence. It is disquieting enough to entertain your suggestion that the human species will (and should) fill Earth up completely - land and sea - but to have any pertinence to the discussion, we would have to ascribe these same corrupt and naively self-centered motivations to all other species.
My point remains to emphasize the importance of the vast separation between stellar systems. Explorers may (I certainly hope will) cross interplanetary and even interstellar distances to nearby stars. Mass travel (even by the proxy of autonomous robotic probes) is orders of magnitude more difficult. Long distance travel - even by proxy - piles completely unwarranted motivational assumptions on top of the daunting technical challenges. The authors, for instance, assume probes capable of autonomous operations for 0.1 Gy and capable of leaving a cosmic post-it note that will survive similarly as long.
Quality of life is more important than quantity of life.
Humanity does not, in the end, grow exponentially.
Only about 1/7 of nations are flat or declining (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_population_growth_rate). It seems unwarranted therefore to discount the 6/7 that are growing as some statistical anomaly. The population of the top 1/7 is doubling at the hellacious rate of about every quarter century.
Wealthy developed nations hit a minimal/no growth point... Developed country after developed country keeps hitting this wall, where the birthrate drops to or below maintenance rate.
You mean developed nations like Moldova, Micronesia and Montenegro? Even the Vatican City is managing a maintenance rate :-)
America stands apart from this, for the time, due largely to immigration.
The U.S. sits comfortably in the middle of the range with many other countries - they can't all be growing due to immigration. North America - as developed a region of the world as any could wish - is well above China, the country with the world's most draconian population policies. Even so, China is growing at a rate to continue to double every century.
However, a good extreme example of this trend is Japan.
Japan is trending just slightly negative at -0.14% Aside from the former Axis powers, one would be hard-pressed to characterize the countries with flat (or very slightly downward) population as "developed". Many are sad and still recovering former Soviet satellites. Extrapolating the small list of current ZPG candidates into a worldwide trend that will halt population growth worldwide half a century from now (and then in perpetuity) is wishful thinking.
The goal is to spawn self-replicating colonies...suppose by the year 2200 we can do it for the GDP equivalent of an aircraft carrier and its support fleet
Why? Who would fund this on Earth or any other planet? What is the economic incentive?
If it was going to have happened, it should already have happened.
Assuming it is both a possible and sufficiently desirable scenario.
The fact that it hasn't happened is an indication that we're the first.
No - it's an indication that the universe is very very large. The gap between hospitable way stations is too large to easily cross. To infer an absence of neighbors from the lack of rusting hulks visible from the road only makes sense if the time necessary to cover the mean distance to the next homestead is shorter than the time for the rust to completely consume all trace of the Oldsmobile that Granny and Jed arrived in.
To get back on topic, it is irrelevant if shipping "excess" humans off-world can solve overpopulation. What is relevant is that the mechanism of exponential growth could potentially allow an entire galaxy to be settled in a (relatively) timely fashion. The result may not be pretty, with a multitude of overpopulated worlds, but it is possible nonetheless.
It is not irrelevant. The assumption here is that we will somehow curb our Malthusian growth planetside, but indulge ourselves from world-to-world. The bottleneck in settling new worlds (even if technically feasible) ensures that the spread of human and non-human species - and their attendant civilizations - will be thoroughly quenched.
The real issue here is that the authors assume that each visit from a probe leaves evidence persisting for a million or even a hundred million years. One can only think that they borrowed this from Kubrick's 2001, because even geological features can become obscured over such timescales. There is also the small question of a multitude of species inevitably developing technology (and the cultural will) sufficient to build probes that will maintain themselves for millions of years in interstellar space far from a source of energy.