I'm not sure what you mean by "refund". The warranty 30-day period starts from when you receive the laptop: http://laptopgiving.org/en/warranty.php
If you mean you'd like to cancel your order and get a refund instead, that wasn't part of the original deal. BUT it looks like that should be possible because of the delivery troubles.
Search for "refund" in the page: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/G1G1_Fulfillment_Information
If you do try to get a refund, it sounds from other folks like it will take some patience. You also will likely have to be VERY EXPLICIT if you want a refund of the full amount (purchase part and donation part), or they might refund the purchase price, but keep the donation part.
I got 3 XO's. 1 keyboard was bad almost immediately. 1 went bad after about 25 days. 1 keyboard's been just fine. The two bad XO's got RMA'd, and the replacements have had no keyboard trouble.
My personal experience leads me to believe it's been a significant problem, but that it's limited to just some machines.
I just found the idea so far-out, plus the April 1st, that I was prone to doubt, and then when I searched I got some results. But now I've seen the official protest note, and I believe it.
I believe it, but it is nearly unbelievable. Gah!
Anyway, I just tried the search again and got 19476 results. Maybe things have been set right.
"... who replied in an April 1st e-mail that the university had recently begun blocking the search term because the database received federal funding."
As others have pointed out, once you get admitted to a hotshot school, there often turns out to be a way to pay for it. However, if your family's clearly able and unwilling to pay for it, that might rule out financial aid.
In which case, one possibility is switching your order. Rather than trying to get someone to pay for your school now in return for work later, work first for a couple years. Then you'll be independent of your parents (make sure you really are independent so it's not a scam), and you can make these decisions based on your own priorities and income.
If you're well-motivated (as it sounds like you are) you should be able to do a lot in a couple years which will only enhance your attractiveness to places like MIT. Plus you can experiment with your lifestyle (where to live, who to befriend, how much to party) in ways you can't as much once you've committed to a school.
it's been done here many times. Slow news day I guess, but nobody is surprised by this. It's pretty much common sense.
Still worthwhile. Common sense can be good, or can be completely wrong. Math (well done) is right and provides strong theory to work with, but might not say anything about the real world if the analogies are off. Real experiments tell you what really happens.
OK, sorry if I was thin-skinned. No hard feelings.
As I said, I'm not a lawyer. I suppose that the legal meaning of "use" in this particular context might be different than its common meaning. It seems likely that recipients of a letter like that would read it just as I did.
I know the basics of the difference between copyright and trademark rules. Knowing that difference, I've noticed that many businesses (apparently) deliberately confuse and entangle the ideas, and then claim that the strongest features of each apply. The letter had that feel about it.
Well, I am an atheist, yes. And so I don't believe that there are any gods sniggering at me. (I'm sure lots of humans do.)
I'm not sure if you misunderstood me, though. The "sniggering deity" I was referring to was one who (hypothetically) created humans in such a way as to make it look like they didn't create humans--deliberately being tricky. That's what it looks like to me when people try to reconcile evolution by natural selection with creation (in the sense of creating specific outcomes/organisms).
There's plenty of people who don't believe in natural selection at all. They see it as quite clear that their deity created people in some other way and did so blatantly, and so I don't imagine their deity as a sniggering one. I think they're wrong, but that's something else.
After reading your journal entry, I think I read your post here about the same way. What I'm saying is that, to use your analogy... if a brilliant engineer used "evolution" as a decompression algorithm to achieve particular organisms, then that's not evolution by natural selection.
It might be empirically indistinguishable from evolution by natural selection until we get to interview the engineer. But if I compress and encrypt a file, decompressing and decrypting it is nothing like natural selection. That doesn't mean it's impossible. It just means it's not natural selection.
I think that there's an effort to "get along" by denying that certain beliefs are essentially in conflict.
The idea of evolution by natural selection isn't at odds with other forms of creationism--it wouldn't rule out an engineer/god setting up the rules for the universe as we might set up cellular automata to see how things work out.
This is why I would like to have clarified why people seem to think that the concept of Creationism is even at odds with Evolution.
Creationism isn't necessarily at odds with "evolution". It is necessarily at odds with evolution by natural selection. Natural selection means that... it's natural, that there isn't an intelligent decision maker with a goal in mind. For instance, if I was a trick-shot expert in pool and I did something involving three banks and sunk four balls, that would show that I was a trick-shot expert who set things up awesome in the beginning. Likewise, the idea that a deity set things up at the dawn of time knowing that it would work out via super-complex processes to have humans and mosquitoes... that's just an odd form of creationism.
In fact, it has more in common with young-earth creationism than with the theory of natural selection. It implies that a god had some goal in mind, and took steps needed to achieve it, but went to great lengths to disguise that fact. Some theories have a god laying down fossils to be tricky, this story has a god using smoke and mirrors to make it look like there is no god. There's certainly some appeal to the idea of a deity sniggering in the sky, laughing at how stupid we are, but whatever its aesthetic appeal, I don't find it very convincing.
I think you and I have no disagreement on substance. I was not responding to the whole of the story. I was responding to one part of the letter. That's why I quoted a particular part of the letter. The letter (according to this boing boing postsaid:
"Even with the best of intentions, unauthorized use of another company's trademark is against the law."
"Ford" is a trademark. I have just used it (with the best of intentions) without authorization. I did so legally. Therefore the sentence is bullshit.
Sometimes I do things which deserve snide responses. This was not one of those times.
"Even with the best of intentions, unauthorized use of another company's trademark is against the law."
I ain't no lawyer. But that's bullshit. Ford! Ford! Ford! Fnord! (Kleenex, Microsoft, Corona, NBC!)
Hell if I know whether they could win this fight if it were taken to court, but of course it's legal to use another company's trademark without authorization. Otherwise it would be impossible to say "Budweiser beer sucks", because they'd sue me.
That letter is trying to muddy the waters of copyright versus trademark in order to make their claims seem stronger.
It's possible to believe in religion/gods and evolution without any conflict. But that depends on how you define your religion and how you define evolution. The most obvious ways of defining both are essentially incompatible.
If you consider evolution as evolution by natural selection, you have to admit that you're explicitly disallowing for a creator god. If you claim that there's been the hand of a god guiding evolution in order to get particular kinds of creatures, then that's not natural selection, and it really makes the whole understanding of evolution something different.
This doesn't rule out any kind of religion, but it does rule out lots. The only way to simultaneously hold belief in creator gods and evolution by natural selection is to do something we've evolved nicely to do--which is to simultaneously believe contrary ideas.
Actually 70% of American households give at least $1800 per year, that is more than most countries.
I haven't read the book yet, though I mean to, so I'm not going to throw out an opinion about general charity. But your statistic is off and probably unintentionally misleading.
The article you link says, "The 70 percent of American households that make charitable contributions give, on average, $1,800 dollars per year". Considering the Warren Buffets, Bill & Melinda Gate's and other crazy-rich extreme philanthropists, this means lots of that 70% of households donated considerably less than $1,800.
You would be included in that 70% statistic if you all you did that year was pledge $35 to your local PBS fund drive.
Today's generation of kids is the most technology savvy group that this country has ever produced. They are born with an iPod in one hand and a cell phone in another. They're text messaging, e-mailing, instant messaging. They're on MySpace, YouTube & Google. They've got Nintendo Wiis, Game Boys, Play Stations. ...they don't know how to cook, they can't fix their own cars. They can't search for information past typing something into Google, THEY DON'T KNOW HOW SHIT WORKS.
OK, it's a generalization, just like his generalization. I hate the notion that "technology savvy" means "knows how to operate a user interface designed to be easy to operate". Yes, I'm an old fart (38), and grumpy. Regardless, my 4-year-old is proficient with a web browser. He is by no means tech savvy, and he learns more about real technology by interacting with a tricycle or bionicles than he does by playing some Flash game.
That said, I agree school sucks. It sucked when I was in school ("good" public schools in the 70's & 80's) and I hear it sucks worse now. I don't particularly see what text messaging can do to improve on the suckiness.
I'm writing academic papers using LaTeX, and finally remanaged my reference management. Most of the references I use these days are available electronically, and I've started dumping them all in the same directory, "bibliography". Then I use BibDesk (I'm on a Mac) to categorize and link to the file.
For me using LaTeX, this is especially handy given that I'll want to cite many of these in actual papers. However, even for things I'm not going to cite, it helps a good bit in organization. You can search by authors, keywords, dates, whatever. I use keywords to tag whatever subjects it refers to (as far as my interests identify subjects), and an extra keyword if I have a specific project/paper in mind for it.
If you don't use Mac, there's similar things on other platforms.
Applied math is great, but saying science is a sub-specialty of applied math is like saying music is a subfield of math, painting is a subfield of chemistry, or writing is a subfield of computer science because everyone uses word processors nowadays.
Science is an approach to finding out about the world. Math helps with that tremendously, but lots of scientists have done great work which didn't involve significant math--Galileo and Darwin among them.
As to the original question--practice explaining what you do. I bet most Slashdotters don't understand what you mean (is your research in psychology? optics? AI? material science? it's pretty obfuscated), never mind a random high school student, and to a kindergartener you'd be better off saying "I do cool things with computers!" with a big smile on your face. I teach my 3-year-old son about what I do (economics & game theory), and sure, he doesn't get much of it, but he's picking things up (he's learning to not always play Rock in Rock-Paper-Scissors, for instance). Most areas of study have some intuitive story which captures their spirit, you need to find that for your field.
As to how to have the kids learn--if a 3-to-6-year-old is in a new environment and also having fun, they're learning. Probably the best way to help them learn is to figure out what they can screw around with without destroying your work.
It's just installing software, I imagine one of your bosses can handle it. If you don't want to quit, and you don't want to report them, you still don't want this to be primarily your responsibility if the business gets busted.
Simply tell your boss(es) you're not comfortable installing illegal copies of software and suggest this problem can be worked around if they take care of it personally. Then, just maybe, they'll think a little bit harder about legal alternatives, and in any case, your ass is better covered.
It's not uncommon for my 3-year-old son to take an hour and a half on complicated tasks like, um, eating a sandwich. How long a game should take when people are fairly focused and taking it seriously is completely different than how long it can take playing it with young kids. They'll need constant reminders of the rules, be trying to count their money and arrange it right, wander off and come back wanting to drive their toy car around the game board...
Interestingly, the same applies to stoned adults.
I got the feeling Lucas stole the midichlorians bit from Madeleine L'Engle's A Wind in the Door, which had intelligent, psychic mitochondria. On the other hand, L'Engle's book didn't have the elitism of saying that some are born with more mitochondria than others.
Both authors are not members of the medical profession. Graduate school of management. Bleah... Move along...
The authors are economists. Economists tend to be well trained in the use of statistics. Doctors tend to suck at statistics. A neurologist might be able to say something about brain structure and autism that an economist wouldn't understand, but I'd trust a random economist over a random M.D. to statistically identify behavioral factors related to autism.
I'm not saying that TV causes autism. Neither are the authors of the study. But they took two separate approaches to the question and they both gave the same answer. Maybe they cheated and took 5 approaches, and only reported the two that "worked", but that's a different question.
The approaches they took control fairly well for the counter-hypothesis that autistic-prone kids want to watch more TV, since it takes place at the population level, rather than the individual level.
A lot of the comments here seem intent on finding excuses to ignore the study. If you want to ignore the study, don't bother reading or commenting. If you're interested in whether it's true or not, then take it seriously until you find a GOOD reason not to.
The authors are aware of the limitations of what they've done. Unless there's a serious fault with the research (which I doubt anyone commenting here has identified since the story was posted), this means it's a start which could be followed up with alternative methods.
Although our findings are consistent with our hypothesis, we do not believe our findings
represent definitive evidence for our hypothesis. We believe the only way to establish
definitively whether or not early childhood television watching is a trigger for autism is to more
directly test the hypothesis. For example, one could monitor the viewing habits of a large
number of children from the ages of zero to three and see whether the children who are
eventually diagnosed with autism on average watched more television before the age of three.
The finding that those diagnosed with autism had indeed watched more television would be
subject to the criticism that maybe those prone to autism are more drawn to television viewing
(this is similar to the criticism of Christakis et al.'s (2004) study of television viewing and
ADHD). But if a condition of participation in the study was that parents were required to limit
television viewing, one could judge whether television viewing is important by looking at the
overall rate of autism in the sample.
I've gone back and forth on being (relative to my peers) very strong or very weak at math. Probably pre-calc was my weakest time. Pre-calc for me meant a hodge-podge of trig and bits of algebra and stuff. It was a mess, and I barely passed. I barely passed the first two semesters of calc also. However, by the time I started grad school, I was significantly ahead of the group in my math ability.
There was no trick to it for me, but a variety of things. First, just stick with it. Keep doing it and do the best you can in each class. Keep progressing, but balance your progression. You want to move on to classes with more advanced math, but not that require skills you failed to pick up earlier. Even if you suck, a lot of it will come back to you later.
Try to mix up pure math and applied classes. It's an enormous help to see the weird stuff you did as just "math" used for something. But once you start to get the feel for it, the pure math classes can give you cool, fun insights.
Draw lots of pictures. I actually recommend graph paper, rather than software tools. If you're doing probability, draw Venn diagrams. If you're doing calculus, plot the functions. If you're doing something with a geometric component, draw the shapes.
Work with others. If you find a good partner/group, this is fantastic. If you find a mediocre partner/group it's still helpful. It gives you the opportunity to explain your methods and solutions, and explaining is a fantastic way of learning. It also gives you an immediate source to turn to when otherwise you'd spend 9 hours pulling your hair out about a problem. You can either learn from someone else's insight, or at least feel better because it's hard for everyone.
I'm a gamer (board & role-playing games) and a programmer, and so the first college math classes which I really enjoyed were probability theory and discrete math. They gave me the math for dealing with things I already had a good intuition for. If you can find similar courses which apply to some knowledge you have, that can help.
Anyway, for me there was no "trick" or applying a different way of thinking. It was just plugging away at it. Good luck.
...at some point, for some people, this won't be true. But mostly, a "computer" we refer to is a general-purpose tool, far more general-purpose than other kinds of tools people are familiar with. This generality implies you can do more with it than browse the web and compose Word documents if you want, which is great, but understanding the generality can also help understand how things work and why they can go wrong.
So, I think it's worth impressing on people that a computer is a device (made up of processor(s), RAM, hard drive, display, keyboard, mouse,...) which runs software (by loading it from the hard drive into RAM and then accessing the RAM with the processor). That's what a computer IS. The web page you see is the result of specific programs the computer is running. The virus eating 4 years of baby pictures is just another program and your computer shouldn't be expected to know the difference.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not sure what you mean by "refund". The warranty 30-day period starts from when you receive the laptop:
http://laptopgiving.org/en/warranty.php
If you mean you'd like to cancel your order and get a refund instead, that wasn't part of the original deal. BUT it looks like that should be possible because of the delivery troubles.
Search for "refund" in the page:
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/G1G1_Fulfillment_Information
If you do try to get a refund, it sounds from other folks like it will take some patience. You also will likely have to be VERY EXPLICIT if you want a refund of the full amount (purchase part and donation part), or they might refund the purchase price, but keep the donation part.
I got 3 XO's. 1 keyboard was bad almost immediately. 1 went bad after about 25 days. 1 keyboard's been just fine. The two bad XO's got RMA'd, and the replacements have had no keyboard trouble.
My personal experience leads me to believe it's been a significant problem, but that it's limited to just some machines.
Ha!
My bad, it seems.
I just found the idea so far-out, plus the April 1st, that I was prone to doubt, and then when I searched I got some results. But now I've seen the official protest note, and I believe it.
I believe it, but it is nearly unbelievable. Gah!
Anyway, I just tried the search again and got 19476 results. Maybe things have been set right.
I don't suggest slashdotting the popline system, but if you go test it, a simple query for "abortion" returns 52 results.
This looks like a lagged April Fool. Should kill or revise the post.
"... who replied in an April 1st e-mail that the university had recently begun blocking the search term because the database received federal funding."
Stephenson's books have been expanding pretty much exponentially. How long will this one be?
(I like them anyway.)
As others have pointed out, once you get admitted to a hotshot school, there often turns out to be a way to pay for it. However, if your family's clearly able and unwilling to pay for it, that might rule out financial aid.
In which case, one possibility is switching your order. Rather than trying to get someone to pay for your school now in return for work later, work first for a couple years. Then you'll be independent of your parents (make sure you really are independent so it's not a scam), and you can make these decisions based on your own priorities and income.
If you're well-motivated (as it sounds like you are) you should be able to do a lot in a couple years which will only enhance your attractiveness to places like MIT. Plus you can experiment with your lifestyle (where to live, who to befriend, how much to party) in ways you can't as much once you've committed to a school.
Still worthwhile. Common sense can be good, or can be completely wrong. Math (well done) is right and provides strong theory to work with, but might not say anything about the real world if the analogies are off. Real experiments tell you what really happens.
OK, sorry if I was thin-skinned. No hard feelings.
As I said, I'm not a lawyer. I suppose that the legal meaning of "use" in this particular context might be different than its common meaning. It seems likely that recipients of a letter like that would read it just as I did.
I know the basics of the difference between copyright and trademark rules. Knowing that difference, I've noticed that many businesses (apparently) deliberately confuse and entangle the ideas, and then claim that the strongest features of each apply. The letter had that feel about it.
Well, I am an atheist, yes. And so I don't believe that there are any gods sniggering at me. (I'm sure lots of humans do.)
I'm not sure if you misunderstood me, though. The "sniggering deity" I was referring to was one who (hypothetically) created humans in such a way as to make it look like they didn't create humans--deliberately being tricky. That's what it looks like to me when people try to reconcile evolution by natural selection with creation (in the sense of creating specific outcomes/organisms).
There's plenty of people who don't believe in natural selection at all. They see it as quite clear that their deity created people in some other way and did so blatantly, and so I don't imagine their deity as a sniggering one. I think they're wrong, but that's something else.
After reading your journal entry, I think I read your post here about the same way. What I'm saying is that, to use your analogy... if a brilliant engineer used "evolution" as a decompression algorithm to achieve particular organisms, then that's not evolution by natural selection.
It might be empirically indistinguishable from evolution by natural selection until we get to interview the engineer. But if I compress and encrypt a file, decompressing and decrypting it is nothing like natural selection. That doesn't mean it's impossible. It just means it's not natural selection.
I think that there's an effort to "get along" by denying that certain beliefs are essentially in conflict.
The idea of evolution by natural selection isn't at odds with other forms of creationism--it wouldn't rule out an engineer/god setting up the rules for the universe as we might set up cellular automata to see how things work out.
This is why I would like to have clarified why people seem to think that the concept of Creationism is even at odds with Evolution.
Creationism isn't necessarily at odds with "evolution". It is necessarily at odds with evolution by natural selection. Natural selection means that... it's natural, that there isn't an intelligent decision maker with a goal in mind. For instance, if I was a trick-shot expert in pool and I did something involving three banks and sunk four balls, that would show that I was a trick-shot expert who set things up awesome in the beginning. Likewise, the idea that a deity set things up at the dawn of time knowing that it would work out via super-complex processes to have humans and mosquitoes... that's just an odd form of creationism.
In fact, it has more in common with young-earth creationism than with the theory of natural selection. It implies that a god had some goal in mind, and took steps needed to achieve it, but went to great lengths to disguise that fact. Some theories have a god laying down fossils to be tricky, this story has a god using smoke and mirrors to make it look like there is no god. There's certainly some appeal to the idea of a deity sniggering in the sky, laughing at how stupid we are, but whatever its aesthetic appeal, I don't find it very convincing.
Um, yes.
I think you and I have no disagreement on substance. I was not responding to the whole of the story. I was responding to one part of the letter. That's why I quoted a particular part of the letter. The letter (according to this boing boing postsaid:
"Even with the best of intentions, unauthorized use of another company's trademark is against the law."
"Ford" is a trademark. I have just used it (with the best of intentions) without authorization. I did so legally. Therefore the sentence is bullshit.
Sometimes I do things which deserve snide responses. This was not one of those times.
"Even with the best of intentions, unauthorized use of another company's trademark is against the law."
I ain't no lawyer. But that's bullshit. Ford! Ford! Ford! Fnord! (Kleenex, Microsoft, Corona, NBC!)
Hell if I know whether they could win this fight if it were taken to court, but of course it's legal to use another company's trademark without authorization. Otherwise it would be impossible to say "Budweiser beer sucks", because they'd sue me.
That letter is trying to muddy the waters of copyright versus trademark in order to make their claims seem stronger.
If you consider evolution as evolution by natural selection, you have to admit that you're explicitly disallowing for a creator god. If you claim that there's been the hand of a god guiding evolution in order to get particular kinds of creatures, then that's not natural selection, and it really makes the whole understanding of evolution something different.
This doesn't rule out any kind of religion, but it does rule out lots. The only way to simultaneously hold belief in creator gods and evolution by natural selection is to do something we've evolved nicely to do--which is to simultaneously believe contrary ideas.
I haven't read the book yet, though I mean to, so I'm not going to throw out an opinion about general charity. But your statistic is off and probably unintentionally misleading.
The article you link says, "The 70 percent of American households that make charitable contributions give, on average, $1,800 dollars per year". Considering the Warren Buffets, Bill & Melinda Gate's and other crazy-rich extreme philanthropists, this means lots of that 70% of households donated considerably less than $1,800.
You would be included in that 70% statistic if you all you did that year was pledge $35 to your local PBS fund drive.
OK, it's a generalization, just like his generalization. I hate the notion that "technology savvy" means "knows how to operate a user interface designed to be easy to operate". Yes, I'm an old fart (38), and grumpy. Regardless, my 4-year-old is proficient with a web browser. He is by no means tech savvy, and he learns more about real technology by interacting with a tricycle or bionicles than he does by playing some Flash game.
That said, I agree school sucks. It sucked when I was in school ("good" public schools in the 70's & 80's) and I hear it sucks worse now. I don't particularly see what text messaging can do to improve on the suckiness.
For me using LaTeX, this is especially handy given that I'll want to cite many of these in actual papers. However, even for things I'm not going to cite, it helps a good bit in organization. You can search by authors, keywords, dates, whatever. I use keywords to tag whatever subjects it refers to (as far as my interests identify subjects), and an extra keyword if I have a specific project/paper in mind for it.
If you don't use Mac, there's similar things on other platforms.
Gah! Ugh!
Applied math is great, but saying science is a sub-specialty of applied math is like saying music is a subfield of math, painting is a subfield of chemistry, or writing is a subfield of computer science because everyone uses word processors nowadays.
Science is an approach to finding out about the world. Math helps with that tremendously, but lots of scientists have done great work which didn't involve significant math--Galileo and Darwin among them.
As to the original question--practice explaining what you do. I bet most Slashdotters don't understand what you mean (is your research in psychology? optics? AI? material science? it's pretty obfuscated), never mind a random high school student, and to a kindergartener you'd be better off saying "I do cool things with computers!" with a big smile on your face. I teach my 3-year-old son about what I do (economics & game theory), and sure, he doesn't get much of it, but he's picking things up (he's learning to not always play Rock in Rock-Paper-Scissors, for instance). Most areas of study have some intuitive story which captures their spirit, you need to find that for your field.
As to how to have the kids learn--if a 3-to-6-year-old is in a new environment and also having fun, they're learning. Probably the best way to help them learn is to figure out what they can screw around with without destroying your work.
It's just installing software, I imagine one of your bosses can handle it. If you don't want to quit, and you don't want to report them, you still don't want this to be primarily your responsibility if the business gets busted.
Simply tell your boss(es) you're not comfortable installing illegal copies of software and suggest this problem can be worked around if they take care of it personally. Then, just maybe, they'll think a little bit harder about legal alternatives, and in any case, your ass is better covered.
It's not uncommon for my 3-year-old son to take an hour and a half on complicated tasks like, um, eating a sandwich . How long a game should take when people are fairly focused and taking it seriously is completely different than how long it can take playing it with young kids. They'll need constant reminders of the rules, be trying to count their money and arrange it right, wander off and come back wanting to drive their toy car around the game board... Interestingly, the same applies to stoned adults.
I got the feeling Lucas stole the midichlorians bit from Madeleine L'Engle's A Wind in the Door, which had intelligent, psychic mitochondria. On the other hand, L'Engle's book didn't have the elitism of saying that some are born with more mitochondria than others.
The authors are economists. Economists tend to be well trained in the use of statistics. Doctors tend to suck at statistics. A neurologist might be able to say something about brain structure and autism that an economist wouldn't understand, but I'd trust a random economist over a random M.D. to statistically identify behavioral factors related to autism.
I'm not saying that TV causes autism. Neither are the authors of the study. But they took two separate approaches to the question and they both gave the same answer. Maybe they cheated and took 5 approaches, and only reported the two that "worked", but that's a different question.
The approaches they took control fairly well for the counter-hypothesis that autistic-prone kids want to watch more TV, since it takes place at the population level, rather than the individual level.
A lot of the comments here seem intent on finding excuses to ignore the study. If you want to ignore the study, don't bother reading or commenting. If you're interested in whether it's true or not, then take it seriously until you find a GOOD reason not to.
The authors are aware of the limitations of what they've done. Unless there's a serious fault with the research (which I doubt anyone commenting here has identified since the story was posted), this means it's a start which could be followed up with alternative methods.
I've gone back and forth on being (relative to my peers) very strong or very weak at math. Probably pre-calc was my weakest time. Pre-calc for me meant a hodge-podge of trig and bits of algebra and stuff. It was a mess, and I barely passed. I barely passed the first two semesters of calc also. However, by the time I started grad school, I was significantly ahead of the group in my math ability.
There was no trick to it for me, but a variety of things. First, just stick with it. Keep doing it and do the best you can in each class. Keep progressing, but balance your progression. You want to move on to classes with more advanced math, but not that require skills you failed to pick up earlier. Even if you suck, a lot of it will come back to you later.
Try to mix up pure math and applied classes. It's an enormous help to see the weird stuff you did as just "math" used for something. But once you start to get the feel for it, the pure math classes can give you cool, fun insights.
Draw lots of pictures. I actually recommend graph paper, rather than software tools. If you're doing probability, draw Venn diagrams. If you're doing calculus, plot the functions. If you're doing something with a geometric component, draw the shapes.
Work with others. If you find a good partner/group, this is fantastic. If you find a mediocre partner/group it's still helpful. It gives you the opportunity to explain your methods and solutions, and explaining is a fantastic way of learning. It also gives you an immediate source to turn to when otherwise you'd spend 9 hours pulling your hair out about a problem. You can either learn from someone else's insight, or at least feel better because it's hard for everyone.
I'm a gamer (board & role-playing games) and a programmer, and so the first college math classes which I really enjoyed were probability theory and discrete math. They gave me the math for dealing with things I already had a good intuition for. If you can find similar courses which apply to some knowledge you have, that can help.
Anyway, for me there was no "trick" or applying a different way of thinking. It was just plugging away at it. Good luck.
...at some point, for some people, this won't be true. But mostly, a "computer" we refer to is a general-purpose tool, far more general-purpose than other kinds of tools people are familiar with. This generality implies you can do more with it than browse the web and compose Word documents if you want, which is great, but understanding the generality can also help understand how things work and why they can go wrong.
...) which runs software (by loading it from the hard drive into RAM and then accessing the RAM with the processor). That's what a computer IS. The web page you see is the result of specific programs the computer is running. The virus eating 4 years of baby pictures is just another program and your computer shouldn't be expected to know the difference.
So, I think it's worth impressing on people that a computer is a device (made up of processor(s), RAM, hard drive, display, keyboard, mouse,