Indeed. Secret ballots are the very foundation of a democratic election.
Sure, various communist and dictatorial countries had 'elections', but when you'd get shot if you didn't vote for Saddam, or whoever, it meant that the people weren't getting the leader they actually wanted.
The only problem with democracy, really, is that you sometimes do get the leader you voted for.
After 5 rounds of free prep time you should be able to do better than that. Besides, that would hardly kill a level 17 cleric who'll be hovering around 170hp or so.
You get one attack (sure for 50 damage) during the surprise round. The cleric moves away and you get a second attack for 50 damage. Then various bad things happen to you.
That's assuming the cleric has no rounds of prep time, has no spot check, no items on, no contingent healing, no ability to tumble, no spells up. It's pretty one sided, but the cleric will still probably win.
If you allow such cheese as Divine Metamagic, then things get progressively worse for non-spellcasters.
You can end a whole fight with a color spray, sleep, or web. I've tanked before as a 5th level sorcerer before, since with shield, mage armor and alter self up the monsters couldn't hit him, and if they did hit him, he'd just recast false life.
While you might think that playing a wizard is difficult, I've leveled up enough wizards and sorcerers through the years to know their strength in low levels is things like the above, not pitching out the solitary useless 1d4+1 magic missiles. You just find the niche for yourself, play smart with conserving your spells, and they'll do just as well as the raging 26 strength half-orc barbarian. Not in damage, but if you knock out 3 enemies with a color spray, that's just as good as killing three people in one action.
When you hit 8th level or so, then the damage spells come into their own power, and you start casting the big fireballs, combusts, etc., with an empower slapped on top of it for extra gas. 12d8 (no save) all day long from an empowered combust outshines the barbarian, and at 10th level, the 15d6 empowered fireballs will rack up huge amounts of damage against groups of enemies.
Like I said, there's really no weak spot for them, as long as you know how to play. Of course, with a philosophy like that, I *do* usually end up getting stuck playing the wizard in home groups. =)
It was true in old D&D. But in the new editions, low level mages have spells like shield and mage armor for +8 to AC, alter self for +6 to AC, false life (so they have more hp than a fighter), backbiter, color spray, etc. There's no weak levels for a mage.
>> Did you play the same D&D I did? Magic users are incredibly gimped compared to fighters.
This was true before 3ed, but not after 3ed. Well, maybe it's true if you don't optimize properly.
Mages in 3ed start around on par with fighters and end better than fighters. The only weakness a low level mage has is lack of spells per day, and a low starting hp. But his color spray can end a combat with a single action. By 3rd level or so, he will have an AC around 26 (much better than a fighter's) and have spells enough to end a couple combats by himself every day. By 7th level he gets polymorph, and he's better than a fighter, even at fighting. I wrote one of the first power attack calculators (www.distanceeducationconsultants.com/ddcalc.php) to calculate how much damage my wizard would be doing with power attack when he had Shapechange and a bunch of other buffs up.
I run a nationwide 3.5ed D&D campaign (anyone can play -- www.livingplanar.com), and have talked a little bit with some people at WOTC about 4th edition. If you've been paying attention to their releases over the last year or two, you'll have noticed like I did that they've been experimenting with a lot of new 'systems' for doing stuff. The Tome of Battle completely redid combat for non-spellcasters, the Tome of Magic introduced 3 new magic systems which didn't fit in with the standard magic-user/cleric model that we've had since the '70s. Magic of Incarnum was another alternate magic system. Complete Scoundrel introduced 'skill tricks' which rewrote how skills worked. Complete Mage introduced 'reserve feats' which allowed spellcasters to cast (weak) spells all day long. Hell, the Warlock (which was a weak spellcaster that never ran out of spells) was probably their first real attempt at 'fixing' magic in D&D, which has long been problematic, is it has always overshadowed your mundane fighter types.
In 3ed or 3.5ed D&D, if you want to play a fighter (and you're optimizing your character), you play a spellcaster, and use spells to make yourself more human than the human.
At the San Diego Comicon this year I was a WOTC volunteer who was basically the 'Star Wars Saga Edition Guy' who got to explain the rules of Saga Edition to maybe 50 tables of people, running half hour games each time. Since Saga Edition is supposed to be real close to 4th edition, I'm probably as familiar as anyone with the hypothetical rules right now. Saga edition, in a nutshell... is okay. It removes your armor class and saving throws. Instead you have a joint AC/Save thing called Fort Defense, Reflex Defense and Will Defense, and the attacker makes all dice rolls (with the defense numbers normally 10 points higher than your old save, so a +5 reflex save would be a 15 reflex defense in the new system) so if I were to, say, fireball the party as a DM, I'd roll one d20 with my 10d6 fireball damage. If I got a 15 on the d20 'attack' roll, it would do full damage to everyone with a Reflex Defense of 15 or lower, and half damage to everyone higher. So you don't have to wait for 6 people to break out their dice, figure out their saving throw bonuses, etc. You just pitch the dice together, announce the result, and move on. A nice touch, though I'm a bit leery of running spells like Wail of the Banshee that way, as it will greatly increase the chance of TPKs -- we'll see if they keep one save for the party with that.
AC is now your Reflex Defense.
They have something called a condition track which runs concurrently with your hit points (you still have hit points -- Saga Edition is 90% the same as D20 rules). Any time you take more than your 'damage threshold' in damage (it's usually somewhere around a number between 15 to 20), you get a point of impairment, which adds a cumulative penalty to all your D20 rolls (-1, -2, -5, -10 KO), until you get knocked out at 5 points of impairment. So even if you have 200 hit points, if you take 20 damage 5 times in a combat, you'll be KOed, because they were bigger hits to you than 10 10 point hits.
The main thing that annoys me about the new system is that it is a little too generic. There's very little difference in the classes, with saves being almost totally revamped so that everyone's saves will be within 2 points of each other (your class save bonus only applies once, and you get the best of all classes that you multiclass in, and then progresses the same for everyone). Likewise, everyone gets a bonus to damage equal to half their class level. So a 20th level noble does the same damage with a blaster as a 20th level Jedi (3d6+10). The only difference in the classes are their 'special ability' talent trees, which work like in World of Warcraft. Essentially, every other level you get a new 'talent', many of which have prerequisites of other talents. So if you want the ability to reroll an attack roll once per day (a rogue ability) you might need the talent to reroll a skil
Hmm, doubtful, at least any time soon. The current setup makes too much money for the cable companies, so they don't have a lot of incentive to change the sweet deal they have for themselves. Essentially, they're reverse ISPs, which package the internet and then spoon feed it to their subscribers.
ABC has already started offering their shows over IP, but it relegates you to watching Grey's Anatomy on a relatively small screen, getting a crick in your neck from staring at the laptop too long.
AT&T is pushing something called IPTV (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPTV) which sounds like it might be a good solution to a lot of problems. But you'll still be paying through the nose for cable service.
At the current rates for cable service (my parents pay something ridiculous), when I moved into a new house I made the decision to not get cable, and have been pretty happy with it so far. Broadcast HDTV gives me a few channels to entertain my girlfriend with when she comes over, and I don't watch TV at all these days.
I don't know how to explain it, but a lot of the people I've seen create websites for government or local authority branches are business types lacking on the technical side. Basically the person who the project manager likes most, regardless of reviewing their technical ability on previous sites other than quickly browsing through one or two and going "ohh, thats nice isnt it!".
So you're saying that government is all politics, then?
If somebody stinks, their contracts aren't renewed. Is there a problem with implementing something like this stateside? Again, just curious. Yes, you generally can't fire teachers in America.
Trying to figure out what actually works in education is actually a very major problem. Suppose you have a motivated teacher who develops a unique curriculum. What you often find is that its the teacher making the difference (because he or she's very motivated and is a great teacher), not the curriculum. Which is why the Department of Education is very big right now on properly controlled experiments for new programs. They've compiled a database of what works (called the What Works Clearinghouse): http://www.whatworks.ed.gov/
From my own experiences: The #1 thing a school can do to improve it's performance is change its demographics. Get more upper class kids, and your test scores will go through the roof. While that doesn't sound practical, that's the one guaranteed way to improve school performance. And schools are certainly penalized if the demographics shift the other way, which I consider singularly unfair. A lot of the major downturns in 'bad' districts I've worked with are the result of demographics shifts.
On a more practical level, I think that the attitude of the students is the #1 obstacle to learning. Kids certainly aren't stupid, but they'll sink to whatever level is expected of them. If they're not college bound, then they basically don't do anything in high school, because they don't care. On the other hand, if you can make a kid believe that college is necessary for his future well being (and many kids think they're all going to be rich multimillionaires and never have to do a lick of work in their lives)... then magically everything falls into place. I personally support the idea of getting as many kids into AP classes as possible, as the expectations in AP classes are set at the proper point.
If you can get through to kids and get them to internalize high goals, that is the #1 thing that would help education in America.
The only thing stopping everyone from taking AP classes is the fact that we're losing most of our failing kids in middle school. If kids aren't properly motivated and educated in middle school, they'll fail in high school and have greatly reduced chances of going to college or excelling in college.
At an elementary district my aunt used to work at, it caused something of a scandal when auditors discovered that for years the schools had been prohibiting their "not so bright" students from taking standardized tests, so as to artificially boost their API numbers, win various awards, etc.
If you read Freakonomics (which isn't actually about Economics, but stats), the author shows how Chicago schools used stats to discover that a large number of their teachers were cheating on standardized tests -- they'd wait till the students when home, then erased and re-filled in correct answers for the students. Under statistical analysis, it would show up as a huge spike in year-to-year analysis of students' scores. Suspicious teachers were retested (well, their students were), while under adult supervision, so to speak, and the classes which suddenly fell back down to average numbers got new teachers the next year.
If you really want to help the US education system, do the following: * ban sodas and candy and fastfood * expand the free lunch program to every kid and include breakfast - hungry kids can't learn - and there are too many of them * go to year-round schooling with longer non-summer seasonal breaks * make physical education mandatory at every grade level - they need breaks and exercise * allow merit-based pay/bonuses for teachers who do a good job (using a variety of metrics) * lower class sizes - a teacher can't manage 38 kids AND teach them * lower the administrative burden on schools so they can hire more teachers and fewer administrators
I'm an evaluator for around 20 school districts around California, and I have seen all of the above done, and it still doesn't help.
Remember, a photon -- as we learn it in 8th grade -- doesn't exist. A photon is actually a quantum wavefront which collapses to what we normally call a photon on observation. If you pass single photons through a double slit apparatus, it will interfere with itself.
If they have some way of exploiting physics so one waveform passes through all the nodes, and they have some way of reconstructing which route it took (maybe through a polarization filter on each node) then it might be possible to do in O(1) time. My quantum-foo isn't that good, but I've seen experiments where games like that are played.
Yes, it was borderline starvation, and I'd get weak from lack of food. Not intentional by any means, as I ate a lot. I was just naturally skinny and I exercised very hard (was county-wide MVP for volleyball). But that's the target goal for my BMI, which is why I think the system is just ludicrously stupid.
>>So China's sudden, radical conversion from Maoism to capitalism was preceded by a sudden, radical change in people's common values?
The Chinese were all aware Maoism didn't work. Having 14 to 30 million people starve to death will do that to you. And the Chinese have always been pretty capitalistically-minded people.
The question to the central government was how to integrate capitalism without losing their control over society. So far, it seems to have worked out pretty well for them. Although there's something like a thousand riots a year over the restrictions they place on society.
My fiancee is at UC San Francisco, the top school in the world for medicine. They claim BMI was developed by insurance companies to be able to label everyone overweight and be able to deny health care or charge higher rates.
Actually, the GP is right. BMI does a really bad job estimating body fat on two types of people: big people, and muscular people.
As someone that is 2 meters tall, it claims I'm overweight if I weigh more than 210 pounds, and says my ideal weight is 180 pounds. I was 180 pounds in high school, and was quite underweight at the time, with a body fat percentage of 3% or so.
Now, I have a body fat percentage of 18% which is borderline overweight, but I have a BMI of 32 or so. I asked my doctor about it the last time I had a physical, and he basically laughed and said BMI was a joke, and that whatever exercise program I was doing (martial arts 4-5 days a week for 1-3 hours at a time), it was working pretty well.
Yeah, BMI is a really terrible standard. Body Fat percentage is really the only way to go, and can be tested very quickly (either by fat pinch or by dunking).
A lot of health plans do offer discounts already. My cousin saves $50/month by going to a gym regularly (the gym actually signs off every time she enters and leaves). I think it's a great system, and puts incentives in the right places to make Americans healthy.
Yeah, when I was in college 10 years ago I discovered several ways of effectively shutting down the internet. The possibility of punishment wasn't there (our lab computers didn't require people to log in to use so there's no audit trail), but I still didn't do it since I am of the opinion that practical jokes should always be in good humor.
Because a lot of high performance apps are structured in a multi-tier fashion to take advantage of cores, or multiple CPUs on the same board, because the latency is better than going across an interconnect. For example, if you're iterating over an array, you put cores near each other, so they can communicate their work with no more effort than pulling data from a different cache.
I like it. In my work with high performance computers, a significant limiting factor in a lot of our tasks was the interprocessor bandwidth. The Niagra2 has a crossbar, with a huge amount of bandwidth available between the different cores and their L2 caches.
I'd like to see some benchmarks, and more technical specs, on these babies.
A lot of chicks are indeed taken, unattractive, or crazy. I'd say about 1 out of 10 women of my age range meets the three criteria. If one out of 10 women finds me attractive, that means I have to meet ~100 women of my age to get a girlfriend.
The problem with computer nerds is that they might only talk with a few new women every year, and then complain when they can't find a girlfriend. One actually has to work hard to get a chick. In grad school, I went to martial arts classes, dance classes, the college SCA, parties, conventions, etc., both because I was interested in them, but also so I could keep my eye out for potential girlfriends. At the ballroom dance club I was approached by a woman, and now we've been dating for years (and are engaged). Turns out she was the official club greeter, and I'd misread her friendliness as hitting on me, but hey, it worked out well.
It sounds like you're a bit afraid of the whole process. Don't be. Just get out there, talk to every person you find attractive, be willing to make mistakes (!), work on your social skills (!), possibly work out if you're not in shape, and don't expect anything, and you should be pleasantly surprised. The only hard part to dating is finding a large enough pool of new people to talk to.
Old acquaintances don't count. If you haven't asked out a woman by the third time you talk to her, she'll put you firmly into the friend box. And it's hard to break out of the friend box.
A good woman is one of the most wonderful things in the world. Don't let your fear of the process get the better of you.
What about banks that set up policies that are intentionally designed to rip off their customers? Back when I was poor, I kept a very careful eye on my bank account, and always made sure I had the correct amount of money in my account to cover automatic payments, written cheques, et cetera. Then I got hit with an NSF fee for a transaction that successfully went through. The penalty caused me to not have enough money for a cheque that I wrote, which triggered another penalty, which kind of snowballed.
I called up Wells Fargo and yelled at them. Their defense? Their software checks to see if you have sufficient funds for an automated payment a full week before the payment is made. If you don't have enough money then, they hit you with an NSF penalty, even if you deposit money and have it cleared well in time for the payment to be made. After I yelled at them (nicely) for a while, they finally removed all the penalties, but told me next time, "Make sure you have more money in your account." Which, you know, is great advice to someone that is poor.
You take that situation, multiply it by all the customers Wells Fargo has, and you have an intentional situation that's a lot worse than some jokers finding a buggy ATM.
I did find a buggy ATM once, that errored out during a transaction. It gave me $200... without debiting it from my account. When I called Wells Fargo to report it, they called me a liar, and said that the situation couldn't possibly have happened. Hey, their loss.
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They could probably install the drug sensors at the same time they do the TISP wiring.
http://www.google.com/tisp/press.html
Indeed. Secret ballots are the very foundation of a democratic election.
Sure, various communist and dictatorial countries had 'elections', but when you'd get shot if you didn't vote for Saddam, or whoever, it meant that the people weren't getting the leader they actually wanted.
The only problem with democracy, really, is that you sometimes do get the leader you voted for.
After 5 rounds of free prep time you should be able to do better than that. Besides, that would hardly kill a level 17 cleric who'll be hovering around 170hp or so.
You get one attack (sure for 50 damage) during the surprise round. The cleric moves away and you get a second attack for 50 damage. Then various bad things happen to you.
That's assuming the cleric has no rounds of prep time, has no spot check, no items on, no contingent healing, no ability to tumble, no spells up. It's pretty one sided, but the cleric will still probably win.
If you allow such cheese as Divine Metamagic, then things get progressively worse for non-spellcasters.
You can end a whole fight with a color spray, sleep, or web. I've tanked before as a 5th level sorcerer before, since with shield, mage armor and alter self up the monsters couldn't hit him, and if they did hit him, he'd just recast false life.
While you might think that playing a wizard is difficult, I've leveled up enough wizards and sorcerers through the years to know their strength in low levels is things like the above, not pitching out the solitary useless 1d4+1 magic missiles. You just find the niche for yourself, play smart with conserving your spells, and they'll do just as well as the raging 26 strength half-orc barbarian. Not in damage, but if you knock out 3 enemies with a color spray, that's just as good as killing three people in one action.
When you hit 8th level or so, then the damage spells come into their own power, and you start casting the big fireballs, combusts, etc., with an empower slapped on top of it for extra gas. 12d8 (no save) all day long from an empowered combust outshines the barbarian, and at 10th level, the 15d6 empowered fireballs will rack up huge amounts of damage against groups of enemies.
Like I said, there's really no weak spot for them, as long as you know how to play. Of course, with a philosophy like that, I *do* usually end up getting stuck playing the wizard in home groups. =)
It was true in old D&D. But in the new editions, low level mages have spells like shield and mage armor for +8 to AC, alter self for +6 to AC, false life (so they have more hp than a fighter), backbiter, color spray, etc. There's no weak levels for a mage.
>> Did you play the same D&D I did? Magic users are incredibly gimped compared to fighters.
This was true before 3ed, but not after 3ed. Well, maybe it's true if you don't optimize properly.
Mages in 3ed start around on par with fighters and end better than fighters. The only weakness a low level mage has is lack of spells per day, and a low starting hp. But his color spray can end a combat with a single action. By 3rd level or so, he will have an AC around 26 (much better than a fighter's) and have spells enough to end a couple combats by himself every day. By 7th level he gets polymorph, and he's better than a fighter, even at fighting. I wrote one of the first power attack calculators (www.distanceeducationconsultants.com/ddcalc.php) to calculate how much damage my wizard would be doing with power attack when he had Shapechange and a bunch of other buffs up.
I run a nationwide 3.5ed D&D campaign (anyone can play -- www.livingplanar.com), and have talked a little bit with some people at WOTC about 4th edition. If you've been paying attention to their releases over the last year or two, you'll have noticed like I did that they've been experimenting with a lot of new 'systems' for doing stuff. The Tome of Battle completely redid combat for non-spellcasters, the Tome of Magic introduced 3 new magic systems which didn't fit in with the standard magic-user/cleric model that we've had since the '70s. Magic of Incarnum was another alternate magic system. Complete Scoundrel introduced 'skill tricks' which rewrote how skills worked. Complete Mage introduced 'reserve feats' which allowed spellcasters to cast (weak) spells all day long. Hell, the Warlock (which was a weak spellcaster that never ran out of spells) was probably their first real attempt at 'fixing' magic in D&D, which has long been problematic, is it has always overshadowed your mundane fighter types.
In 3ed or 3.5ed D&D, if you want to play a fighter (and you're optimizing your character), you play a spellcaster, and use spells to make yourself more human than the human.
At the San Diego Comicon this year I was a WOTC volunteer who was basically the 'Star Wars Saga Edition Guy' who got to explain the rules of Saga Edition to maybe 50 tables of people, running half hour games each time. Since Saga Edition is supposed to be real close to 4th edition, I'm probably as familiar as anyone with the hypothetical rules right now. Saga edition, in a nutshell... is okay. It removes your armor class and saving throws. Instead you have a joint AC/Save thing called Fort Defense, Reflex Defense and Will Defense, and the attacker makes all dice rolls (with the defense numbers normally 10 points higher than your old save, so a +5 reflex save would be a 15 reflex defense in the new system) so if I were to, say, fireball the party as a DM, I'd roll one d20 with my 10d6 fireball damage. If I got a 15 on the d20 'attack' roll, it would do full damage to everyone with a Reflex Defense of 15 or lower, and half damage to everyone higher. So you don't have to wait for 6 people to break out their dice, figure out their saving throw bonuses, etc. You just pitch the dice together, announce the result, and move on. A nice touch, though I'm a bit leery of running spells like Wail of the Banshee that way, as it will greatly increase the chance of TPKs -- we'll see if they keep one save for the party with that.
AC is now your Reflex Defense.
They have something called a condition track which runs concurrently with your hit points (you still have hit points -- Saga Edition is 90% the same as D20 rules). Any time you take more than your 'damage threshold' in damage (it's usually somewhere around a number between 15 to 20), you get a point of impairment, which adds a cumulative penalty to all your D20 rolls (-1, -2, -5, -10 KO), until you get knocked out at 5 points of impairment. So even if you have 200 hit points, if you take 20 damage 5 times in a combat, you'll be KOed, because they were bigger hits to you than 10 10 point hits.
The main thing that annoys me about the new system is that it is a little too generic. There's very little difference in the classes, with saves being almost totally revamped so that everyone's saves will be within 2 points of each other (your class save bonus only applies once, and you get the best of all classes that you multiclass in, and then progresses the same for everyone). Likewise, everyone gets a bonus to damage equal to half their class level. So a 20th level noble does the same damage with a blaster as a 20th level Jedi (3d6+10). The only difference in the classes are their 'special ability' talent trees, which work like in World of Warcraft. Essentially, every other level you get a new 'talent', many of which have prerequisites of other talents. So if you want the ability to reroll an attack roll once per day (a rogue ability) you might need the talent to reroll a skil
Remember, it's not lupus.
http://itsnotlup.us/
Hmm, doubtful, at least any time soon. The current setup makes too much money for the cable companies, so they don't have a lot of incentive to change the sweet deal they have for themselves. Essentially, they're reverse ISPs, which package the internet and then spoon feed it to their subscribers.
ABC has already started offering their shows over IP, but it relegates you to watching Grey's Anatomy on a relatively small screen, getting a crick in your neck from staring at the laptop too long.
AT&T is pushing something called IPTV (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPTV) which sounds like it might be a good solution to a lot of problems. But you'll still be paying through the nose for cable service.
At the current rates for cable service (my parents pay something ridiculous), when I moved into a new house I made the decision to not get cable, and have been pretty happy with it so far. Broadcast HDTV gives me a few channels to entertain my girlfriend with when she comes over, and I don't watch TV at all these days.
I don't know how to explain it, but a lot of the people I've seen create websites for government or local authority branches are business types lacking on the technical side. Basically the person who the project manager likes most, regardless of reviewing their technical ability on previous sites other than quickly browsing through one or two and going "ohh, thats nice isnt it!".
So you're saying that government is all politics, then?
If somebody stinks, their contracts aren't renewed. Is there a problem with implementing something like this stateside? Again, just curious.
Yes, you generally can't fire teachers in America.
Trying to figure out what actually works in education is actually a very major problem. Suppose you have a motivated teacher who develops a unique curriculum. What you often find is that its the teacher making the difference (because he or she's very motivated and is a great teacher), not the curriculum. Which is why the Department of Education is very big right now on properly controlled experiments for new programs. They've compiled a database of what works (called the What Works Clearinghouse):
http://www.whatworks.ed.gov/
From my own experiences:
The #1 thing a school can do to improve it's performance is change its demographics. Get more upper class kids, and your test scores will go through the roof. While that doesn't sound practical, that's the one guaranteed way to improve school performance. And schools are certainly penalized if the demographics shift the other way, which I consider singularly unfair. A lot of the major downturns in 'bad' districts I've worked with are the result of demographics shifts.
On a more practical level, I think that the attitude of the students is the #1 obstacle to learning. Kids certainly aren't stupid, but they'll sink to whatever level is expected of them. If they're not college bound, then they basically don't do anything in high school, because they don't care. On the other hand, if you can make a kid believe that college is necessary for his future well being (and many kids think they're all going to be rich multimillionaires and never have to do a lick of work in their lives)... then magically everything falls into place. I personally support the idea of getting as many kids into AP classes as possible, as the expectations in AP classes are set at the proper point.
If you can get through to kids and get them to internalize high goals, that is the #1 thing that would help education in America.
The only thing stopping everyone from taking AP classes is the fact that we're losing most of our failing kids in middle school. If kids aren't properly motivated and educated in middle school, they'll fail in high school and have greatly reduced chances of going to college or excelling in college.
At an elementary district my aunt used to work at, it caused something of a scandal when auditors discovered that for years the schools had been prohibiting their "not so bright" students from taking standardized tests, so as to artificially boost their API numbers, win various awards, etc.
If you read Freakonomics (which isn't actually about Economics, but stats), the author shows how Chicago schools used stats to discover that a large number of their teachers were cheating on standardized tests -- they'd wait till the students when home, then erased and re-filled in correct answers for the students. Under statistical analysis, it would show up as a huge spike in year-to-year analysis of students' scores. Suspicious teachers were retested (well, their students were), while under adult supervision, so to speak, and the classes which suddenly fell back down to average numbers got new teachers the next year.
If you really want to help the US education system, do the following:
* ban sodas and candy and fastfood
* expand the free lunch program to every kid and include breakfast - hungry kids can't learn - and there are too many of them
* go to year-round schooling with longer non-summer seasonal breaks
* make physical education mandatory at every grade level - they need breaks and exercise
* allow merit-based pay/bonuses for teachers who do a good job (using a variety of metrics)
* lower class sizes - a teacher can't manage 38 kids AND teach them
* lower the administrative burden on schools so they can hire more teachers and fewer administrators
I'm an evaluator for around 20 school districts around California, and I have seen all of the above done, and it still doesn't help.
Remember, a photon -- as we learn it in 8th grade -- doesn't exist. A photon is actually a quantum wavefront which collapses to what we normally call a photon on observation. If you pass single photons through a double slit apparatus, it will interfere with itself.
If they have some way of exploiting physics so one waveform passes through all the nodes, and they have some way of reconstructing which route it took (maybe through a polarization filter on each node) then it might be possible to do in O(1) time. My quantum-foo isn't that good, but I've seen experiments where games like that are played.
Yes, it was borderline starvation, and I'd get weak from lack of food. Not intentional by any means, as I ate a lot. I was just naturally skinny and I exercised very hard (was county-wide MVP for volleyball). But that's the target goal for my BMI, which is why I think the system is just ludicrously stupid.
>>So China's sudden, radical conversion from Maoism to capitalism was preceded by a sudden, radical change in people's common values?
o nsequences
The Chinese were all aware Maoism didn't work. Having 14 to 30 million people starve to death will do that to you. And the Chinese have always been pretty capitalistically-minded people.
The question to the central government was how to integrate capitalism without losing their control over society. So far, it seems to have worked out pretty well for them. Although there's something like a thousand riots a year over the restrictions they place on society.
Read more at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward#C
My fiancee is at UC San Francisco, the top school in the world for medicine. They claim BMI was developed by insurance companies to be able to label everyone overweight and be able to deny health care or charge higher rates.
Actually, the GP is right. BMI does a really bad job estimating body fat on two types of people: big people, and muscular people.
As someone that is 2 meters tall, it claims I'm overweight if I weigh more than 210 pounds, and says my ideal weight is 180 pounds. I was 180 pounds in high school, and was quite underweight at the time, with a body fat percentage of 3% or so.
Now, I have a body fat percentage of 18% which is borderline overweight, but I have a BMI of 32 or so. I asked my doctor about it the last time I had a physical, and he basically laughed and said BMI was a joke, and that whatever exercise program I was doing (martial arts 4-5 days a week for 1-3 hours at a time), it was working pretty well.
Yeah, BMI is a really terrible standard. Body Fat percentage is really the only way to go, and can be tested very quickly (either by fat pinch or by dunking).
A lot of health plans do offer discounts already. My cousin saves $50/month by going to a gym regularly (the gym actually signs off every time she enters and leaves). I think it's a great system, and puts incentives in the right places to make Americans healthy.
Yeah, when I was in college 10 years ago I discovered several ways of effectively shutting down the internet. The possibility of punishment wasn't there (our lab computers didn't require people to log in to use so there's no audit trail), but I still didn't do it since I am of the opinion that practical jokes should always be in good humor.
"The answer is Procedural Programming."
a ge)
Oh my, Procedural Programming! They must have been the first company to use the C programming language, like, ever.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C_(programming_langu
Someone should slap the Slashdot editors.
Because a lot of high performance apps are structured in a multi-tier fashion to take advantage of cores, or multiple CPUs on the same board, because the latency is better than going across an interconnect. For example, if you're iterating over an array, you put cores near each other, so they can communicate their work with no more effort than pulling data from a different cache.
I like it. In my work with high performance computers, a significant limiting factor in a lot of our tasks was the interprocessor bandwidth. The Niagra2 has a crossbar, with a huge amount of bandwidth available between the different cores and their L2 caches.
I'd like to see some benchmarks, and more technical specs, on these babies.
A lot of chicks are indeed taken, unattractive, or crazy. I'd say about 1 out of 10 women of my age range meets the three criteria. If one out of 10 women finds me attractive, that means I have to meet ~100 women of my age to get a girlfriend.
The problem with computer nerds is that they might only talk with a few new women every year, and then complain when they can't find a girlfriend. One actually has to work hard to get a chick. In grad school, I went to martial arts classes, dance classes, the college SCA, parties, conventions, etc., both because I was interested in them, but also so I could keep my eye out for potential girlfriends. At the ballroom dance club I was approached by a woman, and now we've been dating for years (and are engaged). Turns out she was the official club greeter, and I'd misread her friendliness as hitting on me, but hey, it worked out well.
It sounds like you're a bit afraid of the whole process. Don't be. Just get out there, talk to every person you find attractive, be willing to make mistakes (!), work on your social skills (!), possibly work out if you're not in shape, and don't expect anything, and you should be pleasantly surprised. The only hard part to dating is finding a large enough pool of new people to talk to.
Old acquaintances don't count. If you haven't asked out a woman by the third time you talk to her, she'll put you firmly into the friend box. And it's hard to break out of the friend box.
A good woman is one of the most wonderful things in the world. Don't let your fear of the process get the better of you.
What about banks that set up policies that are intentionally designed to rip off their customers? Back when I was poor, I kept a very careful eye on my bank account, and always made sure I had the correct amount of money in my account to cover automatic payments, written cheques, et cetera. Then I got hit with an NSF fee for a transaction that successfully went through. The penalty caused me to not have enough money for a cheque that I wrote, which triggered another penalty, which kind of snowballed.
I called up Wells Fargo and yelled at them. Their defense? Their software checks to see if you have sufficient funds for an automated payment a full week before the payment is made. If you don't have enough money then, they hit you with an NSF penalty, even if you deposit money and have it cleared well in time for the payment to be made. After I yelled at them (nicely) for a while, they finally removed all the penalties, but told me next time, "Make sure you have more money in your account." Which, you know, is great advice to someone that is poor.
You take that situation, multiply it by all the customers Wells Fargo has, and you have an intentional situation that's a lot worse than some jokers finding a buggy ATM.
I did find a buggy ATM once, that errored out during a transaction. It gave me $200... without debiting it from my account. When I called Wells Fargo to report it, they called me a liar, and said that the situation couldn't possibly have happened. Hey, their loss.