As a PhD student, I've asked myself what I'd do in the situation. It depends on the course material. Note that this is relevant for sciences.
If you're gonna talk about mathematics, you don't really need computers. It's even easy to see that it's much more convenient to use pencils and paper than a computer, when you have many equations with a lot of different symbols, no matter how fast your LaTeX is. In different instances it makes sense to have a computer presentation by the teacher, when it comes to certain graphs and pictures. But the students? they only need to type in their homework, so that it's readable and easy to send through e-mail.
If you're gonna talk about computer simulations, than it makes sense that everyone has a computer. you give everyone a similar environment, and you start programming, they see your code, they do postprocessing together with you... the point is that they follow every step you make. from writing the code, to running it, handling results, making figures, stuff like that. It's a lot of different elements that are coming together, and it doesn't make sense to separate them. Because if you do separate numerical methods from actual simulations, it's not as fun.
as to the facebookers, I'd kick them out of class in any situation. assuming I'd never teach a class about facebook.
photocopying sheet music is a far cry from kids singing a song.
really? Mozart "stole" music from the church, without having a written version, by remembering the notes. so, under this law: would it be legal for him to sing said stolen music? (I realize it would be illegal to distribute written copies).
in the end, I find it idiotic that teachers have to worry about this kind of thing. They should be able to distribute as many copies as they pleased, when it comes to learning material (any learning material). I mean... the point of teachers is to teach kids something, and society should value that more than some greedy idiots who want their pension plan to be "I wrote this song once". Sorry: greedy idiots who want their pension plan to be "I introduced this songwriter to this singer once".
Python (and I assume Perl) can go graphical right away if you set them up to use gnuplot properly. I have to make a lot of figures for my work, and I wrote myself a subroutine that calls gnuplot to create an eps directly from Python; for a generic problem, it's trivial to set it up that you compile a full LaTeX document, describing some problem and a resulting graph. And you can just show kids the details if they want them, but they wouldn't need all of them.
As far as algorithms go... I would just have a class on Rubik's cube (the 2^3 version). That's enough for the base concepts, and kids should be able to understand it before they're 10.
They should maybe try electric mopeds. If that would work. I assume the fact they wouldn't wake up the whole neighbourhood would make them unsellable...
I am enlighted by your informative commentary, and shall be buying a tank shortly.
I'm sorry, but you don't get to accuse the city officials of siding with the small vehicles. People who can only afford one car, and buy a small one to use in the city, should take trains or buses. Or they should buy a big one like you say, and take trams and buses in the city. Like it or not, the fact is that people live in cities, and these cities need to be clean. And people need to get from A to B in reasonable time in these cities, not wait for hours in trafic because some idiot decided they wanted a bigger car than their neighbour.
are you saying that the differently named hardware is actually different hardware? I think the crowd here will hate you for siding with the big bad corporation.
And here we have the real problem. as long as there is the possibility of conflict, two separate groups will attempt to keep secrets. and you also get disinformation and so on. If this keeps happening, we can't really have a scientific study of UFO phenomena. And it's annoying, because some people honestly want to know what they saw, and sometimes there is a conspiracy to hide the truth (military planes or similar).
I can certainly see why most serious scientists just ignore the issue for now...
if we consider ourselves members of a rational society, this shouldn't be news. UFO reports should be public period. They are reports of phenomena that are unexplained to the observers. If everyone has access to those reports, than it's easier to find someone who can explain them. I really don't understand why these reports were secret in the first place (except for the names and similar stuff).
On a more serious note, you cannot discuss mathematics as an art without realizing that humanity's progress is a highly nonlinear process, and huge leaps are made from "hm, that's funny" moments. Society's problem is it wants a clear way to distribute money to mathematicians (and scientists generally), and we can't really decide which are the good problems to work on, in the context of "what'll be more useful 50 years into the future?". This is also related to the issue of copyrights and patents: if something is truly useful, you will find all the relevant information in a public library or on the internet, but usually you still need to pay specialists to explain it to you. once you understand it, your teacher encourages you to propagate that knowledge, and expand it in anyway you can (the only problem is that it's hard to find people that have the patience to understanding it).
I remember reading about people being able to read into your computer through fluctuations in the power line. I hope I remember correctly. anyway, once that option is there, the only way to keep safe is to turn off the computer. I have a friend who told me ten years ago that if I want to keep my data private, I have to unplug the network cable, turn off the computer and then unplug the power cable. strangely enough, he wasn't talking about sex.
Yes. thank you for that link. Anybody with minimal knowledge of how atomic weights are computed (i.e. a weighted average of the atomic masses of the various isotopes) can guess that if the concentrations of isotopes are different in different samples, the "atomic weight" will be different. I went and read the famous abstract anyway. quote: "This fundamental change in the presentation of the atomic weights represents an important advance in our knowledge of the natural world and underscores the significance and contributions of chemistry to the well-being of humankind in the International Year of Chemistry 2011." This article is just about the results of some measurements. ok, useful measurements, but NOT an important advance in our knowledge of the natural world.
I had to really think about measuring the efficiency of a simulation and I came up with a single answer: money. I was at a lecture about gyrokinetic simulations, and when I heard about the amount of resources being used for some simulations, I asked "how much does one of these simulations cost, in euros?". Luckily for me, the guy knew (large simulations cost in order of thousands), and he also knew how much an experiment on ITER will cost (order of a million); his argument was "it's obviously efficient to run a thousand simulations and pick the most relevant set of parameters for an experiment afterwards". I think this is the way to go with comparing supercomputers: "In order to simulate experiment X, we needed N1 euros for the developers, and N2 euros of electricity to run the code on a machine that cost N3 euros to build". If you want to be thorough, add some maintenance costs. It's a bit complicated, because developers might actually be researchers, and it's not very clear how much of their time goes into writing code... but we don't really have a better way of measuring efficiency.
The article isn't very informative. As far as I know, you can have communication from parents to their children with genetic code. with viruses, you can also broadcast something horizontally to all individuals. From the article I get that they're trying to formalize a programming language that can control 1 individual bacteria. Honestly, it's a bit sad that I don't have time to look into the details, even if I don't know a lot about biology.
However, I will start worrying when they start designing systems of bacteria that pass information systematically between themselves to solve some given problem. And with an immune system problem, I think you're reaching that point.
he/she missed a few geometry classes too, because he/she thinks you can capture 3D with only one camera. and some other geometry classes, because he/she thinks a 2D array of 2D cameras makes a 4D camera. simple explanation for apparent stupidity: we just fed a troll.
why don't you go all the way? call him an idiot, and tell him that if the atoms move faster, they have a greater kinetic energy, and all that energy has mass, therefore weight!
well, it usually turns out that it's enough to change just the scientific circles. Columbus thought the world was round, and only because of that he wanted to go to sea... that changed things a lot for everyone (think of the potato and corn). regarding the instincts... please let me know if you find anything.
Slashdot Mirror
As a PhD student, I've asked myself what I'd do in the situation. It depends on the course material. Note that this is relevant for sciences.
If you're gonna talk about mathematics, you don't really need computers. It's even easy to see that it's much more convenient to use pencils and paper than a computer, when you have many equations with a lot of different symbols, no matter how fast your LaTeX is. In different instances it makes sense to have a computer presentation by the teacher, when it comes to certain graphs and pictures. But the students? they only need to type in their homework, so that it's readable and easy to send through e-mail.
If you're gonna talk about computer simulations, than it makes sense that everyone has a computer. you give everyone a similar environment, and you start programming, they see your code, they do postprocessing together with you... the point is that they follow every step you make. from writing the code, to running it, handling results, making figures, stuff like that. It's a lot of different elements that are coming together, and it doesn't make sense to separate them. Because if you do separate numerical methods from actual simulations, it's not as fun.
as to the facebookers, I'd kick them out of class in any situation. assuming I'd never teach a class about facebook.
photocopying sheet music is a far cry from kids singing a song.
really? Mozart "stole" music from the church, without having a written version, by remembering the notes. so, under this law: would it be legal for him to sing said stolen music? (I realize it would be illegal to distribute written copies).
in the end, I find it idiotic that teachers have to worry about this kind of thing. They should be able to distribute as many copies as they pleased, when it comes to learning material (any learning material). I mean... the point of teachers is to teach kids something, and society should value that more than some greedy idiots who want their pension plan to be "I wrote this song once". Sorry: greedy idiots who want their pension plan to be "I introduced this songwriter to this singer once".
I had no idea that could happen. reposting: "researcher says `hm, that's funny`".
stupid brackets.
I would go with "researcher says >".
Python (and I assume Perl) can go graphical right away if you set them up to use gnuplot properly.
I have to make a lot of figures for my work, and I wrote myself a subroutine that calls gnuplot to create an eps directly from Python; for a generic problem, it's trivial to set it up that you compile a full LaTeX document, describing some problem and a resulting graph. And you can just show kids the details if they want them, but they wouldn't need all of them.
As far as algorithms go... I would just have a class on Rubik's cube (the 2^3 version). That's enough for the base concepts, and kids should be able to understand it before they're 10.
They should maybe try electric mopeds. If that would work. I assume the fact they wouldn't wake up the whole neighbourhood would make them unsellable...
I am enlighted by your informative commentary, and shall be buying a tank shortly.
I'm sorry, but you don't get to accuse the city officials of siding with the small vehicles. People who can only afford one car, and buy a small one to use in the city, should take trains or buses. Or they should buy a big one like you say, and take trams and buses in the city. Like it or not, the fact is that people live in cities, and these cities need to be clean. And people need to get from A to B in reasonable time in these cities, not wait for hours in trafic because some idiot decided they wanted a bigger car than their neighbour.
are you saying that the differently named hardware is actually different hardware? I think the crowd here will hate you for siding with the big bad corporation.
And here we have the real problem. as long as there is the possibility of conflict, two separate groups will attempt to keep secrets. and you also get disinformation and so on.
If this keeps happening, we can't really have a scientific study of UFO phenomena. And it's annoying, because some people honestly want to know what they saw, and sometimes there is a conspiracy to hide the truth (military planes or similar).
I can certainly see why most serious scientists just ignore the issue for now...
if we consider ourselves members of a rational society, this shouldn't be news.
UFO reports should be public period. They are reports of phenomena that are unexplained to the observers. If everyone has access to those reports, than it's easier to find someone who can explain them. I really don't understand why these reports were secret in the first place (except for the names and similar stuff).
yes, but seven ate nine
you had me at complex buffer sizes.
On a more serious note, you cannot discuss mathematics as an art without realizing that humanity's progress is a highly nonlinear process, and huge leaps are made from "hm, that's funny" moments. Society's problem is it wants a clear way to distribute money to mathematicians (and scientists generally), and we can't really decide which are the good problems to work on, in the context of "what'll be more useful 50 years into the future?".
This is also related to the issue of copyrights and patents: if something is truly useful, you will find all the relevant information in a public library or on the internet, but usually you still need to pay specialists to explain it to you. once you understand it, your teacher encourages you to propagate that knowledge, and expand it in anyway you can (the only problem is that it's hard to find people that have the patience to understanding it).
it's very simple. you live longer if, in your bloodline, children are consistently conceived at old age. and that's about it...
do you think they're going to cite him when they publish their results?
I remember reading about people being able to read into your computer through fluctuations in the power line. I hope I remember correctly.
anyway, once that option is there, the only way to keep safe is to turn off the computer.
I have a friend who told me ten years ago that if I want to keep my data private, I have to unplug the network cable, turn off the computer and then unplug the power cable. strangely enough, he wasn't talking about sex.
Yes. thank you for that link. Anybody with minimal knowledge of how atomic weights are computed (i.e. a weighted average of the atomic masses of the various isotopes) can guess that if the concentrations of isotopes are different in different samples, the "atomic weight" will be different.
I went and read the famous abstract anyway. quote: "This fundamental change in the presentation of the atomic weights represents an important advance in our knowledge of the natural world and underscores the significance and contributions of chemistry to the well-being of humankind in the International Year of Chemistry 2011."
This article is just about the results of some measurements. ok, useful measurements, but NOT an important advance in our knowledge of the natural world.
I had to really think about measuring the efficiency of a simulation and I came up with a single answer: money. I was at a lecture about gyrokinetic simulations, and when I heard about the amount of resources being used for some simulations, I asked "how much does one of these simulations cost, in euros?". Luckily for me, the guy knew (large simulations cost in order of thousands), and he also knew how much an experiment on ITER will cost (order of a million); his argument was "it's obviously efficient to run a thousand simulations and pick the most relevant set of parameters for an experiment afterwards".
I think this is the way to go with comparing supercomputers: "In order to simulate experiment X, we needed N1 euros for the developers, and N2 euros of electricity to run the code on a machine that cost N3 euros to build". If you want to be thorough, add some maintenance costs. It's a bit complicated, because developers might actually be researchers, and it's not very clear how much of their time goes into writing code... but we don't really have a better way of measuring efficiency.
The article isn't very informative. As far as I know, you can have communication from parents to their children with genetic code. with viruses, you can also broadcast something horizontally to all individuals. From the article I get that they're trying to formalize a programming language that can control 1 individual bacteria.
Honestly, it's a bit sad that I don't have time to look into the details, even if I don't know a lot about biology.
However, I will start worrying when they start designing systems of bacteria that pass information systematically between themselves to solve some given problem. And with an immune system problem, I think you're reaching that point.
he/she missed a few geometry classes too, because he/she thinks you can capture 3D with only one camera. and some other geometry classes, because he/she thinks a 2D array of 2D cameras makes a 4D camera.
simple explanation for apparent stupidity: we just fed a troll.
tanks. i needed that.
why don't you go all the way? call him an idiot, and tell him that if the atoms move faster, they have a greater kinetic energy, and all that energy has mass, therefore weight!
Seeing it's so popular, I don't understand why the guy didn't patent his idea... to tell you the truth, I do believe you could use it for technology.
well, it usually turns out that it's enough to change just the scientific circles. Columbus thought the world was round, and only because of that he wanted to go to sea... that changed things a lot for everyone (think of the potato and corn).
regarding the instincts... please let me know if you find anything.
+1 "completely pointless question that destroys the basis for solipsism by just being".
but seriously, your bafflement is annusing.
obviously, there's been a mistake. we are monitoring your situation and will advise.