I believe that there is a perception in the US that math is _supposed_ to be hard.... so teachers make it hard.
Many of the math classes I have taken require you to memorize various formulas etc. vice putting the emphasis on how to work the formulas and understand what it is you are really doing. So if you cannot properly regurgitate the Quadratic Equation come test day you just missed every one of those problems.
I have asked teachers "Is this a Math Class or a Memorization Class?" a few times... and they all get pissed so they are obviously aware that they are artificially making the class harder than it needs to be (or hard in the wrong area).
This is a fire code violation where I live... and might be where you are at as well. You can't have any coverings that might block the sprinklers from getting to every nook and cranny.
Actually I was thinking about this the other day as I was scanning some history books for Distributed Proofreaders.... history, for the most part, has _already been written_ it should be fairly easy to cull through Public Domain history books, select the chapters/sections that are well written and create an 'open' history textbook.
The header is being changed.... a few lines will appear at the top with the remainder appearing at the end of the e-text... of course this only affects e-texts added to the archive _after_ the header change.
This has been my experience with math courses for the most part. I never understood why they expect you to be able to regurgitate formulae when the whole point is to know when to use them, how to use them and understand how they work.
Somewhere along the line the American education system concluded that math is _supposed_ to be hard and the easiest way to make it hard is to require people to memorize seemingly inane formulae and then require them to regurgitate them verbatim prior to applying them (test time).
I have pissed off more than a few math teachers with a simple question: Is this a math class or a memorization class?
I personally developed a real hatred of math due to this 'memorization requirement'.
No matter what you run eventually you will forget exactly how and where you ran it... before the drywall goes up go into each room and take pictures of every wall and the ceilings, these can be a major time saver when trying to find wiring, studs etc. later on.
I'm with the guys that are reccomending running coax... you can never have enough cable TV jacks..put on in every wall. (Honey, can't we put the couch over there and the TV over there???? No, there's no cable TV jack.)
If you live in an area where ceiling fans are commonly used have a box put in the ceiling of every room and the multi-gang switch boxes in the walls... major pain in the ass to try and put these in later.
I don't know how many times I have searched for something and get a perfect looking search result only to find out it is a broken link. I have not used all of the search engines out there but I don't remember any of the ones that I have used having an obvious method to flag a link as broken.
I know that their spiders go through the database and verify links but I'd be willing to bet that is takes months to go over it once. Why not flag links as broken and have the spider verify/remove those first?
Just cleaning up the broken links could improve the search results.
UPS does home consumer shipping as a sideline: they're more worried about pleasing their corporate customers.
I don't know about that.. I work for a _very_ large financial services company and I once Next-Day-Air shipped a Cisco 7507 router ($35,000 insurance, packed in Cisco's packing material)and it arrived nearly crushed. Took 3 months of bitchin and lots of phone calls/escalation to get UPS to fess up and pay for it.
First it was the 'sub-standard packaging' excuse... we have our own UPS personnel on site so my obvious question was 'Why did they accept the shipment?' and then it was 'We only insure up to $10,000'.... so why did they charge me for the requested $35,000 insurance on the package??
Eventually they honored the agreement that was made when they accepted and insured the shipment but it was a major pain in the ass.
No pics but near as we could guess is that it had been dropped while being loaded into an aircraft.
For anybody who is interested in actually helping Project Gutenberg by donating a little of their time I have created an online Distributed Proofreaders Site which is an effort to produce E-Text's for PG. Most old books do not scan/OCR well and a significant amount of proofreading and formatting is required.
This site uses a combination of PHP, mySQL and some Java Script to create a 'library'. People scanning books upload the scanned image files and the initial text file for the images that is produced by OCR software.
When a proofer elects to proofread a page for a particular project, the text and image file are displayed on a single webpage. This allows the text file to be easily reviewed and compared to the image file, thus assisting the proofreading of the text file. The edited text file is then submitted back into the library. The basic concept is that several proofreaders can be working on the same book, but different pages, at the same time. This significantly speeds up the proofreading process.
Once all pages for a particular book have been processed all the pages are concatenated into one text file which is downloaded by the Project Manager where it is properly formatted/final proofread and submitted to the PG archive.
The site has a limited amount of bandwidth and will probably become overwhelmed with the/. effect but if you are interested please check out my site at http://charlz.dynip.com/gutenberg
You should read the book.. I have.. also a very good read, although now a bit dated, is The Great Reckoning by the same authors.. they DO NOT look at "only one of many concurrent trends in society", in fact in The Great Reckoning they look at, and draw conclusions from, so many seeming unrelated things that it makes the book hard to put down. Some of the predicitions that they have made have come true and some have not (yet) but all in all a very interesting read.
Distributed program to update local hosts file??
on
Pirate DNS?
·
· Score: 1
I may be completely off base here.. but all that is really needed is a Gnutella like program to update the local hosts file on a machine right???
I am sure that there are some serious problems with this idea but it seems like an easy way to get a new level of name resolution without giving up or having to duplicate the current DNS system. From my (limited) understanding of how computers resolve names, first they look in the local hosts file for an entry.. if none then they go out and hit the DNS server that is configured in the TCP/IP configs.
A program that periodically hits the 'Alternate Domain Name System' (ADNS) network for updates is all that is really needed. It would download the update file and then copy it to the local hosts file. Filters could be built in to avoid duplication of established.com.gov etc endings to avoid the potential legal battles that hijacked domains would bring. And, if desired, enforce a convention on the names such as the current www.*.*
Obvious problems I can readily think of are: someone has to develope the application ( multiple OS's for sure), file size could quickly become a problem, bandwidth might be a problem the protocol would have to be designed to minimize excess transmissions maybe similar to some routing protocols, there has to be a big enough need/desire for this sort of thing in order for it to really catch on.
Slashdot Mirror
I believe that there is a perception in the US that math is _supposed_ to be hard.... so teachers make it hard.
Many of the math classes I have taken require you to memorize various formulas etc. vice putting the emphasis on how to work the formulas and understand what it is you are really doing. So if you cannot properly regurgitate the Quadratic Equation come test day you just missed every one of those problems.
I have asked teachers "Is this a Math Class or a Memorization Class?" a few times... and they all get pissed so they are obviously aware that they are artificially making the class harder than it needs to be (or hard in the wrong area).
This is a fire code violation where I live... and might be where you are at as well. You can't have any coverings that might block the sprinklers from getting to every nook and cranny.
;)
Sorry!
Actually I was thinking about this the other day as I was scanning some history books for Distributed Proofreaders.... history, for the most part, has _already been written_ it should be fairly easy to cull through Public Domain history books, select the chapters/sections that are well written and create an 'open' history textbook.
The header is being changed.... a few lines will appear at the top with the remainder appearing at the end of the e-text... of course this only affects e-texts added to the archive _after_ the header change.
Somewhere along the line the American education system concluded that math is _supposed_ to be hard and the easiest way to make it hard is to require people to memorize seemingly inane formulae and then require them to regurgitate them verbatim prior to applying them (test time).
I have pissed off more than a few math teachers with a simple question: Is this a math class or a memorization class?
I personally developed a real hatred of math due to this 'memorization requirement'.
Plain Text
or zipped at
ZIP
Help out Project Gutenberg!!
Distributed Proofreaders
No matter what you run eventually you will forget exactly how and where you ran it... before the drywall goes up go into each room and take pictures of every wall and the ceilings, these can be a major time saver when trying to find wiring, studs etc. later on.
I'm with the guys that are reccomending running coax... you can never have enough cable TV jacks..put on in every wall. (Honey, can't we put the couch over there and the TV over there???? No, there's no cable TV jack.)
If you live in an area where ceiling fans are commonly used have a box put in the ceiling of every room and the multi-gang switch boxes in the walls... major pain in the ass to try and put these in later.
I don't know how many times I have searched for something and get a perfect looking search result only to find out it is a broken link. I have not used all of the search engines out there but I don't remember any of the ones that I have used having an obvious method to flag a link as broken.
I know that their spiders go through the database and verify links but I'd be willing to bet that is takes months to go over it once. Why not flag links as broken and have the spider verify/remove those first?
Just cleaning up the broken links could improve the search results.
Help out Project Gutenberg!
Distributed Proofreaders http://charlz.dns2go.com/gutenberg
UPS does home consumer shipping as a sideline: they're more worried about pleasing their corporate customers.
.... so why did they charge me for the requested $35,000 insurance on the package??
I don't know about that.. I work for a _very_ large financial services company and I once Next-Day-Air shipped a Cisco 7507 router ($35,000 insurance, packed in Cisco's packing material)and it arrived nearly crushed. Took 3 months of bitchin and lots of phone calls/escalation to get UPS to fess up and pay for it.
First it was the 'sub-standard packaging' excuse... we have our own UPS personnel on site so my obvious question was 'Why did they accept the shipment?' and then it was 'We only insure up to $10,000'
Eventually they honored the agreement that was made when they accepted and insured the shipment but it was a major pain in the ass.
No pics but near as we could guess is that it had been dropped while being loaded into an aircraft.
_Chainsaw
Help out Project Gutenberg! Distributed Proofreaders http://charlz.dynip.com/gutenberg)
This site uses a combination of PHP, mySQL and some Java Script to create a 'library'. People scanning books upload the scanned image files and the initial text file for the images that is produced by OCR software.
When a proofer elects to proofread a page for a particular project, the text and image file are displayed on a single webpage. This allows the text file to be easily reviewed and compared to the image file, thus assisting the proofreading of the text file. The edited text file is then submitted back into the library. The basic concept is that several proofreaders can be working on the same book, but different pages, at the same time. This significantly speeds up the proofreading process.
Once all pages for a particular book have been processed all the pages are concatenated into one text file which is downloaded by the Project Manager where it is properly formatted/final proofread and submitted to the PG archive.
The site has a limited amount of bandwidth and will probably become overwhelmed with the /. effect but if you are interested please check out my site at http://charlz.dynip.com/gutenberg
The site can always use some more proofreaders!
Thanks!
Charles
You should read the book.. I have.. also a very good read, although now a bit dated, is The Great Reckoning by the same authors.. they DO NOT look at "only one of many concurrent trends in society", in fact in The Great Reckoning they look at, and draw conclusions from, so many seeming unrelated things that it makes the book hard to put down. Some of the predicitions that they have made have come true and some have not (yet) but all in all a very interesting read.
I may be completely off base here.. but all that is really needed is a Gnutella like program to update the local hosts file on a machine right???
.com .gov etc endings to avoid the potential legal battles that hijacked domains would bring. And, if desired, enforce a convention on the names such as the current www.*.*
I am sure that there are some serious problems with this idea but it seems like an easy way to get a new level of name resolution without giving up or having to duplicate the current DNS system. From my (limited) understanding of how computers resolve names, first they look in the local hosts file for an entry.. if none then they go out and hit the DNS server that is configured in the TCP/IP configs.
A program that periodically hits the 'Alternate Domain Name System' (ADNS) network for updates is all that is really needed. It would download the update file and then copy it to the local hosts file. Filters could be built in to avoid duplication of established
Obvious problems I can readily think of are: someone has to develope the application ( multiple OS's for sure), file size could quickly become a problem, bandwidth might be a problem the protocol would have to be designed to minimize excess transmissions maybe similar to some routing protocols, there has to be a big enough need/desire for this sort of thing in order for it to really catch on.