When I was a grad student, the lab in the education department asked me to implement a "fast, simple" method of pulling up student records. I bought them a cheap mag-strip reader and wrote a little script that would grab the Student ID from the card, then submit it to their campus information system. The lab manager (who was not a tech) was shocked that it worked. He assumed the information on the card would be encrypted or something.
That same year a buddy of mine who worked for IT services put together a demo of how easily the mag cards could be forged - with less than $100 + a cheap laptop. His bosses were impressed and asked him to demo it for one of the VPs. When he did, the VP told him, "You know, you're on thin ice here. You could get in a lot of trouble for this."
In essence, the administration (who purchased the card systems) didn't want to know if they were secure. They just wanted to give the impression of security.
This happens all the time. The judiciary doesn't want to deal with people - they want to deal with lawyers.... who get paid by the people.
I once had to fight a ticket in a small town traffic court. I requested a deposition via registered mail, and in my state, if the deposition isn't sent within 30 days the ticket becomes defective. It had been almost 2 months, and I still didn't have it.
As my court date approached, I took the issue up with the town clerk (who only worked a few hours, four days a week). She had never heard that they needed to send out the depositions before the court date (kind of hard to defend oneself without knowing the officer's account), but said she would take it up with the judge. In the meantime, I sent the court, again by registered mail, a notarized motion to dismiss on the grounds that the ticket was defective.
After another week of trying, the secretary finally caved and gave me the judge's work number (he owned the gas station in the town). He was unclear on the particulars of depositions, so he pushed my court date back and then he added:
"You know, you're not really following the proper procedures."
"OK. What are the proper procedures?"
"I can't tell you."
So, it comes as no surprise that government wants to hide laws from the people.
Not with "real" guns, but a "friend" of mine used to play this game:
Get two friends and two bb guns. Put the guns on a table (pumped to maximum pressure) then play odds & evens: On the count "three," put out one or two fingers. If all three players put out the same number, the round is a draw. If one of the three is different, he (or she?) runs away from the table while the other two grab the guns and try to hit him in the back.
But it's not in a biology-related field, so I'll first focus my comments on your points.
For what it's worth, I (almost) completely agree with your post. Certainty may not be the antithesis of science, but it is to the scientist as humility is to many religionists: Something we seek, but of which we should never claim to achieve absolutely.
The hardest thing for me to beat out of new grad students' heads is the idea that the model is reality. Even if we hold to positivist notions (and not all "scientists" do), different models approximate reality in different contexts. You adequately described a few of those in physics. In softer "sciences", it can be much messier.
That said, regarding the TFA: Because a model's usefulness varies by context, which model is taught and when it is taught should be dictated by the context of the learning. If you're in Sunday school, being indoctrinated (not used in a pejorative connotation - the U.S. Pledge of Allegiance is indoctrination as well) into some moral code, there may be some justification for ID... though I can't think of any.
In a science class, the models that are most useful in the context of science - at the students' current level - should be taught. We may even teach models that are less useful to real scientists because they are more useful to the students: We teach about electron orbits in grade school, even though we don't accept them as a completely accurate description of those subatomic particles' behavior/existence.
Lest my comments be construed to imply some sort of support for this law in LA, let me be clear: ID is not a useful model in the context of science. In a religious or philosophical discussion, it may serve some purpose, but not in science. And, as has been stated many times in this thread, it's not even because ID is wrong; it's because it's not falsifiable. Most students learn aspects of Lamarckian evolution because we can test it and show through evidence that it is less useful than Darwin's ideas. ID doesn't even get that far, which is why it is so dangerous.
I met Dodd once. He was trying to sneak a relative into an event where I was interpreting for foreign dignitaries. The woman working security told him his guest did not have the proper credentials to enter the VIP area. His response was quick:
"But I'm SENATOR Dodds."
She wasn't impressed:
"Yes, I know that. And HE doesn't have the proper credentials."
This semester I had a student bring me a draft of a paper to look over. I thumbed through it for a few minutes and said, "It looks complete, but I can't give you a real evaluation until I've read it." He then asked some questions about the final exam (which was coming up) and we started talking about the course content. I wanted to contextualize the discussion in something familiar to him, so I started using examples from the topic of his paper.
I quickly realized he had no idea what I was talking about, so I asked him a direct question that I had seen addressed in his paper. He stared at me. I asked it again. "Am I supposed... to know that?" he asked.
He turned in his paper later. I started googling and found he had copied 23 of his 30 pages from five different websites (none of them Wikipedia). Oops. Unfortunately, it's his first offense (so he won't get expelled) and I'm the only one who teaches this class. I'll be seeing him again in a semester or two.
I looked up my area's geohash a few times, but, since my degree is 90% Lake Ontario, 5% my side, and 5% the other, I'd have to drive five hours to get there 50% of the time.
Editorial bias is not the only issue with the journal model we have now. A bigger issue may be that negative results are so unlikely to be published that researchers won't even submit them.
A "fun" thing to do is a research synthesis where you compare the findings in the refereed journal articles with those from dissertation abstracts. Dissertations usually have a much higher rate of negative findings.
Many people in the US equate the college degree with getting a job. They take the "right to work" and backtrack to "right to school after high school" because you need college training to get a good job. The New York State Teachers Union newspaper recently featured a picture of a rally with a sign reading, "Keep SUNY [the state university system] open to ALL!"
Huh? Since when did university become a right rather than a privilege one earned? Oh, that happened a few years after we decided that everyone had to finish high school and made high school a college prep program.
Do people now feel OBLIGATED to send money to the heirs of the Shakespeare estate every time they quote the Bard? Do you send money to the heirs of Volta every time you use a battery? No? If you don't then you are a sanctimonious hypocrite.
I've had this discussion many times in academic circles. The discussions are typically rational with well-founded arguments. Then I talk to business people and lawyers. They don't see their actions as hypocritical because their actions are legal. As difficult as it may be to understand, there are people who are only guided by what the law allows (or doesn't), and not by intellectual honesty or fairness.
They believe that it's not hypocritical to require their posterity be paid by those who use their IP, while they don't pay Volta's family for the battery because there is no law requiring them to pay.
It's the most frustrating thing to talk with people about the way it could/should be (and was) only to have them re-explain the way things are.
KDE (and other window managers) makes inverting the screen trivial. mount the laptop upside down under the cabinet like one of those Bose CD players. The screen flips down like in a minivan DVD player.
Back in the days of Napster, I attended a "satellite" senate hearing on campus. Orrin Hatch, Sean Fanning, and two musicians were there. One musician was a local independent artist who said he had no problem with Napster, but had huge problems with the record companies. The other musician was the lead singer for the Byrds, and he testified that his concert attendance was up and a "whole new generation of fans" learned about his music through Napster.
Also there were a few small tech firms who gave overviews of how they intended to use P2P technologies and expressed their concern that legislation that targeted Napster would interfere with their business.
Orrin Hatch seemed to agree, nodded, smiled, even presented Fanning with a hat from the college bookstore. He closed with remarks like, "This is a complicated issue that needs more attention." And then promptly furthered his work to kill P2P and consumer rights.
Your anecdote about Mr. Rogers just contributes further evidence that what's happening here is not what the artists want and definitely not what the consumers want. It's the middlemen forcing something on both parties, limiting the reach of the artists and what consumers can do with the artists' work.
Claude Elsinore: And I'd like to point out that these tapes have not been faked, or altered in any way. In fact they have time coding, which is very hard to fake.
The Judge: Would you please explain for the court "time coding."
Claude Elsinore: Well, uh, just because I don't know what it is, it doesn't mean I'm lying.
I will also add that many professors would love to contribute to open materials, but cannot because posting something to their website doesn't count in one's tenure dossier. If a company like FlatWorld Knowledge can underwrite the textbook (even with just the promise to make it available, no upfront cost) it will encourage the production of open educational material.
However, I contacted FWK and found that they're only focusing on business and economics texts for the time being.
I once heard a "scientist" on a local NPR show claim to have definitively linked violent games to violent behavior. There were two problems with his claim:
1. His research only investigated the immediate effect of viewing violent or non-violent images and a single measure of aggression immediately following the treatment. His "link" was grossly exaggerated.
The research in the TFA seems to have measured only immediately following the session. Hey, heavy drinkers are often less stressed after their first shot too.
2. More apropos, the debate as to whether vicariously living an experience increases the participants' desire to engage in that experience (contagion), or it purges them of the desire to engage in that experience (catharsis) has been raging for more than two millennia.
While the research in TFA informs the debate, it still assumes that contagion is the case.
"This will help us develop an emotion and gaming questionnaire to distinguish the type of gamer who is likely to transfer their online aggression into everyday life."
We should be just as skeptical of research that appears to support gaming as we are of research with contrary findings.
The TICCIT program was a twin of the PLATO NSF grant. Led by C. Victor Bunderson, it was later incorporated into an early LMS, but eventually abandoned. I was on an LMS committee at a large university with Dr. Bunderson before he retired. We often consulted his old, yellowing journal articles and his students' theses to generate our features requests. Even in the early 2000's, companies like Blackboard were still talking about implementing something almost like what he had running on IBM mainframes in the late 60's.
When Blackboard first asserted a patent on the LMS, the only comment I got out of Dr. Bunderson was, "The idea of patenting these old ideas in slightly new garb (and many confusing words) is extremely offensive to those of us who thought of them years ago, and shared them widely."
As a professor, I can tell you that USian parents hover over their kids long after high school. It may stem from an unhealthy overprotectiveness, or it might be that they are simply protecting their investment: Most college students receive thousands of dollars from their parents each year. Also, if the kids drop out, the parents will feel obligated to house and feed them until they get back on their feet.
So, yes, as screwed up as it is, parents call teachers and administrators (even deans) to voice their concerns. And it's not just for safety issues. My department chair routinely gets calls from parents whose children did poorly in a class, or were not accepted into their major of choice, etc.
That means half their productivity is explained by beer drinking, and half on all other variables combined.
I agree with the first part, but not with the second. R^2 of.5 is quite good in social/behavioral sciences*, but it does not mean that "all other variables" only account for half the variance in performance because other variables could "share" the variance associated with beer drinking.
For example, sociability might be highly correlated with beer drinking and performance. There is likely to be a lot of "shared variance" between the two predictors, but it is possible that sociability alone would account for more variance in performance than beer drinking. An ANOVA (or equivalent) analysis would partition the variance between the variables and the variable-by-variable interactions.
* In the (US) financial markets, an important stat is how well a particular mutual fund correlates with the S&P 500. R^2 of less than.95 is considered unacceptable (if you're looking for one that tracks).
Slashdot Mirror
When I was a grad student, the lab in the education department asked me to implement a "fast, simple" method of pulling up student records. I bought them a cheap mag-strip reader and wrote a little script that would grab the Student ID from the card, then submit it to their campus information system. The lab manager (who was not a tech) was shocked that it worked. He assumed the information on the card would be encrypted or something.
That same year a buddy of mine who worked for IT services put together a demo of how easily the mag cards could be forged - with less than $100 + a cheap laptop. His bosses were impressed and asked him to demo it for one of the VPs. When he did, the VP told him, "You know, you're on thin ice here. You could get in a lot of trouble for this."
In essence, the administration (who purchased the card systems) didn't want to know if they were secure. They just wanted to give the impression of security.
I second this. I thought about ordering Spore for my son for his birthday.... Nope. Not with the DRM. Sorry, EA.
Interesting results.
Please tell me you cut the legalese of the PG preface from the text before testing it.
This happens all the time. The judiciary doesn't want to deal with people - they want to deal with lawyers.... who get paid by the people.
I once had to fight a ticket in a small town traffic court. I requested a deposition via registered mail, and in my state, if the deposition isn't sent within 30 days the ticket becomes defective. It had been almost 2 months, and I still didn't have it.
As my court date approached, I took the issue up with the town clerk (who only worked a few hours, four days a week). She had never heard that they needed to send out the depositions before the court date (kind of hard to defend oneself without knowing the officer's account), but said she would take it up with the judge. In the meantime, I sent the court, again by registered mail, a notarized motion to dismiss on the grounds that the ticket was defective.
After another week of trying, the secretary finally caved and gave me the judge's work number (he owned the gas station in the town). He was unclear on the particulars of depositions, so he pushed my court date back and then he added:
"You know, you're not really following the proper procedures."
"OK. What are the proper procedures?"
"I can't tell you."
So, it comes as no surprise that government wants to hide laws from the people.
The review makes it sound better than (or at least as well thought through as) Twilight.
Not with "real" guns, but a "friend" of mine used to play this game:
Get two friends and two bb guns. Put the guns on a table (pumped to maximum pressure) then play odds & evens: On the count "three," put out one or two fingers. If all three players put out the same number, the round is a draw. If one of the three is different, he (or she?) runs away from the table while the other two grab the guns and try to hit him in the back.
Oh, hours of fun.
How many FF2 users just hate "AwsomeBar"?
Last I checked, FF2 security updates were still being pushed automatically, so what's the big deal about using 2.x over 3.0?
But it's not in a biology-related field, so I'll first focus my comments on your points.
For what it's worth, I (almost) completely agree with your post. Certainty may not be the antithesis of science, but it is to the scientist as humility is to many religionists: Something we seek, but of which we should never claim to achieve absolutely.
The hardest thing for me to beat out of new grad students' heads is the idea that the model is reality. Even if we hold to positivist notions (and not all "scientists" do), different models approximate reality in different contexts. You adequately described a few of those in physics. In softer "sciences", it can be much messier.
That said, regarding the TFA: Because a model's usefulness varies by context, which model is taught and when it is taught should be dictated by the context of the learning. If you're in Sunday school, being indoctrinated (not used in a pejorative connotation - the U.S. Pledge of Allegiance is indoctrination as well) into some moral code, there may be some justification for ID... though I can't think of any.
In a science class, the models that are most useful in the context of science - at the students' current level - should be taught. We may even teach models that are less useful to real scientists because they are more useful to the students: We teach about electron orbits in grade school, even though we don't accept them as a completely accurate description of those subatomic particles' behavior/existence.
Lest my comments be construed to imply some sort of support for this law in LA, let me be clear: ID is not a useful model in the context of science. In a religious or philosophical discussion, it may serve some purpose, but not in science. And, as has been stated many times in this thread, it's not even because ID is wrong; it's because it's not falsifiable. Most students learn aspects of Lamarckian evolution because we can test it and show through evidence that it is less useful than Darwin's ideas. ID doesn't even get that far, which is why it is so dangerous.
I met Dodd once. He was trying to sneak a relative into an event where I was interpreting for foreign dignitaries. The woman working security told him his guest did not have the proper credentials to enter the VIP area. His response was quick:
"But I'm SENATOR Dodds."
She wasn't impressed:
"Yes, I know that. And HE doesn't have the proper credentials."
This semester I had a student bring me a draft of a paper to look over. I thumbed through it for a few minutes and said, "It looks complete, but I can't give you a real evaluation until I've read it." He then asked some questions about the final exam (which was coming up) and we started talking about the course content. I wanted to contextualize the discussion in something familiar to him, so I started using examples from the topic of his paper.
I quickly realized he had no idea what I was talking about, so I asked him a direct question that I had seen addressed in his paper. He stared at me. I asked it again. "Am I supposed... to know that?" he asked.
He turned in his paper later. I started googling and found he had copied 23 of his 30 pages from five different websites (none of them Wikipedia). Oops. Unfortunately, it's his first offense (so he won't get expelled) and I'm the only one who teaches this class. I'll be seeing him again in a semester or two.
I looked up my area's geohash a few times, but, since my degree is 90% Lake Ontario, 5% my side, and 5% the other, I'd have to drive five hours to get there 50% of the time.
Editorial bias is not the only issue with the journal model we have now. A bigger issue may be that negative results are so unlikely to be published that researchers won't even submit them.
A "fun" thing to do is a research synthesis where you compare the findings in the refereed journal articles with those from dissertation abstracts. Dissertations usually have a much higher rate of negative findings.
Many people in the US equate the college degree with getting a job. They take the "right to work" and backtrack to "right to school after high school" because you need college training to get a good job. The New York State Teachers Union newspaper recently featured a picture of a rally with a sign reading, "Keep SUNY [the state university system] open to ALL!"
Huh? Since when did university become a right rather than a privilege one earned? Oh, that happened a few years after we decided that everyone had to finish high school and made high school a college prep program.
The oracle of Bacon at UVA is what, ten years old? And not a single mention in this discussion?
http://oracleofbacon.org/
Do people now feel OBLIGATED to send money to the heirs of the Shakespeare estate every time they quote the Bard? Do you send money to the heirs of Volta every time you use a battery? No? If you don't then you are a sanctimonious hypocrite.
I've had this discussion many times in academic circles. The discussions are typically rational with well-founded arguments. Then I talk to business people and lawyers. They don't see their actions as hypocritical because their actions are legal. As difficult as it may be to understand, there are people who are only guided by what the law allows (or doesn't), and not by intellectual honesty or fairness.
They believe that it's not hypocritical to require their posterity be paid by those who use their IP, while they don't pay Volta's family for the battery because there is no law requiring them to pay.
It's the most frustrating thing to talk with people about the way it could/should be (and was) only to have them re-explain the way things are.
KDE (and other window managers) makes inverting the screen trivial. mount the laptop upside down under the cabinet like one of those Bose CD players. The screen flips down like in a minivan DVD player.
Add a wireless keyboard and (as you said) bammo!
OT, but in the same vein...
Back in the days of Napster, I attended a "satellite" senate hearing on campus. Orrin Hatch, Sean Fanning, and two musicians were there. One musician was a local independent artist who said he had no problem with Napster, but had huge problems with the record companies. The other musician was the lead singer for the Byrds, and he testified that his concert attendance was up and a "whole new generation of fans" learned about his music through Napster.
Also there were a few small tech firms who gave overviews of how they intended to use P2P technologies and expressed their concern that legislation that targeted Napster would interfere with their business.
Orrin Hatch seemed to agree, nodded, smiled, even presented Fanning with a hat from the college bookstore. He closed with remarks like, "This is a complicated issue that needs more attention." And then promptly furthered his work to kill P2P and consumer rights.
Your anecdote about Mr. Rogers just contributes further evidence that what's happening here is not what the artists want and definitely not what the consumers want. It's the middlemen forcing something on both parties, limiting the reach of the artists and what consumers can do with the artists' work.
Claude Elsinore: And I'd like to point out that these tapes have not been faked, or altered in any way. In fact they have time coding, which is very hard to fake.
The Judge: Would you please explain for the court "time coding."
Claude Elsinore: Well, uh, just because I don't know what it is, it doesn't mean I'm lying.
As a professor, I second both your points.
I will also add that many professors would love to contribute to open materials, but cannot because posting something to their website doesn't count in one's tenure dossier. If a company like FlatWorld Knowledge can underwrite the textbook (even with just the promise to make it available, no upfront cost) it will encourage the production of open educational material.
However, I contacted FWK and found that they're only focusing on business and economics texts for the time being.
Does anyone else think that our modern military personnel spent a little too much time playing G.I. Joe as a kid?
It appears you are trying to make a snide comment.
[Cancel] [Allow]
I once heard a "scientist" on a local NPR show claim to have definitively linked violent games to violent behavior. There were two problems with his claim:
1. His research only investigated the immediate effect of viewing violent or non-violent images and a single measure of aggression immediately following the treatment. His "link" was grossly exaggerated.
The research in the TFA seems to have measured only immediately following the session. Hey, heavy drinkers are often less stressed after their first shot too.
2. More apropos, the debate as to whether vicariously living an experience increases the participants' desire to engage in that experience (contagion), or it purges them of the desire to engage in that experience (catharsis) has been raging for more than two millennia.
While the research in TFA informs the debate, it still assumes that contagion is the case.
"This will help us develop an emotion and gaming questionnaire to distinguish the type of gamer who is likely to transfer their online aggression into everyday life."
We should be just as skeptical of research that appears to support gaming as we are of research with contrary findings.
The TICCIT program was a twin of the PLATO NSF grant. Led by C. Victor Bunderson, it was later incorporated into an early LMS, but eventually abandoned. I was on an LMS committee at a large university with Dr. Bunderson before he retired. We often consulted his old, yellowing journal articles and his students' theses to generate our features requests. Even in the early 2000's, companies like Blackboard were still talking about implementing something almost like what he had running on IBM mainframes in the late 60's.
When Blackboard first asserted a patent on the LMS, the only comment I got out of Dr. Bunderson was, "The idea of patenting these old ideas in slightly new garb (and many confusing words) is extremely offensive to those of us who thought of them years ago, and shared them widely."
As a professor, I can tell you that USian parents hover over their kids long after high school. It may stem from an unhealthy overprotectiveness, or it might be that they are simply protecting their investment: Most college students receive thousands of dollars from their parents each year. Also, if the kids drop out, the parents will feel obligated to house and feed them until they get back on their feet.
So, yes, as screwed up as it is, parents call teachers and administrators (even deans) to voice their concerns. And it's not just for safety issues. My department chair routinely gets calls from parents whose children did poorly in a class, or were not accepted into their major of choice, etc.
That means half their productivity is explained by beer drinking, and half on all other variables combined.
.5 is quite good in social/behavioral sciences*, but it does not mean that "all other variables" only account for half the variance in performance because other variables could "share" the variance associated with beer drinking.
.95 is considered unacceptable (if you're looking for one that tracks).
I agree with the first part, but not with the second. R^2 of
For example, sociability might be highly correlated with beer drinking and performance. There is likely to be a lot of "shared variance" between the two predictors, but it is possible that sociability alone would account for more variance in performance than beer drinking. An ANOVA (or equivalent) analysis would partition the variance between the variables and the variable-by-variable interactions.
* In the (US) financial markets, an important stat is how well a particular mutual fund correlates with the S&P 500. R^2 of less than