I'm so tired of hearing "researchers" talk about the certainties of their discoveries. This is a breath of fresh air:
"We have no positive proof this is an impact crater, but we were able to exclude some other hypotheses, and this led us to our conclusion," Professor Longo, the research team leader, told BBC News.
The comparison of partisan politics to athletic teams is astute.
A few years ago my brother-in-law was watching his favorite baseball team (Atlanta) and a former Atlanta player was at bat for the opposing team. "Do you remember when this guy was good?" he asked.
So the player was worse because he now played for another team. In the end, team supports are cheering for the jersey... for a logo... for laundry.
Remember when the democrats lost in 2004? They made "strategic shifts" in their platform to appeal more to moderate voters. The republican candidates are all jockeying for distance from the president, who many of them supported in 2004. So, in politics, you're not really rooting for a platform or an ideology or a candidate. You're rooting for an elephant or a donkey.
I'd absolutely love to make a mod for a racing game of my neighborhood, the Bay Area.
LOL. I grew up there. Tearing down 680 from the top of the Sunol Grade coming back from Pleasanton at 2AM after a date. Paying no attention to lane lines.
Racing up Highway 9, left on Sanborn Rd. or Skyline.
Almost running down a cyclist on Hecker Pass.
Canada College has a loop I always thought would make a great circuit.
If my father had ever found out what I did in his RX-7, I would never have survived.
I teach college courses to preservice primary and secondary education teachers on how (if and when) to properly integrate technology into their teaching. One of the issues we cover is online safety, including user tracking by ad companies. I've found the following demonstration effective:
With each teacher at a computer (we use laptops), walk them through how to view and clear the cookies in Firefox. With the cookies cleared, give them five or ten minutes to browse their favorite websites, check their email, etc. Then go back and check the cookies again.
What you will find is a list very similar to your list of domains. After another five minutes of explanation, the teachers will ask how they can block the cookies.
I did this in Europe in 2004. I took a Zaurus SL-5500 ($200 off eBay) and a wireless CF card ($40 off a LUG member). I ran Kismet and had the standard ssid "linksys" and "default" preconfigured. (BTW, the best open wifi was next to the Pompidou in Paris.)
Checked my email, posted to my blog, looked up public transit routes, checked train times, etc. Never paid for Internet cafes.
The Zaurus (or like device) is small enough to not notice, has a lanyard loop, and is reasonably durable thanks to the hard screen cover. There must be something more modern now, but that's what I would do.
3rd. In Arizona they planted broom grass (or something like that) to stop erosion, only to find that it bridged the natural fire breaks in the habitat. A region that used to suffer few fire is now threatened annually.
4th. By not allowing woodlands to burn periodically, we've created the potential for much worse destruction by fire.
Haven't we learned from the Nemo lawsuit (and others) that copyright does not protect private citizens' creations. It only works for corporate-backed "creative" works.
I'm not sure how well those assumptions hold in other fields.
The last year of my PhD, I applied for an administrative position at a large university. I did two phone interviews, and then flew cross-country (their expense) to interview on site. The faculty and staff in the various interviews were extremely cordial, and the vice provost (who would have been my boss) even had his assistant drive me around town after dinner, and show me the "good" neighborhoods, etc.
When I didn't get the job, I wasn't too discouraged simply because the guy they did hire (it didn't take too much googling to find him) already had a PhD and five years of amazing experience. If I had the choice between myself and him, I would have hired him.
I asked an administrator at my school why they would even bother interviewing me. He told me that departments are allotted a number of applicants they can fly out for the interview. In many cases, it doesn't matter how large the gap is between the #1 and #2, or #2 and #3 candidates. They'll fly out the top [however many slots they are allotted] that meet their minimum criteria, just in case their first choice turns out to be less impressive in person.
Of course, unless you're at Stanford or Harvard, the number of applications for any given position is often far less in academe than what you would expect in the private sector.
Floyd Landis is the disputed champion, not David Millar.
David Millar is a convicted and admitted doper, who's never come close to winning the Tour. He was in the press this year because it was his first year back from his suspension.
Landis, OTOH, grew up Mennonite, which is a bit less strict than Amish.
Plus, given that the international Court of Arbitration of Sport, just upheld that the French lab that tested Landis' sample doesn't follow protocol (and cleared another rider of his positive test), whether Landis will lose his title is very much a question mark.
Recommending that GPS units shouldn't be used because it would cause a change in the person's brain is ridiculous unless the benefit of *not* changing the brain is good for anything other than the task the GPS does.
American Scientist had an episode where they taught a seeing girl braille, and tested her ability while doing an fMRI. The sections of her brain that fired during the test were associated with tactile processing. Then they blindfolded her for 100 hours, and retested. This time, her visual cortex was firing. The brain is dynamic and can repurpose unused neurons. This may be why people can no longer remember 7-digit telephone numbers: We all have PDA/cell phones to do it for us.
Is this bad? Not unless you value the ability to remember phone numbers.
Would it be bad if London taxi drivers no longer knew every little alleyway? Not so long as they could still accomplish their task.
BTW, I had a very different experience with a cabby in Paris. I told him where I wanted to go and he handed me a road atlas and said, "Trouvez-le."
I teach a college course for teaching majors. Each year I do a phishing demonstration where I post a bunch of links on my blog, including one to the university's intranet. The links are all full paths (http://...), but the href in the intranet link points to a different server. When the students try to login, they get a message about phishing.
This semester I was a bit worried because I had heard IE 7 had new "anti-phishing technology." I thought IE would obviously check the text of the link against the target address, but that didn't happen. FireFox 2 doesn't either.
How hard would it be to check the text of a link against a regex for urls, then, if it is a url, check that the target is the same?
If you're going to college, look around campus for a part-time coding job. Don't go to the CS department, but look at the schools of education, the humanities, etc. A lot of these schools do computer projects, but lack the skills to write their own apps or admin their own systems.
I know one CS major who will have grad school offering all sorts of assistantships because he's gotten into coding applications for foreign language systems.
You can also watch the local *nix Users Group lists for job offers to students. I see two a week.
One caveat: You will not make bank through these jobs. I didn't as an undergrad, and I haven't as a graduate student. What I did was build a a ton of marketable skills that have now started to pan out in major contracts with research groups all over the country.
A few years ago my undergrad department was planning to build a new building. One of my professors recommended me for a committee that was designing the new labs. In the meeting, professors were scribbling on graph paper to show the layouts they wanted. I decided I could do better in WorldCraft, which I happened to have on my laptop. After a quick demo, they had my laptop on the LCD projector and were directing me to move equipment, furniture, lighting, etc., around until they were satisfied. I then compiled the map, and ran it in Half-Life to get screenshots to show the interior designers what we had in mind.
Of course, for scale and realism, I inserted a couple Half-Life scientists in white lab coats.
Showing some of the professors, who were younger, and, I thought, less likely to be offended, I typed "/impulse 101" into the console (that's the grant-all-weapons cheat), and blew away one in-game scientist with the rocket launcher. The scientist's body gibbed, with half of the skull skidding to my character's feet. Then I went up to another scientist, pulled out the shotgun and shot him. Blood splattered on the terminal behind him, he staggered, and then collapsed.
Far and away, most professors I tested felt the shotgun was more offensive/disturbing than the rocket launcher. (And, yes, I did randomize for the order effect.)
I attribute this effect to the fact that the shotgun was much more realistic than the rocket launcher.
The last four figures are, in fact, the year 1999. Wahid (1) and Tis'a (9) are graphical cognates of their associated "Arabic" Numerals.
If you want to see some fun computing logic in action, type some random Arabic into a Unicode-capable editor, then some numbers, then some more letters. Backspace through the whole text and the cursor will jump around as the direction of the text is difference from the direction of the numbers. You will also notice how the form of the second-to-last letter changes when the last letter is deleted.
I remember a news report of US soldiers going door-to-door shaking down a "hostile" Iraqi town. My favorite moment was the first grunt through the door yelling, "Yimshi! Yimshi! Get down! Get down!" as he threw a confused Iraqi to the floor.
I know enough Arabic to know Yimshi means "Walk," or "Leave/Get out of here."
Slashdot Mirror
May I make a suggestion? Use the free VMWare player and the distro image of your choice to begin the migration to Linux.
a t/45
http://www.vmware.com/products/player/
http://www.vmware.com/vmtn/appliances/directory/c
I'm so tired of hearing "researchers" talk about the certainties of their discoveries. This is a breath of fresh air:
"We have no positive proof this is an impact crater, but we were able to exclude some other hypotheses, and this led us to our conclusion," Professor Longo, the research team leader, told BBC News.
Better put (as my stats professor said):
Torture statistics enough, and it will admit to anything.
OT, but hey...
Did you notice two drivers continue through the toll booth after the accident?
The comparison of partisan politics to athletic teams is astute.
A few years ago my brother-in-law was watching his favorite baseball team (Atlanta) and a former Atlanta player was at bat for the opposing team. "Do you remember when this guy was good?" he asked.
So the player was worse because he now played for another team. In the end, team supports are cheering for the jersey... for a logo... for laundry.
Remember when the democrats lost in 2004? They made "strategic shifts" in their platform to appeal more to moderate voters. The republican candidates are all jockeying for distance from the president, who many of them supported in 2004. So, in politics, you're not really rooting for a platform or an ideology or a candidate. You're rooting for an elephant or a donkey.
I'd absolutely love to make a mod for a racing game of my neighborhood, the Bay Area.
LOL. I grew up there. Tearing down 680 from the top of the Sunol Grade coming back from Pleasanton at 2AM after a date. Paying no attention to lane lines.
Racing up Highway 9, left on Sanborn Rd. or Skyline.
Almost running down a cyclist on Hecker Pass.
Canada College has a loop I always thought would make a great circuit.
If my father had ever found out what I did in his RX-7, I would never have survived.
Dang. I was stupid when I was a teenager.
I cannot believe "KickTam" didn't make the list. He/she was so lame, Apple dropped by it after a very short time.
Chris Adamson mentions him at the end of this article and links to this Apple dev page for a picture.
The name "KickTam" came from a developer's young child who couldn't say "QuickTime" properly.
While these other mascots may score between 3 and 7 on the lameness meter, KickTam was an 11.
I teach college courses to preservice primary and secondary education teachers on how (if and when) to properly integrate technology into their teaching. One of the issues we cover is online safety, including user tracking by ad companies. I've found the following demonstration effective:
With each teacher at a computer (we use laptops), walk them through how to view and clear the cookies in Firefox. With the cookies cleared, give them five or ten minutes to browse their favorite websites, check their email, etc. Then go back and check the cookies again.
What you will find is a list very similar to your list of domains. After another five minutes of explanation, the teachers will ask how they can block the cookies.
I did this in Europe in 2004. I took a Zaurus SL-5500 ($200 off eBay) and a wireless CF card ($40 off a LUG member). I ran Kismet and had the standard ssid "linksys" and "default" preconfigured. (BTW, the best open wifi was next to the Pompidou in Paris.)
Checked my email, posted to my blog, looked up public transit routes, checked train times, etc. Never paid for Internet cafes.
The Zaurus (or like device) is small enough to not notice, has a lanyard loop, and is reasonably durable thanks to the hard screen cover. There must be something more modern now, but that's what I would do.
3rd. In Arizona they planted broom grass (or something like that) to stop erosion, only to find that it bridged the natural fire breaks in the habitat. A region that used to suffer few fire is now threatened annually.
4th. By not allowing woodlands to burn periodically, we've created the potential for much worse destruction by fire.
5th. I'm sure people can think of others.
God: Noah, I want you to build an ark!
Noah: Riiiiiiiight!
God: I'm serious. Build it so many qubits by so many qubits.
Noah: Riiiiiiiight! What's a qubit?
God: Um, I used to know that. Uh, that's not important....
--
PS - Yes, I know the difference between qubit and cubit, and if you've never heard Bill Cosby's "Noah" routine, I am entirely too old.
I bought a Garmin GPS12 back in '98 that had the screen on the bottom. It made for great one-hand used.
I guess adding "cellphone" to a design is just like adding "on the Internet" to a business plan.
Haven't we learned from the Nemo lawsuit (and others) that copyright does not protect private citizens' creations. It only works for corporate-backed "creative" works.
(Yes, that was laden with sarcasm.)
I'm not sure how well those assumptions hold in other fields.
The last year of my PhD, I applied for an administrative position at a large university. I did two phone interviews, and then flew cross-country (their expense) to interview on site. The faculty and staff in the various interviews were extremely cordial, and the vice provost (who would have been my boss) even had his assistant drive me around town after dinner, and show me the "good" neighborhoods, etc.
When I didn't get the job, I wasn't too discouraged simply because the guy they did hire (it didn't take too much googling to find him) already had a PhD and five years of amazing experience. If I had the choice between myself and him, I would have hired him.
I asked an administrator at my school why they would even bother interviewing me. He told me that departments are allotted a number of applicants they can fly out for the interview. In many cases, it doesn't matter how large the gap is between the #1 and #2, or #2 and #3 candidates. They'll fly out the top [however many slots they are allotted] that meet their minimum criteria, just in case their first choice turns out to be less impressive in person.
Of course, unless you're at Stanford or Harvard, the number of applications for any given position is often far less in academe than what you would expect in the private sector.
Floyd Landis is the disputed champion, not David Millar.
. html
David Millar is a convicted and admitted doper, who's never come close to winning the Tour. He was in the press this year because it was his first year back from his suspension.
Landis, OTOH, grew up Mennonite, which is a bit less strict than Amish.
Plus, given that the international Court of Arbitration of Sport, just upheld that the French lab that tested Landis' sample doesn't follow protocol (and cleared another rider of his positive test), whether Landis will lose his title is very much a question mark.
http://www.velonews.com/race/int/articles/11366.0
(Not too mention, according to the lab's own documents, Landis' sample was too contaminated to be tested in the first place.)
Recommending that GPS units shouldn't be used because it would cause a change in the person's brain is ridiculous unless the benefit of *not* changing the brain is good for anything other than the task the GPS does.
American Scientist had an episode where they taught a seeing girl braille, and tested her ability while doing an fMRI. The sections of her brain that fired during the test were associated with tactile processing. Then they blindfolded her for 100 hours, and retested. This time, her visual cortex was firing. The brain is dynamic and can repurpose unused neurons. This may be why people can no longer remember 7-digit telephone numbers: We all have PDA/cell phones to do it for us.
Is this bad? Not unless you value the ability to remember phone numbers.
Would it be bad if London taxi drivers no longer knew every little alleyway? Not so long as they could still accomplish their task.
BTW, I had a very different experience with a cabby in Paris. I told him where I wanted to go and he handed me a road atlas and said, "Trouvez-le."
They neither have practice in solving problems, nor can they multiply 6x30 without a calculator.
Let's see....
30+30+30+30+30+30 =
60+30+30+30+30 =
90+30+30+30 =
120+30+30 =
150+30 =
180!
It works... Just not as efficiently.
BTW (It's a joke.)
I'll point us back to a couple of /. posts.
1 7/0342224
First, Nature found that people judge websites in a few milliseconds:
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/01/
Then Harvard and Cal find that phishing works because people judge too much on the visual presentation:
http://it.slashdot.org/it/06/03/30/1556226.shtml
Now we see that people are poor judges of content. Quite close to A + B = C.
I teach a college course for teaching majors. Each year I do a phishing demonstration where I post a bunch of links on my blog, including one to the university's intranet. The links are all full paths (http://...), but the href in the intranet link points to a different server. When the students try to login, they get a message about phishing.
This semester I was a bit worried because I had heard IE 7 had new "anti-phishing technology." I thought IE would obviously check the text of the link against the target address, but that didn't happen. FireFox 2 doesn't either.
How hard would it be to check the text of a link against a regex for urls, then, if it is a url, check that the target is the same?
If you're going to college, look around campus for a part-time coding job. Don't go to the CS department, but look at the schools of education, the humanities, etc. A lot of these schools do computer projects, but lack the skills to write their own apps or admin their own systems.
I know one CS major who will have grad school offering all sorts of assistantships because he's gotten into coding applications for foreign language systems.
You can also watch the local *nix Users Group lists for job offers to students. I see two a week.
One caveat: You will not make bank through these jobs. I didn't as an undergrad, and I haven't as a graduate student. What I did was build a a ton of marketable skills that have now started to pan out in major contracts with research groups all over the country.
This is anecdotal, but interesting.
A few years ago my undergrad department was planning to build a new building. One of my professors recommended me for a committee that was designing the new labs. In the meeting, professors were scribbling on graph paper to show the layouts they wanted. I decided I could do better in WorldCraft, which I happened to have on my laptop. After a quick demo, they had my laptop on the LCD projector and were directing me to move equipment, furniture, lighting, etc., around until they were satisfied. I then compiled the map, and ran it in Half-Life to get screenshots to show the interior designers what we had in mind.
Of course, for scale and realism, I inserted a couple Half-Life scientists in white lab coats.
Showing some of the professors, who were younger, and, I thought, less likely to be offended, I typed "/impulse 101" into the console (that's the grant-all-weapons cheat), and blew away one in-game scientist with the rocket launcher. The scientist's body gibbed, with half of the skull skidding to my character's feet. Then I went up to another scientist, pulled out the shotgun and shot him. Blood splattered on the terminal behind him, he staggered, and then collapsed.
Far and away, most professors I tested felt the shotgun was more offensive/disturbing than the rocket launcher. (And, yes, I did randomize for the order effect.)
I attribute this effect to the fact that the shotgun was much more realistic than the rocket launcher.
Except the French had "Nouvelle Star" before we had "American Idol."
It's even covered there more than here.
You're right on the pork rinds though... Hmm. That sounds good.
Obviously, Slashcode doesn't handle Arabic script well.
Let's test Slashcode's handling of Arabic script:
.
The last four figures are, in fact, the year 1999. Wahid (1) and Tis'a (9) are graphical cognates of their associated "Arabic" Numerals.
If you want to see some fun computing logic in action, type some random Arabic into a Unicode-capable editor, then some numbers, then some more letters. Backspace through the whole text and the cursor will jump around as the direction of the text is difference from the direction of the numbers. You will also notice how the form of the second-to-last letter changes when the last letter is deleted.
I remember a news report of US soldiers going door-to-door shaking down a "hostile" Iraqi town. My favorite moment was the first grunt through the door yelling, "Yimshi! Yimshi! Get down! Get down!" as he threw a confused Iraqi to the floor.
I know enough Arabic to know Yimshi means "Walk," or "Leave/Get out of here."