They make the phone look like it can't support more than 16 colors. It just doesn't feel modern.
Right, I think they should had some gloss, a bevel, some gradients, and maybe a drop shadow and reflective surface. That'll bring it into the 21st century.
So you think that square boxes and text that is cut off is light years ahead of other UIs?
Well, that's the form of the UI, but it's the function that I find more compelling than other phones. The focus for Windows Phone 7 is on Hubs rather than apps. While an app focuses on a single task, a hub integrates similar tasks. For instance, on iOS, if I want to check my friend's twitter feed and a facebook wall, I need two apps to do this; I have to launch one, close it, then launch another. On WP7 there is a single location for this information, and what's more is hubs are extensible, so any service can integrate with them.
Tiles serve to visualize the contents of hubs (The people tile for example shows pictures of your contacts, the pictures tile shows your photos) and the "cut off text" along with parallax indicates your relative location in the hub. While it seems like these are simply aesthetic choices, if you actually use the device you find they serve a functional purpose
And anyway, what exactly is the competition doing? Want to talk about iOS, which is essentially a grid of icons? iOS is hardly consistent, as every app has a custom interface. Yes there are a handful of standardized UI elements, but beyond that there is no standardization. The same is true for Android, where every manufacturer is free to re-imagine the user interface.
There's a difference between television sensationalism with the sole intent of capturing the interest of ignorant viewers, and actual scientific discourse. I don't think anyone qualified to have an opinion in the matter is taking the position dkleinsc parodied.
The problem is, that this is the choice we have. Get physically violated or barraged by x-rays. Me, I'll take the third option and not fly at all. As long as these ridiculous measures are in place, I'll take the train or the bus, no matter how much more it costs or how much longer it takes.
The head of my research group was also looking to compete, but part c in your list is what prevented him. He decided to wait it out, see how the competition went, and perhaps enter the next time the hold it. I have a feeling many universities felt the same way, as you didn't see a lot of the big guns participate in this one (which might be more due to part d, but who knows).
Laser range finders are a must for accurate mapping and localization. I work with the UTM and other LIDARS on my robots, and the maps the produce are extremely accurate. Vision based navigation is possible, but it takes a lot of computation, and a lot of work to account for the uncertainty introduced. I'd say if you have the money, use both. Kinect might work well in a crunch, but as of now vision based SLAM is still in its infancy.
CMU has generous financial aid. They awarded me $14k in need based grants every year, which, at the time, cut my tuition in half. With loans and work-study I graduated with under 20k in debt. You should try, no matter what your financial status is.
Yes, I prefer this method of learning/teaching. It's a better measure of student ability, and is more rewarding for the students, so they tend to actually learn more. I find tests usually only measure time management skills.
However, it seems like this was a class of hundreds of students. Sometimes it's hard to implement those learning environments for so many students. Obviously, this is a testament to smaller class sizes, as opposed to mass market prepackaged courses.
You make a valid point, but the attitude you suggest promotes grade inflation: companies want the best students, so they higher students with As. Students want jobs so they go to schools that grant As. Schools that grant Cs want students, so they grant As. It's a vicious cycle, and a University must make a conscious effort to stop it.
The solution to this, as a University, is to build a reputation for academic excellence and proper grading ethics.
I went to Carnegie Mellon for my undergrad, and I certainly have a few hard earned Cs on my transcript. I wasn't uncommon for some exams to average in the 40-60% range. A student from may have a higher GPA than me, but when people see I went to Carnegie Mellon, my GPA hardly matters anymore. This is because to employers, CMU has built a reputation for producing quality graduates.
There's a difference between procuring a list of questions with the answers and a list of questions without the answers. For the latter, you have to invest the effort to find the answer for each question. Many professors will actually take this approach.
The former is absolutely different from studying. It matching an answer with the first few words of a sentence. This is not learning the material.
As a lecturer, I have a presentation every other day. I find my iPad is awful for them, as you can't annotate the slides. Further, developing presentations in iPad Keynote is an exercise in patience, while exporting from Power Point to keynote is a crapshoot, especially if you have complex animations. I resort to my trusty Dell Latitude XT for presentations. Even if it is heavier, it offers much more functionality.
While true, there are some things you leave out. First, notice the presenter view on the iPad. It displays slide number and.... well that's it. I'm used to the power point presenter view, which displays the slide, your slide deck, notes, a timer, and drawing tools. For the iPad you have to constantly turn around to see the screen. Also you can't annotate the screen. These are seriously limitations to presentations.
Further, as I mentioned, VGA output is enabled on a per app basis. For example, you can't plug the iPad into a TV and watch shows using the ABC player, while this functionality is standard on any netbook with a web browser. For presentations, this means you can't open a web page to show your audience, a common enough task, as safari doesn't support VGA out.
So, while you assume the parent was referencing an inability to connect his iPad to a projector, he was actually alluding to the anemic presentation functionality it offers.
True, but not every application supports projector output. The iPad doesn't simply duplicate the display; this features is enabled on a per app basis. So if you were hoping to display certain content from an app, you may be out of luck. However, apps like Keynote and Penultimate (recently) support this.
There was a time before iPad when the majority of tablets came with a digitizer for pen input. Obviously this hindered mass adoption, but the is made tablets perfect for note taking and drawing. Currently the iPad and similar touch only tablets are suitable for content consumption, while there is a whole other class of tablets out there meant for content creation.
Hopefully the stylus will find its way back to join touch.
Another way to get a sense of who is cheating is by talking to the lab instructors. They have more hands on contact with the students, and have a better sense of their capabilities. I'm a TA for a large course (200+ students) and I know my students much better than the professor. I know which of my students are struggling, which of them are improving, and which of them are stellar. It's not a perfect system, but it might be beneficial in extracting the false positives from a hypothesis test.
I'm a TA also, and I attribute this behavior to some sense of entitlement held by the students. I continuously encounter students who come to me and tell me they don't "deserve" the grade they received, or it is "too low." I gave one student a zero on a page of an exam because there was no work shown, just an answer with a circle (which was wrong). She came to me incensed, and demanded I give her full credit.
I've never had a student change an answer yet. All the assignments must be scanned by the students and submitted, so I'm prepared.
I think the answer is he made it too easy. From what I can gather, he was using canned exams that came with the textbook. Students obviously got wind of this and used their internet savvy to find a copy on line; there's a wealth of teacher and solution manuals out there.
He also says that the students can take the make up exam from 7:00 am on monday to 12:00am on wednesday. This seems odd to me, and it's either that the exams are on line or at a computer cluster of some sort. Either way it seems possible that students could be taking it before their friends and sharing their answers. Typically in this situation the teacher is using software provided by the textbook which randomizes questions, but there are only so many questions to ask a class of a couple hundred students.
The obvious solution is to design a test to disincentivize cheating. Tell them they can bring a piece of paper with definitions, terms, equations.... anything they can fit on the page. Then design the test to test a range of knowledge. Make 1/3 easy, 1/3 difficult, and 1/3 very challenging. The very challenging questions should really probe the student's knowledge of the material; pose it in a new way, ask them to extend a concept, and other questions you just can't look up or even anticipate. This way, if the student can answer the easy and medium problems, and some of the hard problems, he'll end up with a C, which is pretty much the objective.
The problem is, this is difficult and time consuming, something most Professors won't entertain. Therefore they end up recycling exams, or worse, outsourcing them, and end up with situations of mass cheating.
Wow, invigilator! What an awesome word. I proctor exams as part of my TA duty. From now one I'm going to tell people "I have to go invigilate." On second thought... maybe not.
While the work the MIT student did is noteworthy, it's really quite trivial thanks to ROS. I do robotics research using ROS, and SLAM, navigation, planning, etc. are all handled by ROS automatically as long as you provide the appropriate data streams. It's really as simple as plugging in a device. Even the gesture recognition is handled by the kinect driver and issuing commands from gestures is trivial at that point.
I think the real recognition should be given to the group at CCNY (no I don't got school there) who did the work of getting the kinect driver working in ROS in the first place, and aren't even mentioned in this article.
This is a common negotiating tactic known as anchoring. If you want $10, you ask for $20, and then "reluctantly" accept $10. It's used mainly by children on their parents who want to a larger allowance or to stay up later.
Slashdot Mirror
They make the phone look like it can't support more than 16 colors. It just doesn't feel modern.
Right, I think they should had some gloss, a bevel, some gradients, and maybe a drop shadow and reflective surface. That'll bring it into the 21st century.
So you think that square boxes and text that is cut off is light years ahead of other UIs?
Well, that's the form of the UI, but it's the function that I find more compelling than other phones. The focus for Windows Phone 7 is on Hubs rather than apps. While an app focuses on a single task, a hub integrates similar tasks. For instance, on iOS, if I want to check my friend's twitter feed and a facebook wall, I need two apps to do this; I have to launch one, close it, then launch another. On WP7 there is a single location for this information, and what's more is hubs are extensible, so any service can integrate with them.
Tiles serve to visualize the contents of hubs (The people tile for example shows pictures of your contacts, the pictures tile shows your photos) and the "cut off text" along with parallax indicates your relative location in the hub. While it seems like these are simply aesthetic choices, if you actually use the device you find they serve a functional purpose
And anyway, what exactly is the competition doing? Want to talk about iOS, which is essentially a grid of icons? iOS is hardly consistent, as every app has a custom interface. Yes there are a handful of standardized UI elements, but beyond that there is no standardization. The same is true for Android, where every manufacturer is free to re-imagine the user interface.
Wow, I wish those were wallpaper sized. They're stunning.
There's a difference between television sensationalism with the sole intent of capturing the interest of ignorant viewers, and actual scientific discourse. I don't think anyone qualified to have an opinion in the matter is taking the position dkleinsc parodied.
The problem is, that this is the choice we have. Get physically violated or barraged by x-rays. Me, I'll take the third option and not fly at all. As long as these ridiculous measures are in place, I'll take the train or the bus, no matter how much more it costs or how much longer it takes.
If this actually happened, I guarantee you we would start to see security checkpoints for security checkpoints.
The head of my research group was also looking to compete, but part c in your list is what prevented him. He decided to wait it out, see how the competition went, and perhaps enter the next time the hold it. I have a feeling many universities felt the same way, as you didn't see a lot of the big guns participate in this one (which might be more due to part d, but who knows).
Laser range finders are a must for accurate mapping and localization. I work with the UTM and other LIDARS on my robots, and the maps the produce are extremely accurate. Vision based navigation is possible, but it takes a lot of computation, and a lot of work to account for the uncertainty introduced. I'd say if you have the money, use both. Kinect might work well in a crunch, but as of now vision based SLAM is still in its infancy.
I think I left out a sentence in my post. I meant to say project based assessment is my preferred method of learning. I hate exams.
CMU has generous financial aid. They awarded me $14k in need based grants every year, which, at the time, cut my tuition in half. With loans and work-study I graduated with under 20k in debt. You should try, no matter what your financial status is.
Yes, I prefer this method of learning/teaching. It's a better measure of student ability, and is more rewarding for the students, so they tend to actually learn more. I find tests usually only measure time management skills.
However, it seems like this was a class of hundreds of students. Sometimes it's hard to implement those learning environments for so many students. Obviously, this is a testament to smaller class sizes, as opposed to mass market prepackaged courses.
You make a valid point, but the attitude you suggest promotes grade inflation: companies want the best students, so they higher students with As. Students want jobs so they go to schools that grant As. Schools that grant Cs want students, so they grant As. It's a vicious cycle, and a University must make a conscious effort to stop it.
The solution to this, as a University, is to build a reputation for academic excellence and proper grading ethics.
I went to Carnegie Mellon for my undergrad, and I certainly have a few hard earned Cs on my transcript. I wasn't uncommon for some exams to average in the 40-60% range. A student from may have a higher GPA than me, but when people see I went to Carnegie Mellon, my GPA hardly matters anymore. This is because to employers, CMU has built a reputation for producing quality graduates.
There's a difference between procuring a list of questions with the answers and a list of questions without the answers. For the latter, you have to invest the effort to find the answer for each question. Many professors will actually take this approach.
The former is absolutely different from studying. It matching an answer with the first few words of a sentence. This is not learning the material.
As a lecturer, I have a presentation every other day. I find my iPad is awful for them, as you can't annotate the slides. Further, developing presentations in iPad Keynote is an exercise in patience, while exporting from Power Point to keynote is a crapshoot, especially if you have complex animations. I resort to my trusty Dell Latitude XT for presentations. Even if it is heavier, it offers much more functionality.
While true, there are some things you leave out. First, notice the presenter view on the iPad. It displays slide number and.... well that's it. I'm used to the power point presenter view, which displays the slide, your slide deck, notes, a timer, and drawing tools. For the iPad you have to constantly turn around to see the screen. Also you can't annotate the screen. These are seriously limitations to presentations.
Further, as I mentioned, VGA output is enabled on a per app basis. For example, you can't plug the iPad into a TV and watch shows using the ABC player, while this functionality is standard on any netbook with a web browser. For presentations, this means you can't open a web page to show your audience, a common enough task, as safari doesn't support VGA out.
So, while you assume the parent was referencing an inability to connect his iPad to a projector, he was actually alluding to the anemic presentation functionality it offers.
True, but not every application supports projector output. The iPad doesn't simply duplicate the display; this features is enabled on a per app basis. So if you were hoping to display certain content from an app, you may be out of luck. However, apps like Keynote and Penultimate (recently) support this.
There was a time before iPad when the majority of tablets came with a digitizer for pen input. Obviously this hindered mass adoption, but the is made tablets perfect for note taking and drawing. Currently the iPad and similar touch only tablets are suitable for content consumption, while there is a whole other class of tablets out there meant for content creation.
Hopefully the stylus will find its way back to join touch.
Another way to get a sense of who is cheating is by talking to the lab instructors. They have more hands on contact with the students, and have a better sense of their capabilities. I'm a TA for a large course (200+ students) and I know my students much better than the professor. I know which of my students are struggling, which of them are improving, and which of them are stellar. It's not a perfect system, but it might be beneficial in extracting the false positives from a hypothesis test.
Well, it says he's lazy at worst, or perhaps over worked. But that does not excuse cheating.
I'm a TA also, and I attribute this behavior to some sense of entitlement held by the students. I continuously encounter students who come to me and tell me they don't "deserve" the grade they received, or it is "too low." I gave one student a zero on a page of an exam because there was no work shown, just an answer with a circle (which was wrong). She came to me incensed, and demanded I give her full credit.
I've never had a student change an answer yet. All the assignments must be scanned by the students and submitted, so I'm prepared.
I think the answer is he made it too easy. From what I can gather, he was using canned exams that came with the textbook. Students obviously got wind of this and used their internet savvy to find a copy on line; there's a wealth of teacher and solution manuals out there.
He also says that the students can take the make up exam from 7:00 am on monday to 12:00am on wednesday. This seems odd to me, and it's either that the exams are on line or at a computer cluster of some sort. Either way it seems possible that students could be taking it before their friends and sharing their answers. Typically in this situation the teacher is using software provided by the textbook which randomizes questions, but there are only so many questions to ask a class of a couple hundred students.
The obvious solution is to design a test to disincentivize cheating. Tell them they can bring a piece of paper with definitions, terms, equations.... anything they can fit on the page. Then design the test to test a range of knowledge. Make 1/3 easy, 1/3 difficult, and 1/3 very challenging. The very challenging questions should really probe the student's knowledge of the material; pose it in a new way, ask them to extend a concept, and other questions you just can't look up or even anticipate. This way, if the student can answer the easy and medium problems, and some of the hard problems, he'll end up with a C, which is pretty much the objective.
The problem is, this is difficult and time consuming, something most Professors won't entertain. Therefore they end up recycling exams, or worse, outsourcing them, and end up with situations of mass cheating.
Wow, invigilator! What an awesome word. I proctor exams as part of my TA duty. From now one I'm going to tell people "I have to go invigilate." On second thought... maybe not.
While the work the MIT student did is noteworthy, it's really quite trivial thanks to ROS. I do robotics research using ROS, and SLAM, navigation, planning, etc. are all handled by ROS automatically as long as you provide the appropriate data streams. It's really as simple as plugging in a device. Even the gesture recognition is handled by the kinect driver and issuing commands from gestures is trivial at that point.
I think the real recognition should be given to the group at CCNY (no I don't got school there) who did the work of getting the kinect driver working in ROS in the first place, and aren't even mentioned in this article.
I don't think the question really is about whether the child should have been searched or not
That's not a question? She's a fucking toddler throwing a fit, not Osama Bin Laden.
This is a common negotiating tactic known as anchoring. If you want $10, you ask for $20, and then "reluctantly" accept $10. It's used mainly by children on their parents who want to a larger allowance or to stay up later.