It isn't Google's job to feel guilty for the lack of qualified black tech workers. Universities these days are falling down over themselves trying to be inclusive, promote diversity, etc.; promising black students in technical fields are highly sought after... yet there are almost none of them. I'm in computational physics, not in computer engineering, so it's a slightly different field. However, the university I'm at now is extremely diversity-promoting -- and located in a city that is ~50% black... and there is one black physicist there. She's not African-American, either; she's Ethiopian (and competent as all hell, and headed for industry). At my previous university, there were folks from all around the world: a few Afrikaaners, Dutch, Russians, Germans, Brazilians, French, Chinese, Indians, Native Americans, Koreans, Mexicans, and so on... and no black folks at all. At the physics and astronomy conferences I go to, there are almost no black people. Yes, this is physics, not tech engineering, but I imagine the situation is about the same there.
For whatever reason, blacks (and especially African-Americans) are underrepresented in the tech sector. This is definitely worth some concern: it could be for innocent reasons, it could be for ones that need to be addressed (having to do with substandard schools in black areas, for instance), but whatever it is it's not Google's problem. By all means, let's make sure tech classes in black schools are up to standard, but it's not Google's job to worry about this.
Forcing Google at Al Sharpton-point to seek out and hire black folks, regardless of whether they are able to do their jobs well or not, is only going to make things worse, as people will ask "Is that guy over there able to do his job, or is he a quota hire?"
You jest, but I take the failure of ebil al-Qaeda terrists who want to kill or at least scare the fuck out of Americans to kill or scare the fuck out of Americans, combined with how easy it is to do said killing or fuck-scaring, as evidence that they're far less threatening than we're told they are.
Instead we get whackadoodle underpants bombers and wacky Chechens. But the toll from the Boston bombing (5 dead, ~200 injured) is the same as an average week in the ghetto of Baltimore (a city of half a million). If we were really allocating resources to the places with the greatest impact on Americans' ability to live free of fear and violence, we'd worry on inner city black communities, not underpants bombers and butthurt Chechens.
... the fact that you can do this with a telephone is pretty scary.
Just recently I saw a massive police overreaction (closing off a block of downtown DC in front of a university hospital, complete with police abusing citizens) just because some student left her backpack lying around. If this is all it takes to provoke this sort of reaction, and if a few phone calls can get someone "swatted", then why the hell does al-Qaeda bother with bombings and flying planes into things? Send over a few sleeper cells with nondescript bags and boxes and watch the panic fly.
This is pretty damn analogous to an allergic reaction: "ack, a piece of peanut antigen! FETCH ALL THE CYTOKINES, BOYS, THIS MEANS WAR!"
Well, we could start with education, and help nuclear not be a bad word. We could start by helping green energy "scale" as best we can, and by doing what we can to help it (i.e. by allowing electricity suppliers to change the price of power on a timescale of minutes and communicate this to consumers, allowing them or their thermostats, etc., to throttle consumption up and down to match the fluctuating supplies of wind and solar).
We could start by seeing just how much of a reduction in the standard of living it would entail if it were done by less disruptive economically sensible means (a carbon tax with the tax rate tuned to create whatever desired reduction you'd like). I imagine it would be less than you'd think.
There are mines that have a lot more autonomy than that: there are anti-submarine mines called CAPTOR mines that contain a torpedo and a sonar unit; the sonar unit will launch the torpedo at submarines, but not at ships.
Bikes are narrow and don't take up a whole lane: it's silly to treat them exactly as cars.
The most sane bike laws I've seen allow bikes to operate in one of two modes:
1) Not occupying a whole lane: ride at the rightmost edge of the right lane without claiming it, drivers are allowed to pass with 3' (preferably 5') clearance. Cars are allowed to "pull up next to them", although they often don't out of courtesy.
2) Occupying a whole lane: a cyclist riding in the middle of the lane is acting like a car and you can't pass her in that lane; cyclists are only supposed to do this when they judge that road conditions are such that cars can't pass them safely (right side of lane has too much debris, not enough clearance, etc.)
This was in Tucson, where cyclists and cars coexist quite peacefully. If you're in a place with asshole cyclists or asshole drivers it probably has nothing to do with either cyclists or drivers or the local laws, and more that you live in a place with more assholes.
This is a point that non-cyclists miss: a bike going below (say) 4mph is quite unstable (and at 0mph has to put a foot down). Forcing cyclists to accelerate from a stop -- shifting gears as they do so and worrying about stability -- puts them in a dangerous spot.
Bike commuter here in a large city: yes, we definitely do stuff like that for safety. As a cyclist you don't want to be stopped in amongst cars at a red light when it turns green, so the standard thing to do is lane-split, then watch the pedestrian signals and haul ass as soon as cross traffic stops during their yellow.
That way all the cars have plenty of time to see the bikers and not hit them, and we've got more clear road to see potholes and shit without traffic all around.
Well, the roads have to still be constructed to handle those big trucks. If the cyclists are going to pay tax for infrastructure, there's no need to waste money building things that can handle ten-ton trucks (and as a consequence can't handle the weather).
Let's say you are detecting light from a fluorescent lamp. It has some mercury atoms in it which are excited by an electric current, and their de-excitation causes the emission of a visible light photon.
You can compute the transition amplitude and figure out how long, on average, it will take to spit out a photon. (You do this by applying time-dependent perturbation theory coupling the two quantum states with a dipole-transition electric field, to first order.) But you can't predict exactly when the photon will come out, only the probability that it will in a certain time interval.
Well, what drive is it on? Tell them: in this OS there is one filesystem, and the stuff on your drives is attached to various places on it. So you might have one drive at/, and your CD gets connected at/media/cdrom, your thumbdrive at/media/usb, and so on.
Why is my thumb drive copied to the hard disk when I put it in? It's not -- it's attached somewhere to the filesystem.
Why does Loinox use the wrong slashes? Because / means divide, and it's a directory divider.
Seriously, if you can't understand this after fifteen minutes of explanation you shouldn't be paid to fuck with computers.
Do people really get degrees in IT fields without studying Unix?
Serious question -- I'm a scientist and everybody works with it at some time or other, and a computational physics course using C on Linux is standard fare. At the grad school I went to, there were shared Linux workstations in all the graduate student offices, just as a matter of course, and if you didn't know how to use them you figured it out.
Can you really get a whole degree in computers without touching Unix?
Training people to use Linux is pretty simple unless they're dense. I've known quite a lot of nontechnical people who, when presented with LXDE or similar, go "oh, okay, this is pretty easy" and proceed to do all their shit just like they did before, except the slashes go the other way.
Given that the US set back the progress of polio vaccination in the Muslim world by a bogus vaccination campaign designed to hunt down Bin Laden's DNA, wankers fighting over power are in a very real sense responsible for the resurgence of polio.
[1] Create and collect assignments: Classroom weaves together Google Docs, Drive and Gmail to help teachers create and collect assignments paperlessly.
To "create assignments", I make a pdf in my favorite pdf-maker, then post it on the course website (a plain HTML page with links), then tell the students about it. To "collect assignments", I tell the students to email them to the course submission email -- shared between the lead instructor and the grader, if there is one.
They can quickly see who has or hasn't completed the work, and provide direct, real-time feedback to individual students.
I don't have the time to play policeman ("I see little Susie hasn't even started coding yet and the homework's due tomorrow"); if Susie wants my help she has my email.
[2] Improve class communications: Teachers can make announcements, ask questions and comment with students in real time—improving communication inside and outside of class.
I can best "improve class communications" by talking to the damn students. If they want to talk to me and I'm around, there's email or coming by my office; if I don't respond to either, then chances are I won't be reachable by google widget, either.
[3] Stay organized: Classroom automatically creates Drive folders for each assignment and for each student. Students can easily see what's due on their Assignments page.'
They can easily see what's due by visiting the course website and seeing "Homework 4 (link) -- due Monday, April 14". Sorting things by assignment and by student is as simple as asking them to include their name and the assignment number in their submission, and running a perl script. For less technically inclined teachers, use whatever file-sifting features your OS of choice has.
I've seen highly-technologized courses run way off the rails, because there's a delusion that fancy computerization can take the place of talking to the students. It can't. The only instructional technology I really have a need for is:
1) The computers that we actually use (I teach computational physics) 2) A projector, so I can show them examples 3) A website, where they can download shit (pdf's of assignments and notes) and see what's due 4) Email
Most Arizonan gun-rights advocates see the right to be armed as an extension of personal property rights, and the right to exclude armed people from your own property is also an exercise of personal property rights. They won't raise a legal objection to someone saying "no guns on my property, please", because they think that people can exclude anyone from their property, and that's their choice to make.
Given that the presence of guns is far more weakly correlated with murder than the presence of crack cocaine, why don't we create a Federal law banning smoking crack instead? I mean, it's not even grown here, and crackheads need a constant supply. It should be easier to keep out the crack than the guns, I'd think.
Slashdot Mirror
It isn't Google's job to feel guilty for the lack of qualified black tech workers. Universities these days are falling down over themselves trying to be inclusive, promote diversity, etc.; promising black students in technical fields are highly sought after... yet there are almost none of them. I'm in computational physics, not in computer engineering, so it's a slightly different field. However, the university I'm at now is extremely diversity-promoting -- and located in a city that is ~50% black... and there is one black physicist there. She's not African-American, either; she's Ethiopian (and competent as all hell, and headed for industry). At my previous university, there were folks from all around the world: a few Afrikaaners, Dutch, Russians, Germans, Brazilians, French, Chinese, Indians, Native Americans, Koreans, Mexicans, and so on... and no black folks at all. At the physics and astronomy conferences I go to, there are almost no black people. Yes, this is physics, not tech engineering, but I imagine the situation is about the same there.
For whatever reason, blacks (and especially African-Americans) are underrepresented in the tech sector. This is definitely worth some concern: it could be for innocent reasons, it could be for ones that need to be addressed (having to do with substandard schools in black areas, for instance), but whatever it is it's not Google's problem. By all means, let's make sure tech classes in black schools are up to standard, but it's not Google's job to worry about this.
Forcing Google at Al Sharpton-point to seek out and hire black folks, regardless of whether they are able to do their jobs well or not, is only going to make things worse, as people will ask "Is that guy over there able to do his job, or is he a quota hire?"
The same way that I trust that any other non-monopoly is acting responsibly with its ability to set prices: not buying things from them if they don't.
When apples are $3/pound I will eat something else.
zombies.malebolge.hl 127.0.0.1
You jest, but I take the failure of ebil al-Qaeda terrists who want to kill or at least scare the fuck out of Americans to kill or scare the fuck out of Americans, combined with how easy it is to do said killing or fuck-scaring, as evidence that they're far less threatening than we're told they are.
Instead we get whackadoodle underpants bombers and wacky Chechens. But the toll from the Boston bombing (5 dead, ~200 injured) is the same as an average week in the ghetto of Baltimore (a city of half a million). If we were really allocating resources to the places with the greatest impact on Americans' ability to live free of fear and violence, we'd worry on inner city black communities, not underpants bombers and butthurt Chechens.
... the fact that you can do this with a telephone is pretty scary.
Just recently I saw a massive police overreaction (closing off a block of downtown DC in front of a university hospital, complete with police abusing citizens) just because some student left her backpack lying around. If this is all it takes to provoke this sort of reaction, and if a few phone calls can get someone "swatted", then why the hell does al-Qaeda bother with bombings and flying planes into things? Send over a few sleeper cells with nondescript bags and boxes and watch the panic fly.
This is pretty damn analogous to an allergic reaction: "ack, a piece of peanut antigen! FETCH ALL THE CYTOKINES, BOYS, THIS MEANS WAR!"
Nuclear fission is only politically explosive because people are ignorant. We could perhaps work on fixing that.
Well, we could start with education, and help nuclear not be a bad word. We could start by helping green energy "scale" as best we can, and by doing what we can to help it (i.e. by allowing electricity suppliers to change the price of power on a timescale of minutes and communicate this to consumers, allowing them or their thermostats, etc., to throttle consumption up and down to match the fluctuating supplies of wind and solar).
We could start by seeing just how much of a reduction in the standard of living it would entail if it were done by less disruptive economically sensible means (a carbon tax with the tax rate tuned to create whatever desired reduction you'd like). I imagine it would be less than you'd think.
People condemn autonomous killing robots because they might screw up and kill something that shouldn't be killed.
How is this any different from what humans in charge of deciding who to kill do? (exhibit A: the Iraq war)
There are mines that have a lot more autonomy than that: there are anti-submarine mines called CAPTOR mines that contain a torpedo and a sonar unit; the sonar unit will launch the torpedo at submarines, but not at ships.
[citation needed], and all that.
Cyclists in urban areas ride that way anyway no matter what the laws are.
Bikes are narrow and don't take up a whole lane: it's silly to treat them exactly as cars.
The most sane bike laws I've seen allow bikes to operate in one of two modes:
1) Not occupying a whole lane: ride at the rightmost edge of the right lane without claiming it, drivers are allowed to pass with 3' (preferably 5') clearance. Cars are allowed to "pull up next to them", although they often don't out of courtesy.
2) Occupying a whole lane: a cyclist riding in the middle of the lane is acting like a car and you can't pass her in that lane; cyclists are only supposed to do this when they judge that road conditions are such that cars can't pass them safely (right side of lane has too much debris, not enough clearance, etc.)
This was in Tucson, where cyclists and cars coexist quite peacefully. If you're in a place with asshole cyclists or asshole drivers it probably has nothing to do with either cyclists or drivers or the local laws, and more that you live in a place with more assholes.
This is a point that non-cyclists miss: a bike going below (say) 4mph is quite unstable (and at 0mph has to put a foot down). Forcing cyclists to accelerate from a stop -- shifting gears as they do so and worrying about stability -- puts them in a dangerous spot.
Bike commuter here in a large city: yes, we definitely do stuff like that for safety. As a cyclist you don't want to be stopped in amongst cars at a red light when it turns green, so the standard thing to do is lane-split, then watch the pedestrian signals and haul ass as soon as cross traffic stops during their yellow.
That way all the cars have plenty of time to see the bikers and not hit them, and we've got more clear road to see potholes and shit without traffic all around.
Well, the roads have to still be constructed to handle those big trucks. If the cyclists are going to pay tax for infrastructure, there's no need to waste money building things that can handle ten-ton trucks (and as a consequence can't handle the weather).
Let's say you are detecting light from a fluorescent lamp. It has some mercury atoms in it which are excited by an electric current, and their de-excitation causes the emission of a visible light photon.
You can compute the transition amplitude and figure out how long, on average, it will take to spit out a photon. (You do this by applying time-dependent perturbation theory coupling the two quantum states with a dipole-transition electric field, to first order.) But you can't predict exactly when the photon will come out, only the probability that it will in a certain time interval.
Well, what drive is it on? /, and your CD gets connected at /media/cdrom, your thumbdrive at /media/usb, and so on.
Tell them: in this OS there is one filesystem, and the stuff on your drives is attached to various places on it. So you might have one drive at
Why is my thumb drive copied to the hard disk when I put it in?
It's not -- it's attached somewhere to the filesystem.
Why does Loinox use the wrong slashes?
Because / means divide, and it's a directory divider.
Seriously, if you can't understand this after fifteen minutes of explanation you shouldn't be paid to fuck with computers.
Do people really get degrees in IT fields without studying Unix?
Serious question -- I'm a scientist and everybody works with it at some time or other, and a computational physics course using C on Linux is standard fare. At the grad school I went to, there were shared Linux workstations in all the graduate student offices, just as a matter of course, and if you didn't know how to use them you figured it out.
Can you really get a whole degree in computers without touching Unix?
Training people to use Linux is pretty simple unless they're dense. I've known quite a lot of nontechnical people who, when presented with LXDE or similar, go "oh, okay, this is pretty easy" and proceed to do all their shit just like they did before, except the slashes go the other way.
many professionals struggle to understand UNIX-style paths
Wait, really?
There are IT professionals who have trouble with the idea that /home/entropius/widgets is a subdirectory of /home/entropius, and so on?
Given that the US set back the progress of polio vaccination in the Muslim world by a bogus vaccination campaign designed to hunt down Bin Laden's DNA, wankers fighting over power are in a very real sense responsible for the resurgence of polio.
This is so goddamn true.
I hate Blackboard. So do the students.
[1] Create and collect assignments: Classroom weaves together Google Docs, Drive and Gmail to help teachers create and collect assignments paperlessly.
To "create assignments", I make a pdf in my favorite pdf-maker, then post it on the course website (a plain HTML page with links), then tell the students about it.
To "collect assignments", I tell the students to email them to the course submission email -- shared between the lead instructor and the grader, if there is one.
They can quickly see who has or hasn't completed the work, and provide direct, real-time feedback to individual students.
I don't have the time to play policeman ("I see little Susie hasn't even started coding yet and the homework's due tomorrow"); if Susie wants my help she has my email.
[2] Improve class communications: Teachers can make announcements, ask questions and comment with students in real time—improving communication inside and outside of class.
I can best "improve class communications" by talking to the damn students. If they want to talk to me and I'm around, there's email or coming by my office; if I don't respond to either, then chances are I won't be reachable by google widget, either.
[3] Stay organized: Classroom automatically creates Drive folders for each assignment and for each student. Students can easily see what's due on their Assignments page.'
They can easily see what's due by visiting the course website and seeing "Homework 4 (link) -- due Monday, April 14".
Sorting things by assignment and by student is as simple as asking them to include their name and the assignment number in their submission, and running a perl script. For less technically inclined teachers, use whatever file-sifting features your OS of choice has.
I've seen highly-technologized courses run way off the rails, because there's a delusion that fancy computerization can take the place of talking to the students. It can't. The only instructional technology I really have a need for is:
1) The computers that we actually use (I teach computational physics)
2) A projector, so I can show them examples
3) A website, where they can download shit (pdf's of assignments and notes) and see what's due
4) Email
You'd be wrong about that, then.
Most Arizonan gun-rights advocates see the right to be armed as an extension of personal property rights, and the right to exclude armed people from your own property is also an exercise of personal property rights. They won't raise a legal objection to someone saying "no guns on my property, please", because they think that people can exclude anyone from their property, and that's their choice to make.
Given that the presence of guns is far more weakly correlated with murder than the presence of crack cocaine, why don't we create a Federal law banning smoking crack instead? I mean, it's not even grown here, and crackheads need a constant supply. It should be easier to keep out the crack than the guns, I'd think.