Publication is determined by scientists and journal editors. Funding is determined by rich people who may or may not have any understanding of science, and who may or may not have a specific political agenda they are seeking to advance. It's worth noting that the preponderance of money available to the more politically charged issues means that scientists who happen to be furthering someone's agenda get funding, but since the funding doesn't usually pay the scientist, it's ridiculous to make the assumption that the scientist is doing it for the payoff.
Well, you know those fat-cat scientists, using their crafty political manipulation skills to put more cash in their wallets, which is why they became climate scientists in the first place: the big cash payoffs.
...The logic being that scientists will do fake research so that someone will spend money on the fake research. Apparently scientists get massive hard-ons knowing that money was spent on things, and will gladly waste grant money just to be mean, because its sure as hell not goin in their wallets.
No. The only issue with non-MS office suites is that they don't play nice with MS. OpenOffice works just fine for.odt files, as complex as you like. Yes, MS products will be better at being MS products. Just because something is the standard doesn't mean it's better, it just means everyone uses it.
No, that's not true. The errors in Watchmen were egregious and insulting to an audience that pays ten bucks to see the damn flick in the first place. The actor who played Nixon was inexplicably wearing a grocery bag filled with flesh colored play-doh. About one out of every three scenes was computer animated for no reason. The sex scenes were long and uncomfortably graphic. The script was like if you took the original comic book and threw it in a blender. The errors in direction were more than obvious, but actively tangible and gustable, like a wet sponge being sloppy forced into ones mouth on the end of a stick. It was an atrocious movie, not because of any subjective errors of aesthetic philosophy, but because it was a cheap, poorly thought out attempt to cash in on fanboyism. The whole quality of the filmmaking was amateurish, and not something I should have to expect from people who are demanding I pay them big people money to sit in the dark and watch.
Given that everyone's said something different, I'm confused as to what response a non-virgin would give as their call sign. "That's stupid"? No, that's covered. "That's hot"? No, also covered. "That's technically interesting" No, also covered. I get it, everyone who posts on slashdot is a virgin because we're on the internet and only super NERDS use the internet because this is STILL THE 1970'S AND WE ALL HAVE POCKET PROTECTORS. You can tell because our houses are filled with toys and we ride a bike to work. Is OP also a fag?
this is actually a bizarre feature of Chrome, and a major reason I don't use it. It's like they're punishing you for not thinking their UI is light enough. Firefox and IE both show tabs on mouseover, and all of the browsers allow ctrl-tab switching. This is not to mention hiding tabs hardly cripples the browser: just hit F11 and switch tabs if you're shortcut-phobic. Or more directly, show the tabs on mouseover in Chrome and Google's ridiculous showboating becomes irrelevant.
Pretty much every browser has a "fullscreen" F11 option, which hides the Nav bar along with any other pieces of UI. If you need to fullscreen a page to view it better, you always could. You can even navigate with keyboard shortcuts. Its nothing new, of course, but what it is is a forced configuration catering to a rather narrow set of preferences. It's certainly a valid configuration, but it looks to me to be one more example of Google trying to wow us with pointless configuration changes. This isn't going to make the browser run faster or cleaner, it's going to make some people happy because their choice of browser configuration comes out of the box, piss off some other people because their configuration is harder or impossible to set up, and irritate the ever loving shit out of tech-support guys who have to deal with hordes of people answering the question "what is the URL of X site you're visiting?" with confused silence. This is the no-caps-lock look-at-us-we're-so-crazy tactic all over again.
I don't think the article was saying "math students and computer science students," I think it was saying "math and computer science students." In many universities, the two are a single major, with the degree of specialization in either field being left up to the individual student, who remains a "mathematics/computer science" students. Yes, the math and comp sci curricula are less intensive at these schools, but it's a perfectly valid way of categorizing the discipline, despite the objections of mathematicians or computer scientists who still get all prickly about having their offices in the same building. A class which may have no value on its own to a pure mathematician (i.e., an introductory programming or web development class) might still be offered as a "mat/compsci" section.
There's a big difference between all those things and DoD spending: DoD spending sets fire to money. Social Security, Medicaid, all these social programs end up putting money back into the economy (paying doctors, food merchants, etc.) whereas DoD sends money overseas to get blown up. The money the government has sunk into SS is for the most part still knocking around the country somewhere. The money the government has spent on defense is a billion pieces of metal in the desert. Yes, not all of DoD spending goes to munitions, and some entitlement programs have holes at the bottom that money leaks out, but DoD is literally a money hole.
Defense is a necessary evil because economically it is the worst investment a government can make. A ludicrously large defense budget like the one we have should be a symbol of a national pathology: its size only due to some horrible level of military strife. Some sort of New Deal fetishism about the power of war to generate wealth has led to us burning money. Entitlements, while certainly an issue, are not where our money is going.
The teacher is an adult. The students are children. By your logic, we should allow kindergarten teachers who throw tantrums and cannot read. One of the functions of any scholastic institution, higher or otherwise, is to TEACH the kind of respect you are asking the students to have. The teacher is the source of the respect you find in the classroom: none of it comes from the students because students don't have respect. Yes, if the student fails to learn the lesson of creating a respectful learning environment, you discipline them, but you don't abandon the ideals of respect you're trying to teach. If you do, the school needs to find someone who does, because you are not fit to be a teacher.
Despite a lot of big talk in this thread, there is not a single educated person on here who did not lack very many of the qualities of a functional adult possesses before their education, and who does not owe their maturity to an adult who saw fit to instruct them in those qualities without any help from them as students. If a teacher begins teaching that 2+2=7, one does not rationalize this by saying that this is what her students believe, so it cannot be helped: one fires her because she is teaching incorrect behavior. What the teacher has done is publicly (remember, the internet is in fact public) abandon the creation of a respectful class environment, and the school board needs to find someone who will not do that.
And I do not think you are reading the situation correctly: the teacher is not bemoaning the fact that her students are troubled, she is calling them names in the manner of a middle schooler How exactly are students going to be "thrown into the fray" for being "dim" and "ratlike"? Will they be summoned to the principle and told that they will be expelled if they don't stop being such an ugly little git? What this amounts to is a teacher expected to teach kids maturity behaving immaturely, demonstrating her unfitness for employment. Speech is an action, and if you are hired on the basis of being a person who acts in a certain way, don't act surprised when acting contrary to that gets you fired.
Go home and complain. At their home. In private. This is the fire in a crowded movie theater scenario, and we don't need to do it again here. The teacher actively damaged her relationship with her students, and no matter what the "Stern Teacher" crowd on Slashdot seems to think, calling a child ugly, stupid, or annoying will not only fail to teach them better, but make it harder to teach them at all. Yes, you may not care how someone feels about me as long as they are doing their job, that is a very mature attitude: something the average student is not. I personally wouldn't attend that class: I can hang out with someone who calls me names during lunch.
If a teacher makes it clear that through diligent schoolwork, I can earn their approval, that is one thing. It is quite another for them to tell me they think I'm a ratty little moron who will never amount to anything. No one has a positive scholastic experience with such a teacher. No one, I don't care how many hard knock stories you have: you would have been better served by a teacher who didn't hate children. I have seen teachers get fired for establishing antagonistic relationships with the student body: just because she chose to do it on a blog doesn't mean they're stripping her of her e-rights/
tl;dr If I work for a PR firm, and a client hires me, I am not allowed to go home and post drawings of them blowing a horse online, and claim I was "just complaining about work" when they fire me. (Unless of course, this client is the CEO of Horseblowers Unlimited)
Anonymous isn't a movement because its participation does not depend on traditional sociological forces. Yes, by removing the "core fanatics" of Justin Bieber fandom or Facebook (Though I think that's a pretty specious assertion to begin with) you might hurt the movement because those movements rely on participation to propagate: no one will use Facebook if no one is using Facebook, and etc. A member of Anonymous participates in Anonymous raids because they're bored, and only in a few rare cases are those raids an opportunity to be part of the group. Starting a raid and participating in a raid are not things that you need to be a charismatic leader or "core fanatic" to do. To start a raid, all I have to do is go to 4chan, post a picture of a naked lady next to the words "tiem to raid amazon gogogo" and suddenly I'm a "core fanatic." If I want to participate in that raid I download the LOIC or its equivalent, and suddenly I'm a "core fanatic." Of course I won't, because I'm not stupid, but I sure as hell CAN. Now if only they could eradicate every internet user with more than 30 seconds of free time, I'm sure basic sociological rules about how to eradicate a movement apply, but it is certainly a mistake to think of this as a group of people motivated by traditional social motivations, and that without the charismatic leaders the group will suddenly lost focus: Anonymous has no leadership because what it does requires no leaders, there are not coordinated groups of people who make its actions possible.
I've never seen webapps as a way to supplant desktop applications: indeed, most webapps which have this as their goal are simply atrocious. I think the point of projects like Chromeless and Prism is to change web browsers, not desktop computing.
The web browser is a fine, robust piece of software, but its sensibility is extremely outdated: when is the last time any of us actually "browsed" the web, outside of something like stumbleupon? I use my browser to read newsfeeds, check email, and to look things up, and do not need a lot of fiddly browser chrome bits flying around in my face...except when I do, which is where prism becomes valuable. The browser is a tool for doing all those things which require bookmarks, an address bar, back/forward/refresh buttons, and multiple tabs. Doing everything you do on the internet through a chromed browser is like reading books through a pair of binoculars. It wastes screen real estate for no reason.
Historically, the solution has been to make the browser ultralight, a la Chrome and Midori, but then you get browser's which are TOO light. Sometimes we need a dashboard of fiddlybits. What projects like Prism and Chromeless do is modularize internet functionality, so that web-based services can blend seamlessly with desktop applications. The cloud is a silly philosophy, but that doesn't take away from the unchromed web's utility
It's really quite innovative, actually. The guy seems to be claiming that "engineering" is a thing you do, like driving, and that you can't do it without a license. By this logic, there would be no licensed engineers, only people with their "engineering" license, presumably the only ones allowed to operate an engineerotron without someone over 21 in the passenger seat.
As delightful as this is, it is worrying that this Ritter clown is saying there might be weight to the argument even if no claim of professional qualifications is made. It is very likely that his interests are not in enforcing licensing laws for their own sake, but to extend the monopolization of the profession in the way the medical profession is charged with by homeopaths and faith healers. It is evident the phrasing "if the DOT or the public were misled" is not contingent on the report being right or wrong, but rather on the report being convincing. In the service of this impulse, the legal philosophy it confirms is a very dangerous one.
Engineering is a very broadly practiced activity, and it is done in the service of many professions and applications. Scientists might write whole papers detailing the construction of a certain instrument or apparatus, applying methods indistinguishable from those employed by engineers: are these unlicensed scientists then to be prosecuted for "misleading" the scientific community? By this definition, anyone who calculates efficiency could be considered in violation of a law. I don't think this will seriously be considered, but I believe the consequences if it is are very, very dire.
True dat. High school social studies: pretty much everything congress does, they do through the ICC. That is, or course, as long as that thing crosses state lines, which seems fair to me. I'm pretty for federalism, myself.
My organization's network computers all use IE with the Bing searchbar pre-selected. You can't change it to Google. When I want to search, I go use the search bar out of habit or laziness, and no matter what I search for, I am given something like local business listings. Doing a search for resistor color codes gives like Resistor bagels or what resistor to wear for summer. I exaggerate, but the results are almost always almost totally useless, and I end up copying the search term and pasting it into Google and getting to the page I need. I have long said that Bing should just have button which enters the search into Google. Good on ya, MS.
Flip aside, my problem isn't that the theories aren't testable, or that outlandish claims are made, but that they are being reported to the public without giving any background in order to make them seem more bizarre than they actually are. Deepak Chopra isn't a theoretical physicist, he's an example of what happens when you give people theoretical physics without adequate explanation. People believe Deepak Chopra, and people who make similar claims based on quantum physics, because science told them anything is possible. It might be possible to do (almost) anything, but it doesn't mean any reality some crackpot wants to imagine has to be worthy of serious consideration
I'm pretty sure all people mean when they say this is the continuum between theory and evidence. That the sun rises every day, this is evidence. If Greene's book were a collection of letters from his negaself in dimension gamma explaining how over there, TV watches YOU then his book would be composed of evidence. If it is a detailing of the cosmological theory that such a collection has or would have supported, it is theory. The implication, when a work attempts to posit a theory so outlandish as Greene's without providing the evidence, is that such evidence has not been obtained. It is true that a work can be theoretical even in the face of overwhelming evidence, such as books on the theory of spectroscopy or redox titrations, but it is also true that the continuum of rational and empirical support for a particular conjecture is bracketed quite neatly by "theory" and "evidence" and it is not our duty to shrink the semantic field of those words because some yokels among us don't understand how to communicate.
It really bugs me that most of the scientists to catch the media spotlight in the last decade or so have been lame ducks like this one. I don't think there's anything wrong with theoretical physicists, but the weird "gee-whiz" science they practice is no real representation of science. It gives the impression that the only way to capture the public's attention is to make up bizarre theories that have no real use. Every time I hear someone like Greene talk, it sounds suspiciously like the "what if we're all, like, one atom on like a giant's thumbnail or something!?" brand of stoner bullshit you would hear from a liberal arts major who took an astronomy class once. Scientists from Kaku to Tyson who promote the "Wowzers" school of scientific thought tend to be hopeless, mincing jackasses at best and ourtight charlatans at worst.
Science has not only the potential, but the duty to ask profound questions about human enterprise and provide meaningful answers. Positing the most outlandish theories you can and spoon-feeding a kindergarten version of them to a public which doesn't have the time to know better is probably the reason that pubic attitudes towards science are so shitty lately.
Scientists need to take very seriously the public face they present, and realize that the kind of science they give people is the kind of science they will perform. No one since Sagan has made a serious attempt to get people interested in real science and to provide them with the tools they might need to reap its very real rewards. Instead we're given junk food like Greene's book which uses concepts we don't understand to fool us into thinking things that aren't true. The first step towards correcting this is to stop presenting the surface facts of a scientific advance without paying attention to the theoretical underpinnings: quantum mechanics is an excellent example of something that shouldn't be taught to anyone without at least three semesters of calculus, because then we get Deepak Chopra and homeopathy. The media is usually given the blame for seizing on a piece of misinformation, but scientific media darlings ladle stuff like this out with rabid glee.
Point is, stop it. I'd bet good money that scientific illiteracy is traceable back to scientific showmanship like this multiverse crap. Science is a process which has as its goal the separation of reality from unreality, and when you start positing the existence of magic, unicorns, and voodoo like this stuff the whole damn thing falls apart.
Well, society has always had a love affair with people who "no one thinks are cool." I'd be suspicious of the claim that the popularity of geek culture as an idea hasn't risen in the last few years. (The ghastly term "geek chic" is evidence enough of this) Of course, no one wants to actually PARTICIPATE in geek culture, they just like the idea. The younger ones among us might recall the fad among high-school girls in the early 00's to claim to like "geeky guys" or "nerds" which usually didn't mean actual geeks but guys with unkempt hair, box glasses, and keds. I absolutely agree that no one thinks actual geeks are cool, but people are certainly enamored of the "Hollywood geek;" the attractive, non-threatening intellectual with habits that derive coolness from hipsteresque retro-fetishism (Star Trek, Silver Age comics, 80's video games).
Your furry example has one problem: not even furries are ignorant of the fact that everyone hates furries.
But yeah, people use "geek" as a put down in movies, but people also use "punk" as a put down, and we all know what kind of high school THAT linguistic arc resulted in. Pretty much every teen movie from the eighties onward has a geek or other outcast as its protagonist. People like to think they like geeks because they like to think they have the specialness that comes from being, or being attracted to, social misfits or outcasts. Go to any college campus and you will find hundreds of intellectual loners: no matter how mainstream your interests, no matter how many friends you have, you can talk yourself into thinking you're totally weird and geeky and into stuff that NO ONE LIKES EVER.
I think that this attitude has been easier to conflate with "geekdom" because geeky pastimes have become socialized. Now, you can do something "nerdy" (which makes you weird and special) without having to deal with any of the social consequences of being weird and special! Most people who own an iPhone or Android phone are not developers, nor do they use these gadgets to pursue technological hobbies, but I have heard many of these people declare what a geek they are because of the time they spend modding or fiddling with said device (which they use to talk to their many friends and coordinate their non-geek interests). Video games, which used to be the province of the unathletic shut in, are increasingly being played by fratboy types, which is why the protagonist of many modern games is some variant of Dickballs McMeathead and his Elite Testicle Squad. But again: playing video games is something weird and special, even though you can now do it with all your friends. While before, being a geek (and hence, SPECIAL!) meant spending lots of time reading books or staring at a computer or other lame, unpopular activities, now we can just engage in a few, safe geeky activities. We aren't GEEKS, of course, just like Sum 41 fans were never punks, but we get to pretend and be part of a secret club for as long as we want to, without having to pay the price of admission.
College is in no way an indicator of intelligence: as many people have said, it's an indicator of economic status. The very existence of a show like Campus PD reveals college for what it is: a giant daycare center for rich children.
All throughout high school I was told that while things were easy now, college was srs bznss. When I got to college it was pretty clear that this was just an excuse for rich idiots to put off having a job for another few years. The only difference between high school and college is the multi-thou price tag, which means the only thing a college degree says about you is that you're in a little more debt than everyone else.
That said, I think the effect of this on employers is the opposite. Its gotten to the point that any average schmuck can get through college, so if you don't have a degree, employers think it means you're slightly stupider than the average schmuck. This statistic doesn't mean clever people are making more money, it just means stupid people are making less.
Because if you are going to go to school for 10+ years you should get paid more than some loser with an MBA. The article places the blame for the scientific decline squarely on the shoulders of education, but the real problem is money. Science USED to be a solid career choice. You could most likely obtain a professorship relatively quickly, there were no such things as postdocs, and the science sector was growing. Now it's not, and there are not enough jobs in science for everyone who goes into it.
It would be nice if people loved science enough to want to do it for love alone, but for the time you spend getting a PhD You can get an MBA and do science in your spare time. The pay should be commensurate to the effort, and for scientists today, it isn't even close.
Slashdot Mirror
Publication is determined by scientists and journal editors. Funding is determined by rich people who may or may not have any understanding of science, and who may or may not have a specific political agenda they are seeking to advance. It's worth noting that the preponderance of money available to the more politically charged issues means that scientists who happen to be furthering someone's agenda get funding, but since the funding doesn't usually pay the scientist, it's ridiculous to make the assumption that the scientist is doing it for the payoff.
Well, you know those fat-cat scientists, using their crafty political manipulation skills to put more cash in their wallets, which is why they became climate scientists in the first place: the big cash payoffs.
...The logic being that scientists will do fake research so that someone will spend money on the fake research. Apparently scientists get massive hard-ons knowing that money was spent on things, and will gladly waste grant money just to be mean, because its sure as hell not goin in their wallets.
Chromium doesn't count!!@!
No. The only issue with non-MS office suites is that they don't play nice with MS. OpenOffice works just fine for .odt files, as complex as you like. Yes, MS products will be better at being MS products. Just because something is the standard doesn't mean it's better, it just means everyone uses it.
No, that's not true. The errors in Watchmen were egregious and insulting to an audience that pays ten bucks to see the damn flick in the first place. The actor who played Nixon was inexplicably wearing a grocery bag filled with flesh colored play-doh. About one out of every three scenes was computer animated for no reason. The sex scenes were long and uncomfortably graphic. The script was like if you took the original comic book and threw it in a blender. The errors in direction were more than obvious, but actively tangible and gustable, like a wet sponge being sloppy forced into ones mouth on the end of a stick. It was an atrocious movie, not because of any subjective errors of aesthetic philosophy, but because it was a cheap, poorly thought out attempt to cash in on fanboyism. The whole quality of the filmmaking was amateurish, and not something I should have to expect from people who are demanding I pay them big people money to sit in the dark and watch.
wat?
Given that everyone's said something different, I'm confused as to what response a non-virgin would give as their call sign. "That's stupid"? No, that's covered. "That's hot"? No, also covered. "That's technically interesting" No, also covered. I get it, everyone who posts on slashdot is a virgin because we're on the internet and only super NERDS use the internet because this is STILL THE 1970'S AND WE ALL HAVE POCKET PROTECTORS. You can tell because our houses are filled with toys and we ride a bike to work. Is OP also a fag?
this is actually a bizarre feature of Chrome, and a major reason I don't use it. It's like they're punishing you for not thinking their UI is light enough. Firefox and IE both show tabs on mouseover, and all of the browsers allow ctrl-tab switching. This is not to mention hiding tabs hardly cripples the browser: just hit F11 and switch tabs if you're shortcut-phobic. Or more directly, show the tabs on mouseover in Chrome and Google's ridiculous showboating becomes irrelevant.
Pretty much every browser has a "fullscreen" F11 option, which hides the Nav bar along with any other pieces of UI. If you need to fullscreen a page to view it better, you always could. You can even navigate with keyboard shortcuts. Its nothing new, of course, but what it is is a forced configuration catering to a rather narrow set of preferences. It's certainly a valid configuration, but it looks to me to be one more example of Google trying to wow us with pointless configuration changes. This isn't going to make the browser run faster or cleaner, it's going to make some people happy because their choice of browser configuration comes out of the box, piss off some other people because their configuration is harder or impossible to set up, and irritate the ever loving shit out of tech-support guys who have to deal with hordes of people answering the question "what is the URL of X site you're visiting?" with confused silence. This is the no-caps-lock look-at-us-we're-so-crazy tactic all over again.
I don't think the article was saying "math students and computer science students," I think it was saying "math and computer science students." In many universities, the two are a single major, with the degree of specialization in either field being left up to the individual student, who remains a "mathematics/computer science" students. Yes, the math and comp sci curricula are less intensive at these schools, but it's a perfectly valid way of categorizing the discipline, despite the objections of mathematicians or computer scientists who still get all prickly about having their offices in the same building. A class which may have no value on its own to a pure mathematician (i.e., an introductory programming or web development class) might still be offered as a "mat/compsci" section.
There's a big difference between all those things and DoD spending: DoD spending sets fire to money. Social Security, Medicaid, all these social programs end up putting money back into the economy (paying doctors, food merchants, etc.) whereas DoD sends money overseas to get blown up. The money the government has sunk into SS is for the most part still knocking around the country somewhere. The money the government has spent on defense is a billion pieces of metal in the desert. Yes, not all of DoD spending goes to munitions, and some entitlement programs have holes at the bottom that money leaks out, but DoD is literally a money hole.
Defense is a necessary evil because economically it is the worst investment a government can make. A ludicrously large defense budget like the one we have should be a symbol of a national pathology: its size only due to some horrible level of military strife. Some sort of New Deal fetishism about the power of war to generate wealth has led to us burning money. Entitlements, while certainly an issue, are not where our money is going.
The teacher is an adult. The students are children. By your logic, we should allow kindergarten teachers who throw tantrums and cannot read. One of the functions of any scholastic institution, higher or otherwise, is to TEACH the kind of respect you are asking the students to have. The teacher is the source of the respect you find in the classroom: none of it comes from the students because students don't have respect. Yes, if the student fails to learn the lesson of creating a respectful learning environment, you discipline them, but you don't abandon the ideals of respect you're trying to teach. If you do, the school needs to find someone who does, because you are not fit to be a teacher.
Despite a lot of big talk in this thread, there is not a single educated person on here who did not lack very many of the qualities of a functional adult possesses before their education, and who does not owe their maturity to an adult who saw fit to instruct them in those qualities without any help from them as students. If a teacher begins teaching that 2+2=7, one does not rationalize this by saying that this is what her students believe, so it cannot be helped: one fires her because she is teaching incorrect behavior. What the teacher has done is publicly (remember, the internet is in fact public) abandon the creation of a respectful class environment, and the school board needs to find someone who will not do that.
And I do not think you are reading the situation correctly: the teacher is not bemoaning the fact that her students are troubled, she is calling them names in the manner of a middle schooler How exactly are students going to be "thrown into the fray" for being "dim" and "ratlike"? Will they be summoned to the principle and told that they will be expelled if they don't stop being such an ugly little git? What this amounts to is a teacher expected to teach kids maturity behaving immaturely, demonstrating her unfitness for employment. Speech is an action, and if you are hired on the basis of being a person who acts in a certain way, don't act surprised when acting contrary to that gets you fired.
Go home and complain. At their home. In private. This is the fire in a crowded movie theater scenario, and we don't need to do it again here. The teacher actively damaged her relationship with her students, and no matter what the "Stern Teacher" crowd on Slashdot seems to think, calling a child ugly, stupid, or annoying will not only fail to teach them better, but make it harder to teach them at all. Yes, you may not care how someone feels about me as long as they are doing their job, that is a very mature attitude: something the average student is not. I personally wouldn't attend that class: I can hang out with someone who calls me names during lunch.
If a teacher makes it clear that through diligent schoolwork, I can earn their approval, that is one thing. It is quite another for them to tell me they think I'm a ratty little moron who will never amount to anything. No one has a positive scholastic experience with such a teacher. No one, I don't care how many hard knock stories you have: you would have been better served by a teacher who didn't hate children. I have seen teachers get fired for establishing antagonistic relationships with the student body: just because she chose to do it on a blog doesn't mean they're stripping her of her e-rights/
tl;dr If I work for a PR firm, and a client hires me, I am not allowed to go home and post drawings of them blowing a horse online, and claim I was "just complaining about work" when they fire me. (Unless of course, this client is the CEO of Horseblowers Unlimited)
Anonymous isn't a movement because its participation does not depend on traditional sociological forces. Yes, by removing the "core fanatics" of Justin Bieber fandom or Facebook (Though I think that's a pretty specious assertion to begin with) you might hurt the movement because those movements rely on participation to propagate: no one will use Facebook if no one is using Facebook, and etc. A member of Anonymous participates in Anonymous raids because they're bored, and only in a few rare cases are those raids an opportunity to be part of the group. Starting a raid and participating in a raid are not things that you need to be a charismatic leader or "core fanatic" to do. To start a raid, all I have to do is go to 4chan, post a picture of a naked lady next to the words "tiem to raid amazon gogogo" and suddenly I'm a "core fanatic." If I want to participate in that raid I download the LOIC or its equivalent, and suddenly I'm a "core fanatic." Of course I won't, because I'm not stupid, but I sure as hell CAN. Now if only they could eradicate every internet user with more than 30 seconds of free time, I'm sure basic sociological rules about how to eradicate a movement apply, but it is certainly a mistake to think of this as a group of people motivated by traditional social motivations, and that without the charismatic leaders the group will suddenly lost focus: Anonymous has no leadership because what it does requires no leaders, there are not coordinated groups of people who make its actions possible.
I've never seen webapps as a way to supplant desktop applications: indeed, most webapps which have this as their goal are simply atrocious. I think the point of projects like Chromeless and Prism is to change web browsers, not desktop computing.
The web browser is a fine, robust piece of software, but its sensibility is extremely outdated: when is the last time any of us actually "browsed" the web, outside of something like stumbleupon? I use my browser to read newsfeeds, check email, and to look things up, and do not need a lot of fiddly browser chrome bits flying around in my face...except when I do, which is where prism becomes valuable. The browser is a tool for doing all those things which require bookmarks, an address bar, back/forward/refresh buttons, and multiple tabs. Doing everything you do on the internet through a chromed browser is like reading books through a pair of binoculars. It wastes screen real estate for no reason.
Historically, the solution has been to make the browser ultralight, a la Chrome and Midori, but then you get browser's which are TOO light. Sometimes we need a dashboard of fiddlybits. What projects like Prism and Chromeless do is modularize internet functionality, so that web-based services can blend seamlessly with desktop applications. The cloud is a silly philosophy, but that doesn't take away from the unchromed web's utility
It's really quite innovative, actually. The guy seems to be claiming that "engineering" is a thing you do, like driving, and that you can't do it without a license. By this logic, there would be no licensed engineers, only people with their "engineering" license, presumably the only ones allowed to operate an engineerotron without someone over 21 in the passenger seat.
As delightful as this is, it is worrying that this Ritter clown is saying there might be weight to the argument even if no claim of professional qualifications is made. It is very likely that his interests are not in enforcing licensing laws for their own sake, but to extend the monopolization of the profession in the way the medical profession is charged with by homeopaths and faith healers. It is evident the phrasing "if the DOT or the public were misled" is not contingent on the report being right or wrong, but rather on the report being convincing. In the service of this impulse, the legal philosophy it confirms is a very dangerous one.
Engineering is a very broadly practiced activity, and it is done in the service of many professions and applications. Scientists might write whole papers detailing the construction of a certain instrument or apparatus, applying methods indistinguishable from those employed by engineers: are these unlicensed scientists then to be prosecuted for "misleading" the scientific community? By this definition, anyone who calculates efficiency could be considered in violation of a law. I don't think this will seriously be considered, but I believe the consequences if it is are very, very dire.
True dat. High school social studies: pretty much everything congress does, they do through the ICC. That is, or course, as long as that thing crosses state lines, which seems fair to me. I'm pretty for federalism, myself.
My organization's network computers all use IE with the Bing searchbar pre-selected. You can't change it to Google. When I want to search, I go use the search bar out of habit or laziness, and no matter what I search for, I am given something like local business listings. Doing a search for resistor color codes gives like Resistor bagels or what resistor to wear for summer. I exaggerate, but the results are almost always almost totally useless, and I end up copying the search term and pasting it into Google and getting to the page I need. I have long said that Bing should just have button which enters the search into Google. Good on ya, MS.
Flip aside, my problem isn't that the theories aren't testable, or that outlandish claims are made, but that they are being reported to the public without giving any background in order to make them seem more bizarre than they actually are. Deepak Chopra isn't a theoretical physicist, he's an example of what happens when you give people theoretical physics without adequate explanation. People believe Deepak Chopra, and people who make similar claims based on quantum physics, because science told them anything is possible. It might be possible to do (almost) anything, but it doesn't mean any reality some crackpot wants to imagine has to be worthy of serious consideration
"Nobel peace prize in physics"?
I didn't mock Feynman, who's mocking Feynman? Didn't say anything about string theory either. Are you alright? Do you need to lie down?
I'm pretty sure all people mean when they say this is the continuum between theory and evidence. That the sun rises every day, this is evidence. If Greene's book were a collection of letters from his negaself in dimension gamma explaining how over there, TV watches YOU then his book would be composed of evidence. If it is a detailing of the cosmological theory that such a collection has or would have supported, it is theory. The implication, when a work attempts to posit a theory so outlandish as Greene's without providing the evidence, is that such evidence has not been obtained. It is true that a work can be theoretical even in the face of overwhelming evidence, such as books on the theory of spectroscopy or redox titrations, but it is also true that the continuum of rational and empirical support for a particular conjecture is bracketed quite neatly by "theory" and "evidence" and it is not our duty to shrink the semantic field of those words because some yokels among us don't understand how to communicate.
It really bugs me that most of the scientists to catch the media spotlight in the last decade or so have been lame ducks like this one. I don't think there's anything wrong with theoretical physicists, but the weird "gee-whiz" science they practice is no real representation of science. It gives the impression that the only way to capture the public's attention is to make up bizarre theories that have no real use. Every time I hear someone like Greene talk, it sounds suspiciously like the "what if we're all, like, one atom on like a giant's thumbnail or something!?" brand of stoner bullshit you would hear from a liberal arts major who took an astronomy class once. Scientists from Kaku to Tyson who promote the "Wowzers" school of scientific thought tend to be hopeless, mincing jackasses at best and ourtight charlatans at worst.
Science has not only the potential, but the duty to ask profound questions about human enterprise and provide meaningful answers. Positing the most outlandish theories you can and spoon-feeding a kindergarten version of them to a public which doesn't have the time to know better is probably the reason that pubic attitudes towards science are so shitty lately.
Scientists need to take very seriously the public face they present, and realize that the kind of science they give people is the kind of science they will perform. No one since Sagan has made a serious attempt to get people interested in real science and to provide them with the tools they might need to reap its very real rewards. Instead we're given junk food like Greene's book which uses concepts we don't understand to fool us into thinking things that aren't true. The first step towards correcting this is to stop presenting the surface facts of a scientific advance without paying attention to the theoretical underpinnings: quantum mechanics is an excellent example of something that shouldn't be taught to anyone without at least three semesters of calculus, because then we get Deepak Chopra and homeopathy. The media is usually given the blame for seizing on a piece of misinformation, but scientific media darlings ladle stuff like this out with rabid glee.
Point is, stop it. I'd bet good money that scientific illiteracy is traceable back to scientific showmanship like this multiverse crap. Science is a process which has as its goal the separation of reality from unreality, and when you start positing the existence of magic, unicorns, and voodoo like this stuff the whole damn thing falls apart.
Well, society has always had a love affair with people who "no one thinks are cool." I'd be suspicious of the claim that the popularity of geek culture as an idea hasn't risen in the last few years. (The ghastly term "geek chic" is evidence enough of this) Of course, no one wants to actually PARTICIPATE in geek culture, they just like the idea. The younger ones among us might recall the fad among high-school girls in the early 00's to claim to like "geeky guys" or "nerds" which usually didn't mean actual geeks but guys with unkempt hair, box glasses, and keds. I absolutely agree that no one thinks actual geeks are cool, but people are certainly enamored of the "Hollywood geek;" the attractive, non-threatening intellectual with habits that derive coolness from hipsteresque retro-fetishism (Star Trek, Silver Age comics, 80's video games).
Your furry example has one problem: not even furries are ignorant of the fact that everyone hates furries.
But yeah, people use "geek" as a put down in movies, but people also use "punk" as a put down, and we all know what kind of high school THAT linguistic arc resulted in. Pretty much every teen movie from the eighties onward has a geek or other outcast as its protagonist. People like to think they like geeks because they like to think they have the specialness that comes from being, or being attracted to, social misfits or outcasts. Go to any college campus and you will find hundreds of intellectual loners: no matter how mainstream your interests, no matter how many friends you have, you can talk yourself into thinking you're totally weird and geeky and into stuff that NO ONE LIKES EVER.
I think that this attitude has been easier to conflate with "geekdom" because geeky pastimes have become socialized. Now, you can do something "nerdy" (which makes you weird and special) without having to deal with any of the social consequences of being weird and special! Most people who own an iPhone or Android phone are not developers, nor do they use these gadgets to pursue technological hobbies, but I have heard many of these people declare what a geek they are because of the time they spend modding or fiddling with said device (which they use to talk to their many friends and coordinate their non-geek interests). Video games, which used to be the province of the unathletic shut in, are increasingly being played by fratboy types, which is why the protagonist of many modern games is some variant of Dickballs McMeathead and his Elite Testicle Squad. But again: playing video games is something weird and special, even though you can now do it with all your friends. While before, being a geek (and hence, SPECIAL!) meant spending lots of time reading books or staring at a computer or other lame, unpopular activities, now we can just engage in a few, safe geeky activities. We aren't GEEKS, of course, just like Sum 41 fans were never punks, but we get to pretend and be part of a secret club for as long as we want to, without having to pay the price of admission.
College is in no way an indicator of intelligence: as many people have said, it's an indicator of economic status. The very existence of a show like Campus PD reveals college for what it is: a giant daycare center for rich children.
All throughout high school I was told that while things were easy now, college was srs bznss. When I got to college it was pretty clear that this was just an excuse for rich idiots to put off having a job for another few years. The only difference between high school and college is the multi-thou price tag, which means the only thing a college degree says about you is that you're in a little more debt than everyone else.
That said, I think the effect of this on employers is the opposite. Its gotten to the point that any average schmuck can get through college, so if you don't have a degree, employers think it means you're slightly stupider than the average schmuck. This statistic doesn't mean clever people are making more money, it just means stupid people are making less.
Because if you are going to go to school for 10+ years you should get paid more than some loser with an MBA. The article places the blame for the scientific decline squarely on the shoulders of education, but the real problem is money. Science USED to be a solid career choice. You could most likely obtain a professorship relatively quickly, there were no such things as postdocs, and the science sector was growing. Now it's not, and there are not enough jobs in science for everyone who goes into it.
It would be nice if people loved science enough to want to do it for love alone, but for the time you spend getting a PhD You can get an MBA and do science in your spare time. The pay should be commensurate to the effort, and for scientists today, it isn't even close.