"a morass of no-reason-just-policy quagmires worthy of organized religions."
Thank you for cogently describing the current state of programming languages.
I was going to suggest by analogy that your neighborhood mechanic be up to speed not only your car, but your bicycle, steamboat, helicopter, Segway, pogo stick and diesel-electric train.
We'll skip the false dichotomy and get to the good part:
"Singing is easy. Doing it well enough that people want to listen is not hard...for people who are good at it. "
OK, except for the concept of talent development. Yes, there are people who can sing the minute they open their mouths. Those who go straight from the birthday part to a career are the incredibly small minority. Most people who are good at something as adults were not exactly that good to begin with. As good as young Mozart, by the time he wrote something that we think of as enduring, put in the 10,000 hours that's typical.
People involved in reductionist endeavors (science, math, programming) are the worst to judge talent development, as their talents reside mostly in cogitating about stuff. When you do so, the odd thing about that is that you're relying on your internal assessment of talent - which to sum up is "I've always been as smart as I am now" - the mind is lousy at seeing its own progress. Any athlete can point to larger muscles, faster times, higher scores, musicians can hear their progress in performance recordings, artists and writers can see proof of their evolving skills. Much less so for "brainy" people. Example? Look at your use of language. Clearly it evolved. Now think back to when you were three. Tell me something that you can remember from then. Will you tell me the story in your three-year-old voice with a three-year-ol'd vocabulary? Nope. Bet you'll use words you didn't learn until much later. It's like looking through the other end of the telescope.
Your understanding of your understanding expands with your expanding understanding, so you don't see the expansion.
Hence the programming world does (as you kind-of suggest) need to look to other disciplines to see how to ensure talent development.
If you only want the prodigies, it's going to be a long, lonely run.
of programming environments where the stuff kids use early on has tangible links to the stuff they'll use later on. Code is not code is not code. The AP exam alone has been through three languages (Pascal, C++, Java) and their official caveat isn't reassuring. I can teach young kids Scratch, Stagecast, NXT all day every day and they love it and learn to solve problems. Trouble is there's no bridge between that and "real" programming. The parentheses are mine, but there's no volume knob on the chorus that rushes to pooh-pooh anything other than a full-blown professional language as "programming". Got it. Hour of Code was an inch deep and a mile wide. Understood. And that's the problem. What's a kid who gets inspired by that first experience to do - jump into a CS course that's an inch wide and a mile deep? To extend another analogy used elsewhere in these comments, it's like going from applying a bandaid to being handed a scalpel and suture set. Want to make a lot of money? Create a language that mimics their maths experience - that explains variables, arrays, transformations, algorithms, sets, etc. in a way that they can parallel and apply. Yes, cue the snarky comments, but I miss BASIC and HyperTalk. Very low learning "floor" and pretty-darn-high learning "ceiling". RunRev / LiveCode has huge potential as it uses hypertalk-ish syntax and actually does something tangible in short time. The engineering equivalent of such a continuum is LabView, but yes, it's basically for instrumentation, no, you can't produce standalone apps, etc. Huge need for a continuum / bridge.
"The mobile subscription rate is at or very very nearly at 100%" Wow. Such an incredibly erroneous and misleading conclusion. 3.5 million people, 3.5 million ovaries. Must mean the subscription rate of ovaries is 100%. And to think that I saw it on Mulberry - er Slashdot. If by the author's own admission it's not 1:1 then WHO CARES. When everyone on the planet has a way to communicate faster than walking and telling someone, THAT WILL BE NEWS.
Except that what hit the fan in 2007+ wasn't a refutation of the model in toto, it was that people were doing things at levels and rates that the model never took into account - which Stiglitz tested and predicted the possibility of. The model failed to predict something that happened - in macroeconomic terms - suddenly. The reassignment of risk in places it was never intended to be at levels that were known to be unsafe while a naive proposition was applied to make it all seem better. That is not what the research community has done with climate change. Economic theory does not only account for deterministic results that can be explained by physics, chemistry and biology. There is a fourth thing it needs to account for - self-interest as expressed through individual psychology. The falling apples can change their minds. In climate, there has been a steady, slow, study-able set of conditions and results that see no significant competing explanation. It's analogous to watching a boulder rolling down a hill at you. Yes, it is possible that it veers off before it hits you. Yes, it is possible that it gets struck by lightning and turns to pebbles. But it's not probable. It may zig left, it may zag right, it may remain airborne for a while, or plow into the ground for a stretch, but the reasonable mind sitting in the path would DUCK!
I often advise students to take notes longhand and then use their tablet camera to collect them, or better yet, transcribe them into a device. Yes it takes time. No you did not buy that device to save time, you bought it to communicate and organize.
Do this in a way that you end up with a mix of Charter and Comcast customers in each market. True competition in cable never took place because once the cable was strung, no one else wanted to do it - and cable companies were not subject to the same wire-sharing that phone companies were. So every market currently has one carrier, and no company has any incentive to provide greater value. Our cable bill increases 5% every year and the number of channels is reduced every year. The only way to switch is to hire a moving truck. If these companies have enough money to buy each other, they have enough to string some cable.
I think when your life can end without warning from one of these the size of a pea, you have at least a bit more insight and concern than the average citizen. As Chris Hadfield has quipped, you spend your time as an astronaut with at least a bit of your brain constantly reviewing "What's the next thing that can kill me.?"
Tell that to FFA, 4-H, and anyone who eats beef. Trust me, cows without horses would just stand there and be cows. As nice as they are, they're not exactly self-starters.
I think having the option to scan the QR code with a simple message to do so is one more way to get the info needed. Aiming a smartphone at the screen is easier than framing a screen with your phone's camera and hoping for a solid shot without a flash before it does something even stranger.
They're used on beer ads, chain pizza ads, breakfast cereal and at Disney parks. So yes, I think the average end user has a shot at this.
I'm thinking of Windows in particular, that usually ends up with anywhere from one to a dozen lines of codes to reference. Linked to a database, it has all the info you need.
Anything's an improvement over: "My computer froze." "What happened?" "It put some message on the screen." "What did it say?" "Something about an error." "What error?" "I dunno. It had some numbers and letters and stuff."
Who was the comedian who said he drove an Escort - the problem was that when he drove down the street people would flash their porch lights cuz they thought he was the pizza guy and missed their house.
Mercifully, there are only three 1988 Escorts for sale in the US on cars.com and 357 of any vintage.
To keep you connected to that company's other things. Let's face it - a smartwatch is way too small to actually do any useful work on - heck, most smartphones are a poor excuse for a full screen experience, productive work, etc. They mostly guide you to where you do the actual work. The smartwatch will be the next link further up that chain - to point you to the phone. Companies want you to have that thing on your wrist tie you to the rest of their product line. No surprise there. The only thing that may be attractive to people is that you don't need to keep looking at your phone, you just need to keep looking at your watch - which is still just about as offensive.
Those we know as journalists have editors, one-time or current peers, more experienced, who can tell them when they're running afoul of what good journalism is.
Those we know as bloggers have nothing more than their own judgement to guide them, which is why journalists grew editors.
Perhaps someday the two will merge, hopefully by bloggers stepping up, and not by journalists stepping down.
Kinda like in science, where you don't get to just throw up any old idea and call it science. You need to test it against replicable observations.
The 9th circuit was mostly making sure people could get press passes and there would not be an army of bloggers filing federal lawsuits.
Case in point? A million ideas about how flight 370 went down. Two weeks of egalitarian, drive-by speculation, and in the end, only one verifiable answer.
... and I'm all for it. Slap another Bilbao Guggenheim-ish case on a few hundred thousand batteries and you solve two problems. You house the batteries in something better looking than a warehouse, and you give even the most culture-phobic something to look at and say "Golly, that's pretty and practical!"
... many of these programs are extra-school (informal ed) and are too often disconnected from the everyday classroom experience. So instead of infusing students' experience with worthwhile programs (science fair, history day, OM, FIRST, etc...) they become glorified dog bones in the case of too many teachers and administrators. Compacting, accelerating, articulating... these are relatively speaking stone-age tools in education and your average teacher has barely heard of them.
I'm tired of going through the textbook to prove what a couple of prizewinning engineering students "really did". It's getting worse in the sense of decoupling from school - just got through judging our state science fair, where a larger than ever number of kids apparently walked into a professional research center, the door closed behind them, and they did something with a handful of profs or RAs and in some cases their research paper was a published journal article. When your state science fair poster has a line that includes "Support for this project was provided by NIH grant XYZ123456789" (I spit you not - I can show you the pics) then we have to go the next level on thinking about this. I'm all for students achieving as high as they can but two things need to happen: (1) they need to put these students in a separate class of "runners" so they don't mop the floor with the student who did good science on a shoestring or within the school lab* and (2) we need to weave the classroom experience and flow of content and process in every subject area to these ISE experiences.
*: yes, I see the loophole - just start hiring research-savvy PhDs to teach at your school and stock it with NMR and PCR and LRF and then it's a race to the top of personnel and experience within the school. THAT'S GOOD - past a certain level, a real writer should be teaching our kids writing, a real musician should be teaching our kids music, a real scientist should be teaching our kids science.
...humans spontaneously turn blue and go blank requiring they be poked in three places simultaneously to get them working again, your version of computing will never replace them.
Start there. Go for it. My training in genetics was late 70s/ early 80s. Infinitely fascinating, and as with lotsa things in science, it turned out to be the simplified version. And now the world has expanded once again, telomeres, epigenetics, etc. A foot and a half away from me is a copy of "The Joy Of Finding Things Out." Man, this is a blast.
I've found only one suitable pre-made Keurig pod for me, Dark Magic Decaf. Meanwhile, I still have opposable thumbs and can operate a french press or a Chemex or a porcelain cone or a Bialetti. Choose your level of messiness (none horrible), but get much better coffee at at least half the price. Yes, it can take up to ten minutes to get it, but there's something to be said for not making everything in life about pushing one button. I can do them all with any heat source, from electric main to the trusty SnowPeak.
Slashdot Mirror
So you were born good at the thing you do now? It's that simple?
"a morass of no-reason-just-policy quagmires worthy of organized religions."
Thank you for cogently describing the current state of programming languages.
I was going to suggest by analogy that your neighborhood mechanic be up to speed not only your car, but your bicycle, steamboat, helicopter, Segway, pogo stick and diesel-electric train.
We'll skip the false dichotomy and get to the good part:
"Singing is easy. Doing it well enough that people want to listen is not hard...for people who are good at it. "
OK, except for the concept of talent development. Yes, there are people who can sing the minute they open their mouths. Those who go straight from the birthday part to a career are the incredibly small minority. Most people who are good at something as adults were not exactly that good to begin with. As good as young Mozart, by the time he wrote something that we think of as enduring, put in the 10,000 hours that's typical.
People involved in reductionist endeavors (science, math, programming) are the worst to judge talent development, as their talents reside mostly in cogitating about stuff. When you do so, the odd thing about that is that you're relying on your internal assessment of talent - which to sum up is "I've always been as smart as I am now" - the mind is lousy at seeing its own progress. Any athlete can point to larger muscles, faster times, higher scores, musicians can hear their progress in performance recordings, artists and writers can see proof of their evolving skills. Much less so for "brainy" people. Example? Look at your use of language. Clearly it evolved. Now think back to when you were three. Tell me something that you can remember from then. Will you tell me the story in your three-year-old voice with a three-year-ol'd vocabulary? Nope. Bet you'll use words you didn't learn until much later. It's like looking through the other end of the telescope.
Your understanding of your understanding expands with your expanding understanding, so you don't see the expansion.
Hence the programming world does (as you kind-of suggest) need to look to other disciplines to see how to ensure talent development.
If you only want the prodigies, it's going to be a long, lonely run.
of programming environments where the stuff kids use early on has tangible links to the stuff they'll use later on.
Code is not code is not code. The AP exam alone has been through three languages (Pascal, C++, Java) and their official caveat isn't reassuring.
I can teach young kids Scratch, Stagecast, NXT all day every day and they love it and learn to solve problems.
Trouble is there's no bridge between that and "real" programming. The parentheses are mine, but there's no volume knob on the chorus that rushes to pooh-pooh anything other than a full-blown professional language as "programming". Got it. Hour of Code was an inch deep and a mile wide. Understood.
And that's the problem. What's a kid who gets inspired by that first experience to do - jump into a CS course that's an inch wide and a mile deep?
To extend another analogy used elsewhere in these comments, it's like going from applying a bandaid to being handed a scalpel and suture set.
Want to make a lot of money? Create a language that mimics their maths experience - that explains variables, arrays, transformations, algorithms, sets, etc. in a way that they can parallel and apply.
Yes, cue the snarky comments, but I miss BASIC and HyperTalk. Very low learning "floor" and pretty-darn-high learning "ceiling". RunRev / LiveCode has huge potential as it uses hypertalk-ish syntax and actually does something tangible in short time. The engineering equivalent of such a continuum is LabView, but yes, it's basically for instrumentation, no, you can't produce standalone apps, etc.
Huge need for a continuum / bridge.
This time make sure his trusty cyberpal has a kill switch.
"The mobile subscription rate is at or very very nearly at 100%"
Wow. Such an incredibly erroneous and misleading conclusion.
3.5 million people, 3.5 million ovaries. Must mean the subscription rate of ovaries is 100%.
And to think that I saw it on Mulberry - er Slashdot.
If by the author's own admission it's not 1:1 then WHO CARES.
When everyone on the planet has a way to communicate faster than walking and telling someone, THAT WILL BE NEWS.
Which is a completely different thing from aerosol-based cooling that was the flash point for the very visible media pieces.
We didn't have a nuclear winter (yet) because we've not set off lots of nuclear bombs in a war (yet).
Your only reliable source of confusion is that Steve Schneider wrote papers about each of them. He retracted the botched calculations of the aerosols.
Except that what hit the fan in 2007+ wasn't a refutation of the model in toto, it was that people were doing things at levels and rates that the model never took into account - which Stiglitz tested and predicted the possibility of. The model failed to predict something that happened - in macroeconomic terms - suddenly. The reassignment of risk in places it was never intended to be at levels that were known to be unsafe while a naive proposition was applied to make it all seem better. That is not what the research community has done with climate change. Economic theory does not only account for deterministic results that can be explained by physics, chemistry and biology. There is a fourth thing it needs to account for - self-interest as expressed through individual psychology. The falling apples can change their minds. In climate, there has been a steady, slow, study-able set of conditions and results that see no significant competing explanation. It's analogous to watching a boulder rolling down a hill at you. Yes, it is possible that it veers off before it hits you. Yes, it is possible that it gets struck by lightning and turns to pebbles. But it's not probable. It may zig left, it may zag right, it may remain airborne for a while, or plow into the ground for a stretch, but the reasonable mind sitting in the path would DUCK!
I often advise students to take notes longhand and then use their tablet camera to collect them, or better yet, transcribe them into a device. Yes it takes time. No you did not buy that device to save time, you bought it to communicate and organize.
Do this in a way that you end up with a mix of Charter and Comcast customers in each market. True competition in cable never took place because once the cable was strung, no one else wanted to do it - and cable companies were not subject to the same wire-sharing that phone companies were. So every market currently has one carrier, and no company has any incentive to provide greater value. Our cable bill increases 5% every year and the number of channels is reduced every year. The only way to switch is to hire a moving truck. If these companies have enough money to buy each other, they have enough to string some cable.
I think when your life can end without warning from one of these the size of a pea, you have at least a bit more insight and concern than the average citizen. As Chris Hadfield has quipped, you spend your time as an astronaut with at least a bit of your brain constantly reviewing "What's the next thing that can kill me.?"
... about replacing the baby-delivering storks with drones.
Where exactly do you live?
Tell that to FFA, 4-H, and anyone who eats beef. Trust me, cows without horses would just stand there and be cows. As nice as they are, they're not exactly self-starters.
...explains more about Australia than it does about Mars.
Yes, I do. http://i.imgur.com/zMyvT.jpg
I think having the option to scan the QR code with a simple message to do so is one more way to get the info needed.
Aiming a smartphone at the screen is easier than framing a screen with your phone's camera and hoping for a solid shot without a flash before it does something even stranger.
They're used on beer ads, chain pizza ads, breakfast cereal and at Disney parks.
So yes, I think the average end user has a shot at this.
I'm thinking of Windows in particular, that usually ends up with anywhere from one to a dozen lines of codes to reference.
Linked to a database, it has all the info you need.
It's pretty reliable stuff: http://datagenetics.com/blog/n...
Which is likely why people would rather scan QR codes than take pictures of every magazine ad they see.
Anything's an improvement over:
"My computer froze."
"What happened?"
"It put some message on the screen."
"What did it say?"
"Something about an error."
"What error?"
"I dunno. It had some numbers and letters and stuff."
Who was the comedian who said he drove an Escort - the problem was that when he drove down the street people would flash their porch lights cuz they thought he was the pizza guy and missed their house.
Mercifully, there are only three 1988 Escorts for sale in the US on cars.com and 357 of any vintage.
To keep you connected to that company's other things. Let's face it - a smartwatch is way too small to actually do any useful work on - heck, most smartphones are a poor excuse for a full screen experience, productive work, etc. They mostly guide you to where you do the actual work. The smartwatch will be the next link further up that chain - to point you to the phone. Companies want you to have that thing on your wrist tie you to the rest of their product line. No surprise there. The only thing that may be attractive to people is that you don't need to keep looking at your phone, you just need to keep looking at your watch - which is still just about as offensive.
Not all writers are journalists.
Those we know as journalists have editors, one-time or current peers, more experienced, who can tell them when they're running afoul of what good journalism is.
Those we know as bloggers have nothing more than their own judgement to guide them, which is why journalists grew editors.
Perhaps someday the two will merge, hopefully by bloggers stepping up, and not by journalists stepping down.
Kinda like in science, where you don't get to just throw up any old idea and call it science. You need to test it against replicable observations.
The 9th circuit was mostly making sure people could get press passes and there would not be an army of bloggers filing federal lawsuits.
Case in point? A million ideas about how flight 370 went down. Two weeks of egalitarian, drive-by speculation, and in the end, only one verifiable answer.
DNA ahead of his time, as usual.
... and I'm all for it. Slap another Bilbao Guggenheim-ish case on a few hundred thousand batteries and you solve two problems. You house the batteries in something better looking than a warehouse, and you give even the most culture-phobic something to look at and say "Golly, that's pretty and practical!"
... many of these programs are extra-school (informal ed) and are too often disconnected from the everyday classroom experience. So instead of infusing students' experience with worthwhile programs (science fair, history day, OM, FIRST, etc...) they become glorified dog bones in the case of too many teachers and administrators. Compacting, accelerating, articulating... these are relatively speaking stone-age tools in education and your average teacher has barely heard of them.
I'm tired of going through the textbook to prove what a couple of prizewinning engineering students "really did". It's getting worse in the sense of decoupling from school - just got through judging our state science fair, where a larger than ever number of kids apparently walked into a professional research center, the door closed behind them, and they did something with a handful of profs or RAs and in some cases their research paper was a published journal article. When your state science fair poster has a line that includes "Support for this project was provided by NIH grant XYZ123456789" (I spit you not - I can show you the pics) then we have to go the next level on thinking about this. I'm all for students achieving as high as they can but two things need to happen: (1) they need to put these students in a separate class of "runners" so they don't mop the floor with the student who did good science on a shoestring or within the school lab* and (2) we need to weave the classroom experience and flow of content and process in every subject area to these ISE experiences.
*: yes, I see the loophole - just start hiring research-savvy PhDs to teach at your school and stock it with NMR and PCR and LRF and then it's a race to the top of personnel and experience within the school. THAT'S GOOD - past a certain level, a real writer should be teaching our kids writing, a real musician should be teaching our kids music, a real scientist should be teaching our kids science.
...humans spontaneously turn blue and go blank requiring they be poked in three places simultaneously to get them working again, your version of computing will never replace them.
Start there. Go for it.
My training in genetics was late 70s/ early 80s.
Infinitely fascinating, and as with lotsa things in science, it turned out to be the simplified version.
And now the world has expanded once again, telomeres, epigenetics, etc.
A foot and a half away from me is a copy of "The Joy Of Finding Things Out."
Man, this is a blast.
I've found only one suitable pre-made Keurig pod for me, Dark Magic Decaf.
Meanwhile, I still have opposable thumbs and can operate a french press or a Chemex or a porcelain cone or a Bialetti.
Choose your level of messiness (none horrible), but get much better coffee at at least half the price.
Yes, it can take up to ten minutes to get it, but there's something to be said for not making everything in life about pushing one button.
I can do them all with any heat source, from electric main to the trusty SnowPeak.