Where would you put these? In any inhabited area the neighbours will complain. Truly isolated areas will require long transmission lines, with consequent power loss.
Actually, an artificial intelligence trained to use another language is what you need to simulate bad English (whatever that may mean to you). Do not assume that failure to produce "good English" implies lack of ability. It may mean working from a different set of rules. It is probably more difficult to create a set of algorithms that would consistently produce "ungrammatical" English than to create one that would do it properly.
The issue goes well beyond "checking grammar". Language developed among people, it shifts constantly because of the needs of the people that use it, and any system for checking grammar that would be fully reliable must be capable of producing meaningful, properly phrased (and spelled) English.
As a possible benchmark, modern speech synthesis research began about 60 years ago, with the intention of producing speech directly from text in real time. How long have we been able to actually do this? This was a trivial task in comparison to dealing with grammar, because all the hard work (creating grammatical English) was already done.
Not in Canada. Even most government departments are not allowed to know your SIN. A case in point: A number of years ago a former employer owed me a small sum of money, something like $2.50. They did not have a forwarding address for me, and passed it on to Labour Canada. Labour Canada asked Revenue Canada to contact me, and have me contact them, because they could not reveal where I was without my permission, and Labour Canada could not look me up in any database, because my ex-employer was forbidden to hand out my SIN.
As I understand it, use of the SIN for other than employment and taxation uses is illegal.
the community is going to have to put more resources into Debian to keep it up to date. I won't use anything else, but you can't have an enterprise running on a mix of testing and unstable.
The company for which I work sends a whopping cheque each quarter to CCRA (equivalent to the IRS) based on GST invoiced less GST paid. Cash flow is a fairly important issue.
That does not follow. The ideographs must be recognised (and remembered) in detail, in order to identify them correctly, which is a difficult task. In fact, a literate reader of Mandarin or Cantonese is said to be able to recognise about 5,000 ideographs. A literate reader of English may not know the meaning of every entry in the OED (which may number a million or so), but can determine how to pronounce it, and for many can work the meaning out from analysing the word. Tah's the value of an alphabet. It is demonstrable (I did a little of the research, once upon a time) that most readers of English translate the visual representation into a phonetic one in the process of determining meaning. This requires understanding the very complex rules of English orthography, and (not incidentally) recognising the patterns that the letters in a word form. Spelling mistakes and letter transposition do not prevent understanding (as an incorrect stroke in an ideograph might), but slow reading. What the Cambridge results indicate is that when the initial and final letters of a mis-spelled word are correct, this limits the number of possible candidates, and allows the reader to make optimal use of recognition strategies. These would include applying what the reader knows about typical letter combinations. Some do not appear in English, and some are highly unlikely. Some candidate combinations will be rejected because of their unpronounceability, either in general, or in the context of the entire word.
This whole thing reminds me of my younger brothers, when they were small, running opposite each other in a circle while holding onto a bicycle inner tube. Once they started, they could only accelerate, and you could predict with certainty they were both going to get hurt, no matter who let go first.
Yes, a lot of the Myers-Briggs practitioners say that, and Jung probably turns over in his grave when they do. My understanding of what he was getting at is that these "preferences" are hard-wired. While the behaviour may change (for some people an easier thing to do than for others), the basic orientations or structures (for want of better words) do not. In my own practice (I'm an I/O Psychologist, and extensively assess 200-300 people a year, using the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator among a number of instruments, though I don't use its perspective), I see clear demarcations between types, and the great difficulty people have trying to be something they are not. The available evidence strongly suggests it is hardwired, individual anecdotes notwithstanding.
The most useful way to look at introversion/extroversion is in terms of energy: where does _yours_ come from? For introverts, it comes from within, extroverts need to get it from contact, and the kind of high energy that extroverts are able to generate when they get together can overload any introvert within range.
The judgment orders Tucows to give up the domain name and related documentation to a Sheriff in Alabama. Unfortunately, Tucows is in a foreign country, and is in no need to respond. How does the Judge expect to enforce the order?
No kidding. I recently set up CUPS on my system, and it automatically added four printers that were clearly not on my system. One of my neighbours (I'm on cable) is no doubt still scratching his head over the test page I sent.:-) I found it expeditious to add Allow from @IF and Deny from @IF statements. I don't have to worry (at the moment) about internal attacks -- my kids aren't that sophisticated (yet).
I'm surprised they didn't use something like corfam (I think that's the name): plastic panels that are essentially an aggregation of narrow square tubes. Mind you, you may have a turbulence problem. Easy to stack them together to get 3D.
The story is told about An Wang (Wang computers were all the rage in the '70s, for those too young to remember), whose response to a project falling behind schedule was to remove at least one person from the project team.
The thing about having 10 to 15 coders is that is about the largest group that can work cohesively together (the ideal maximum is commonly considered to be about 12). Above that, communication has to become more formalized, and too much time gets taken up just handling process issues.
Actually, it's not the LRB you should talk to. The LRB's mandate has to do with unions and their relationships with companies. Individuals should talk to the Labour Standards Branch (that's the BC term, the other Provinces will have similar terminology).
In your case, you should talk to a lawyer. You can get half an hour for very little with most Bar Associations. Just call the local number.
Now, about the suing thing. If you accept a payout, usually that enjoins you from suing - that's protection for you and your former employer. It's another contract - they agree to pay you money to tide you over until you can find another job, and in return you agree not to sue them. If you were forced to sign under duress, that's another matter. If you think that what they are offering is inadequate, then you need to negotiate a better result. Again, a lawyer who specialises in employment law is the best person to talk to, because such people deal with these situations all the time, and can tell you what the market bears.
IANAL, but my field is HR consulting (I'm an Industrial Psychologist), and I deal fairly frequently with people who have been terminated - it's part of my practice. The non-disclosure aspect they may not be able to enforce - they terminated the contract, and a court might find that they thereby waived their rights. Again, you need a lawyer to give you advice on that.
Two comments: 1. There's more than one approach to strip mining - and it's usually referred to as open pit. I have a client that gets coal by taking a mountain apart, then builds a new one, and reforests it. The deer, elk, sheep, goats, bears, coyotes, and wolves are back in numbers not seen for decades. It's a sensible way to do things if you approach it properly. Some companies have not, but in areas where the existence of the mine depends on restoring the land to equal or better, the companies perform. It's good citizenship and good for business into the bargain. I cannot speak for the diamond miners in the North, but they had to make some serious guarantees about the land, given the fragility of the ecosystem. 2. My wife and I never considered a diamond (this was before the mines were even thought of in the North, though I doubt that would have swayed our minds). She got a blue-green tourmaline, which suits her colouring. Emeralds are very nice, but a good one is hard to find (most have inclusions), and more expensive than a diamond of comparable weight. You have to watch some stones - they are soft (tourmaline is - and my wife's is in the garden someplace [just the stone] partly for that reason), and do not wear well. She's now gone to a gold band that matches mine (moebius design).
I think you need to consider what the symbolism is. If it means a great deal to her that you will beggar yourself to please her, then you might as well go for broke. If that doesn't impress her, don't make a fool of yourself. If you don't know for sure what will work, then maybe you're not quite ready - i.e. you don't know her well enough, and need to ask some more questions. You'll spend enough time guessing what she means - I'd start with getting clear about this (and the wedding, while you're at it).:-)
My relationship with Quicken goes back to 1991. No QuickBooks then. Despite the occasional problem, I'd still be using it if our other machine could keep Windoze going for more than half an hour, probably. Switching over took a bit of work, but I now have no reason to go back to it. When my kids outgrow their W98-required games, there'll be two entirely Linux boxen in this house.:-)
Quicken is reported to run _very well_ under Wine. I cannot verify this myself, as I switched to Gnucash. It lacks a little bit of the functionality of Quicken, but it offers a good deal more.
Because my wife and I have some real estate investments, and she runs a sole proprietorship, we need to make use of a "real" financial package. Quicken's use of single-entry bookkeeping used to drive me nuts at times, because some things were very complicated to set up. Gnucash is a true double-entry system.
As for getting your bank statements, unless the bank is using the newer Quicken format, downloading is trivially easy. Quicken developed the QIF format, and this is used still by a large number of financial institutions. Gnucash will sort out the duplications for you, and allow you to classify entries it cannot identify.
In other words, maybe the guy went to M$ because they promised him lots of scope, a chance to have some real influence, and a good chunk of dough. Now disillusioned at the gap between reality and M$ hype, he's going back to where he's comfortable, and might actually have an impact.
Re:Artificial Criteria
on
Good to Great
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Don't confuse the tools with the product. The findings themselves, and their consistency across organizations, are the important results.
In order to do a study like this, you have to set some clear and strict criteria, just to get a manageable data set. You also need to establish a good baseline, and as someone has pointed out in another thread, you have to watch the results for a comparable period of time to ensure that the changes in the organization's culture and processes are effective.
Microsoft and Oracle, for example, may not exist in twenty years, successful as they are now. If you look at the Fortune 500 for 1981, you'll see very few of those organizations that exist now. Twenty years in a business sense is nothing, when there are commercial organizations that have been around for several hundred years (I can think of one - HBC - whose charter was granted in 1670).
...that runs on any system that can do this reliably, i.e. so that it is readily understandable and pleasant to listen to, whose logic has been reduced to this chip. I'm not talking individual words, here. The production of speech from text has been a hot research topic for over 50 years, and every step forward is like Zeno's paradox. English is an extremely complex language, with a very large number of orthographic rules. From the description, it sounds as though the individual phones are calculated, and then smoothed, which isn't exactly how speech works (it's an approximation, but not always a good one).
On the other hand, this could give rise to an entirely new kind of email virus.;-)
By your definition ("idiot local socialist regulations"), the US is one of the worst offenders. Whenever another country can produce less expensive and often more effective products, some US industrial organization runs weeping bitterly to the Commerce Department, not to mention to the Senators and Representatives they own through campaign contributions.
There will be little will in the rest of the world to abandon their own restrictive practices and rules until the US changes its own (hypocritical) approach. What corporations want is access to markets and resources. Anything that gets in the way of that (from their perspective) needs to be modified and eliminated. What allows that to happen is mutual lowering of trade barriers and voluntary surrender of the right to retaliate. As long as Congress and the Commerce Department retain the right to punish "upstarts", the rest of the world can continue to justify their own protectionist practices. Strong corporations don't need protection.
As far as I can see, Katz is not talking about too much media (whatever that really is). In part, the issue, as he notes at the bottom of his piece, is the lack of responsibility regarding the use of technology. It's another good example of the law of unintended consequences. The other problem is the fact that where, in times past, newspapers constituted the fourth estate, providing a balance, the news media are now part of the corporate elite. They make money by selling stories (yes, it's really about advertising, but the stories are the loss leader), and they have gotten themselves on a treadmill. The more people that can be kept glued to the set for the latest revelation, the more ad money they can make. You have here a situation tailor-made for spreading short-term panic.
Fortunately, people as a whole are not that stupid. You can't fool everyone all the time. Thus the unintended consequence is cynicism, disbelief, and eventually loss of interest. In another month, there'll be something else to hype, and the cycle will start again, but with everyone a little more jaded than the time before.
This is critical, in fact. Now, the big mistake interviewers typically ask is "What would you do if...?" You will get a far better result if you (a) write down what the job requires (including interacting with other people) and what your threshold for acceptance is for each (e.g. puts on reasonably clean T-shirt in advance of visit by CEO). Then ask them to describe a situation (or two) in which they dealt with a particular problem or occurrence (these must relate, obviously, to your criteria) If you want to check their brains, ask a question similar to: "You are in a remote location with only a cell phone. You are supposed to do some preparatory work before a major installation starts, and the tools and technical experts who are to do this work are not there. You have people there who can do some of the work, but their skills are limited, and they don't have the tools either. What do you do?" Just the way they approach this question will tell you whether they have it or not.
By all means ask the technical knowledge stuff. Just remember that what counts is what they do with it, and that the best indicator of that is past practice. It takes a pretty sharp individual to BS you about his experiences.
Slashdot Mirror
Tornadoes are not quiet.
Where would you put these? In any inhabited area the neighbours will complain. Truly isolated areas will require long transmission lines, with consequent power loss.
Hey! I write those reports! Quit screwing up my livelihood!
Seriously, they should not be 15 pages. You probably paid (too much) for computer-generated bumf.
Actually, an artificial intelligence trained to use another language is what you need to simulate bad English (whatever that may mean to you). Do not assume that failure to produce "good English" implies lack of ability. It may mean working from a different set of rules. It is probably more difficult to create a set of algorithms that would consistently produce "ungrammatical" English than to create one that would do it properly.
The issue goes well beyond "checking grammar". Language developed among people, it shifts constantly because of the needs of the people that use it, and any system for checking grammar that would be fully reliable must be capable of producing meaningful, properly phrased (and spelled) English.
As a possible benchmark, modern speech synthesis research began about 60 years ago, with the intention of producing speech directly from text in real time. How long have we been able to actually do this? This was a trivial task in comparison to dealing with grammar, because all the hard work (creating grammatical English) was already done.
Not in Canada. Even most government departments are not allowed to know your SIN. A case in point: A number of years ago a former employer owed me a small sum of money, something like $2.50. They did not have a forwarding address for me, and passed it on to Labour Canada. Labour Canada asked Revenue Canada to contact me, and have me contact them, because they could not reveal where I was without my permission, and Labour Canada could not look me up in any database, because my ex-employer was forbidden to hand out my SIN.
As I understand it, use of the SIN for other than employment and taxation uses is illegal.
the community is going to have to put more resources into Debian to keep it up to date. I won't use anything else, but you can't have an enterprise running on a mix of testing and unstable.
The company for which I work sends a whopping cheque each quarter to CCRA (equivalent to the IRS) based on GST invoiced less GST paid. Cash flow is a fairly important issue.
That does not follow. The ideographs must be recognised (and remembered) in detail, in order to identify them correctly, which is a difficult task. In fact, a literate reader of Mandarin or Cantonese is said to be able to recognise about 5,000 ideographs. A literate reader of English may not know the meaning of every entry in the OED (which may number a million or so), but can determine how to pronounce it, and for many can work the meaning out from analysing the word. Tah's the value of an alphabet. It is demonstrable (I did a little of the research, once upon a time) that most readers of English translate the visual representation into a phonetic one in the process of determining meaning. This requires understanding the very complex rules of English orthography, and (not incidentally) recognising the patterns that the letters in a word form. Spelling mistakes and letter transposition do not prevent understanding (as an incorrect stroke in an ideograph might), but slow reading. What the Cambridge results indicate is that when the initial and final letters of a mis-spelled word are correct, this limits the number of possible candidates, and allows the reader to make optimal use of recognition strategies. These would include applying what the reader knows about typical letter combinations. Some do not appear in English, and some are highly unlikely. Some candidate combinations will be rejected because of their unpronounceability, either in general, or in the context of the entire word.
"Reassignment" doesn't mean much. Firing them in a public manner would have been more appropriate.
This whole thing reminds me of my younger brothers, when they were small, running opposite each other in a circle while holding onto a bicycle inner tube. Once they started, they could only accelerate, and you could predict with certainty they were both going to get hurt, no matter who let go first.
Yes, a lot of the Myers-Briggs practitioners say that, and Jung probably turns over in his grave when they do. My understanding of what he was getting at is that these "preferences" are hard-wired. While the behaviour may change (for some people an easier thing to do than for others), the basic orientations or structures (for want of better words) do not. In my own practice (I'm an I/O Psychologist, and extensively assess 200-300 people a year, using the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator among a number of instruments, though I don't use its perspective), I see clear demarcations between types, and the great difficulty people have trying to be something they are not. The available evidence strongly suggests it is hardwired, individual anecdotes notwithstanding.
The most useful way to look at introversion/extroversion is in terms of energy: where does _yours_ come from? For introverts, it comes from within, extroverts need to get it from contact, and the kind of high energy that extroverts are able to generate when they get together can overload any introvert within range.
.. in its own right.
:-/
The judgment orders Tucows to give up the domain name and related documentation to a Sheriff in Alabama. Unfortunately, Tucows is in a foreign country, and is in no need to respond. How does the Judge expect to enforce the order?
I say Novak's still got wriggle room.
Cam
No kidding. I recently set up CUPS on my system, and it automatically added four printers that were clearly not on my system. One of my neighbours (I'm on cable) is no doubt still scratching his head over the test page I sent. :-) I found it expeditious to add Allow from @IF and Deny from @IF statements. I don't have to worry (at the moment) about internal attacks -- my kids aren't that sophisticated (yet).
In his book, Virtual Reality, Howard Rheingold talked about this at length (no pun intended), and called it "teledildonics".
I'm surprised they didn't use something like corfam (I think that's the name): plastic panels that are essentially an aggregation of narrow square tubes. Mind you, you may have a turbulence problem. Easy to stack them together to get 3D.
Cam
The story is told about An Wang (Wang computers were all the rage in the '70s, for those too young to remember), whose response to a project falling behind schedule was to remove at least one person from the project team.
The thing about having 10 to 15 coders is that is about the largest group that can work cohesively together (the ideal maximum is commonly considered to be about 12). Above that, communication has to become more formalized, and too much time gets taken up just handling process issues.
Actually, it's not the LRB you should talk to. The LRB's mandate has to do with unions and their relationships with companies. Individuals should talk to the Labour Standards Branch (that's the BC term, the other Provinces will have similar terminology).
In your case, you should talk to a lawyer. You can get half an hour for very little with most Bar Associations. Just call the local number.
Now, about the suing thing. If you accept a payout, usually that enjoins you from suing - that's protection for you and your former employer. It's another contract - they agree to pay you money to tide you over until you can find another job, and in return you agree not to sue them. If you were forced to sign under duress, that's another matter. If you think that what they are offering is inadequate, then you need to negotiate a better result. Again, a lawyer who specialises in employment law is the best person to talk to, because such people deal with these situations all the time, and can tell you what the market bears.
IANAL, but my field is HR consulting (I'm an Industrial Psychologist), and I deal fairly frequently with people who have been terminated - it's part of my practice. The non-disclosure aspect they may not be able to enforce - they terminated the contract, and a court might find that they thereby waived their rights. Again, you need a lawyer to give you advice on that.
Good luck.
Two comments:
:-)
1. There's more than one approach to strip mining - and it's usually referred to as open pit. I have a client that gets coal by taking a mountain apart, then builds a new one, and reforests it. The deer, elk, sheep, goats, bears, coyotes, and wolves are back in numbers not seen for decades. It's a sensible way to do things if you approach it properly. Some companies have not, but in areas where the existence of the mine depends on restoring the land to equal or better, the companies perform. It's good citizenship and good for business into the bargain. I cannot speak for the diamond miners in the North, but they had to make some serious guarantees about the land, given the fragility of the ecosystem.
2. My wife and I never considered a diamond (this was before the mines were even thought of in the North, though I doubt that would have swayed our minds). She got a blue-green tourmaline, which suits her colouring. Emeralds are very nice, but a good one is hard to find (most have inclusions), and more expensive than a diamond of comparable weight. You have to watch some stones - they are soft (tourmaline is - and my wife's is in the garden someplace [just the stone] partly for that reason), and do not wear well. She's now gone to a gold band that matches mine (moebius design).
I think you need to consider what the symbolism is. If it means a great deal to her that you will beggar yourself to please her, then you might as well go for broke. If that doesn't impress her, don't make a fool of yourself. If you don't know for sure what will work, then maybe you're not quite ready - i.e. you don't know her well enough, and need to ask some more questions. You'll spend enough time guessing what she means - I'd start with getting clear about this (and the wedding, while you're at it).
My relationship with Quicken goes back to 1991. No QuickBooks then. Despite the occasional problem, I'd still be using it if our other machine could keep Windoze going for more than half an hour, probably. Switching over took a bit of work, but I now have no reason to go back to it. When my kids outgrow their W98-required games, there'll be two entirely Linux boxen in this house. :-)
Quicken is reported to run _very well_ under Wine. I cannot verify this myself, as I switched to Gnucash. It lacks a little bit of the functionality of Quicken, but it offers a good deal more.
Because my wife and I have some real estate investments, and she runs a sole proprietorship, we need to make use of a "real" financial package. Quicken's use of single-entry bookkeeping used to drive me nuts at times, because some things were very complicated to set up. Gnucash is a true double-entry system.
As for getting your bank statements, unless the bank is using the newer Quicken format, downloading is trivially easy. Quicken developed the QIF format, and this is used still by a large number of financial institutions. Gnucash will sort out the duplications for you, and allow you to classify entries it cannot identify.
I won't go back.
In other words, maybe the guy went to M$ because they promised him lots of scope, a chance to have some real influence, and a good chunk of dough. Now disillusioned at the gap between reality and M$ hype, he's going back to where he's comfortable, and might actually have an impact.
Don't confuse the tools with the product. The findings themselves, and their consistency across organizations, are the important results.
In order to do a study like this, you have to set some clear and strict criteria, just to get a manageable data set. You also need to establish a good baseline, and as someone has pointed out in another thread, you have to watch the results for a comparable period of time to ensure that the changes in the organization's culture and processes are effective.
Microsoft and Oracle, for example, may not exist in twenty years, successful as they are now. If you look at the Fortune 500 for 1981, you'll see very few of those organizations that exist now. Twenty years in a business sense is nothing, when there are commercial organizations that have been around for several hundred years (I can think of one - HBC - whose charter was granted in 1670).
...that runs on any system that can do this reliably, i.e. so that it is readily understandable and pleasant to listen to, whose logic has been reduced to this chip. I'm not talking individual words, here. The production of speech from text has been a hot research topic for over 50 years, and every step forward is like Zeno's paradox. English is an extremely complex language, with a very large number of orthographic rules. From the description, it sounds as though the individual phones are calculated, and then smoothed, which isn't exactly how speech works (it's an approximation, but not always a good one).
;-)
On the other hand, this could give rise to an entirely new kind of email virus.
By your definition ("idiot local socialist regulations"), the US is one of the worst offenders. Whenever another country can produce less expensive and often more effective products, some US industrial organization runs weeping bitterly to the Commerce Department, not to mention to the Senators and Representatives they own through campaign contributions.
There will be little will in the rest of the world to abandon their own restrictive practices and rules until the US changes its own (hypocritical) approach. What corporations want is access to markets and resources. Anything that gets in the way of that (from their perspective) needs to be modified and eliminated. What allows that to happen is mutual lowering of trade barriers and voluntary surrender of the right to retaliate. As long as Congress and the Commerce Department retain the right to punish "upstarts", the rest of the world can continue to justify their own protectionist practices. Strong corporations don't need protection.
As far as I can see, Katz is not talking about too much media (whatever that really is). In part, the issue, as he notes at the bottom of his piece, is the lack of responsibility regarding the use of technology. It's another good example of the law of unintended consequences. The other problem is the fact that where, in times past, newspapers constituted the fourth estate, providing a balance, the news media are now part of the corporate elite. They make money by selling stories (yes, it's really about advertising, but the stories are the loss leader), and they have gotten themselves on a treadmill. The more people that can be kept glued to the set for the latest revelation, the more ad money they can make. You have here a situation tailor-made for spreading short-term panic.
Fortunately, people as a whole are not that stupid. You can't fool everyone all the time. Thus the unintended consequence is cynicism, disbelief, and eventually loss of interest. In another month, there'll be something else to hype, and the cycle will start again, but with everyone a little more jaded than the time before.
This is critical, in fact. Now, the big mistake interviewers typically ask is "What would you do if...?" You will get a far better result if you (a) write down what the job requires (including interacting with other people) and what your threshold for acceptance is for each (e.g. puts on reasonably clean T-shirt in advance of visit by CEO). Then ask them to describe a situation (or two) in which they dealt with a particular problem or occurrence (these must relate, obviously, to your criteria) If you want to check their brains, ask a question similar to: "You are in a remote location with only a cell phone. You are supposed to do some preparatory work before a major installation starts, and the tools and technical experts who are to do this work are not there. You have people there who can do some of the work, but their skills are limited, and they don't have the tools either. What do you do?" Just the way they approach this question will tell you whether they have it or not.
By all means ask the technical knowledge stuff. Just remember that what counts is what they do with it, and that the best indicator of that is past practice. It takes a pretty sharp individual to BS you about his experiences.