Yes the abandonment of Latin as part of the progressivism was a mistake.
German may have lost out to English as a result of WWI, but English was second and it was inevitable that it would take over. The US, UK, and all its colonies and Commonwealth (Australia, India, NZ, South Africa) made up a very large language block and became the wealthiest and most industrialised nations of the first half of 20th Century, as another wave of globalisation was taking off. They were stable free nations were scholars, business people and those seeking opportunity migrated to in times of trouble. English became the lingua franca of not only science but trade, the humanities, pop culture and the internet. It's also good for crosswords.
It's not a problem, its just the Wikipedia. It is what it is and is actually working surprising well. When it doesn't something else will come along.
There is little point in investing in writing anything worthwhile though because anybody can ruin it, especially the well meaning. The only way to stop that is to spend the rest of your life fighting other people, blocking all change and thus entire point of it being openly editable i.e. becoming an editor.
The policy on only tertiary facts mean that you have to a lot of your time removing all the stuff that contributors actually want to write and people want to read. Pop culture is what will drive a lot of people to contribute. There is no problem with people writing lots of trivia or fans stuff, you just need a way to keep it out of the way of serious stuff.
The idea that citations would solve the problems was flawed. You can always spin anything and then selectively quote citations so it often just provides more stuff for people to argue about. And half of peer reviewed science papers are wrong these days so what use are citations off the web or media? They are just one opinion no more valid than the contributors.
The thing to do is not to try and make Wikipedia perfect but to learn from it. A one size fits all approach that insists on a single correct version of everything is always going to cause problems for controversial topics. And It needs to be lot less labour intensive to fight entropy and save the good stuff, without locking in one viewpoint or out-dated information forever.
In what countries are tax returns public information? The US is the only country where politicians are forced to turn over tax return details in order to run for election. In any other country that would laughed at and regarded as a serious breach of individual privacy.
The SSN may not have been intended to be secret, but it also comes with no security protections other than DOB which can be found on most facebook accounts. So you only security is to keep it as private a possible.
All the usenet groups I read disappeared under the deluge of spam and trolling once Google took it over and allowed anyone to post via the web. It became totally pointless so I read Slashdot instead. Google+ is technically much environment for with dealing with the real world where there are malicious and stupid people. However, it lacks the connections to get things organised from scratch.
Not that the interface is particularly important in a social networks. People happily put up with Facebook's unfriendly interface, bugs, random changes and data harvesting. It is the network that matters and Facebook did that really well. That is why it took out My Space and why Google+ will remain confined to niche applications.
Hah! BMO. I hacked into someone else's account and downloaded all my porn through an anonymiser. So you know nothing about my furry fetish.
Whatever you choose to call them, it is clear that there are a group of people who like to style themselves "anti-skeptics". These people have very little understanding of Earth Sciences and believe that other people's beliefs should be determined solely by National Science Association press releases. They lump anyone who disagrees with them in one group, call them names and then dismiss them as stupid pawns in some great conspiracy. They hold dodgie polls where they claim 70% of scientists say there is some degree AGW since 1950 and the problem is serious. Then claim anyone who doesn't believe that climate is solely determined by C02 emissions has no right to speak because they are violating a consensus.
There are people who are skeptical of the computer modelling predictions, people who are skeptical of whether you can model such a complex system accurately at all, people who are skeptical about the forcing values, people who are skeptical about the amount natural variation, people who are skeptical about the weightings given to solar fluctuation all the way through to people who are skeptical that the Earth hasn't warmed and believe it is actually cooling.
As far funding and conspiracies go the fossil fuel industry is fairly trivial. Heartland spent $18,000 fund air fares and accommodation for one skeptic's lecture tour and this apparently is a scandal. Yet a professional scientist whose salary, research, conference and traveling expenses are all funded by pro AGW, most of it levied on taxpayers who aren't supposed to have a say in it, manufactures fraudulent documents about a Heartland conspiracy and you believe that. WFF and WCF are now billion dollars businesses funded by Government and corportaitons pushing their agendas but skeptics can't question what effects that has.
It was Jones at the CRU who did block the publication and work of other scientists trying to publish temperature records that showed the cooling since Roman times and the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age actually existed. And they managed to get them dismissed as inconsequential local variations in the IPCC report. It was the IPCC that purported to rely on peer reviewed data when over a third of its references weren't including the Himalaya glacier melting figures quoted from a mates article in WCF propaganda and put it in the report and executive summary as scientific fact.
Actually what we know is that the warming is caused by C02, methane, soot, hydrocarbons, decline in S04 in the atmosphere. Along with feedbacks involving changes in water vapour with ice sheets. There there are the primary drivers of fluctuations in solar radiation intensity and electro-magnetic spectrum shifts and cosmic rays. And whole pile of other factors like land use and vegetation chances, evapouration changes, global dimming and its decline, ocean currents and atmospheric systems, the siting of weather stations and the heat island effect.
All those factors are interconnected it is the tiny precise values and errors of all them all that matter. And anyone who approaches analysing such complex system where changes cycle over hours, days, months, years, decades, centuries, millennia and eras, there are large errors and no way to control variables or replicate experiments without a healthy amount of skepticism is an idiot.
The planet has been cooling for the last 55 millions years and we are in an ice age that is getting colder in the long term. In the medium term we are in a warm interglacial and the temperature is cooling towards the next Milankovitch minimum in about 23,000 years. That is the trend you are seeing since Roman times. Without humans the planet would be cooling not warming.
Over the last century and half the climate has warmed as the the planet comes out of the Little Ice Age. Over the last half a century you have AGW on top of the natural variations due to forcing by C02, Methane, Soot, reduction in SO4 and feedback from changes in water vapour in the atmosphere. Over the last decade and a half the planet hasn't warmed because due to low solar radiation and less El Nino events.
No Nature doesn't care about us and will most likely freeze us to death. In the short term we may cook ourselves first though.
The log houses are the same because that is the best way to make a log house out of those type of trees with an axe.
When the Clovis people settled the sea level was lower so the coast areas they may have lived in the North are now on the sea floor. That has always been part of the Clovis theory.
Yes but you can always quote "some" scientists old theory of 1 wave from decades ago and claim your research is new to get more media attention and funding.
I have found iGoogle very useful. Having one tab where I can quickly check email, calendar, weather, docs, to do list etc.and then launch from there only if needed has been very efficient. It means I don't have to use notifications so can ignore stuff when until I quickly want to check then see everything with one click. It is the same on my desktop, laptop and all the different Windows, MacOs and Linux computers in different browsers at work with no hassles or involvement from IT. And it is launched when ever you start the browser or click on the home page icon.
The thing is that not enough people used it for Google to be bothered supporting it and the current trend is to stand alone apps because there is no point in doing anything else on phones and tablets. Sure I can stick a lot of different applications in shortcuts on desktops or run apps in multiple tabs but it will be much less inconvenient. Having everything automatically open in one tab with a sensible layout was the whole point.
Interestingly I tried changing my homepage from iGoogle to Google Search to see what life will be like without iGoogle, but when you try to automatically open search as your homepage it still defaults to iGoogle, part of Google's attempts to promote the service.
Posting about the actual article. That will never do!
The poor are just using social media for what they enjoy. If you aren't brought up in a culture where education is highly important and you need sacrifice in order to spend a lot of time learning and collecting extracurricular activities for college entrance why wouldn't you? This study isn't showing anything but that social media is used the same way as other media by different socioeconomic classes.
There will be social media jobs in marketing, PR and media. However, they will displace other jobs in traditional media and it is uncertain how many of them there will be Facebook's float hasn't been a terrific success. And the jobs won't go to people who just spent time mucking about on social media. The jobs will go to people with degrees from top universities who know how to use social media effectively.
Investing $110 is a business isn't exactly going to get you rich these days. It may have worked like that in the past but it doesn't anymore. The US has the lowest social mobility in the OECD these days. To get rich in the US these days the minimum you need is a degree from a top university and connections so you can get a very high paying job. In many cases you need multiple degrees. The only way you can get those is by having rich parents.
If you go to school is some poor areas of the US you aren't even going to learn basic literacy or numeracy skills, let alone complete High School.
No-one seems to understand that the Industrial Revolution was a TRANSITION from feudalism to freedom which brought the world out of poverty and CREATED wealth for everyone.
</quote>
Feudalism ended in England with The Black Death. It killed enough of the serfs to give them bargaining power for their labour. Instead of killing run-away serfs from rival farms land-owners paid them to harvest crops which were rotting in the field.
The industrial revolution happened much later and was a transition from cottage industries and small tenant farms to factories and broad acre farming. It brought a large increase in national GDP and standards of living eventually. But also created shift work, industrial diseases and accidents, slums and epidemics.
The minimum wage stops those with little bargaining being exploited, but also stops them competing on price and sets a floor for what work is economic to do.
In the US where the minimum wage is low it probably doesn't do much harm and raising it would bring enforced productivity gains.
In Australia where the minimum wage is $16/hr it has a large effect. Low skilled workers can't be economically employed full time. As a result we have 30% of private sector workers as casuals and 30% as contractors. Many of the contractors make less than minimum wage.
Nonsense the IPCC predicted that at 350ppm C02 the climate would become unstable, there would be continuous storms and droughts and wars over water supply. The also said that the worst case scenario it would be 0.6C hotter than 2000 by now. We exceeded their worst case for C02 and Methane emission yet they were totally wrong and the temperature rise has been way below their best case scenario. The science has been spun from the beginning to try and create political action.
What's more anyone who simply points out that the amount of AGW may be less than what the models predicted is attacked as a denier and attempts made to silence them to avoid debating the accuracy of the models.
The major problem is that it a tragedy of the commons situation. The cost of action is much higher than is claimed and whomever acts first suffered great economic disadvantage while those who continue to increase emission benefit. You need to start with low cost changes and get global agreement to adopt them before any progress will be made.
Attempts to read ideology into opinion polls is silly. You get all these arguments about American's are stupid because less of them believe in AGW than Europeans, and liberals are smarter because they believe in Catastrophic AGW regardless of the data. The simple fact is that the recent warm winter raised belief in AGW in the US by close to 20%, and the cold winter in Europe drop belief in AGW over 15% in a poll there. Poll don't mean much.
It is cheaper to use solar than fossil fuels in the middle of a sunny summer day. The problem with that is that it therefore becomes more expensive to sell base load and peak power when it isn't sunny. And wind causes the same problems when it is windy. This means that it no longer economically viable to build combined gas power stations for peak power generation. The result is that power prices go up and supply become unreliable.
This is particularly a problem in Germany where they committed trillion to subsiding solar power and the result has been the government renigging on feed in tariffs for solar and subsiding coal power plants to guarantee supply raising emissions. Shutting down their nuclear plants will only make this even worse.
The US economy faultered because it was being driven by consumption, rapidly rising house prices and financial speculation all funded by unsustainable borrowing. The financial speculators just failed first. And in the process managed to expose the structural problems of low economic growth and massive government debt in Europe.
Nonsense. C is a general purpose language and you can do everything in it. Providing you have the time to design, code and test everything properly in C it will give you the most efficient and reliable programmes. There only a few very specialised things like concurrency that standard C won't do (and there are Cs that will). C syntax is the basis of most programming languages and learning C will will provide a very good base for whatever programming you want to do.
The reason you don't use C is that other languages are easier and faster to program for a lot of things. With something like Python you can learn to write readable code and do things quickly without having to worry about all the low level stuff. That makes them good for teaching introductory programming. No one has been able to books or websites suitable for a child to learn C because it is not the sort of language that works for such an approach. With C you get K&R, a reference manual and some course of exercises to do and sit down and figure it out.
I spent an hour exploring it all and completing all the quests. For the get 5000 damage I just stood next to a skeleton and went and had lunch. There were a few players doing that which looked quite funny.
Once you know where everything is you can sneak past the monsters in your T-shirt and get to an unguarded drop where you can get everything you need kill the Skeleton King in a couple of minutes. It is just a simple demonstration of the technology. As it is open source someone might make a dungeon with good gameplay out of it.
I thought the whole "Got a problem with invasive species x? Import invasive species y!" schtick had gone wrong so many times over the years that there would be more caution about it now.
Actually there is whole new movement in Ecology devoted to the idea. Emma Marris is a leading promoter of it: http://www.emmamarris.com/rambunctious-garden/
Getting tired of discussing habitat degradation and arguing that there are few untouched wildernesses anymore they have started constructing hypothetical ecosystems that may be more stable and an improvement on current ecosystems which have lost important species or become unbalanced by introduced species. So far it is mostly just conference papers but there have been a few projects. There has been a big game ecosystem created in a park in Holland, large domestic horned cattle were introduced to wilderness area in Europe to replace the wild cattle that humans wiped out ages ago and wolves have been reintroduced to national parks in North America to control deer, caribou and bison.
Introducing elephants to the tropical grass lands of Northern Australia is purely hypothetical and never going to happen.
Except these things have such a huge presence and impact on the modern world that a mandatory intro to understanding and programming them is a damn good idea.
Yes these things have a huge presence. But this nonsense goes against all ideas of economics. Productivity dictates that you employ a few hundred or thousand people to work on Android and then just employ low skilled labour install it on billions of phones. The people building the phones, transporting the phones, selling the phones and using the phones which make up just about all the employment involving mobile phones don't have, nor will ever need to have, a clue about coding Android.
The idea that teaching 100% of 15 years to code will produce an economy where 100% of the labour force is made up of highly paid programmers is the typical fallacy that has made the British education system and economy the disasters that they are. Not the solution. And what is the economic reality of this high tech nirvana we are being promised British IT graduates are doing the worst of all graduates in terms of employment and their salaries are declining.
In a modern economy over 80% of the jobs are in service industries. You keep a job by dealing with people in some way that can't easily be replaced by a computer, robot or someone in China or India. You get paid in inverse proportion to the number of people prepared to do your job, which is often only restricted by artificial or regulatory barriers.
Sure you can teach everybody to hack perl. But if they are working on your accounts system, stock systems or customer database they better be able to write code that is reliable, test it thoroughly, make sure it is scalable and train their replacement in its use and maintenance or you will be out of business within a year. Only a few people are ever going to be capable or able to be needed to write the software that the majority will just learn how to use, and which will of course eventually run our Robot Overlords.
I love the engineering of the Raspberry Pi but seriously what on earth is it good for? We have seen this with thin clients and $100 laptops before. They will only sell a few thousand to geeks who can always find a use for another box they can kit out with spare parts.
But for its supposed use by the time you fit a power supply, display, keyboard and a server and provide the training and support to use it in an institutional setting it it will cost roughly the same as a set up using cheap laptops or desktops. And they will be much more reliable and come with enough memory to run what ever you want.
As for hobby programming forget about it. The barrier to hobby programming isn't the hardware, pretty much anyone who wants to can scavenge an old intel desktop or laptop and install a live linux system and whatever language they feel like. Programming is largely a hobby of the wealthy and not important for kids. As long as they are properly trained in a bit of maths and logic in school they can pick up programming whenever they need it easily. The reason why kids spent time programming BBC Micros in the past was because they didn't have access to Angry Birds and cable TV. Those days are long gone and can't be brought back.
"Over and over, we read of hidden, manipulated, and cherry-picked data, refusals to abide with having outsiders vet their work, and allowing naked advocacy into the IPCC reports on climate change as if they were peer-reviewed science. "
No, we don't; you just made those things up.</quote>
He did not make them up. They are all well documented. Various inquiries have found that Mann and Jones and his colleagues at the CRU did cherry pick data, they did manipulate figures to hide declines in temperature. The inquiries, including by the NSF, then concluded that this was normal scientific practice so there was no problem. The IPCC bigwigs did appointed lots of mates to write sections of its reports, including things like the classic section on India where the information was cut and paste from WCF propaganda on ice melting that was discredited.
Of course the fact that a few scientists stupidly exaggerated stuff and fudged a few graphs doesn't change the fact that the planet is warming. What this and the lame attempts to cover-up this up and deny it did was simply to cause serious damage to the climate change activists' agenda. Which is what the article is about. They are trying to blame their failure to win the political argument on a lack of scientific knowledge. They want to make up a scientific argument so they can ride roughshod all over the messy business of democracy and people's rights.
The majority of the population has never understood science and never will. It doesn't matter. In the past that lead to blind acceptance of science as progress but it leads now to cynicism about science. And given the actions of pharmaceutical companies that is fairly easy to understand and sensible. It isn't science that is going to win elections but politics. They have to stop bothering about trying to silence their critics and just debate them and campaign for support.
Significance testing is poor and confusing way of doing statistics that is used mostly in the humanities. The standard method of estimation is much better at conveying the magnitude of the difference and accuracy and likely repeatability of the experiment. Most academic who use significance testing never understood first year statistics anyway. There is a good argument on this issue here: http://www.abc.net.au/rn/ockhamsrazor/stories/2011/3333636.htm
I suspect that one of the reasons that Quorum did better in the experiment what that it uses white space rather than semi-colons and brackets. Misplaced semi-colons and brackets are common trivial errors that experienced programmers make. For novices writing in an editor (without any syntax highlighting or compiler errors to pick them up) under exam conditions that would be a major issue. It will be interesting to see their suggested further research with larger sample and languages like Python and C included.
On Perl. Perl was not a carefully designed language. It was intended for for text processing and just grew with the functionality of a shell, sed, awk, REs, bits of OO and whatever else you can think of thrown in. It is large, irregular and requires of lot of learning by rote and practice to master. It is very powerful and efficient at doing what it does but I don't think anyone is going to claim that it is a good language for quickly teaching the concepts of programming to beginners or the disabled. Which is what the authors of the paper are interested in and are comparing.
And if Perl is so wonderful and easy to use then why have they spent over a decade trying to clean up the syntax, reduce the number of ways of doing the same thing and improve the implementation with Perl 6? A neater language with Perl's functionality may have been a good idea but it has taken so long that other languages have been developed to fulfill roles (PHP, Java, Javascript, C#, Python, Ruby, Haskell etc) along with languages designed for modern issues like concurrency and cloud based applications e.g. Go, Opa and Dart.
Perl's main advantage are that there are lot of people who can do stuff quickly in Perl 5 and there is a lot of code available on the net. Perl 6 will now have little to offer because you would have to rewrite everything. It will be easier to back port new functionality where useful into Perl 5 (as is happening e.g with say (which is another illogical bit to have to learn by rote)) than to do that.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes the abandonment of Latin as part of the progressivism was a mistake.
German may have lost out to English as a result of WWI, but English was second and it was inevitable that it would take over. The US, UK, and all its colonies and Commonwealth (Australia, India, NZ, South Africa) made up a very large language block and became the wealthiest and most industrialised nations of the first half of 20th Century, as another wave of globalisation was taking off. They were stable free nations were scholars, business people and those seeking opportunity migrated to in times of trouble. English became the lingua franca of not only science but trade, the humanities, pop culture and the internet. It's also good for crosswords.
It's not a problem, its just the Wikipedia. It is what it is and is actually working surprising well. When it doesn't something else will come along.
There is little point in investing in writing anything worthwhile though because anybody can ruin it, especially the well meaning. The only way to stop that is to spend the rest of your life fighting other people, blocking all change and thus entire point of it being openly editable i.e. becoming an editor.
The policy on only tertiary facts mean that you have to a lot of your time removing all the stuff that contributors actually want to write and people want to read. Pop culture is what will drive a lot of people to contribute. There is no problem with people writing lots of trivia or fans stuff, you just need a way to keep it out of the way of serious stuff.
The idea that citations would solve the problems was flawed. You can always spin anything and then selectively quote citations so it often just provides more stuff for people to argue about. And half of peer reviewed science papers are wrong these days so what use are citations off the web or media? They are just one opinion no more valid than the contributors.
The thing to do is not to try and make Wikipedia perfect but to learn from it. A one size fits all approach that insists on a single correct version of everything is always going to cause problems for controversial topics. And It needs to be lot less labour intensive to fight entropy and save the good stuff, without locking in one viewpoint or out-dated information forever.
In what countries are tax returns public information?
The US is the only country where politicians are forced to turn over tax return details in order to run for election. In any other country that would laughed at and regarded as a serious breach of individual privacy.
The SSN may not have been intended to be secret, but it also comes with no security protections other than DOB which can be found on most facebook accounts.
So you only security is to keep it as private a possible.
All the usenet groups I read disappeared under the deluge of spam and trolling once Google took it over and allowed anyone to post via the web. It became totally pointless so I read Slashdot instead. Google+ is technically much environment for with dealing with the real world where there are malicious and stupid people. However, it lacks the connections to get things organised from scratch.
Not that the interface is particularly important in a social networks. People happily put up with Facebook's unfriendly interface, bugs, random changes and data harvesting. It is the network that matters and Facebook did that really well. That is why it took out My Space and why Google+ will remain confined to niche applications.
Hah! BMO. I hacked into someone else's account and downloaded all my porn through an anonymiser. So you know nothing about my furry fetish.
Whatever you choose to call them, it is clear that there are a group of people who like to style themselves "anti-skeptics". These people have very little understanding of Earth Sciences and believe that other people's beliefs should be determined solely by National Science Association press releases. They lump anyone who disagrees with them in one group, call them names and then dismiss them as stupid pawns in some great conspiracy. They hold dodgie polls where they claim 70% of scientists say there is some degree AGW since 1950 and the problem is serious. Then claim anyone who doesn't believe that climate is solely determined by C02 emissions has no right to speak because they are violating a consensus.
There are people who are skeptical of the computer modelling predictions, people who are skeptical of whether you can model such a complex system accurately at all, people who are skeptical about the forcing values, people who are skeptical about the amount natural variation, people who are skeptical about the weightings given to solar fluctuation all the way through to people who are skeptical that the Earth hasn't warmed and believe it is actually cooling.
As far funding and conspiracies go the fossil fuel industry is fairly trivial. Heartland spent $18,000 fund air fares and accommodation for one skeptic's lecture tour and this apparently is a scandal. Yet a professional scientist whose salary, research, conference and traveling expenses are all funded by pro AGW, most of it levied on taxpayers who aren't supposed to have a say in it, manufactures fraudulent documents about a Heartland conspiracy and you believe that. WFF and WCF are now billion dollars businesses funded by Government and corportaitons pushing their agendas but skeptics can't question what effects that has.
It was Jones at the CRU who did block the publication and work of other scientists trying to publish temperature records that showed the cooling since Roman times and the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age actually existed. And they managed to get them dismissed as inconsequential local variations in the IPCC report. It was the IPCC that purported to rely on peer reviewed data when over a third of its references weren't including the Himalaya glacier melting figures quoted from a mates article in WCF propaganda and put it in the report and executive summary as scientific fact.
Actually what we know is that the warming is caused by C02, methane, soot, hydrocarbons, decline in S04 in the atmosphere. Along with feedbacks involving changes in water vapour with ice sheets. There there are the primary drivers of fluctuations in solar radiation intensity and electro-magnetic spectrum shifts and cosmic rays. And whole pile of other factors like land use and vegetation chances, evapouration changes, global dimming and its decline, ocean currents and atmospheric systems, the siting of weather stations and the heat island effect.
All those factors are interconnected it is the tiny precise values and errors of all them all that matter. And anyone who approaches analysing such complex system where changes cycle over hours, days, months, years, decades, centuries, millennia and eras, there are large errors and no way to control variables or replicate experiments without a healthy amount of skepticism is an idiot.
The planet has been cooling for the last 55 millions years and we are in an ice age that is getting colder in the long term. In the medium term we are in a warm interglacial and the temperature is cooling towards the next Milankovitch minimum in about 23,000 years. That is the trend you are seeing since Roman times. Without humans the planet would be cooling not warming.
Over the last century and half the climate has warmed as the the planet comes out of the Little Ice Age.
Over the last half a century you have AGW on top of the natural variations due to forcing by C02, Methane, Soot, reduction in SO4 and feedback from changes in water vapour in the atmosphere.
Over the last decade and a half the planet hasn't warmed because due to low solar radiation and less El Nino events.
No Nature doesn't care about us and will most likely freeze us to death. In the short term we may cook ourselves first though.
The log houses are the same because that is the best way to make a log house out of those type of trees with an axe.
When the Clovis people settled the sea level was lower so the coast areas they may have lived in the North are now on the sea floor. That has always been part of the Clovis theory.
Yes but you can always quote "some" scientists old theory of 1 wave from decades ago and claim your research is new to get more media attention and funding.
I have found iGoogle very useful. Having one tab where I can quickly check email, calendar, weather, docs, to do list etc.and then launch from there only if needed has been very efficient. It means I don't have to use notifications so can ignore stuff when until I quickly want to check then see everything with one click. It is the same on my desktop, laptop and all the different Windows, MacOs and Linux computers in different browsers at work with no hassles or involvement from IT. And it is launched when ever you start the browser or click on the home page icon.
The thing is that not enough people used it for Google to be bothered supporting it and the current trend is to stand alone apps because there is no point in doing anything else on phones and tablets. Sure I can stick a lot of different applications in shortcuts on desktops or run apps in multiple tabs but it will be much less inconvenient. Having everything automatically open in one tab with a sensible layout was the whole point.
Interestingly I tried changing my homepage from iGoogle to Google Search to see what life will be like without iGoogle, but when you try to automatically open search as your homepage it still defaults to iGoogle, part of Google's attempts to promote the service.
The difference is that google is just typing in your keywords to a box and having google display the best matches.
A CLI involves learning complicated commands and arguments.
Try typing "list the files in the working directory" into CLI and see how far you get.
Posting about the actual article. That will never do!
The poor are just using social media for what they enjoy. If you aren't brought up in a culture where education is highly important and you need sacrifice in order to spend a lot of time learning and collecting extracurricular activities for college entrance why wouldn't you? This study isn't showing anything but that social media is used the same way as other media by different socioeconomic classes.
There will be social media jobs in marketing, PR and media. However, they will displace other jobs in traditional media and it is uncertain how many of them there will be Facebook's float hasn't been a terrific success. And the jobs won't go to people who just spent time mucking about on social media. The jobs will go to people with degrees from top universities who know how to use social media effectively.
Investing $110 is a business isn't exactly going to get you rich these days. It may have worked like that in the past but it doesn't anymore. The US has the lowest social mobility in the OECD these days. To get rich in the US these days the minimum you need is a degree from a top university and connections so you can get a very high paying job. In many cases you need multiple degrees. The only way you can get those is by having rich parents.
If you go to school is some poor areas of the US you aren't even going to learn basic literacy or numeracy skills, let alone complete High School.
No-one seems to understand that the Industrial Revolution was a TRANSITION from feudalism to freedom which brought the world out of poverty and CREATED wealth for everyone.
</quote>
Feudalism ended in England with The Black Death. It killed enough of the serfs to give them bargaining power for their labour. Instead of killing run-away serfs from rival farms land-owners paid them to harvest crops which were rotting in the field.
The industrial revolution happened much later and was a transition from cottage industries and small tenant farms to factories and broad acre farming. It brought a large increase in national GDP and standards of living eventually. But also created shift work, industrial diseases and accidents, slums and epidemics.
The minimum wage stops those with little bargaining being exploited, but also stops them competing on price and sets a floor for what work is economic to do.
In the US where the minimum wage is low it probably doesn't do much harm and raising it would bring enforced productivity gains.
In Australia where the minimum wage is $16/hr it has a large effect. Low skilled workers can't be economically employed full time. As a result we have 30% of private sector workers as casuals and 30% as contractors. Many of the contractors make less than minimum wage.
Avoid having to learn PHP if at all possible.
Here are the rantings of someone driven insane by PHP:
http://me.veekun.com/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/
Nonsense the IPCC predicted that at 350ppm C02 the climate would become unstable, there would be continuous storms and droughts and wars over water supply.
The also said that the worst case scenario it would be 0.6C hotter than 2000 by now. We exceeded their worst case for C02 and Methane emission yet they were totally wrong and the temperature rise has been way below their best case scenario. The science has been spun from the beginning to try and create political action.
What's more anyone who simply points out that the amount of AGW may be less than what the models predicted is attacked as a denier and attempts made to silence them to avoid debating the accuracy of the models.
The major problem is that it a tragedy of the commons situation. The cost of action is much higher than is claimed and whomever acts first suffered great economic disadvantage while those who continue to increase emission benefit. You need to start with low cost changes and get global agreement to adopt them before any progress will be made.
Attempts to read ideology into opinion polls is silly. You get all these arguments about American's are stupid because less of them believe in AGW than Europeans, and liberals are smarter because they believe in Catastrophic AGW regardless of the data. The simple fact is that the recent warm winter raised belief in AGW in the US by close to 20%, and the cold winter in Europe drop belief in AGW over 15% in a poll there. Poll don't mean much.
It is cheaper to use solar than fossil fuels in the middle of a sunny summer day. The problem with that is that it therefore becomes more expensive to sell base load and peak power when it isn't sunny. And wind causes the same problems when it is windy. This means that it no longer economically viable to build combined gas power stations for peak power generation. The result is that power prices go up and supply become unreliable.
This is particularly a problem in Germany where they committed trillion to subsiding solar power and the result has been the government renigging on feed in tariffs for solar and subsiding coal power plants to guarantee supply raising emissions. Shutting down their nuclear plants will only make this even worse.
The US economy faultered because it was being driven by consumption, rapidly rising house prices and financial speculation all funded by unsustainable borrowing.
The financial speculators just failed first. And in the process managed to expose the structural problems of low economic growth and massive government debt in Europe.
Nonsense. C is a general purpose language and you can do everything in it. Providing you have the time to design, code and test everything properly in C it will give you the most efficient and reliable programmes. There only a few very specialised things like concurrency that standard C won't do (and there are Cs that will).
C syntax is the basis of most programming languages and learning C will will provide a very good base for whatever programming you want to do.
The reason you don't use C is that other languages are easier and faster to program for a lot of things. With something like Python you can learn to write readable code and do things quickly without having to worry about all the low level stuff. That makes them good for teaching introductory programming. No one has been able to books or websites suitable for a child to learn C because it is not the sort of language that works for such an approach. With C you get K&R, a reference manual and some course of exercises to do and sit down and figure it out.
I spent an hour exploring it all and completing all the quests. For the get 5000 damage I just stood next to a skeleton and went and had lunch. There were a few players doing that which looked quite funny.
Once you know where everything is you can sneak past the monsters in your T-shirt and get to an unguarded drop where you can get everything you need kill the Skeleton King in a couple of minutes. It is just a simple demonstration of the technology. As it is open source someone might make a dungeon with good gameplay out of it.
I thought the whole "Got a problem with invasive species x? Import invasive species y!" schtick had gone wrong so many times over the years that there would be more caution about it now.
Actually there is whole new movement in Ecology devoted to the idea. Emma Marris is a leading promoter of it:
http://www.emmamarris.com/rambunctious-garden/
Getting tired of discussing habitat degradation and arguing that there are few untouched wildernesses anymore they have started constructing hypothetical ecosystems that may be more stable and an improvement on current ecosystems which have lost important species or become unbalanced by introduced species. So far it is mostly just conference papers but there have been a few projects. There has been a big game ecosystem created in a park in Holland, large domestic horned cattle were introduced to wilderness area in Europe to replace the wild cattle that humans wiped out ages ago and wolves have been reintroduced to national parks in North America to control deer, caribou and bison.
Introducing elephants to the tropical grass lands of Northern Australia is purely hypothetical and never going to happen.
Except these things have such a huge presence and impact on the modern world that a mandatory intro to understanding and programming them is a damn good idea.
Yes these things have a huge presence. But this nonsense goes against all ideas of economics. Productivity dictates that you employ a few hundred or thousand people to work on Android and then just employ low skilled labour install it on billions of phones. The people building the phones, transporting the phones, selling the phones and using the phones which make up just about all the employment involving mobile phones don't have, nor will ever need to have, a clue about coding Android.
The idea that teaching 100% of 15 years to code will produce an economy where 100% of the labour force is made up of highly paid programmers is the typical fallacy that has made the British education system and economy the disasters that they are. Not the solution. And what is the economic reality of this high tech nirvana we are being promised British IT graduates are doing the worst of all graduates in terms of employment and their salaries are declining.
In a modern economy over 80% of the jobs are in service industries. You keep a job by dealing with people in some way that can't easily be replaced by a computer, robot or someone in China or India. You get paid in inverse proportion to the number of people prepared to do your job, which is often only restricted by artificial or regulatory barriers.
Sure you can teach everybody to hack perl. But if they are working on your accounts system, stock systems or customer database they better be able to write code that is reliable, test it thoroughly, make sure it is scalable and train their replacement in its use and maintenance or you will be out of business within a year. Only a few people are ever going to be capable or able to be needed to write the software that the majority will just learn how to use, and which will of course eventually run our Robot Overlords.
I love the engineering of the Raspberry Pi but seriously what on earth is it good for? We have seen this with thin clients and $100 laptops before.
They will only sell a few thousand to geeks who can always find a use for another box they can kit out with spare parts.
But for its supposed use by the time you fit a power supply, display, keyboard and a server and provide the training and support to use it in an institutional setting it it will cost roughly the same as a set up using cheap laptops or desktops. And they will be much more reliable and come with enough memory to run what ever you want.
As for hobby programming forget about it. The barrier to hobby programming isn't the hardware, pretty much anyone who wants to can scavenge an old intel desktop or laptop and install a live linux system and whatever language they feel like. Programming is largely a hobby of the wealthy and not important for kids. As long as they are properly trained in a bit of maths and logic in school they can pick up programming whenever they need it easily. The reason why kids spent time programming BBC Micros in the past was because they didn't have access to Angry Birds and cable TV. Those days are long gone and can't be brought back.
"Over and over, we read of hidden, manipulated, and cherry-picked data, refusals to abide with having outsiders vet their work, and allowing naked advocacy into the IPCC reports on climate change as if they were peer-reviewed science. "
No, we don't; you just made those things up.</quote>
He did not make them up. They are all well documented. Various inquiries have found that Mann and Jones and his colleagues at the CRU did cherry pick data, they did manipulate figures to hide declines in temperature. The inquiries, including by the NSF, then concluded that this was normal scientific practice so there was no problem. The IPCC bigwigs did appointed lots of mates to write sections of its reports, including things like the classic section on India where the information was cut and paste from WCF propaganda on ice melting that was discredited.
Of course the fact that a few scientists stupidly exaggerated stuff and fudged a few graphs doesn't change the fact that the planet is warming. What this and the lame attempts to cover-up this up and deny it did was simply to cause serious damage to the climate change activists' agenda. Which is what the article is about. They are trying to blame their failure to win the political argument on a lack of scientific knowledge. They want to make up a scientific argument so they can ride roughshod all over the messy business of democracy and people's rights.
The majority of the population has never understood science and never will. It doesn't matter. In the past that lead to blind acceptance of science as progress but it leads now to cynicism about science. And given the actions of pharmaceutical companies that is fairly easy to understand and sensible. It isn't science that is going to win elections but politics. They have to stop bothering about trying to silence their critics and just debate them and campaign for support.
Significance testing is poor and confusing way of doing statistics that is used mostly in the humanities. The standard method of estimation is much better at conveying the magnitude of the difference and accuracy and likely repeatability of the experiment. Most academic who use significance testing never understood first year statistics anyway. There is a good argument on this issue here:
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/ockhamsrazor/stories/2011/3333636.htm
I suspect that one of the reasons that Quorum did better in the experiment what that it uses white space rather than semi-colons and brackets. Misplaced semi-colons and brackets are common trivial errors that experienced programmers make. For novices writing in an editor (without any syntax highlighting or compiler errors to pick them up) under exam conditions that would be a major issue. It will be interesting to see their suggested further research with larger sample and languages like Python and C included.
On Perl. Perl was not a carefully designed language. It was intended for for text processing and just grew with the functionality of a shell, sed, awk, REs, bits of OO and whatever else you can think of thrown in. It is large, irregular and requires of lot of learning by rote and practice to master. It is very powerful and efficient at doing what it does but I don't think anyone is going to claim that it is a good language for quickly teaching the concepts of programming to beginners or the disabled. Which is what the authors of the paper are interested in and are comparing.
And if Perl is so wonderful and easy to use then why have they spent over a decade trying to clean up the syntax, reduce the number of ways of doing the same thing and improve the implementation with Perl 6? A neater language with Perl's functionality may have been a good idea but it has taken so long that other languages have been developed to fulfill roles (PHP, Java, Javascript, C#, Python, Ruby, Haskell etc) along with languages designed for modern issues like concurrency and cloud based applications e.g. Go, Opa and Dart.
Perl's main advantage are that there are lot of people who can do stuff quickly in Perl 5 and there is a lot of code available on the net. Perl 6 will now have little to offer because you would have to rewrite everything. It will be easier to back port new functionality where useful into Perl 5 (as is happening e.g with say (which is another illogical bit to have to learn by rote)) than to do that.