Eating yogurt is not a homeopathic remedy. Look up what homeopathic means.
Eating yogurt is a simple treatment, and as the grandparent's quote indicates it is significantly effective at reducing the incidence of diarrhea in cases of gut flora loss (due to antibiotics usually). However, it is significantly less effective when the problem is specifically c.difficile overgrowth.
So if you're taking antibiotics, get a probiotic yogurt, it is likely to help. If you do end up with c. diff, you may need another type of treatment.
Actually, Canadian dead-tree books are now almost the same price for US/Canada finally. For instance, the new hardcover from JK Rowling is I believe $1 difference. This only happened after there was a significant amount of press uproar about years of unjustifiable differences, which I believe is good evidence for the argument that the pricing gap is pure greed the distributors think they can get away with it.
"Yet schools seem to constantly get rid of these home-grown solutions in favor of Blackboard 'n pals...why?"
Because of CYA support contracts. Executive university ITS staff hate the thought of having the buck stop with their department. By paying outrageous fees to these big players, they always have an out when things don't work - they can yell at someone at Blackboard.
The linked article only mentions Moodle, but Blackboard also announced yesterday that they have hired Charles Severence, one of the founding architects of the Sakai project, in the role of "Chief Sakai Strategist", and also announced that they will provide hosted Moodle and Sakai installations. This is a major foray into the Open Source LMS world, and it's still to be seen whether it is an opportunity to keep relationships with non-Bb schools, or a razed-earth invasion of the OS support arena.
As a side note, technically Banner isn't an LMS, it is a Student Information System (SIS): it goes rather deeper into the registration process than an LMS, and also acts as the HR system at most institutions that use it.
(accidentally posted as AC above... thought I was logged in...)
I've run ESRI products on Linux and Windows platforms, and even though I'm a linux admin first, I would have to recommend Windows/MSSQL if you do choose to go with their products. Although they technically support Linux platforms, I found that their support was abysmal, and when we moved to ArcGIS on Windows, suddenly things worked much better, and their support actually had answers when we needed it.
I would recommend buying yourself a Macbook Pro, getting VMWare Fusion or if you're low on funds after buying the MB, then VirtualBox, and running a Linux VM. You get the solid quality of the MBPro hardware and the standardised hardware environment that a VM offers and the resulting good linux driver behaviour.
I use VirtualBox on my 2010 MBPro and it works like a charm.
Oh, I would rather chew off my own foot than grade first year history papers, but that's what they are: endless digging up and quoting of primary sources with a massive bibliography.
For my institution in Canada, a big concern was that we might be jeopardizing our students' future options if they wrote something that was politically sensitive in the U.S. and it was snatched up under PATRIOT Act legislation and used against them for blacklisting or other discrimination in the future.
I was a technical advisor to a committee creating policy for Turnitin style service use on the university campus I work on. Turnitin isn't a plagiarism detection service: they're being disingenuous when they say that. It is a text matching service. The difference is significant: a first-year history paper might be 75% matched, but not plagiarized because the student correctly attributed all their quoted passages.
The committee recommended against using it for detecting plagiarism, and for encouraging its use as a teaching tool to make students aware of proper citation techniques and the importance of avoiding plagiarism.
Some service like this also happen to be quite good at the most common kind of plagiarism: someone on campus submitting someone elses paper from the previous year to a different prof... but that's a special clear-cut case of cheating, not what people commonly think of as plagiarism.
Just to clarify, multiple certs to the same party is not a problem: as certmaster for a university, hundreds of certs for different CNs have been issued to me.
And yes, I agree it is a broken system: it's a protection racket variant as it currently stands.
Did ANYONE who had commented in this thread actually read the linked article? Nowhere does it say that drone strikes are not hostile, it says that they don't meet the legal definition of "hostilities", which is a very different statement.
If the POTUS calls American Slashdot readers who don't RTFA morons every day for 91 days, he's being hostile, but it doesn't require congressional approval to continue because it's not hostilities as defined by the your War Powers Resolution.
Is there a passive defense against this? I'm very curious: this would seem to be a fairly serious threat for a military plane in combat, how do they deal with it? Is there a film that could be retrofitted to canopy windows on commercial craft?
The institution where I work has been considering the Turnitin products lately. It has been an interesting process analyzing what it can and cannot do, and how to avoid a confrontational situation like that described in the article. First of all, Turnitin can't detect plagiarism. It is a text matching software suite, and can detect commonality between works. Plagiarism is a social phenomenon, and can't be dealt with by an automated tool.
Where the product really shines in my opinion is when it is used as a teaching tool. Students are permitted to submit their assignments to Turnitin before they submit to their instructor, and they get back their originality report from Turnitin. Then they have the ability to *learn* proper attribution and citation with the help of this tool. When a paragraph gets a low originality rating, they can look and verify whether they have correctly cited their source material, and if they have, then they're good to go. When used like this, Turnitin becomes a valuable teaching tool that is appreciated by the students rather than something they try to fight against. And what is the goal in the end? It's not to throw students out of college, it's to make sure they understand how to attribute things correctly, and make them better writers.
To answer the question about what happens if there is a match to a paper from another institution: In that case, an instructor account can request a copy from the other paper's instructor via Turnitin. If the request is granted, the appropriate sections are forwarded to the requesting instructor.
The 8.3 release notes list the Bucardo project http://bucardo.org/ for multi-master replication. I haven't used it... is there something that it is lacking that you think would be addressed by bringing it into the core code base?
It seems that you are comparing nicotine's effects to those of common antidepressants.
That might be a valid point, except that the vast majority of modern psych drugs do *not* "release happy chemicals in your brain". The primary method of action for current antidepressants is reuptake inhibition, ie. they limit how fast specific neurotransmitters are removed from the brain, so they can act for a longer time.
There are some antidepressants that tend to leave people feeling "numb" which is what I think you describe, but these are typically the older tricyclic and first gen antidepressants. In fact, the symptom of someone who "cannot find happiness in activities they once found enjoyable" is a primary symptom of depression, so if someone on antidepressants feels that way, they probably need to get their meds reassessed to find something more effective for them.
You are probably correct that nicotine does release "happy chemicals" into the brain, but this is not a common way in which medications treat depression. Things that actually stimulate positive neurotransmitter release would tend to be highly addictive I imagine, in a much more visceral sense than antidepressants are (and admittedly, some of the antidepressants have some nasty withdrawal effects after medium to long term use). Antidepressant "addictiveness" has the unusual quality that it generally doesn't cause drug-seeking behaviour, but does cause withdrawal-avoidance behaviour. So someone would want the withdrawal effects to stop, but they wouldn't necessarily have cravings for the drug.
Compare that to nicotine addiction, where the withdrawal effects are unpleasant but generally not terrible, however the drug-seeking behaviour is exceptionally strong. It's a very different type of effect.
The statement that antidepressants create a "good feeling" that then becomes a new baseline is not correct. In someone who has depression, even the best things in life will not provide pleasure. Given a successful treatment with anti-depressants, they will be able to enjoy life again... if the drugs made them more numb to pleasure, it would be a failed treatment.
In the enterprise market, Dell has been pushing its custom imaging and rollout services lately. Although being honest about the resources required for a Vista rollout won't hurt Dell at all, they also stand to gain if enterprise clients contract Dell to do custom imaging and rollout for their systems.
For us, this works like this: we develop and test our images here at the college, and send them to Dell. Dell puts them on the hard drives for new machines coming back to us (which image goes on which machines is part of our order). Optionally, they can also have their staff come in with the machines, take them to the departments that are having their systems replaced, get them plugged in, data migrated if necessary (shouldn't be, but...), etc.
I suspect this is a very good profit area for them so increasing the pickup for these services is probably very good for Dell.
I think "reasonably likely to try" is overstating the risk by a lot. Complaining to an upstream company in this sort of situation seems pretty reasonable.
I've used the services of both the local telephone company and the local cable company here over the past few years, and neither seems to pay any attention to what bandwidth usage happens on their SOHO lines with static ips. These services cost approximate 100CDN per month, but I specifically tried to get the cable company to call me one month by continuously torrenting as much as I could for 30 days, and they didn't call or change my line at all. I downloaded over 400G that month and kept a pretty good ratio. I gave up after that and just don't think about it anymore, though the reality is that I don't use that much bandwidth compared to that... maybe 20-30G on an average month.
I need the static ips for the systems I host, and my work picks up some of the costs, but if you're serious about abusing your ISP, buying a more expensive product definitely has its privileges.
As many of you know, each year the Internet must be shut down for 24 hours in order to allow us to clean it. The cleaning process, which eliminates dead email, inactive ftp and www sites, and empty USENET groups, allows for a better working and faster Internet tubes.
This year the cleaning process will take place from 12:01 a.m. GMT on April 1 until 12:01 a.m. GMT on April 2 (the time least likely to interfere with ongoing work). During that 24-hour period, five powerful tube-cleaning robots situated around the world will search the tubes and delete any data that they find....
I would argue that an IP address doesn't really count as "personal information", but lets put that aside for a moment.
All mail systems include headers which indicate the origin of the message, or at least attempt to do so. A normally-functioning mail server inserts a Received: header line with the ip address it received the message from. With web mail systems such as Yahoo, Hotmail, or Gmail, which are mail services not anonymizing services, the web application generally inserts the originating ip address just as if the originating ip address had sent the mail to an SMTP server. If this were not done, there would be no way to track spam back to the actual source, and people would be forced to just outright blacklist the entire Yahoo service to prevent spam.
What I said there is important: Yahoo, Hotmail and Gmail are NOT anonymizer services. They provide a free email address, and yes, that email address isn't necessarily completely easy to trace back to you. But they make no claim that they will protect your identity. They might claim to protect your privacy in that they won't sell your name and phone number and address and the content of your emails to a marketing company (or maybe they will), but they're not in the business of hiding who is sending mail through their service. If they were, they'd all be blacklisted by mail administrators worldwide for harboring spammers.
I also do think that claiming that an IP address is personal information is stretching things a bit. An IP address on an email is personal information in the same way as the postmark on an envelope is personal information: it indicates that someone was at that "location" and put something in the "mail", but you won't be able to know who it was until you go and pull video of the post office to see who came in. On the IP side, you have to go and get ISP logs of who was on that IP at that time.
So putting the IP address on mails sent through web services is critical for antispam efforts and to protect the resources of companies who provide those web services from continuously having to chase down logs and provide them to courts and other interested parties. It also doesn't personally identify anybody by doing so. There's nothing to see here...
I'm a system administrator at a college in Alberta, and at our institution, academic freedom is a very key consideration in any technology we bring on campus. We can encourage and suggest from the administrative side how the academic side should use technology, but the faculty do not have to use any given piece of technology unless their department requires it. Also, we could never implement something like websense style filtering, there are legitimate reasons to look at almost anything on the net from a research point of view sometimes.
There are rules about what you can surf for in the labs and library. Those are enforced by the lab monitors and library staff, and if necessary, via non-academic misconduct proceedings. In the case where a faculty member or student knows they will be viewing potentially offensive material, for example, research on pornography or hate speech, etc, there are protocols in place for how they can get what they need without subjecting others to having to see it on their screens. Additionally, when research type things might violate the terms of the Acceptable Computer Use Policy, there are systems in place for users to get specific pre-approval to violate the ACUP for research purposes.
Basically, here the academic freedom of students and especially faculty to investigate, learn about, research, and publish on any topic is more important than any other concern. It's our job as an institution. What we do have is bandwith shaping to prevent inappropriate uses or entertainment uses from eating so much bandwidth that they prevent others from using their freedom for academic uses.
The problems for captchas are even greater when you consider one scheme I've heard about:
a) Obtain some porn, make a little site that provides free porn. b) However, before you see the porn, you have to fill out this captcha. c) set up your bots to queue up the captchas they hit in their spidering on the porn site. d) present your porn-hounds the captchas from the bots, the bot gets notified of the answer so it can continue.
This model basically provides you with a vast resource of real-person-answered captchas at a fixed one-time cost (the site setup, and possibly acquisition of the porn). I've been unable to come up with anything you could change the captcha to that would prevent this from working, though perhaps something like a graphical "choose the most seriously mutilated penis" would work...
Slashdot Mirror
Eating yogurt is not a homeopathic remedy. Look up what homeopathic means.
Eating yogurt is a simple treatment, and as the grandparent's quote indicates it is significantly effective at reducing the incidence of diarrhea in cases of gut flora loss (due to antibiotics usually). However, it is significantly less effective when the problem is specifically c.difficile overgrowth.
So if you're taking antibiotics, get a probiotic yogurt, it is likely to help. If you do end up with c. diff, you may need another type of treatment.
Actually, Canadian dead-tree books are now almost the same price for US/Canada finally. For instance, the new hardcover from JK Rowling is I believe $1 difference. This only happened after there was a significant amount of press uproar about years of unjustifiable differences, which I believe is good evidence for the argument that the pricing gap is pure greed the distributors think they can get away with it.
Because orbital junk must be orbiting, thus it travels horizontally at much greater speeds than vertically.
"Yet schools seem to constantly get rid of these home-grown solutions in favor of Blackboard 'n pals...why?"
Because of CYA support contracts. Executive university ITS staff hate the thought of having the buck stop with their department. By paying outrageous fees to these big players, they always have an out when things don't work - they can yell at someone at Blackboard.
The linked article only mentions Moodle, but Blackboard also announced yesterday that they have hired Charles Severence, one of the founding architects of the Sakai project, in the role of "Chief Sakai Strategist", and also announced that they will provide hosted Moodle and Sakai installations. This is a major foray into the Open Source LMS world, and it's still to be seen whether it is an opportunity to keep relationships with non-Bb schools, or a razed-earth invasion of the OS support arena.
As a side note, technically Banner isn't an LMS, it is a Student Information System (SIS): it goes rather deeper into the registration process than an LMS, and also acts as the HR system at most institutions that use it.
(accidentally posted as AC above... thought I was logged in...)
I've run ESRI products on Linux and Windows platforms, and even though I'm a linux admin first, I would have to recommend Windows/MSSQL if you do choose to go with their products. Although they technically support Linux platforms, I found that their support was abysmal, and when we moved to ArcGIS on Windows, suddenly things worked much better, and their support actually had answers when we needed it.
I would recommend buying yourself a Macbook Pro, getting VMWare Fusion or if you're low on funds after buying the MB, then VirtualBox, and running a Linux VM. You get the solid quality of the MBPro hardware and the standardised hardware environment that a VM offers and the resulting good linux driver behaviour.
I use VirtualBox on my 2010 MBPro and it works like a charm.
Send a text to my mom when I get to the police station.
Oh, I would rather chew off my own foot than grade first year history papers, but that's what they are: endless digging up and quoting of primary sources with a massive bibliography.
For my institution in Canada, a big concern was that we might be jeopardizing our students' future options if they wrote something that was politically sensitive in the U.S. and it was snatched up under PATRIOT Act legislation and used against them for blacklisting or other discrimination in the future.
I was a technical advisor to a committee creating policy for Turnitin style service use on the university campus I work on. Turnitin isn't a plagiarism detection service: they're being disingenuous when they say that. It is a text matching service. The difference is significant: a first-year history paper might be 75% matched, but not plagiarized because the student correctly attributed all their quoted passages.
The committee recommended against using it for detecting plagiarism, and for encouraging its use as a teaching tool to make students aware of proper citation techniques and the importance of avoiding plagiarism.
Some service like this also happen to be quite good at the most common kind of plagiarism: someone on campus submitting someone elses paper from the previous year to a different prof... but that's a special clear-cut case of cheating, not what people commonly think of as plagiarism.
Just to clarify, multiple certs to the same party is not a problem: as certmaster for a university, hundreds of certs for different CNs have been issued to me.
And yes, I agree it is a broken system: it's a protection racket variant as it currently stands.
Did ANYONE who had commented in this thread actually read the linked article? Nowhere does it say that drone strikes are not hostile, it says that they don't meet the legal definition of "hostilities", which is a very different statement.
If the POTUS calls American Slashdot readers who don't RTFA morons every day for 91 days, he's being hostile, but it doesn't require congressional approval to continue because it's not hostilities as defined by the your War Powers Resolution.
Is there a passive defense against this? I'm very curious: this would seem to be a fairly serious threat for a military plane in combat, how do they deal with it? Is there a film that could be retrofitted to canopy windows on commercial craft?
The institution where I work has been considering the Turnitin products lately. It has been an interesting process analyzing what it can and cannot do, and how to avoid a confrontational situation like that described in the article. First of all, Turnitin can't detect plagiarism. It is a text matching software suite, and can detect commonality between works. Plagiarism is a social phenomenon, and can't be dealt with by an automated tool.
Where the product really shines in my opinion is when it is used as a teaching tool. Students are permitted to submit their assignments to Turnitin before they submit to their instructor, and they get back their originality report from Turnitin. Then they have the ability to *learn* proper attribution and citation with the help of this tool. When a paragraph gets a low originality rating, they can look and verify whether they have correctly cited their source material, and if they have, then they're good to go. When used like this, Turnitin becomes a valuable teaching tool that is appreciated by the students rather than something they try to fight against. And what is the goal in the end? It's not to throw students out of college, it's to make sure they understand how to attribute things correctly, and make them better writers.
To answer the question about what happens if there is a match to a paper from another institution: In that case, an instructor account can request a copy from the other paper's instructor via Turnitin. If the request is granted, the appropriate sections are forwarded to the requesting instructor.
He then goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed at the next zebra crossing.
Now every time I read a /. headline, I'm going to be adding "But No Aliens" to it in my head. *sigh*
The 8.3 release notes list the Bucardo project http://bucardo.org/ for multi-master replication. I haven't used it... is there something that it is lacking that you think would be addressed by bringing it into the core code base?
It seems that you are comparing nicotine's effects to those of common antidepressants.
That might be a valid point, except that the vast majority of modern psych drugs do *not* "release happy chemicals in your brain". The primary method of action for current antidepressants is reuptake inhibition, ie. they limit how fast specific neurotransmitters are removed from the brain, so they can act for a longer time.
There are some antidepressants that tend to leave people feeling "numb" which is what I think you describe, but these are typically the older tricyclic and first gen antidepressants. In fact, the symptom of someone who "cannot find happiness in activities they once found enjoyable" is a primary symptom of depression, so if someone on antidepressants feels that way, they probably need to get their meds reassessed to find something more effective for them.
You are probably correct that nicotine does release "happy chemicals" into the brain, but this is not a common way in which medications treat depression. Things that actually stimulate positive neurotransmitter release would tend to be highly addictive I imagine, in a much more visceral sense than antidepressants are (and admittedly, some of the antidepressants have some nasty withdrawal effects after medium to long term use). Antidepressant "addictiveness" has the unusual quality that it generally doesn't cause drug-seeking behaviour, but does cause withdrawal-avoidance behaviour. So someone would want the withdrawal effects to stop, but they wouldn't necessarily have cravings for the drug.
Compare that to nicotine addiction, where the withdrawal effects are unpleasant but generally not terrible, however the drug-seeking behaviour is exceptionally strong. It's a very different type of effect.
The statement that antidepressants create a "good feeling" that then becomes a new baseline is not correct. In someone who has depression, even the best things in life will not provide pleasure. Given a successful treatment with anti-depressants, they will be able to enjoy life again... if the drugs made them more numb to pleasure, it would be a failed treatment.
In the enterprise market, Dell has been pushing its custom imaging and rollout services lately. Although being honest about the resources required for a Vista rollout won't hurt Dell at all, they also stand to gain if enterprise clients contract Dell to do custom imaging and rollout for their systems.
For us, this works like this: we develop and test our images here at the college, and send them to Dell. Dell puts them on the hard drives for new machines coming back to us (which image goes on which machines is part of our order). Optionally, they can also have their staff come in with the machines, take them to the departments that are having their systems replaced, get them plugged in, data migrated if necessary (shouldn't be, but...), etc.
I suspect this is a very good profit area for them so increasing the pickup for these services is probably very good for Dell.
I think "reasonably likely to try" is overstating the risk by a lot. Complaining to an upstream company in this sort of situation seems pretty reasonable.
I've used the services of both the local telephone company and the local cable company here over the past few years, and neither seems to pay any attention to what bandwidth usage happens on their SOHO lines with static ips. These services cost approximate 100CDN per month, but I specifically tried to get the cable company to call me one month by continuously torrenting as much as I could for 30 days, and they didn't call or change my line at all. I downloaded over 400G that month and kept a pretty good ratio. I gave up after that and just don't think about it anymore, though the reality is that I don't use that much bandwidth compared to that... maybe 20-30G on an average month.
I need the static ips for the systems I host, and my work picks up some of the costs, but if you're serious about abusing your ISP, buying a more expensive product definitely has its privileges.
It's that time again!
As many of you know, each year the Internet must be shut down for 24 hours in order to allow us to clean it. The cleaning process, which eliminates dead email, inactive ftp and www sites, and empty USENET groups, allows for a better working and faster Internet tubes.
This year the cleaning process will take place from 12:01 a.m. GMT on April 1 until 12:01 a.m. GMT on April 2 (the time least likely to interfere with ongoing work). During that 24-hour period, five powerful tube-cleaning robots situated around the world will search the tubes and delete any data that they find....
I would argue that an IP address doesn't really count as "personal information", but lets put that aside for a moment.
All mail systems include headers which indicate the origin of the message, or at least attempt to do so. A normally-functioning mail server inserts a Received: header line with the ip address it received the message from. With web mail systems such as Yahoo, Hotmail, or Gmail, which are mail services not anonymizing services, the web application generally inserts the originating ip address just as if the originating ip address had sent the mail to an SMTP server. If this were not done, there would be no way to track spam back to the actual source, and people would be forced to just outright blacklist the entire Yahoo service to prevent spam.
What I said there is important: Yahoo, Hotmail and Gmail are NOT anonymizer services. They provide a free email address, and yes, that email address isn't necessarily completely easy to trace back to you. But they make no claim that they will protect your identity. They might claim to protect your privacy in that they won't sell your name and phone number and address and the content of your emails to a marketing company (or maybe they will), but they're not in the business of hiding who is sending mail through their service. If they were, they'd all be blacklisted by mail administrators worldwide for harboring spammers.
I also do think that claiming that an IP address is personal information is stretching things a bit. An IP address on an email is personal information in the same way as the postmark on an envelope is personal information: it indicates that someone was at that "location" and put something in the "mail", but you won't be able to know who it was until you go and pull video of the post office to see who came in. On the IP side, you have to go and get ISP logs of who was on that IP at that time.
So putting the IP address on mails sent through web services is critical for antispam efforts and to protect the resources of companies who provide those web services from continuously having to chase down logs and provide them to courts and other interested parties. It also doesn't personally identify anybody by doing so. There's nothing to see here...
I'm a system administrator at a college in Alberta, and at our institution, academic freedom is a very key consideration in any technology we bring on campus. We can encourage and suggest from the administrative side how the academic side should use technology, but the faculty do not have to use any given piece of technology unless their department requires it. Also, we could never implement something like websense style filtering, there are legitimate reasons to look at almost anything on the net from a research point of view sometimes.
There are rules about what you can surf for in the labs and library. Those are enforced by the lab monitors and library staff, and if necessary, via non-academic misconduct proceedings. In the case where a faculty member or student knows they will be viewing potentially offensive material, for example, research on pornography or hate speech, etc, there are protocols in place for how they can get what they need without subjecting others to having to see it on their screens. Additionally, when research type things might violate the terms of the Acceptable Computer Use Policy, there are systems in place for users to get specific pre-approval to violate the ACUP for research purposes.
Basically, here the academic freedom of students and especially faculty to investigate, learn about, research, and publish on any topic is more important than any other concern. It's our job as an institution. What we do have is bandwith shaping to prevent inappropriate uses or entertainment uses from eating so much bandwidth that they prevent others from using their freedom for academic uses.
The problems for captchas are even greater when you consider one scheme I've heard about:
a) Obtain some porn, make a little site that provides free porn.
b) However, before you see the porn, you have to fill out this captcha.
c) set up your bots to queue up the captchas they hit in their spidering on the porn site.
d) present your porn-hounds the captchas from the bots, the bot gets notified of the answer so it can continue.
This model basically provides you with a vast resource of real-person-answered captchas at a fixed one-time cost (the site setup, and possibly acquisition of the porn). I've been unable to come up with anything you could change the captcha to that would prevent this from working, though perhaps something like a graphical "choose the most seriously mutilated penis" would work...