If you're going to define "hitting bottom" as "exactly as bad as it needs to get to get you to change," then the "you have to hit bottom" claim has no logical or explanatory value.
But I think you could say that the deeper the addiction, the deeper the shock has to be in order to break it.
I think they teach a similar fall in the Army's jump school. You land on your feet, take another impact on the side of your knee, another on your thigh, and a fourth on the shoulder. It spreads the damage around, hopefully reducing it.
Of course, if your parachute fails, it's very hard to do, and there's probably not much point to it.
True, but a bit trivial. Putting it so simply implies that cancellation was inevitable, a simple function of the show's fitness in a Darwinian marketplace. It also gives zero insight into *why* one show lives and another show dies.
It sounds like there were a couple of very specific things FOX could have done with the show to keep it alive. More action, more guidance for new viewers, and not playing time slot roulette for starters.
Someone (I don't remember where) once wrote that CBS did more to promote the show in its "Summer Glau" episode of The Big Bang Theory than FOX did in the show's entire run.
You would probably be charged with destruction of government property, vandalism, littering (depending on where you put it), and interfering with a criminal investigation. Then they'd taze you a few times, just to make sure the lesson got through.
If I found one of these on my car, I'd be tempted to drive the device to the police station, drop it on the reception desk, and walk out. But messing with it in any way could get you in trouble.
Some have suggested calling out the bomb squad. No. That's risky as hell. You're knowingly wasting police time and resources, so don't do it unless you have no moral qualms and top-notch acting skills.
Here's what you do instead. If you think you're living well within the law, fight it. You publicize the practice, you write letters to everyone up and down the chain of command, you demand that they stop surveilling you. Then you get a lawyer and find out just how much trouble you can get into by nerfing the device.
If something in your life is technically illegal but morally justifiable, find alternative transportation when needed, and start being more careful in other areas of your life as well (phone, e-mail, browsing, etc.)
If you're going to do something horrible, and you think the police are onto you, just don't do the horrible thing. Easy enough? Good.
Now I really want to know: if you're not suspected of a crime, aren't behaving suspiciously, and aren't meaningfully related to some ongoing investigation, is it still okay for someone in law enforcement to just follow you around? If true, that's pretty disturbing.
...the NSA is only looking at calls crossing the border.
That makes me feel sooooo much better. Note that they also get to intercept Internet traffic (including those top-secret, unbreakable Hotmail accounts).
We shouldn't be shocked that the NSA can't access a Hotmail account. We know damned well that they can, if they know which one they're breaking into. What's shocking is that we gave up these pervasive surveillance powers under grave warnings by politicians and self-styled experts. Clearly, those people wrongly thought that this sort of data mining could be a shortcut for solid detective work. If anything, reports indicate the opposite: a lot of manpower was squandered on false leads dredged up by illegal wiretapping.
For years, we trembled to use words like "cocaine", "bomb", and "Brooklyn Bridge" in phone conversations, even though we knew perfectly well that it could be thwarted by the simplest word replacement schemes.
You're just rehashing the same dumb argument right wingers have been pushing for torture, for illegal wiretapping, for the militarization of counterterrorism, and for the invasion of unrelated countries: okay, maybe it doesn't work, but how else are we going to Keep America Safe(TM)?
I would point out that about 80% of the problems you cite are an artifact of the current technologies and practices, rather than inherent limitations.
Existing institutions have every reason to treat online courses as second-class citizens. You have to expect crappy interfaces and low standards, so long as the purveyors see online classes as a weak stand-in for the real university experience.
If your prof isn't taking his online class seriously, and you can't get him to talk to you, it's time to go over his head and take your complaint to his department. Get other students to do it as well, so you lose that crazy loner smell.
Call me old (more like spatial), but seeing print in the traditional left side right side alignment of a book is the only way I remember anything I read.
Then you won't remember that I find this claim extremely implausible.
Remember, if you respond, you're ceding the point.
Great point. I had a theory class from a teacher who was a terrible lecturer. Brilliant guy. Nice guy. Terrible lecturer, of the mumbler variety. Going to him for individual help wasn't useful either. He sincerely wanted to help, but you'd leave twenty minutes later with a yellow pad full of scrawled equations and a dumbfounded look on your face.
The guy should have been left alone to do his research.
I think a few videos of a rockstar teacher who knew how to get the material across to students would have been a great improvement.
1) I think you underestimate our potential future lifespans.
2) Everybody knows that science journals are an expensive racket. The journals themselves serve a useful function, but by 2020 they'll be either dead or surviving off a different business model. Besides, students aren't likely to have to hunt down the journals for the first two or three years of study.
3) Science labs are necessary, but they migh
4) If it seems he's conflating online course materials with online universities, I'd suspect that the fault lies in either the journalist's writing, the professor's attempts to express himself, or with your interpretation of what he said. I just mean that it's such an obvious distinction that it's hard to imagine him not grasping it.
sitting behind a computer reading, watching some videos and taking an online test really isn't an amazingly useful skill.
Of course not. A dense third grader could master those skills.
It's the material that's supposed to be tricky, not the coveyance.
I don't dispute that working in teams is important, as is socializing. But I think that some of it can be taken online. Some of it can be eliminated.
I understand that you work for a university, and you think it's a special place. I went to one, and I thought it was a pretty special place. You think your institution will -- and should -- be around forever. Maybe you will be. But if you folks can't get tuitions under control, and turn away more and more people, do you deserve to be?
That's the crux of the debate here. An online education might have some warts and deficiencies when compared to a traditional university education. But a university education is probably deficient and clumsy when compared to some other experience that could be had for, say, five or ten times the cost. In the middle ages, the educated often had private tutors; we've sacrificed quality for accessibility before.
Last point: I would take less comfort in the power of the institution than you do. Looking at the great, institutional newspapers, which ones can we safely say will still be "relevant" by 2020?
It would have to be quite a bit cheaper than the current university/college system. You're not paying for buildings, you're not paying to have professors (or even grad students) regurgitate the same basic information over and over again, your infrastructure costs get smaller every year, you don't need to subsidize the NBA and NFL's farm teams, less need for dorms... it seems obvious that it could be much cheaper.
I doubt it will be without a fight. I hear universities use online courses as cash cows. So I think existing institutions won't lead the way in driving down costs.
But given the critical need for cheap and ubiquitous education, and the way tuition costs are trending up, I think this has to be the way to go, even if the quality is lower than by the traditional route.
Draconian copyright law and the "new edition treadmill" drive new books into bookstores. It's not obvious that textbooks are getting better. Longer, yes. Better?
Honestly, it shouldn't take much to create some amazing open textbooks, and it should take very little more to keep them up to date. But you could be right about content creation being a path to prestige.
Disagree. The lack of iTunesU graduates isn't due to a lack of homework problems to hone your learning. That seems like a tiny thing compared to the publication of quality lectures and open source book material. Nor is it due to a lack of interaction with professors. Lots of people get little from the lectures, and much prefer their learning in manuscript form.
No, the lack of iTunesU graduates is due to one thing and one thing only: accreditation. While iTunesU has vast oceans of material to swim through, it has nobody watching or measuring to say, "Yeah, you swam through that. Here's your RSA-signed Silver Swimming Certificate."
Without that, there's no reason for an iTunesU attendee to bother with doing homework, or listening to the lectures he's not interested in. In fact, there's no reason for him to prefer an iTunesU lecture over Battlestar Galactica reruns.
Classroom interactions are important, but you don't need to be in the same lecture hall as the professor to get clarification on a topic. You don't even necessarily need to ask the same professor that originally presented the information. Maybe watching a bit of another lecture by another professor on the same material will clear things up.
The safety net comes from having access to people who understand the material better than you.
I was going to go the "You weren't a CS major, were you?" route, but it looks like fifteen people beat me to the punch.
But you're right: the online, virtual college is going to be a vastly different social experience from what we have now. Pushed to its logical limits, it could be a very isolating place.
On the other hand, you could also be cramming for your finals while backpacking through Europe. I imagine that, by 2020, there will be a lot of other changes to society that might make this less of a concern. Maybe everyone will be algorithmically assigned their significant other by match.google.com.
Some people, freed from the tether of the university, will stay home a couple years longer. Some might set off for adventure. Anyone who falls into the latter category can crash at my place. Just chip in for noms.
My understanding of CSP was that, to increase its baseload ability, you just made it bigger (especially the molten salt tank). I don't remember the source, but I remember someone was quoted as saying that you can store energy as heat 20x cheaper than you could store it in a battery. As the reservoir gets bigger, it loses heat more slowly. Build it big enough, and you can keep it warm all night, even as you're drawing power from it.
You also have the option of burning something to keep the fluid warm, for cloudy days or to provide more baseload.
Transmission losses, while not negligible, seem manageable. I've seen figures of about 2-3% to move electricity 600mi using HVDC. I mean, it's on Wikipedia, so it must be right.
The big problem I see with the "we need power now" argument is that we could probably install several gigawatts of CSP and wind before we could even get the nuclear reactor through the permitting process.
I'm not willing to go to war with China either. Bribery would be the better course, as I proposed.
Every time I have this discussion, people throw out alarming rhetoric like "shackling our economy." Frankly, I don't see it. There are so many ways to *make* money off reducing CO2 emissions*, that I don't see the price of CO2 permits ever getting that high.
Case in point: Sulfur dioxide. Back in the 1990s, acid rain was a problem. Government implements a cap-and-trade system. Power industry screams bloody murder, offering up doomsday scenarios. They said the industry would be bankrupted, that the permits would auction off for an industry-killing $1200/ton. The country would go dark, and even the best of us would resort to cannibalism to make ends meet.
Government goes ahead with the auction. The actual auction price comes in around $300/ton. Emissions are down by 40%, and the program is now expected to cost about 1/4th what the government initially estimated (those estimates themselves being far lower than what industry was claiming). I expect CO2's story to follow about the same course.
Further, if we know that the demand for green technology is only going to rise, letting other countries take the lead assures that in twenty years we'll be a green importer, not a green exporter. We're still scrambling to catch up with the Danish on manufacturing wind turbines. When China gets rich enough to want to replace its coal plants with CSP, who do you want building it for them?
If the goal is to transition to green technology as quickly as possible, it seems obvious to me that slightly slower growth heavily directed towards the exploration and refinement of low-CO2 technology is going to get us there a lot faster than a strategy of maximum, undirected growth.
* Example: The Empire State Building is about to undergo a $20M refit, which they expect to save about $4.4M/year in energy costs, reduce energy consumption by 40%, and eliminate hundreds of thousands of tons of CO2.
So, let me understand. You basically skimmed through the stuff you disagreed with so that you could get to the stuff that told you what you wanted to hear. That response is just weak, and I can't see what you saw in it.
We know for a fact that Jupiter has loads of internal energy, which he entirely ignores. In fact, there's about 60% more energy radiating off the planet than could be explained by the Sun alone. He also spends a bunch of time talking about the Great Red Spot, which actually makes the other guy's point: it's pulling hot air up from Jupiter's depths, where it can be observed.
Jupiter radiates more energy into space than it receives from the Sun. The interior of Jupiter is hot: the core is probably about 20,000 K. The heat is generated by the Kelvin-Helmholtz mechanism, the slow gravitational compression of the planet. (Jupiter does NOT produce energy by nuclear fusion as in the Sun; it is much too small and hence its interior is too cool to ignite nuclear reactions.) This interior heat probably causes convection deep within Jupiter's liquid layers and is probably responsible for the complex motions we see in the cloud tops. Saturn and Neptune are similar to Jupiter in this respect, but oddly, Uranus is not. [src]
So I think it's safe to say that the Skeptical Scientist is correct: Jupiter's weather has more to do with Jupiter's internals than the Sun.
The other guy's discussion of Neptune leads me to believe that he thinks that any change in a picture must be attributable to the Sun, and also be evidence of warming. Pretty lame.
As the Skeptical Science mentioned elsewhere, there is no observed warming of Jupiter. There is a predicted change in how heat is distributed, based on modeling of some surface phenomena.
As another respondent in the same thread pointed out:
I find interesting that "skeptics" so eagerly recommend taking the enormous amount of highly accurate data available for Earth with a grain of salt (or the all shaker for that matter), while at the same time accepting wild conclusions on poorly understood extra-terrestrial "climates" based on very scant, spotty observations.
Finally, and most important, given that the energy output of the Sun hasn't increased over the last 50 years of direct measurements, what mechanism is responsible for this supposed heat wave?
Slashdot Mirror
If you're going to define "hitting bottom" as "exactly as bad as it needs to get to get you to change," then the "you have to hit bottom" claim has no logical or explanatory value.
But I think you could say that the deeper the addiction, the deeper the shock has to be in order to break it.
I think they teach a similar fall in the Army's jump school. You land on your feet, take another impact on the side of your knee, another on your thigh, and a fourth on the shoulder. It spreads the damage around, hopefully reducing it.
Of course, if your parachute fails, it's very hard to do, and there's probably not much point to it.
True, but a bit trivial. Putting it so simply implies that cancellation was inevitable, a simple function of the show's fitness in a Darwinian marketplace. It also gives zero insight into *why* one show lives and another show dies.
It sounds like there were a couple of very specific things FOX could have done with the show to keep it alive. More action, more guidance for new viewers, and not playing time slot roulette for starters.
Someone (I don't remember where) once wrote that CBS did more to promote the show in its "Summer Glau" episode of The Big Bang Theory than FOX did in the show's entire run.
Different timelines. The show made that absolutely clear. According to your own criteria, you'd better have walked out on Star Trek.
You would probably be charged with destruction of government property, vandalism, littering (depending on where you put it), and interfering with a criminal investigation. Then they'd taze you a few times, just to make sure the lesson got through.
If I found one of these on my car, I'd be tempted to drive the device to the police station, drop it on the reception desk, and walk out. But messing with it in any way could get you in trouble.
Some have suggested calling out the bomb squad. No. That's risky as hell. You're knowingly wasting police time and resources, so don't do it unless you have no moral qualms and top-notch acting skills.
Here's what you do instead. If you think you're living well within the law, fight it. You publicize the practice, you write letters to everyone up and down the chain of command, you demand that they stop surveilling you. Then you get a lawyer and find out just how much trouble you can get into by nerfing the device.
If something in your life is technically illegal but morally justifiable, find alternative transportation when needed, and start being more careful in other areas of your life as well (phone, e-mail, browsing, etc.)
If you're going to do something horrible, and you think the police are onto you, just don't do the horrible thing. Easy enough? Good.
Yet another reason to drive junkers.
Now I really want to know: if you're not suspected of a crime, aren't behaving suspiciously, and aren't meaningfully related to some ongoing investigation, is it still okay for someone in law enforcement to just follow you around? If true, that's pretty disturbing.
That makes me feel sooooo much better. Note that they also get to intercept Internet traffic (including those top-secret, unbreakable Hotmail accounts).
We shouldn't be shocked that the NSA can't access a Hotmail account. We know damned well that they can, if they know which one they're breaking into. What's shocking is that we gave up these pervasive surveillance powers under grave warnings by politicians and self-styled experts. Clearly, those people wrongly thought that this sort of data mining could be a shortcut for solid detective work. If anything, reports indicate the opposite: a lot of manpower was squandered on false leads dredged up by illegal wiretapping.
For years, we trembled to use words like "cocaine", "bomb", and "Brooklyn Bridge" in phone conversations, even though we knew perfectly well that it could be thwarted by the simplest word replacement schemes.
You're just rehashing the same dumb argument right wingers have been pushing for torture, for illegal wiretapping, for the militarization of counterterrorism, and for the invasion of unrelated countries: okay, maybe it doesn't work, but how else are we going to Keep America Safe(TM)?
That data isn't useful until you tell us your hourly rates.
I would point out that about 80% of the problems you cite are an artifact of the current technologies and practices, rather than inherent limitations.
Existing institutions have every reason to treat online courses as second-class citizens. You have to expect crappy interfaces and low standards, so long as the purveyors see online classes as a weak stand-in for the real university experience.
If your prof isn't taking his online class seriously, and you can't get him to talk to you, it's time to go over his head and take your complaint to his department. Get other students to do it as well, so you lose that crazy loner smell.
Then you won't remember that I find this claim extremely implausible.
Remember, if you respond, you're ceding the point.
Mail each student three tomato seeds and a water balloon?
I kid!
If the computer's extension cord reached to the bathroom, maybe paper usage would have peaked long ago.
Now we have the Kindle. Let's give it another five years and see what comes of it.
Great point. I had a theory class from a teacher who was a terrible lecturer. Brilliant guy. Nice guy. Terrible lecturer, of the mumbler variety. Going to him for individual help wasn't useful either. He sincerely wanted to help, but you'd leave twenty minutes later with a yellow pad full of scrawled equations and a dumbfounded look on your face.
The guy should have been left alone to do his research.
I think a few videos of a rockstar teacher who knew how to get the material across to students would have been a great improvement.
1) I think you underestimate our potential future lifespans.
2) Everybody knows that science journals are an expensive racket. The journals themselves serve a useful function, but by 2020 they'll be either dead or surviving off a different business model. Besides, students aren't likely to have to hunt down the journals for the first two or three years of study.
3) Science labs are necessary, but they migh
4) If it seems he's conflating online course materials with online universities, I'd suspect that the fault lies in either the journalist's writing, the professor's attempts to express himself, or with your interpretation of what he said. I just mean that it's such an obvious distinction that it's hard to imagine him not grasping it.
Of course not. A dense third grader could master those skills.
It's the material that's supposed to be tricky, not the coveyance.
I don't dispute that working in teams is important, as is socializing. But I think that some of it can be taken online. Some of it can be eliminated.
I understand that you work for a university, and you think it's a special place. I went to one, and I thought it was a pretty special place. You think your institution will -- and should -- be around forever. Maybe you will be. But if you folks can't get tuitions under control, and turn away more and more people, do you deserve to be?
That's the crux of the debate here. An online education might have some warts and deficiencies when compared to a traditional university education. But a university education is probably deficient and clumsy when compared to some other experience that could be had for, say, five or ten times the cost. In the middle ages, the educated often had private tutors; we've sacrificed quality for accessibility before.
Last point: I would take less comfort in the power of the institution than you do. Looking at the great, institutional newspapers, which ones can we safely say will still be "relevant" by 2020?
It would have to be quite a bit cheaper than the current university/college system. You're not paying for buildings, you're not paying to have professors (or even grad students) regurgitate the same basic information over and over again, your infrastructure costs get smaller every year, you don't need to subsidize the NBA and NFL's farm teams, less need for dorms... it seems obvious that it could be much cheaper.
I doubt it will be without a fight. I hear universities use online courses as cash cows. So I think existing institutions won't lead the way in driving down costs.
But given the critical need for cheap and ubiquitous education, and the way tuition costs are trending up, I think this has to be the way to go, even if the quality is lower than by the traditional route.
Draconian copyright law and the "new edition treadmill" drive new books into bookstores. It's not obvious that textbooks are getting better. Longer, yes. Better?
Honestly, it shouldn't take much to create some amazing open textbooks, and it should take very little more to keep them up to date. But you could be right about content creation being a path to prestige.
Disagree. The lack of iTunesU graduates isn't due to a lack of homework problems to hone your learning. That seems like a tiny thing compared to the publication of quality lectures and open source book material. Nor is it due to a lack of interaction with professors. Lots of people get little from the lectures, and much prefer their learning in manuscript form.
No, the lack of iTunesU graduates is due to one thing and one thing only: accreditation. While iTunesU has vast oceans of material to swim through, it has nobody watching or measuring to say, "Yeah, you swam through that. Here's your RSA-signed Silver Swimming Certificate."
Without that, there's no reason for an iTunesU attendee to bother with doing homework, or listening to the lectures he's not interested in. In fact, there's no reason for him to prefer an iTunesU lecture over Battlestar Galactica reruns.
Classroom interactions are important, but you don't need to be in the same lecture hall as the professor to get clarification on a topic. You don't even necessarily need to ask the same professor that originally presented the information. Maybe watching a bit of another lecture by another professor on the same material will clear things up.
The safety net comes from having access to people who understand the material better than you.
I was going to go the "You weren't a CS major, were you?" route, but it looks like fifteen people beat me to the punch.
But you're right: the online, virtual college is going to be a vastly different social experience from what we have now. Pushed to its logical limits, it could be a very isolating place.
On the other hand, you could also be cramming for your finals while backpacking through Europe. I imagine that, by 2020, there will be a lot of other changes to society that might make this less of a concern. Maybe everyone will be algorithmically assigned their significant other by match.google.com.
Some people, freed from the tether of the university, will stay home a couple years longer. Some might set off for adventure. Anyone who falls into the latter category can crash at my place. Just chip in for noms.
The give and take won't disappear. That would degrade the quality of education.
But the give and take may happen inside Second Life.
You're right. Keep wasteful, porkbarrel spending where it belongs: building military hardware.
Building things that meet human needs? Energy? Transportation? Bah! Socialism!
I did several googles on "X is the worst language ever"
C++, Java: 5 votes
PHP, 4 votes (including your comment)
C, Perl 3 votes
Ruby, Lisp, Python 2 votes
Scala, 0 votes
What does it mean? Probably not much.
My understanding of CSP was that, to increase its baseload ability, you just made it bigger (especially the molten salt tank). I don't remember the source, but I remember someone was quoted as saying that you can store energy as heat 20x cheaper than you could store it in a battery. As the reservoir gets bigger, it loses heat more slowly. Build it big enough, and you can keep it warm all night, even as you're drawing power from it.
You also have the option of burning something to keep the fluid warm, for cloudy days or to provide more baseload.
Transmission losses, while not negligible, seem manageable. I've seen figures of about 2-3% to move electricity 600mi using HVDC. I mean, it's on Wikipedia, so it must be right.
The big problem I see with the "we need power now" argument is that we could probably install several gigawatts of CSP and wind before we could even get the nuclear reactor through the permitting process.
I'm not willing to go to war with China either. Bribery would be the better course, as I proposed.
Every time I have this discussion, people throw out alarming rhetoric like "shackling our economy." Frankly, I don't see it. There are so many ways to *make* money off reducing CO2 emissions*, that I don't see the price of CO2 permits ever getting that high.
Case in point: Sulfur dioxide. Back in the 1990s, acid rain was a problem. Government implements a cap-and-trade system. Power industry screams bloody murder, offering up doomsday scenarios. They said the industry would be bankrupted, that the permits would auction off for an industry-killing $1200/ton. The country would go dark, and even the best of us would resort to cannibalism to make ends meet.
Government goes ahead with the auction. The actual auction price comes in around $300/ton. Emissions are down by 40%, and the program is now expected to cost about 1/4th what the government initially estimated (those estimates themselves being far lower than what industry was claiming). I expect CO2's story to follow about the same course.
Further, if we know that the demand for green technology is only going to rise, letting other countries take the lead assures that in twenty years we'll be a green importer, not a green exporter. We're still scrambling to catch up with the Danish on manufacturing wind turbines. When China gets rich enough to want to replace its coal plants with CSP, who do you want building it for them?
If the goal is to transition to green technology as quickly as possible, it seems obvious to me that slightly slower growth heavily directed towards the exploration and refinement of low-CO2 technology is going to get us there a lot faster than a strategy of maximum, undirected growth.
* Example: The Empire State Building is about to undergo a $20M refit, which they expect to save about $4.4M/year in energy costs, reduce energy consumption by 40%, and eliminate hundreds of thousands of tons of CO2.
So, let me understand. You basically skimmed through the stuff you disagreed with so that you could get to the stuff that told you what you wanted to hear. That response is just weak, and I can't see what you saw in it.
We know for a fact that Jupiter has loads of internal energy, which he entirely ignores. In fact, there's about 60% more energy radiating off the planet than could be explained by the Sun alone. He also spends a bunch of time talking about the Great Red Spot, which actually makes the other guy's point: it's pulling hot air up from Jupiter's depths, where it can be observed.
So I think it's safe to say that the Skeptical Scientist is correct: Jupiter's weather has more to do with Jupiter's internals than the Sun.
The other guy's discussion of Neptune leads me to believe that he thinks that any change in a picture must be attributable to the Sun, and also be evidence of warming. Pretty lame.
As the Skeptical Science mentioned elsewhere, there is no observed warming of Jupiter. There is a predicted change in how heat is distributed, based on modeling of some surface phenomena.
As another respondent in the same thread pointed out:
Finally, and most important, given that the energy output of the Sun hasn't increased over the last 50 years of direct measurements, what mechanism is responsible for this supposed heat wave?