"A study of gender differences in 55 nations using the Big Five Inventory found that women tended to be somewhat higher than men in neuroticism, extraversion, agreeableness, and conscientiousness. The difference in neuroticism was the most prominent and consistent, with significant differences found in 49 of the 55 nations surveyed."
The best teaching technique I've ever seen was that practiced by the Bible Study Fellowship back in the 1980s. All the material was broken down into 1-week chunks. You started with reading assignments and an outline that you did on your own. This was followed by a weekly small-group discussion where the group collectively answered a series of questions on the same material. This was followed by a lecture of the whole fellowship. The lecture was now very interesting, because you had personally worked through the material, worked with others to process it and cover the bits you didn't get on your own, and now you had some appreciation of what you were dealing with.
I adopted that pattern for every course I've ever had to teach, and the retention is phenomenal, 90% and higher.
My opinion is it worked so well because:
- Same material, multiple processing methods (reading, writing, talking, listening) - Same material, multiple repetitions - Your FIRST introduction to the material is personal. That increases "ownership". - Questions answered BY a small group invite collaboration and sharing
Long-time smoker here, smoked for 30 years, quit over a period of a year, and for 30 more years have never once ever wanted to smoke a cigarette again.
The key is this: you never, ever "need" to smoke. In fact, just the opposite, you have to force your body to accept smoking. Just remember how sick you got at the beginning. That's how much your normal body doesn't like smoke. It's an irritant! What kind of crazy logic is it to intentionally breathe in smoke?
I sat down 30 years ago and made a list of all the pros and cons of smoking. Honestly, there are a lot of things on both sides of that list, it surprised me. But when you net it out, what remains is this: all that smoking gives you is the desire to have another cigarette.
In other words, it's a cheat. I try to not do stupid things. Cheating yourself is colossally stupid.
Go cold turkey. Forget about walking up to it, attack it head-on. It took me three attempts, each one much easier to maintain than the last.
Exactly. The NSA data center in Utah gets something like 300 MILLION hacking attempts a day. A non-story if ever there was one. Probably the reason it doesn't have legs is because some reporter breathlessly runs it by their IT folks, and they just roll their eyes.
So, if I'm reading the abstracts correctly, what we have here is that a human agent tells one AI which image is the "target", and then leaves it up to that AI and another to work out how to communicate that fact to each other. It turns out that the systems will rarely choose "Explain it in English" as the chosen method.
This is not intelligence in any general sense. This is optimization and rapid evaluation. The correct "answer" is already embodied in the data (talk about THESE images), the message (pick THIS one), and the communication protocol (pick the FASTEST method) -- it's just not obvious to humans what the optimal selection is of all these parameters.
Optimization is just programming by another name. If you select a data set of blonde-haired people and tell a machine to optimize by hair color using the following statistical models, you are going to get "blonde". Or, you could just say, ``hairColor=blonde``. There is literally no difference in the outcome, just in the approach.
But importantly, in BOTH cases it is the human agent who is being intelligent and inventive. Not machines.
There are very, very few legitimate reasons to post anonymously. When I am moderating and I determine that the person is posting anonymously for a legitimate reason, then I give them the same chance at a positive rating as a named poster. But if not, I judge them much more harshly.
Why? Because if you don't have the guts to identify yourself when you could, then you don't deserve to be treated like others who do.
So, don't post anonymously if you want to be a valued member of the conversation.
And, might I add, if the European Union was more like a Federation, if its leaders had to undergo popular elections across the entire EU every 4-6 years, then it would probably be more resilient. The US has survived for 238 years in its present form, the longest-running representative democracy in history. Federalism works.
It's called Federalism. It's the United States of America, not, "America". A federation is a form of government where a collection of independent, equal states act as one on some issues and otherwise act independently internally.
Every State in the USA has its own court system, its own military, its own political body, its own police, and on and on, PLUS the federal government. People pay both State taxes and Federal taxes. They follow both State laws and Federal laws.
And the most important feature of Federalism is that the States are equal to one another, from a Federal perspective. They are like the partners in a partnership.
But the EC is NOT a deliberative body. It is an honorary one. There's the source of your misunderstanding, I think.
The members of the EC are picked by the winners. Membership is temporary, the entire EC is dissolved once the election results have been reported to Congress. In fact, the ACTUAL vote to confirm the election is done by Congress, not by the EC. And yes, it is an actual show-of-hands vote. The job of the EC is to simply report the official results of each state.
That is why any electors who don't report properly are called "faithless" electors. They literally make a promise to faithfully report the results when they are appointed.
This is very simple, actually. The problem statement is, "how to best conduct a single majority vote election across multiple, independent entities of varying sizes and densities of the population"? The answer is, "hold a majority election in every independent entity and the winner overall of each election is the winner overall of the race." But what if the entities are of _vastly_ different sizes and densities? Then the answer is, "weight the individual elections by population."
The Electoral College is a perfectly legitimate solution to the problem. Maybe you're getting confused by the notion of a "College". There is a body of people that forms a College, but exists only as a formality, because someone must keep a record and report the results of the election. The College, for example, is temporary and changes at every election. It is honorary.
It's very important to get a business-class Cox connection to your home. It costs more, but it's more than worth it. You get a dedicated IP. You get a nice, clean contract that lets you run any service you want to, as long as it doesn't hurt the network and is legal. When you have a problem, you get a real IT person on the the phone when you call, not some remote call center operator going through a script. Hardware updates such as new modems are included in the price. And most importantly, the uptime and stability are outstanding.
Sounds like maybe Cox Internet. They don't take kindly to their customers being abused. For example, they had refused to buckle under to Rightscorp, the copyright shakedown firm, and blocked their notices for years. As Cox explained in their suit (which they lost):
"Rightscorp and Plaintiffs tried to abuse Cox’s system," Cox told the judge. "Rightscorp sells shady services to copyright holders. It shakes down ISP customers for money without regard to actual liability, and it tries to enlist ISPs in its scheme. Cox explained it would not accept Rightscorp’s wrongful notices and asked Rightscorp to fix its notices. Rightscorp refused, instead dumping thousands of notices per day on Cox. As a result, Cox blocked Rightscorp’s notices. This suit is Rightscorp’s retribution, with Plaintiffs’ complicity, for Cox’s refusal to participate in Rightscorp’s scheme."
Nonsense. The US election requires one to win a majority of ALL THE STATES. Why? Because it's named the "United States" of America, not just "Amerika".
Clinton absolutely, positively lost the popular vote of ALL THE STATES, and Trump won them. Which is why he's sitting in the Oval Office and she's taken up knitting.
You know, we DO know about digital signing. And defense in depth. And chain of custody. And to top it all off, you can't just attack some of the machines, they are spread out in thousands of locations across each state. You have to win a majority of ALL the precincts.
So no, your scenario of just popping a USB drive into a couple of voting machines is not going to work. It's a lot, lot harder than you think.
The voting machines are not internetworked. The attacks described here were not against voting equipment but against voter registration databases which have web interfaces.
I am an election official in Virginia. Every one of these scenarios I've looked at about how easy it is to modify voting equipment have thoroughly improbable -- and in some cases, physically impossible -- scenarios. America is physically a very big place. Virginia has thousands of individual voting precincts. To modify the source code, you'd have to launch a simultaneous, in-person sneak attack at thousands of locations, all without getting caught. That is just not a credible scenario. In some of these scenarios, they have people literally opening up a voting machine on election day, which is really preposterous. Every voting machine is under the constant gaze not only of multiple officers, but also all the voters waiting in line. That in-my-eyesight requirement is one of the reasons I am strongly in favor of in-person voting.
We have been running elections for hundreds of years, now. We do know a thing or two about how to secure them.
The problems people experience with open source projects are very broadly felt. Just as one example, 70% of people reported a problem with rudeness and name-calling. That dwarfs the issues with stereotyping, which was reported by only 10%. What's up with that? We should let the data guide us to what needs to be focused upon. Sure, issues with women in OSS need to be fixed, but I bet if we get better with the 70% issues it'll go a long way towards fixing the 10%, too.
Slashdot Mirror
Yawn. More of the same trying to get ahead by hating on the other side.
"A study of gender differences in 55 nations using the Big Five Inventory found that women tended to be somewhat higher than men in neuroticism, extraversion, agreeableness, and conscientiousness. The difference in neuroticism was the most prominent and consistent, with significant differences found in 49 of the 55 nations surveyed."
Emphasis added. From the parent's link.
The best teaching technique I've ever seen was that practiced by the Bible Study Fellowship back in the 1980s. All the material was broken down into 1-week chunks. You started with reading assignments and an outline that you did on your own. This was followed by a weekly small-group discussion where the group collectively answered a series of questions on the same material. This was followed by a lecture of the whole fellowship. The lecture was now very interesting, because you had personally worked through the material, worked with others to process it and cover the bits you didn't get on your own, and now you had some appreciation of what you were dealing with.
I adopted that pattern for every course I've ever had to teach, and the retention is phenomenal, 90% and higher.
My opinion is it worked so well because:
- Same material, multiple processing methods (reading, writing, talking, listening)
- Same material, multiple repetitions
- Your FIRST introduction to the material is personal. That increases "ownership".
- Questions answered BY a small group invite collaboration and sharing
There you have it.
That's some kind of pitiful argument. No wonder they're losing.
Long-time smoker here, smoked for 30 years, quit over a period of a year, and for 30 more years have never once ever wanted to smoke a cigarette again.
The key is this: you never, ever "need" to smoke. In fact, just the opposite, you have to force your body to accept smoking. Just remember how sick you got at the beginning. That's how much your normal body doesn't like smoke. It's an irritant! What kind of crazy logic is it to intentionally breathe in smoke?
I sat down 30 years ago and made a list of all the pros and cons of smoking. Honestly, there are a lot of things on both sides of that list, it surprised me. But when you net it out, what remains is this: all that smoking gives you is the desire to have another cigarette.
In other words, it's a cheat. I try to not do stupid things. Cheating yourself is colossally stupid.
Go cold turkey. Forget about walking up to it, attack it head-on. It took me three attempts, each one much easier to maintain than the last.
You can do this. Your body will thank you.
I am an officer of election in Virginia. Do you seriously think we're stupid enough to NETWORK our voting machines?
As if.
Exactly. The NSA data center in Utah gets something like 300 MILLION hacking attempts a day. A non-story if ever there was one. Probably the reason it doesn't have legs is because some reporter breathlessly runs it by their IT folks, and they just roll their eyes.
Never read the books? You're not missing much. One of those rare instances where the movie was much better than the book.
So, if I'm reading the abstracts correctly, what we have here is that a human agent tells one AI which image is the "target", and then leaves it up to that AI and another to work out how to communicate that fact to each other. It turns out that the systems will rarely choose "Explain it in English" as the chosen method.
This is not intelligence in any general sense. This is optimization and rapid evaluation. The correct "answer" is already embodied in the data (talk about THESE images), the message (pick THIS one), and the communication protocol (pick the FASTEST method) -- it's just not obvious to humans what the optimal selection is of all these parameters.
Optimization is just programming by another name. If you select a data set of blonde-haired people and tell a machine to optimize by hair color using the following statistical models, you are going to get "blonde". Or, you could just say, ``hairColor=blonde``. There is literally no difference in the outcome, just in the approach.
But importantly, in BOTH cases it is the human agent who is being intelligent and inventive. Not machines.
There are very, very few legitimate reasons to post anonymously. When I am moderating and I determine that the person is posting anonymously for a legitimate reason, then I give them the same chance at a positive rating as a named poster. But if not, I judge them much more harshly.
Why? Because if you don't have the guts to identify yourself when you could, then you don't deserve to be treated like others who do.
So, don't post anonymously if you want to be a valued member of the conversation.
And, might I add, if the European Union was more like a Federation, if its leaders had to undergo popular elections across the entire EU every 4-6 years, then it would probably be more resilient. The US has survived for 238 years in its present form, the longest-running representative democracy in history. Federalism works.
It's called Federalism. It's the United States of America, not, "America". A federation is a form of government where a collection of independent, equal states act as one on some issues and otherwise act independently internally.
Every State in the USA has its own court system, its own military, its own political body, its own police, and on and on, PLUS the federal government. People pay both State taxes and Federal taxes. They follow both State laws and Federal laws.
And the most important feature of Federalism is that the States are equal to one another, from a Federal perspective. They are like the partners in a partnership.
But the EC is NOT a deliberative body. It is an honorary one. There's the source of your misunderstanding, I think.
The members of the EC are picked by the winners. Membership is temporary, the entire EC is dissolved once the election results have been reported to Congress. In fact, the ACTUAL vote to confirm the election is done by Congress, not by the EC. And yes, it is an actual show-of-hands vote. The job of the EC is to simply report the official results of each state.
That is why any electors who don't report properly are called "faithless" electors. They literally make a promise to faithfully report the results when they are appointed.
THIS
This is very simple, actually. The problem statement is, "how to best conduct a single majority vote election across multiple, independent entities of varying sizes and densities of the population"? The answer is, "hold a majority election in every independent entity and the winner overall of each election is the winner overall of the race." But what if the entities are of _vastly_ different sizes and densities? Then the answer is, "weight the individual elections by population."
The Electoral College is a perfectly legitimate solution to the problem. Maybe you're getting confused by the notion of a "College". There is a body of people that forms a College, but exists only as a formality, because someone must keep a record and report the results of the election. The College, for example, is temporary and changes at every election. It is honorary.
It's very important to get a business-class Cox connection to your home. It costs more, but it's more than worth it. You get a dedicated IP. You get a nice, clean contract that lets you run any service you want to, as long as it doesn't hurt the network and is legal. When you have a problem, you get a real IT person on the the phone when you call, not some remote call center operator going through a script. Hardware updates such as new modems are included in the price. And most importantly, the uptime and stability are outstanding.
Sounds like maybe Cox Internet. They don't take kindly to their customers being abused. For example, they had refused to buckle under to Rightscorp, the copyright shakedown firm, and blocked their notices for years. As Cox explained in their suit (which they lost):
"Rightscorp and Plaintiffs tried to abuse Cox’s system," Cox told the judge. "Rightscorp sells shady services to copyright holders. It shakes down ISP customers for money without regard to actual liability, and it tries to enlist ISPs in its scheme. Cox explained it would not accept Rightscorp’s wrongful notices and asked Rightscorp to fix its notices. Rightscorp refused, instead dumping thousands of notices per day on Cox. As a result, Cox blocked Rightscorp’s notices. This suit is Rightscorp’s retribution, with Plaintiffs’ complicity, for Cox’s refusal to participate in Rightscorp’s scheme."
Ah, the Babylon Bee. A fine source of wry humor.
That's just bone-headed. If you want to manufacture a new energy-efficient whatzit, go right ahead. No one's stopping you.
Nonsense. The US election requires one to win a majority of ALL THE STATES. Why? Because it's named the "United States" of America, not just "Amerika".
Clinton absolutely, positively lost the popular vote of ALL THE STATES, and Trump won them. Which is why he's sitting in the Oval Office and she's taken up knitting.
You know, we DO know about digital signing. And defense in depth. And chain of custody. And to top it all off, you can't just attack some of the machines, they are spread out in thousands of locations across each state. You have to win a majority of ALL the precincts.
So no, your scenario of just popping a USB drive into a couple of voting machines is not going to work. It's a lot, lot harder than you think.
The voting machines are not internetworked. The attacks described here were not against voting equipment but against voter registration databases which have web interfaces.
I am an election official in Virginia. Every one of these scenarios I've looked at about how easy it is to modify voting equipment have thoroughly improbable -- and in some cases, physically impossible -- scenarios. America is physically a very big place. Virginia has thousands of individual voting precincts. To modify the source code, you'd have to launch a simultaneous, in-person sneak attack at thousands of locations, all without getting caught. That is just not a credible scenario. In some of these scenarios, they have people literally opening up a voting machine on election day, which is really preposterous. Every voting machine is under the constant gaze not only of multiple officers, but also all the voters waiting in line. That in-my-eyesight requirement is one of the reasons I am strongly in favor of in-person voting.
We have been running elections for hundreds of years, now. We do know a thing or two about how to secure them.
Only 39 states? With thousands of attacks per minute on your garden-variety server? That's a weirdly specific number.
The problems people experience with open source projects are very broadly felt. Just as one example, 70% of people reported a problem with rudeness and name-calling. That dwarfs the issues with stereotyping, which was reported by only 10%. What's up with that? We should let the data guide us to what needs to be focused upon. Sure, issues with women in OSS need to be fixed, but I bet if we get better with the 70% issues it'll go a long way towards fixing the 10%, too.
The computer-generated one was fingernails on a chalkboard. But you could see where it could go.