The incentive for me is I can do other things. When I drive, I focus on driving and the radio/podcast/audio book. If someone, or something, else drives, I could read a real book, nap, do email, play games, whatever.
As others have mentioned, it also greatly reduces a huge point of failure in the whole driving thing . . . driver fatigue, human error, etc. No more opening the window in freezing temperatures and sipping on the 5th cup of gas station coffee to make it to your parents for the holiday . . .
I wanted something similar (visual cues for meeting reminders; my "email" system is on a KVM with other "dev" systems). I ended up getting the Dream Cheeky 815 USB Webmail Notifier (http://www.dreamcheeky.com/webmail-notifier) - the thing is designed for email notifications with webmail, but there's an Apache License 2.0 driver and helper app (http://dreamcheekyusb.codeplex.com/), which worked fine to drive the thing - the little command line app that uses the driver had enough functionality (gradual on, color change, and blink) that I didn't need to write any real code.
A little macro scripting, and it was working fine with Outlook.
A little bigger that the other solutions, so maybe not great for a rack (though it's probably about 1U so it would work fine), but works nice sitting on my desk under my displays . . .
If we were using base 3, we'd have 3, 9, 27 (as these are the corresponding values for 10, 100, and 1000 - which would be 2, 4, and 8 in binary). Note that 3 in trinary would be 20 (which wouldn't exist in binary)
Sounds like these controllers are even smarter than that. Sounds like it can download weather reports, be hooked to remote sensors, etc, and run in open and closed control loops with this data.
Now, I'm not sure how smart all these adaptive features are, but ideally, this would mean the remote management would be more for monitoring, than managing . . . sounds pretty slick, especially for large installations (think city's with lots of parks).
I guess I should have clarified that the pictures are largely tongue in cheek and featuring their staff and caricatures of actions being taken . . . sorry about that!
Enforcement is the key. In my experience, lots of places have no cell phone signs, but few enforce it. On the other hand, when I lived in Montana, there was this great little restaurant called the No Sweat Cafe.
Small place, with 30 seats or so, but kind of a hippy-ish joint. Everything prepared from scratch, large amounts of local and organic foods, and a no cell phone sign, accompanied by pictures of people with phones being removed from the store or phones being destroyed. In fact, the anti-cell culture is such that when I've been there with friends who've forgotten to mute or silence their phones, I feel slightly embarrassed.
The LA times had an article on this two months ago. The most interesting part of the article may be where the refer to a California study that found the average underground monthly average tank temp ranged from 64 to 83 degrees F. At 83 degrees F, that's about a 1.2% volumetric change from 60 degrees.
Is 1% worth a law suit? Depends on your perspective I guess . . .
It's a paradigm shift. Do you sort and organize files, or do you just use local search? gmail is the best example of this shift - gmail didn't even have folders originally, and relied upon tags and searching.
Desktop search tools are the extension of this model - don't worry about files, directory structures, etc. Just search instead.
Definitely a shift, and not one that I want to make, as I like the organization provided by hierarchical directory structures. That being said, I do have google desktop installed, and find myself using it occasionally to find files. I like the fact that it searches my web history as well. I do wish it would index my email (we use groupwise here, which afaik there isn't a plugin for).
I find it interesting that most of the responses to your post seem to suggest the US would stop/hinder other space elevator efforts, whereas I read your post to mean that it would be a repeat of the space race. In other words, the US would be spurred on by others technical achievements, and would invest the resources to accelerate its efforts, so that it would be the first nation to have a functional space elevator.
She's also got some interesting view points - there's reasons why she doesn't capitalize i and her name. Some what socialistic, but it's a well reasoned decision, and it's a personal one she's chosen to make, and she seems intelligent enough to deal with the consequences (she'll keep her name in lowercase even for publication, where I'd imagine many may see her as pretentious for doing so, or imitating e.e. cummings or something else). She's even got it legally changed to lowercase.
Anyway, back to my original point - context matters, and in this case, this is a blog essay. Reading it, it seems apparent to me that she's clearly just exploring the ideas (constantly pointing out her bias), and hoping for some feedback. She knows this isn't going to be published in Nature or Science, and arguably some of the attitudes expressed throughout this thread could be extensions of her ideas about "class" and social networks (or in this case forums).
In any case, I understand your viewpoint, and respect your decision - but I appreciate the fact she's willing to write up her thoughts and ideas, so that others can read and ponder. Not everything I read has to be a scientific paper or suitable for publication in the NY Times, and blogs and similar venues provide a great tool to make information accessible to the masses. I think the other appeal to me is that a significant amount of "coherent, professional" work is highly filtered and processed - essays like the one being discussed work at the point when the idea hasn't been refined, when it's not ready for print publication, but is still something you want to think about . . .
I used to work in the prevention field for a state agency. It's interesting to see how slowly change comes around. The "gold standard" for this kind of data is the Youth Risk Beahvior Surveillance Survey (YRBSS), done every two years by the CDC. Many states also run their own prevention needs assessments.
While I was never directly involved with these surveys, my understanding was that there was a decent amount of statistical research put into them to try and get the most accurate data possible, so ideally your example of coke use among the impoverished would be thrown out.
Your description of DARE isn't really fair, as that could be any old school, health terrorism type approach (think of the "This is your brain, this is your brain on drugs" or aspects of the current Montana Meth Project). DAREs model focussed upon getting police into classrooms, as well as peer role models. Police departments liked it because it let them connect a bit more with the community.
DARE's an interesting program that got a lot of attention, but it's actual impact upon encouraging youth to make healthy decisions has no scientific standing. Hell, some of the studies actually showed that drug use went up after exposure to DARE. One could argue that there was some beneficial aspect, as it stressed to the prevention community that evaluation of programs is as vital as good program design.
My brother for a while (and maybe still?) was "signing" his credit card receipts with smiley faces (two dots and a smile). He had been doing this for months, and while I was visiting him in San Francisco over the Thanksgiving weekend, we went and grabbed some food at a little Chinese restaurant.
We were unlocking our bikes, this little Asian woman came running out with his receipt, pointing at the smiley face, and saying in broken English that that wasn't a signature. He fixed the signature, and we were on our way.
Obviously, he has no expectation of security from his signature on credit card transactions, but it was interesting to run into a vendor who actually did . . .
"Users will get their iPhone when they sign a contract including both voice and data plans."
This has the advantage of pointing out that data plans are required. I know I've been considering getting an iPhone, but once you add a data plan you're basically at $80+/month. Of course, that figure is estimated using the current voice and PDA data plans. Throw in another 20 bucks minimum if you want to tether w/o violating their terms of use.
Without having actually tried out the touchscreen and other features, it's difficult to say whether the iPhone is worth the premium price it will demand.
According to this post, Dell is stating that this was a mistake on there part, and they're working to resolve it. Looks like more of us should review Hanlon's razor . . .
I think it'd be better to just pick an existing standard than to create yet another new one. Except for the fact that SD maxes out at 2 GB (or 32 if you count SDHC) . . . so something will need to be done to provide for ever increasing amounts of digital storage . . .
To me, the real benefit of texting is when I don't want to talk to the person. There are plenty of times when what was supposed to be a 1-minute call turns into a 5-minute call . . .
Also, I'm sure if you were doing 200 texts a day, you'd become pretty proficient at it . . .
Granted, both sex offenders and DUI/DWIs are horrible crimes, but it does seem as if we're not giving people a fair chance at reintegrating into society . . .
A lot of people have posted about salary requirements and things. Please note that the original question states that he's currently an AmeriCorps member. For those who aren't familiar, AmeriCorps is a national service program where people commit to a term of service on a limited subsistence allowance. Most positions require 1700 hours for a year, and pay around 1000k/month, with the option of either a $1,200 cash stipend or a $4,725 education award upon successful completion of service.
Anyway, to get back to the original posters point about how to sell the school board on this proposition, there's a couple things I'd suggest. First, try to get a champion within the system, whether this be a board member, school principal, a group of teachers, etc. Having someone else advocate for your cause sends a stronger message than you begging for a job.
Second, prepare a report of what you've done in your two years as an AmeriCorps member. What was the status of the computer systems before you were there? Technical knowledge among the staff? In other words, tell the board what they'd get by investing in you. You need to convince the board what the value add of having a full time position is, as opposed to 30 hours a week. Whether you present it as what you add to the school, or what the school loses if they don't create the position, is up to you. Both approaches have strengths and weaknesses.
Note that the contractor is a challenge here. You might burn a bridge if the board does make it into a full time position, and you get the position as opposed to him/her. In small town Montana, that could make things interesting . . .
p.s. From your email address, I'm guessing you're in Bonner, MT. Having spent two years in Helena (one as an AmeriCorps*VISTA back before Katie was in her position, and Laura was the Tech Corps director, and the second as a state employee), good luck! It's beautiful, and Missoula is a wonderfully liberal city, but jobs, especially tech jobs, are definitely a challenge.
From my understanding, the campaign got the domain alias (http://www.myspace.com/barackobama), but not the actual content/community/friends of the page Anthony had built. The 17k or so on the current page is what the "official" campaign had built on their page. It also sounds as if MySpace will return the content/community/friends to Anthony if he desires, but w/o the barackobama alias.
While I understand the intent of this argument, who's going to draw the line? If we take your view point with regards to scientific papers, does that mean bloggers, reporters, etc should only be allowed to mention what's in the abstract? Is the conclusion verboten because it goes into more details? Is a meta-analysis where you compare the major finding with another major finding crossing the line?
As Asimov said, "There is a single light of science, and to brighten it anywhere is to brighten it everywhere." In my mind, in the realm of science, knowledge should be shared, especially considering the vast majority is funded with public dollars. Of course, even with journals having publishing policies that require published authors to make it so others can duplicate their experiments easily, this rarely seems to work in practice. (Here's a link to Nature's policy regarding availability of data and materials.) Yea for publish or perish and the ultra-competitive nature of funding . . .
Especially with regards to a scientific paper/article, showing a graph and a short blurb related to it isn't the main intent of the paper. Any researcher who's really going to utilize the material is going to need the full article, as it's neigh impossible to capture a whole scientific paper in a blurb.
A weak analogy here could be that you shouldn't reprint the punchline to a Peanut's comic strip as that would be the major point of the strip . . .
While I'm a fan of Kettlehouse's Bongwater and the liberal attitudes of Missoula, I'd argue that Blackfoot is the "best beer in the world." (Of course, it probably doesn't hurt that I used to live about 100 yards door-to-door from the tap room . . . )
Try to read the article before defending something - the call happened at 4:17 AM and was recorded on a machine.
From the original article, "They believed they'd found the culprit when they traced the phone number they thought was responsible to Webb" - which seems to imply that they used call ID.
This article from the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review mentions clearly that the call happened in the middle of the night, that a message was left, and there was some variation in the time of the calls logged:
The district placed the blame by matching Webb's call, recorded on his phone at 3:12 a.m. daylight-saving time, to the threat recorded by the school as having been received at 3:17 a.m. Eastern Standard Time -- but that was 4:17 daylight-saving time, or an hour after Webb's call, Andrews said.
Perhaps more interestingly, nine days after the event, the school district passed what seems to be this knee-jerk policy (as the actual bomb thread had a blocked caller ID), that states the district will no longer accept calls from those with blocked caller ID
Slashdot Mirror
The incentive for me is I can do other things. When I drive, I focus on driving and the radio/podcast/audio book. If someone, or something, else drives, I could read a real book, nap, do email, play games, whatever.
As others have mentioned, it also greatly reduces a huge point of failure in the whole driving thing . . . driver fatigue, human error, etc. No more opening the window in freezing temperatures and sipping on the 5th cup of gas station coffee to make it to your parents for the holiday . . .
Argh, correct link for the blink(1) Kickstarter - http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/thingm/blink1-the-usb-rgb-led
Purchase link: http://buy.thingm.com/blink1 (out of stock, was $30)
The BlinkStick mentioned in the original is $16
The Dream Cheeky was $10 (I think I paid 9 on a woot sale)
There was a kickstarter, blink(1) a little over a year ago that did the same thing - http://stackexchange.com/leagues/1/year/stackoverflow/2013-01-01/759517#759517 (and in a nicer package).
I wanted something similar (visual cues for meeting reminders; my "email" system is on a KVM with other "dev" systems). I ended up getting the Dream Cheeky 815 USB Webmail Notifier (http://www.dreamcheeky.com/webmail-notifier) - the thing is designed for email notifications with webmail, but there's an Apache License 2.0 driver and helper app (http://dreamcheekyusb.codeplex.com/), which worked fine to drive the thing - the little command line app that uses the driver had enough functionality (gradual on, color change, and blink) that I didn't need to write any real code.
A little macro scripting, and it was working fine with Outlook.
A little bigger that the other solutions, so maybe not great for a rack (though it's probably about 1U so it would work fine), but works nice sitting on my desk under my displays . . .
If we were using base 3, we'd have 3, 9, 27 (as these are the corresponding values for 10, 100, and 1000 - which would be 2, 4, and 8 in binary). Note that 3 in trinary would be 20 (which wouldn't exist in binary)
Maybe we're switching to base 6 ;)
Sounds like these controllers are even smarter than that. Sounds like it can download weather reports, be hooked to remote sensors, etc, and run in open and closed control loops with this data.
Now, I'm not sure how smart all these adaptive features are, but ideally, this would mean the remote management would be more for monitoring, than managing . . . sounds pretty slick, especially for large installations (think city's with lots of parks).
The direction you're going around the circle reverses, not the indexing of the numbers . . .
I guess I should have clarified that the pictures are largely tongue in cheek and featuring their staff and caricatures of actions being taken . . . sorry about that!
Enforcement is the key. In my experience, lots of places have no cell phone signs, but few enforce it. On the other hand, when I lived in Montana, there was this great little restaurant called the No Sweat Cafe.
Small place, with 30 seats or so, but kind of a hippy-ish joint. Everything prepared from scratch, large amounts of local and organic foods, and a no cell phone sign, accompanied by pictures of people with phones being removed from the store or phones being destroyed. In fact, the anti-cell culture is such that when I've been there with friends who've forgotten to mute or silence their phones, I feel slightly embarrassed.
The LA times had an article on this two months ago. The most interesting part of the article may be where the refer to a California study that found the average underground monthly average tank temp ranged from 64 to 83 degrees F. At 83 degrees F, that's about a 1.2% volumetric change from 60 degrees.
Is 1% worth a law suit? Depends on your perspective I guess . . .
It's a paradigm shift. Do you sort and organize files, or do you just use local search? gmail is the best example of this shift - gmail didn't even have folders originally, and relied upon tags and searching.
Desktop search tools are the extension of this model - don't worry about files, directory structures, etc. Just search instead.
Definitely a shift, and not one that I want to make, as I like the organization provided by hierarchical directory structures. That being said, I do have google desktop installed, and find myself using it occasionally to find files. I like the fact that it searches my web history as well. I do wish it would index my email (we use groupwise here, which afaik there isn't a plugin for).
I find it interesting that most of the responses to your post seem to suggest the US would stop/hinder other space elevator efforts, whereas I read your post to mean that it would be a repeat of the space race. In other words, the US would be spurred on by others technical achievements, and would invest the resources to accelerate its efforts, so that it would be the first nation to have a functional space elevator.
Context matters too. danah published this as a self proclaimed "blog essay." She's actually done lots of interesting research into social networks and youth, and has many published articles. Having read some of her other work, she can "play the game" and write with an academic voice, following standard formats, and citing as appropriate. Mainly since I've read that she's been an Intel fellow at MIT, interened for Google/Blogger, worked for V-Day, doing her PhD at Berkley after being heavily recruited/encouraged, etc, I'll bear with the fact that it's a blog essay, and not a "professional" paper.
She's also got some interesting view points - there's reasons why she doesn't capitalize i and her name. Some what socialistic, but it's a well reasoned decision, and it's a personal one she's chosen to make, and she seems intelligent enough to deal with the consequences (she'll keep her name in lowercase even for publication, where I'd imagine many may see her as pretentious for doing so, or imitating e.e. cummings or something else). She's even got it legally changed to lowercase.
Anyway, back to my original point - context matters, and in this case, this is a blog essay. Reading it, it seems apparent to me that she's clearly just exploring the ideas (constantly pointing out her bias), and hoping for some feedback. She knows this isn't going to be published in Nature or Science, and arguably some of the attitudes expressed throughout this thread could be extensions of her ideas about "class" and social networks (or in this case forums).
In any case, I understand your viewpoint, and respect your decision - but I appreciate the fact she's willing to write up her thoughts and ideas, so that others can read and ponder. Not everything I read has to be a scientific paper or suitable for publication in the NY Times, and blogs and similar venues provide a great tool to make information accessible to the masses. I think the other appeal to me is that a significant amount of "coherent, professional" work is highly filtered and processed - essays like the one being discussed work at the point when the idea hasn't been refined, when it's not ready for print publication, but is still something you want to think about . . .
I used to work in the prevention field for a state agency. It's interesting to see how slowly change comes around. The "gold standard" for this kind of data is the Youth Risk Beahvior Surveillance Survey (YRBSS), done every two years by the CDC. Many states also run their own prevention needs assessments.
While I was never directly involved with these surveys, my understanding was that there was a decent amount of statistical research put into them to try and get the most accurate data possible, so ideally your example of coke use among the impoverished would be thrown out.
Your description of DARE isn't really fair, as that could be any old school, health terrorism type approach (think of the "This is your brain, this is your brain on drugs" or aspects of the current Montana Meth Project). DAREs model focussed upon getting police into classrooms, as well as peer role models. Police departments liked it because it let them connect a bit more with the community.
DARE's an interesting program that got a lot of attention, but it's actual impact upon encouraging youth to make healthy decisions has no scientific standing. Hell, some of the studies actually showed that drug use went up after exposure to DARE. One could argue that there was some beneficial aspect, as it stressed to the prevention community that evaluation of programs is as vital as good program design.
My brother for a while (and maybe still?) was "signing" his credit card receipts with smiley faces (two dots and a smile). He had been doing this for months, and while I was visiting him in San Francisco over the Thanksgiving weekend, we went and grabbed some food at a little Chinese restaurant.
We were unlocking our bikes, this little Asian woman came running out with his receipt, pointing at the smiley face, and saying in broken English that that wasn't a signature. He fixed the signature, and we were on our way.
Obviously, he has no expectation of security from his signature on credit card transactions, but it was interesting to run into a vendor who actually did . . .
To be a bit more informative, it should read:
"Users will get their iPhone when they sign a contract including both voice and data plans."
This has the advantage of pointing out that data plans are required. I know I've been considering getting an iPhone, but once you add a data plan you're basically at $80+/month. Of course, that figure is estimated using the current voice and PDA data plans. Throw in another 20 bucks minimum if you want to tether w/o violating their terms of use.
Without having actually tried out the touchscreen and other features, it's difficult to say whether the iPhone is worth the premium price it will demand.
According to this post, Dell is stating that this was a mistake on there part, and they're working to resolve it. Looks like more of us should review Hanlon's razor . . .
To me, the real benefit of texting is when I don't want to talk to the person. There are plenty of times when what was supposed to be a 1-minute call turns into a 5-minute call . . .
Also, I'm sure if you were doing 200 texts a day, you'd become pretty proficient at it . . .
Actually, Navteq does send people out to drive the roads and key them . . .
I'd say shaming people is still a technique that's in fairly active use, whether intentionally or unintentionally.
Sex offender registries, and resultant websites mapping their residences would be an example.
"Scarlet letter" plates for DUI/DWIs seem to be gaining traction as well.
Granted, both sex offenders and DUI/DWIs are horrible crimes, but it does seem as if we're not giving people a fair chance at reintegrating into society . . .
I'm sure there are other examples out there . . .
A lot of people have posted about salary requirements and things. Please note that the original question states that he's currently an AmeriCorps member. For those who aren't familiar, AmeriCorps is a national service program where people commit to a term of service on a limited subsistence allowance. Most positions require 1700 hours for a year, and pay around 1000k/month, with the option of either a $1,200 cash stipend or a $4,725 education award upon successful completion of service.
Anyway, to get back to the original posters point about how to sell the school board on this proposition, there's a couple things I'd suggest. First, try to get a champion within the system, whether this be a board member, school principal, a group of teachers, etc. Having someone else advocate for your cause sends a stronger message than you begging for a job.
Second, prepare a report of what you've done in your two years as an AmeriCorps member. What was the status of the computer systems before you were there? Technical knowledge among the staff? In other words, tell the board what they'd get by investing in you. You need to convince the board what the value add of having a full time position is, as opposed to 30 hours a week. Whether you present it as what you add to the school, or what the school loses if they don't create the position, is up to you. Both approaches have strengths and weaknesses.
Note that the contractor is a challenge here. You might burn a bridge if the board does make it into a full time position, and you get the position as opposed to him/her. In small town Montana, that could make things interesting . . .
p.s. From your email address, I'm guessing you're in Bonner, MT. Having spent two years in Helena (one as an AmeriCorps*VISTA back before Katie was in her position, and Laura was the Tech Corps director, and the second as a state employee), good luck! It's beautiful, and Missoula is a wonderfully liberal city, but jobs, especially tech jobs, are definitely a challenge.
From my understanding, the campaign got the domain alias (http://www.myspace.com/barackobama), but not the actual content/community/friends of the page Anthony had built. The 17k or so on the current page is what the "official" campaign had built on their page. It also sounds as if MySpace will return the content/community/friends to Anthony if he desires, but w/o the barackobama alias.
While I understand the intent of this argument, who's going to draw the line? If we take your view point with regards to scientific papers, does that mean bloggers, reporters, etc should only be allowed to mention what's in the abstract? Is the conclusion verboten because it goes into more details? Is a meta-analysis where you compare the major finding with another major finding crossing the line?
As Asimov said, "There is a single light of science, and to brighten it anywhere is to brighten it everywhere." In my mind, in the realm of science, knowledge should be shared, especially considering the vast majority is funded with public dollars. Of course, even with journals having publishing policies that require published authors to make it so others can duplicate their experiments easily, this rarely seems to work in practice. (Here's a link to Nature's policy regarding availability of data and materials.) Yea for publish or perish and the ultra-competitive nature of funding . . .
Especially with regards to a scientific paper/article, showing a graph and a short blurb related to it isn't the main intent of the paper. Any researcher who's really going to utilize the material is going to need the full article, as it's neigh impossible to capture a whole scientific paper in a blurb.
A weak analogy here could be that you shouldn't reprint the punchline to a Peanut's comic strip as that would be the major point of the strip . . .
While I'm a fan of Kettlehouse's Bongwater and the liberal attitudes of Missoula, I'd argue that Blackfoot is the "best beer in the world." (Of course, it probably doesn't hurt that I used to live about 100 yards door-to-door from the tap room . . . )