Most text books have practice questions for each chapter, and some answers in the back. Why not just work through some of those on your own? Math is the kind of subject that you can only learn by doing problems, so I don't think there's any shortcuts. But I suppose if you work on problems, it's nice to have a teacher to help if you get stuck, but perhaps a reasonable substitute would be forums.
it is now common opinion that the majority of US citizens lead carefree hedonistic life. And it's nobody's fault but their own.
The data I've seen indicates that American school children don't work as hard as their counterparts in other industrialized countries (in terms of the number of hours per year spent in school), but American workers do work more days/year because most of us aren't given 4 wk vacations like all Europeans.
Knowledge is free, education is not. Knowledge is needed at most jobs, education in all honesty is not. I think its time for society to realize this.
I totally agree. I've heard lots of people tell me, and I'm becoming convinced, that a traditional college education is simply not the right choice for many people. Although US high schools suck, if they didn't find the initiative to learn something there, why should the public front the money for a few more years of irresponsibility? Chances are pretty good that they'll go just because they can get a loan and all their friends are going, and thus merely delay the inevitability of getting a job they don't need a college degree for.
An interesting anecdote. When I was taking the senior year undergrad class for my major, the professor gave hard tests. After the second test, he basically told us that those who got below a certain score were probably in the wrong major. Students complained and the professor had to apologize later, but I think he had a good point... the department had financial incentives to get as many butts in seats as they could, which in the long run probably hurt some of them.
On the other hand, if you're studying something that's actually valuable for the economy and you get good grades, I've found that funds tend to become available...
Logically the only way this can be true is if you think slower than you type, in which case, sorry, you may not be the best software engineer out there.
It looks like you didn't take the time to think through your logic before you jumped to this conclusion!
relax. you always need to make a few simplifications/approximations in order to do a back-of-the-envelope calculation...
after reading this summary, my secret hope is that the story can be used as precedent for the US. you kid yourself if you think that americans really care what happens in mexico...
If they want to raise the price, then so be it, and don't waste my time with arguments about why fees are "justified". I'll decide what I'm willing to buy at the new prices.
But why raise the price of the ipod and not the music?
It is natural to hypothesize that other types of games will have a similar impact, but until that is tested and confirmed across a spectrum of puzzles, you can't safely generalize that.
No, I'd hypothesize pretty much the same as what the article stated, that there's something more or less special about Tetris... It's a puzzle, so it has a thinking component, but it's also real time so you're rewarded for solving that puzzle over and over as fast as possible. I know my mind works in two modes: one when I'm solving problems alone, another when I'm in a testing situation (e.g. school, interviews, etc), so there is a difference when you're trying to do things as quickly as possible.
I'm just trying to explain the economics, as I understand it, which is simply to point out that a linear curve *can not* beat an exponential curve!!! Fine, add whatever fixed costs are necessary to properly dispose of the excess trash generated, and my point still stands.
Contrary to popular believe its always been the case that tools and machines were made just good enough.
The definition of "just good enough" depends almost entirely on the cost to manufacturer any given device.
Well, ok, but I don't think you've identified the driving force, because the real question is:
When is the obsolescence date of the device you're thinking of purchasing?
If a better/cheaper device will be on sale next year, then you're not going to pay as much for what you can get today. On the other hand, if the product you buy won't become obsolete for another decade, then you might as well pay the extra money to get good quality. Technology improves on an exponential scale. To illustrate my point: why buy a laptop now that will cost 3000$ and keep it for 3 years, instead of buying a 1000$ laptop every year for 3 years? I'll get a better deal with the cheaper laptops!
"let's see if we can get dumb ideas paid for if we call 'em green".
Look... they were given $100,000, which is a TINY amount of money when it comes down to it. The US gov't can cough up $trillions for wars with highly uncertain energy related benefits. Compared to that, these guys have been given a TEENSY WEENSY amount of money. It's like giving your kid brother 2 pennies to make your bed for you. Chances are, he won't do it, but the cost was essentially zero!
We agree that you can't compare tax rates directly, but I also think it's a mistake to compare two countries such as the US and Sweden like this, although you've provided a good start.
One reason is because the US has far more expenditures than Sweden. For example, the US pays 4.06% of it's GDP vs 1.5% for Sweden. And yes, friendly countries spend less *because* the US spends more.
As another example, illustrating the difficulty in establishing fair comparisons, is that although perhaps most Swedish colleges cost less than most American ones, you might not be comparing equivalent quality. American universities tend to be ranked quite well, with (allegedly) 17 out of the top 20, whereas Sweden's best is ranked at #86. I went to a public American university (ranked #28 on that list), and paid only a few thousand dollars (not including room+board) and I finished debt free, far less than your 50k$ lower bound estimate. My grad school is ranked higher, and they paid me ~25k$/yr, because there's plenty of money in the US for basic research.
Furthermore, several US states/regions are really struggling, for various reasons, and drag the over all American averages down. A better comparison would be to compare individual US states vs Sweden. Maybe the best comparison would be Sweden vs "New Sweden", aka Minnesota. But this is already off topic, so I won't bother.:-)
This story is just like Biden revealing the secret bunker. The gov't needs to do a better job keeping secret things which need to be secret. You can't blame the inspector (e.g. P2P) for pointing out holes in your security. I want the First Family to be safe, but I'm unwilling to compromise my liberties to guarantee this (not that this is the proposed solution; I'm just saying).
At least flaws like these in security are being discovered during "peace" time.
on the other hand.... perhaps a better question is whether it's a good idea to get a kindle, ASSUMING you already have a laptop. which is, i think, a quite likely scenario.
so are the conveniences of a kindle worth 500$ to me? my answer is no.
1) I have my own way of sorting & storing.pdf of academic papers on my laptop. 2) My laptop already does everything i need, including markup, searching, cross-linking to the internet, VPN to my school so I can access more papers. 3) All the tools I like to have (like energy unit converters) are easy access on my laptop, so if I'm reading a paper, I can quickly convert to my preferred units. 4) It doesn't bother me to read on a laptop screen (macbook bought last year), although i don't typically read the entire thing. 5) I don't need to read in random places or from random angles. Any places I might go, e.g. coffee shops, my laptop is not an inconvenience. They'll have an outlet for me to plug in, + wifi + coffee. 6) I spend just about as much time searching for more papers online as I do actually reading them...
so a kindle feels like a step down in terms of capability, that it doesn't make up for in convenience.
at some price point, or in some possible life circumstances, maybe the balance would change, but for me right now, I'm not going to buy one.
Overall, the proposal has a lot of merit and I'm hoping the rest of the nation can benefit from California's efforts here. It would be good to have a state like California to lead this effort, and then allow other districts in other states be able to leverage what they do.
Typically, I'd agree with you. However, California's budget crisis is ridiculous right now, and I don't think that experimenting with untested methods is a good idea for us. Experiments tend to have budget overruns. California needs to spend it's effort trying to figure out how to get it's overpaid, deadweight, (and sometimes criminal) teachers out of the system. Maybe in the future.
Actually, I think the ball is in your court. Letting local conscientious districts work out the details is a better way to get started. In general, I like to see good ideas & practices trickle upwards in American government, from grassroots to the federal level, rather than the other way. Yes it takes longer, but you're far more likely to get it right the first time.
11) Landline is cheap, so why not keep it as a backup? 12) DSL runs through landlines 13) Other services, such as some Life Line direct-to-fire-department run through landlines. 14) People might figure out something useful for landlines to do that we haven't thought of yet.
Yes, the US has its problems, but I trust American commitment to free speech and non-bureaucratic efficiency far more than the UN's ability to administer something as important as this. The UN lost a lot of my respect when Ahmadinejad gamed the system to give the anti-racism speech. I have no confidence that the UN can't be manipulated in other ways since there's no obvious way to keep it accountable, whereas if the US impinges on free speech we can sue it.
I agree with your points, and I think that online poker should be legal. I'd even go a step further in saying that I'm not worried about children becoming addicted, since they're already addicted to everything else (sugar, WoW, TV, etc). Addictions are a concern because by definition they represent an opportunity cost to the rest of their lives. Poker puts that cost in direct monetary terms, whereby I think people could potentially learn their lesson early, when they're more accepting of correction. Furthermore, poker is educational in that you can learn to beat your competition using math, a lesson I wish more people were receptive to. It's no different than any other kind of game which has a buy-in for competitions.
On the other hand, for the very reason poker doesn't bother me, other kinds of gambling do concern me on a moral level. For almost every game where you're playing against the house, you're guaranteed to lose. These types of games are typically rigged so that your losing margins are small, but on average, you're paying a lot of money to push that button or pull that lever. By telling people "today you might get lucky", these games teach people to unlearn any math they've learned, and to ignore any wisdom someone might tell them. That is, these games train people to be careless.
remember that Linux came along as a free alternative to challenge the established OS, with mixed success. now, we have a non-free alternative coming along to challenge Latex (e.g. TexShop). Somehow it seems the odds of success are marginal.
Here's what Tex/Latex have going for them, as viewed by a grad student currently writing his thesis, like myself:
* Knuth designed Tex to be more than just words on paper, he designed formulas to help make your documents beautiful. I think he's getting it right, which is why his version numbers are converging to pi.
* Part of the reason is that Latex is not just about formulas. It's also about styles, lists, bibliography, cross referencing within your doc, etc, which WYSIWYG has not been able to get right so far, and for the needs of power-users, I suspect it never will. I use both, and I still struggle to get Word lists to do what I want.
* User experience. Now that I've spent time on the Tex learning curve, and I can typically get it to do what I want, why would I want to get on another learning curve?
* Free. With software like TexShop, I already have all I want, in a great package.
i went in for a sleep apnea test a couple years ago based on a hunch my mom had. they wired me up and put me to bed. when i woke up, they showed me all their reports about how my sleep apnea index was off the charts. they gave me a cpap machine (charged to my insurance) and off i went, and i plugged in every night for maybe a year or two.
but eventually i stopped. why? it just seemed like it was more hassle than it was worth. it's not that i doubt what the doctors saw in the report, and nor do I doubt that sleep apnea is a serious condition that some people have... it's that i began to doubt it was as serious as they said it was for me. they do, after all, have incentive to make a big deal about it, in just the same way as the news media keeps itself in business. and people typically go along with it, partly because of the placebo effect.
i'd never heard of "restless leg syndrome" before now, and i have no comment on the diagnosis that you received. but i do not believe that just because you can identify, name, measure, and write a prescription, that it's necessarily serious.
Slashdot Mirror
Most text books have practice questions for each chapter, and some answers in the back. Why not just work through some of those on your own? Math is the kind of subject that you can only learn by doing problems, so I don't think there's any shortcuts. But I suppose if you work on problems, it's nice to have a teacher to help if you get stuck, but perhaps a reasonable substitute would be forums.
it is now common opinion that the majority of US citizens lead carefree hedonistic life. And it's nobody's fault but their own.
The data I've seen indicates that American school children don't work as hard as their counterparts in other industrialized countries (in terms of the number of hours per year spent in school), but American workers do work more days/year because most of us aren't given 4 wk vacations like all Europeans.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_statutory_minimum_employment_leave_by_country
and at any rate, Slashdotters are a poor statistical sample!
Knowledge is free, education is not. Knowledge is needed at most jobs, education in all honesty is not. I think its time for society to realize this.
I totally agree. I've heard lots of people tell me, and I'm becoming convinced, that a traditional college education is simply not the right choice for many people. Although US high schools suck, if they didn't find the initiative to learn something there, why should the public front the money for a few more years of irresponsibility? Chances are pretty good that they'll go just because they can get a loan and all their friends are going, and thus merely delay the inevitability of getting a job they don't need a college degree for.
An interesting anecdote. When I was taking the senior year undergrad class for my major, the professor gave hard tests. After the second test, he basically told us that those who got below a certain score were probably in the wrong major. Students complained and the professor had to apologize later, but I think he had a good point... the department had financial incentives to get as many butts in seats as they could, which in the long run probably hurt some of them.
On the other hand, if you're studying something that's actually valuable for the economy and you get good grades, I've found that funds tend to become available...
Since apparently the definition of a supercomputer is a machine capable of 1 gigaflop, SGI was scooped by Apple 10 years ago!
Logically the only way this can be true is if you think slower than you type, in which case, sorry, you may not be the best software engineer out there.
It looks like you didn't take the time to think through your logic before you jumped to this conclusion!
relax. you always need to make a few simplifications/approximations in order to do a back-of-the-envelope calculation...
after reading this summary, my secret hope is that the story can be used as precedent for the US. you kid yourself if you think that americans really care what happens in mexico...
for websites, it's super easy to see who's visited, with many online services providing this.
why isn't there a way to attach a counter to your inbox (i'm looking at gmail)? could it be embedded in a custom theme?
If they want to raise the price, then so be it, and don't waste my time with arguments about why fees are "justified". I'll decide what I'm willing to buy at the new prices.
But why raise the price of the ipod and not the music?
It is natural to hypothesize that other types of games will have a similar impact, but until that is tested and confirmed across a spectrum of puzzles, you can't safely generalize that.
No, I'd hypothesize pretty much the same as what the article stated, that there's something more or less special about Tetris... It's a puzzle, so it has a thinking component, but it's also real time so you're rewarded for solving that puzzle over and over as fast as possible. I know my mind works in two modes: one when I'm solving problems alone, another when I'm in a testing situation (e.g. school, interviews, etc), so there is a difference when you're trying to do things as quickly as possible.
I'm just trying to explain the economics, as I understand it, which is simply to point out that a linear curve *can not* beat an exponential curve!!! Fine, add whatever fixed costs are necessary to properly dispose of the excess trash generated, and my point still stands.
Contrary to popular believe its always been the case that tools and machines were made just good enough.
The definition of "just good enough" depends almost entirely on the cost to manufacturer any given device.
Well, ok, but I don't think you've identified the driving force, because the real question is:
When is the obsolescence date of the device you're thinking of purchasing?
If a better/cheaper device will be on sale next year, then you're not going to pay as much for what you can get today. On the other hand, if the product you buy won't become obsolete for another decade, then you might as well pay the extra money to get good quality. Technology improves on an exponential scale. To illustrate my point: why buy a laptop now that will cost 3000$ and keep it for 3 years, instead of buying a 1000$ laptop every year for 3 years? I'll get a better deal with the cheaper laptops!
"let's see if we can get dumb ideas paid for if we call 'em green".
Look... they were given $100,000, which is a TINY amount of money when it comes down to it. The US gov't can cough up $trillions for wars with highly uncertain energy related benefits. Compared to that, these guys have been given a TEENSY WEENSY amount of money. It's like giving your kid brother 2 pennies to make your bed for you. Chances are, he won't do it, but the cost was essentially zero!
Exactly.
1) they release movies with pretty graphics and no story.
2) then they release movies with graphics AND story.
=> profit
If you *reverse* the order, then they only make half the profit because nobody would pay to see movies of type #1 if type #2 are available!
We agree that you can't compare tax rates directly, but I also think it's a mistake to compare two countries such as the US and Sweden like this, although you've provided a good start.
One reason is because the US has far more expenditures than Sweden. For example, the US pays 4.06% of it's GDP vs 1.5% for Sweden. And yes, friendly countries spend less *because* the US spends more.
As another example, illustrating the difficulty in establishing fair comparisons, is that although perhaps most Swedish colleges cost less than most American ones, you might not be comparing equivalent quality. American universities tend to be ranked quite well, with (allegedly) 17 out of the top 20, whereas Sweden's best is ranked at #86. I went to a public American university (ranked #28 on that list), and paid only a few thousand dollars (not including room+board) and I finished debt free, far less than your 50k$ lower bound estimate. My grad school is ranked higher, and they paid me ~25k$/yr, because there's plenty of money in the US for basic research.
Furthermore, several US states/regions are really struggling, for various reasons, and drag the over all American averages down. A better comparison would be to compare individual US states vs Sweden. Maybe the best comparison would be Sweden vs "New Sweden", aka Minnesota. But this is already off topic, so I won't bother. :-)
This story is just like Biden revealing the secret bunker. The gov't needs to do a better job keeping secret things which need to be secret. You can't blame the inspector (e.g. P2P) for pointing out holes in your security. I want the First Family to be safe, but I'm unwilling to compromise my liberties to guarantee this (not that this is the proposed solution; I'm just saying).
At least flaws like these in security are being discovered during "peace" time.
including Google.
on the other hand.... perhaps a better question is whether it's a good idea to get a kindle, ASSUMING you already have a laptop. which is, i think, a quite likely scenario.
so are the conveniences of a kindle worth 500$ to me? my answer is no.
1) I have my own way of sorting & storing .pdf of academic papers on my laptop.
2) My laptop already does everything i need, including markup, searching, cross-linking to the internet, VPN to my school so I can access more papers.
3) All the tools I like to have (like energy unit converters) are easy access on my laptop, so if I'm reading a paper, I can quickly convert to my preferred units.
4) It doesn't bother me to read on a laptop screen (macbook bought last year), although i don't typically read the entire thing.
5) I don't need to read in random places or from random angles. Any places I might go, e.g. coffee shops, my laptop is not an inconvenience. They'll have an outlet for me to plug in, + wifi + coffee.
6) I spend just about as much time searching for more papers online as I do actually reading them...
so a kindle feels like a step down in terms of capability, that it doesn't make up for in convenience.
at some price point, or in some possible life circumstances, maybe the balance would change, but for me right now, I'm not going to buy one.
Overall, the proposal has a lot of merit and I'm hoping the rest of the nation can benefit from California's efforts here. It would be good to have a state like California to lead this effort, and then allow other districts in other states be able to leverage what they do.
Typically, I'd agree with you. However, California's budget crisis is ridiculous right now, and I don't think that experimenting with untested methods is a good idea for us. Experiments tend to have budget overruns. California needs to spend it's effort trying to figure out how to get it's overpaid, deadweight, (and sometimes criminal) teachers out of the system. Maybe in the future.
Actually, I think the ball is in your court. Letting local conscientious districts work out the details is a better way to get started. In general, I like to see good ideas & practices trickle upwards in American government, from grassroots to the federal level, rather than the other way. Yes it takes longer, but you're far more likely to get it right the first time.
11) Landline is cheap, so why not keep it as a backup?
12) DSL runs through landlines
13) Other services, such as some Life Line direct-to-fire-department run through landlines.
14) People might figure out something useful for landlines to do that we haven't thought of yet.
We all know that xenu's followers will simply do their edits from home, from now on.
I'm not so sure. My guess is they behave at least slightly differently when nobody's looking over their shoulders.
So... you say the US has more commitment than the UN to free speech, because the UN let someone give a speech, um, freely?
Of course .
good point. like all good americans, i don't trust the UN *or* the US gov't. my key point is that the US gov't is sued when it screws up.
Yes, the US has its problems, but I trust American commitment to free speech and non-bureaucratic efficiency far more than the UN's ability to administer something as important as this. The UN lost a lot of my respect when Ahmadinejad gamed the system to give the anti-racism speech. I have no confidence that the UN can't be manipulated in other ways since there's no obvious way to keep it accountable, whereas if the US impinges on free speech we can sue it.
I agree with your points, and I think that online poker should be legal. I'd even go a step further in saying that I'm not worried about children becoming addicted, since they're already addicted to everything else (sugar, WoW, TV, etc). Addictions are a concern because by definition they represent an opportunity cost to the rest of their lives. Poker puts that cost in direct monetary terms, whereby I think people could potentially learn their lesson early, when they're more accepting of correction. Furthermore, poker is educational in that you can learn to beat your competition using math, a lesson I wish more people were receptive to. It's no different than any other kind of game which has a buy-in for competitions.
On the other hand, for the very reason poker doesn't bother me, other kinds of gambling do concern me on a moral level. For almost every game where you're playing against the house, you're guaranteed to lose. These types of games are typically rigged so that your losing margins are small, but on average, you're paying a lot of money to push that button or pull that lever. By telling people "today you might get lucky", these games teach people to unlearn any math they've learned, and to ignore any wisdom someone might tell them. That is, these games train people to be careless.
And that is immoral.
Something usually free is already widely used.
remember that Linux came along as a free alternative to challenge the established OS, with mixed success. now, we have a non-free alternative coming along to challenge Latex (e.g. TexShop). Somehow it seems the odds of success are marginal.
Here's what Tex/Latex have going for them, as viewed by a grad student currently writing his thesis, like myself:
* Knuth designed Tex to be more than just words on paper, he designed formulas to help make your documents beautiful. I think he's getting it right, which is why his version numbers are converging to pi.
* Part of the reason is that Latex is not just about formulas. It's also about styles, lists, bibliography, cross referencing within your doc, etc, which WYSIWYG has not been able to get right so far, and for the needs of power-users, I suspect it never will. I use both, and I still struggle to get Word lists to do what I want.
* User experience. Now that I've spent time on the Tex learning curve, and I can typically get it to do what I want, why would I want to get on another learning curve?
* Free. With software like TexShop, I already have all I want, in a great package.
here's my anecdote.
i went in for a sleep apnea test a couple years ago based on a hunch my mom had. they wired me up and put me to bed. when i woke up, they showed me all their reports about how my sleep apnea index was off the charts. they gave me a cpap machine (charged to my insurance) and off i went, and i plugged in every night for maybe a year or two.
but eventually i stopped. why? it just seemed like it was more hassle than it was worth. it's not that i doubt what the doctors saw in the report, and nor do I doubt that sleep apnea is a serious condition that some people have... it's that i began to doubt it was as serious as they said it was for me. they do, after all, have incentive to make a big deal about it, in just the same way as the news media keeps itself in business. and people typically go along with it, partly because of the placebo effect.
i'd never heard of "restless leg syndrome" before now, and i have no comment on the diagnosis that you received. but i do not believe that just because you can identify, name, measure, and write a prescription, that it's necessarily serious.