I don't understand your point here. Are you saying it's more efficient for the professor to give the same lecture every term for years at a time, writing the same thing on the board over and over again? That they can't spend an afternoon with Inkscape and a word processor or a pad of paper and a scanner? Or that I'm somehow ignorant for being an autodidact?
I think your idea of "instruction" is vastly different than what happens at most universities. You get crammed into a class of 100 or so students and act as a passive receptacle for somewhere between 1 and 3 hours.
Later on you ask your friends for clarification, if they don't know, you ask the course newsgroup or go to office hours. THIS is where the real instruction happens.
The dude standing in front of the blackboard is just another medium, it is more effective for some than others. If this medium is what you think education is, I pity you.
Alright, so be honest here. How many times during lectures do you hint at what will be on the exam? How much emphasis do you put on the material that will be on the exam in terms of lecture hours spent talking about it?
And how much time do you spend teaching things that aren't on the exam?
Someone studying from the book won't know what you'll be measuring, they will get a broad and shallow education on the material vs the narrow and deep understanding that exams typically test for. They didn't necessarily learn less, but the only metric you're using will show otherwise.
I graduated 3 years ago, but it bothered me immensely when professors would write things on the board that weren't duplicated in the course notes. It was just a lazy way to enforce attendance. I always learned better out of books than by listening to someone, so sitting around in class just to transcribe felt like a waste of time.
So this whole issue of not having diagrams or about which device to use seems like a manufactured problem. Putting a PDF on the course website with all the diagrams and text would render it moot.
I don't care about the BBC, I care about the inflammatory tone of the summary. CCTV is a network consisting of 19 channels, a small fraction is news that is favourable to the Chinese government but most of it is typical TV crap like talk shows, dramas, and cartoons.
Saying that delivering CCTV over iPhone is a new way to project political views or some form of indoctrination is about as accurate as doing a find/replace of CCTV for BBC in the summary. It is needlessly alarmist, it's a troll written by someone who has never watched TV in China.
I wish more networks would think about making their content available on the iPhone, state-sponsored or not. It's quite convenient. But if someone has an issue with CCTV's content or the lack of free speech in China, they should write accurately about that and not what medium it is delivered over.
"The UK's Heritage Minister has praised the growth of the iPlayer application from state broadcaster BBC as the Trust looks for new ways to project its political views. The free flash video streaming, one of a growing number from British state-owned news outlets, has gained 500,000 users in the month or so since it went online and is adding 2,000 new users each day, the BBC Trust said in a statement on its Web site. The iPlayer app has shown 'favorable performance' and proven especially popular during broadcasts of major events, such as a recent royal funeral, the statement said."
But I guess "Chinese government streams television network to iPhones" wouldn't be nearly as fetching.
Unlike a lot of the posters here, I think at that age, it's more important to show students why math is important than the concepts used by upper year college students. When I started my Math/CS undergrad, the department pretty much dismissed everything I was taught in high school and started from first principles. Even things I taught myself at that time outside of school like computer graphics turned out to be irrelevant.
In relation to statistics, I think they're vastly under taught and under appreciated in the high school curriculum. As much as engineers and scientists like to scoff at the lax rigor that's employed sometimes, statistics are essential to the social sciences. We need good psychologists, good economists, good politicians, and insightful voters, and statistics is how we get there.
Also, every time some USian I work with spits out that asinine Mark Twain quote about statistic or says "14% of all people can tell you they're made up", I just want to hit them. It seems like rhetoric has totally destroyed data in this country's discourse.
Anyways, the most interesting book I've read when considering this aspect is Freaknomics. It shows how data analysis can be used to explain everyday phenomena in society in laymen's terms. It's pulp, but it's interesting. There might also be others with a similar bent.
I agree with you completely about GTA 4. The worst part is that when you're driving back to a mission you've done twice before with an NPC, he'll say something along the lines of "Let's just listen to the radio" instead of repeating the mission dialogue again.
This is insane. It's an acknowledgement from Rockstar that they know there's tedium in having to repeat the same motions over and over again but they do nothing about it.
Errr ya, except for the part where that controller used the motion of your eyebrows instead of EEG, it's a very similar idea, if by similar you mean festering with the scent of an unmatched chromosome...
Re:Can we get HD early?
on
HD Wii By 2011?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I did indeed buy one. The biggest problem I have with the image is the crazy amount of staircasing all over the place. I actually turned it back to 480i because the deinterlacer on my Bravia produces a smoother image overall even if there's less detail (my guess is that it averages the scan fields at a higher resolution). It also eliminates the lame 16bit alpha dithering that some games have.
I don't mind the Wii, but one thing that really bugs me is that it looks like shit on my 46" LCD. I would gladly pay extra to get a Wii that renders the same 3D scenes at 720p.
It's not totally far out, people upgraded their GameBoy Advance to the SP and their Nintendo DS to the redesign, but I doubt enough people have large HDTVs to make it a viable market before 2011.
All the best gear and consequent social esteem comes from random drops. Because the drops are random, your best strategy is to spend as much time as possible killing as many things as you can to increase your chances of getting rewarded. Since these drops give social esteem, for a lot of people the payoff is high enough to be worth a significant investment in time.
It's basically the same kind of thing that causes people to spend hours in front of slot machines.
I recently threw together a prototype for my company using OpenCV. That OpenCV exists for this sort of thing is a godsend. One of our interns recently completed a UI research project that also relied on OpenCV.
But one of the problems I had while doing it was that whenever I searched for more documentation about the algorithms I was trying to write, all I could find where either papers describing how some researcher's system was better than mine, or some magic MATLAB code that worked on a small set of test images. There were no solid implementations written in C for any of these systems.
I would love to dick around for weeks implementing all these research papers and then evaluating their results and real world performance, but I don't think my boss or my company's shareholders would enjoy that. Like every company, resources are limited for something that isn't making money.
With that said, the best way to further AI research, particularly in the highly marketable fields of machine learning and computer vision (but probably others as well), is to add implementations of cutting edge research to existing BSD-licensed libraries like OpenCV for companies to evaluate. If products that use that research become profitable, private companies are likely to throw a lot more money and researchers at the problem, all competing to one-up the other.
If you think I'm being unrealistic, you should check out the realtime face detection that recent Cannon cameras use for autofocus. Once upon a time, object recognition was considered a cutting edge AI problem.
Maybe it's the product of growing up under the red scare, but between the anti-Vietnam movement, the war on drugs, "Family Values", the war on terrorism, and the bare minimum of environmental laws/cheap gas/tax breaks for SUVs, the boomers' voting record will probably cause them to be remembered as the most cowardly and coddled generation in history.
What I don't understand is why did MS release one big new OS kernel to every market at once instead of having a slower introduction? With NT5, they released Win2000 and targeted it mainly to business and power users. This gave time for the drivers of more exotic sound and graphics hardware to mature.
When WinXP came out with the NT5.1 kernel 2 years later, there was a plethora of stable drivers already in the market from any company that mattered.
They could have done the same thing with Vista by hyping the new security and search features early on and then releasing a consumer version with Aero Glass enabled by default and all the other whiz bang features.
I agree that Macs have pretty weak video cards but I think the same could be said about most mainstream PCs. Only hardcore gamers are willing to significantly invest in a more expensive card. So while some PC games tend to cater to this market and these products definitely look impressive, it's the more average looking titles like WoW and The Sims that bring in lots of revenue because everyone can run them.
It seems like now that the average mac finally has an architecture that can play some of their more demanding games, EA thinks that these titles will also be profitable.
But I agree with you in that as long as there isn't a mainstream model with a replaceable video card or at least a really good video card, the Mac won't be a gaming platform of choice, just a gaming platform.
I had a NetMD player a couple years ago and I don't think the article goes into enough detail about just how bad SonicStage really is. The interface was some crazy non-standard flash thing that ran really slow, it crashed all the time, and you had to do some weird check-in thing that would only let you burn an mp3 to 3 disks before you had to "check out" one of the copies by removing it for the disk.
It's seriously one of the worst pieces of software I've ever used. I ended up creating 1GB audio cd images of my mp3s and then ripping them using a less offensive piece of Sony software. But eventually, it got to the point that I just stopped making new disks and got tired of the ones I had. The NetMD player ended up in a drawer for many months until I gave it away and bought a Rio Karma.
I read a few reviews before purchasing but I figured the software couldn't be THAT bad. I was wrong. The battery life and the price of media were amazing though and it was a nice little piece of hardware for the $130 I paid.
As an aside, the player skipped whenever I kept it in my shorts pocket, it wasn't as bulletproof as I thought it would be from reading reviews. It skipped way more than my Karma but the Karma's harddrive eventually died so I maybe I unwittingly vibrate like a paintshaker or something.
One of the defining characteristics of a psychopath is a muted fear response to many situations. Is it possible that, without some instinctive fear response created by negative social situations throughout a lifetime, a psychopath is much more outgoing than most in the same way that these mice who can't remember past social stigmas are?
The HUD in Metroid Prime had a lot of useless decoration but it also added a lot to the experience.
Similarly, The Prince is always in the bottom right corner of the screen in Katamari Damacy. He's a swell looking little fellow and fun to watch even if he doesn't convey much information to the player. I think it adds a lot to the aesthetics of the game.
This may sound foreign to a lot of nerds, but most people like to use things that look nice. The interface of a game is no exception, a neat looking HUD will improve the game as long as it's not intrusive.
I find the worst is not being able to see people's second name field. A lot of people I know use it to organize where they're going that night or to state what has happened to them recently and I'm left in the dark because I have a Mac.
"Where's this person?" "Oh, they're out of town for the weekend, didn't you read their msn name?"
That extra name field is really important for a program that's meant to communicate with your friends. Even Microsoft's Mac client doesn't support it which is incredibly annoying.
I think CSI: Miami is total soccermom porn. The 40-something raspy detective drives around Miami in a hummer killing alligators and nogoodniks while arresting ethnic people. I think a large portion of their audience just might be retarded in just the right ways to take it seriously to some extent.
Slashdot Mirror
Didn't Autodesk Toxik 2008 already do HDR compositing with RED cameras?
Not only that, didn't they sell it to real live customers?
This is not the first, it's not even notable, frankly
You can wrap nearly any codec's stream in DRM as long as the container supports it. So DRM has nothing to do with the issue at hand.
Do not conflate H.264 with DRM.
Why should you care if people attend?
I don't understand your point here. Are you saying it's more efficient for the professor to give the same lecture every term for years at a time, writing the same thing on the board over and over again? That they can't spend an afternoon with Inkscape and a word processor or a pad of paper and a scanner? Or that I'm somehow ignorant for being an autodidact?
I think your idea of "instruction" is vastly different than what happens at most universities. You get crammed into a class of 100 or so students and act as a passive receptacle for somewhere between 1 and 3 hours.
Later on you ask your friends for clarification, if they don't know, you ask the course newsgroup or go to office hours. THIS is where the real instruction happens.
The dude standing in front of the blackboard is just another medium, it is more effective for some than others. If this medium is what you think education is, I pity you.
Alright, so be honest here. How many times during lectures do you hint at what will be on the exam? How much emphasis do you put on the material that will be on the exam in terms of lecture hours spent talking about it?
And how much time do you spend teaching things that aren't on the exam?
Someone studying from the book won't know what you'll be measuring, they will get a broad and shallow education on the material vs the narrow and deep understanding that exams typically test for. They didn't necessarily learn less, but the only metric you're using will show otherwise.
I graduated 3 years ago, but it bothered me immensely when professors would write things on the board that weren't duplicated in the course notes. It was just a lazy way to enforce attendance. I always learned better out of books than by listening to someone, so sitting around in class just to transcribe felt like a waste of time.
So this whole issue of not having diagrams or about which device to use seems like a manufactured problem. Putting a PDF on the course website with all the diagrams and text would render it moot.
I don't care about the BBC, I care about the inflammatory tone of the summary. CCTV is a network consisting of 19 channels, a small fraction is news that is favourable to the Chinese government but most of it is typical TV crap like talk shows, dramas, and cartoons.
Saying that delivering CCTV over iPhone is a new way to project political views or some form of indoctrination is about as accurate as doing a find/replace of CCTV for BBC in the summary. It is needlessly alarmist, it's a troll written by someone who has never watched TV in China.
I wish more networks would think about making their content available on the iPhone, state-sponsored or not. It's quite convenient. But if someone has an issue with CCTV's content or the lack of free speech in China, they should write accurately about that and not what medium it is delivered over.
"The UK's Heritage Minister has praised the growth of the iPlayer application from state broadcaster BBC as the Trust looks for new ways to project its political views. The free flash video streaming, one of a growing number from British state-owned news outlets, has gained 500,000 users in the month or so since it went online and is adding 2,000 new users each day, the BBC Trust said in a statement on its Web site. The iPlayer app has shown 'favorable performance' and proven especially popular during broadcasts of major events, such as a recent royal funeral, the statement said."
But I guess "Chinese government streams television network to iPhones" wouldn't be nearly as fetching.
Unlike a lot of the posters here, I think at that age, it's more important to show students why math is important than the concepts used by upper year college students. When I started my Math/CS undergrad, the department pretty much dismissed everything I was taught in high school and started from first principles. Even things I taught myself at that time outside of school like computer graphics turned out to be irrelevant.
In relation to statistics, I think they're vastly under taught and under appreciated in the high school curriculum. As much as engineers and scientists like to scoff at the lax rigor that's employed sometimes, statistics are essential to the social sciences. We need good psychologists, good economists, good politicians, and insightful voters, and statistics is how we get there.
Also, every time some USian I work with spits out that asinine Mark Twain quote about statistic or says "14% of all people can tell you they're made up", I just want to hit them. It seems like rhetoric has totally destroyed data in this country's discourse.
Anyways, the most interesting book I've read when considering this aspect is Freaknomics. It shows how data analysis can be used to explain everyday phenomena in society in laymen's terms. It's pulp, but it's interesting. There might also be others with a similar bent.
Well thank god the story tag is still there. Otherwise how would I ever know?!
I agree with you completely about GTA 4. The worst part is that when you're driving back to a mission you've done twice before with an NPC, he'll say something along the lines of "Let's just listen to the radio" instead of repeating the mission dialogue again.
This is insane. It's an acknowledgement from Rockstar that they know there's tedium in having to repeat the same motions over and over again but they do nothing about it.
Errr ya, except for the part where that controller used the motion of your eyebrows instead of EEG, it's a very similar idea, if by similar you mean festering with the scent of an unmatched chromosome...
I did indeed buy one. The biggest problem I have with the image is the crazy amount of staircasing all over the place. I actually turned it back to 480i because the deinterlacer on my Bravia produces a smoother image overall even if there's less detail (my guess is that it averages the scan fields at a higher resolution). It also eliminates the lame 16bit alpha dithering that some games have.
I don't mind the Wii, but one thing that really bugs me is that it looks like shit on my 46" LCD. I would gladly pay extra to get a Wii that renders the same 3D scenes at 720p.
It's not totally far out, people upgraded their GameBoy Advance to the SP and their Nintendo DS to the redesign, but I doubt enough people have large HDTVs to make it a viable market before 2011.
All the best gear and consequent social esteem comes from random drops. Because the drops are random, your best strategy is to spend as much time as possible killing as many things as you can to increase your chances of getting rewarded. Since these drops give social esteem, for a lot of people the payoff is high enough to be worth a significant investment in time.
It's basically the same kind of thing that causes people to spend hours in front of slot machines.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operant_conditioning
And ya, I had roommates in college who only ever played WoW. They were losers desperate for all the esteem they could get.
I recently threw together a prototype for my company using OpenCV. That OpenCV exists for this sort of thing is a godsend. One of our interns recently completed a UI research project that also relied on OpenCV.
But one of the problems I had while doing it was that whenever I searched for more documentation about the algorithms I was trying to write, all I could find where either papers describing how some researcher's system was better than mine, or some magic MATLAB code that worked on a small set of test images. There were no solid implementations written in C for any of these systems.
I would love to dick around for weeks implementing all these research papers and then evaluating their results and real world performance, but I don't think my boss or my company's shareholders would enjoy that. Like every company, resources are limited for something that isn't making money.
With that said, the best way to further AI research, particularly in the highly marketable fields of machine learning and computer vision (but probably others as well), is to add implementations of cutting edge research to existing BSD-licensed libraries like OpenCV for companies to evaluate. If products that use that research become profitable, private companies are likely to throw a lot more money and researchers at the problem, all competing to one-up the other.
If you think I'm being unrealistic, you should check out the realtime face detection that recent Cannon cameras use for autofocus. Once upon a time, object recognition was considered a cutting edge AI problem.
Maybe it's the product of growing up under the red scare, but between the anti-Vietnam movement, the war on drugs, "Family Values", the war on terrorism, and the bare minimum of environmental laws/cheap gas/tax breaks for SUVs, the boomers' voting record will probably cause them to be remembered as the most cowardly and coddled generation in history.
"Generation-Me" indeed.
Why yes, I do have karma to burn.
What I don't understand is why did MS release one big new OS kernel to every market at once instead of having a slower introduction? With NT5, they released Win2000 and targeted it mainly to business and power users. This gave time for the drivers of more exotic sound and graphics hardware to mature.
When WinXP came out with the NT5.1 kernel 2 years later, there was a plethora of stable drivers already in the market from any company that mattered.
They could have done the same thing with Vista by hyping the new security and search features early on and then releasing a consumer version with Aero Glass enabled by default and all the other whiz bang features.
Woah, it looks like you just blew the lid off this whole scandal! Thank you for your astute observations, noble citizen!
I agree that Macs have pretty weak video cards but I think the same could be said about most mainstream PCs. Only hardcore gamers are willing to significantly invest in a more expensive card. So while some PC games tend to cater to this market and these products definitely look impressive, it's the more average looking titles like WoW and The Sims that bring in lots of revenue because everyone can run them.
It seems like now that the average mac finally has an architecture that can play some of their more demanding games, EA thinks that these titles will also be profitable.
But I agree with you in that as long as there isn't a mainstream model with a replaceable video card or at least a really good video card, the Mac won't be a gaming platform of choice, just a gaming platform.
I had a NetMD player a couple years ago and I don't think the article goes into enough detail about just how bad SonicStage really is. The interface was some crazy non-standard flash thing that ran really slow, it crashed all the time, and you had to do some weird check-in thing that would only let you burn an mp3 to 3 disks before you had to "check out" one of the copies by removing it for the disk.
It's seriously one of the worst pieces of software I've ever used. I ended up creating 1GB audio cd images of my mp3s and then ripping them using a less offensive piece of Sony software. But eventually, it got to the point that I just stopped making new disks and got tired of the ones I had. The NetMD player ended up in a drawer for many months until I gave it away and bought a Rio Karma.
I read a few reviews before purchasing but I figured the software couldn't be THAT bad. I was wrong. The battery life and the price of media were amazing though and it was a nice little piece of hardware for the $130 I paid.
As an aside, the player skipped whenever I kept it in my shorts pocket, it wasn't as bulletproof as I thought it would be from reading reviews. It skipped way more than my Karma but the Karma's harddrive eventually died so I maybe I unwittingly vibrate like a paintshaker or something.
One of the defining characteristics of a psychopath is a muted fear response to many situations. Is it possible that, without some instinctive fear response created by negative social situations throughout a lifetime, a psychopath is much more outgoing than most in the same way that these mice who can't remember past social stigmas are?
Can anyone who knows more about the area respond?
The HUD in Metroid Prime had a lot of useless decoration but it also added a lot to the experience.
Similarly, The Prince is always in the bottom right corner of the screen in Katamari Damacy. He's a swell looking little fellow and fun to watch even if he doesn't convey much information to the player. I think it adds a lot to the aesthetics of the game.
This may sound foreign to a lot of nerds, but most people like to use things that look nice. The interface of a game is no exception, a neat looking HUD will improve the game as long as it's not intrusive.
I find the worst is not being able to see people's second name field. A lot of people I know use it to organize where they're going that night or to state what has happened to them recently and I'm left in the dark because I have a Mac.
"Where's this person?"
"Oh, they're out of town for the weekend, didn't you read their msn name?"
That extra name field is really important for a program that's meant to communicate with your friends. Even Microsoft's Mac client doesn't support it which is incredibly annoying.
I think CSI: Miami is total soccermom porn. The 40-something raspy detective drives around Miami in a hummer killing alligators and nogoodniks while arresting ethnic people. I think a large portion of their audience just might be retarded in just the right ways to take it seriously to some extent.