My wife was in a similar position -- she couldn't remember anything beyond basic algebra from high school, and didn't have the time for classes. She ended up getting a copy of "Practical Algebra: A Self-Teaching Guide" be Shelby and Slavin, and learning from that in what spare time she did have. She enjoyed learning from the book, and now understands algebra very well indeed.
This is easily the best math textbook to learn from that I've come across. The explanations are consistently clear, accessable (my wife almost never had to get me to explain things) and concise. At the same time, this is not a dumbed-down book. The content is simply excellent, and is well presented.
Math education needs to be much more than learning how to multiply. The mechanics of multiplying/ long division etc are sufficiently useful that its worth students learning and practising how to do it, but actually understanding what's math actually means and is useful for is far more useful. Unfortunately, less than half the teachers at primary grade level can teach understanding rather than mechanics, and it's hard to test actual understanding.
Better yet, and even more poorly taught (at least in the USA) is being able to apply what is taught to a new but simple problem, a skill that even many of the top high school graduates don't have. (This is a large part of why many college freshman physics courses have high failure rates.)
These skills require a level of understanding the math and of abstract thinking which is hard to teach, but most teachers don't even bother to try. It's just a whole lot easier to say "this is how to do this sort of problem...". If this was taught consistently, then math would be one of the most useful classes in an education. Without it, it's largely replacable by a calculator.
The students with a natural aptitude for math and abstraction (and those whose parents work to ensure their children do understand and can use what they learn) will do well, find math useful and end up with superior problem solving skills.
As far as I can see, you should be able to release a patch under almost any license you want (the excerpts from the original source that a patch needs should be covered under fair use for any reasonable patch). However, any binary you produce is a derivitive of both the original (GPL) code, and your patch. In this case, the resulting binary would be subject to the copyright restrictions of both the original GPL code, and whatever you put on your own patch, so all the freedoms and restrictions of the GPL apply to the binary. The only reason I can see to not distribute a patch under the same license as the original code is if you wanted people to be able to do anything with your patch itself, in which case a BSD style license on the patch might make sense. Of course if the licenses contradict each other, then you couldn't distribute the binary at all, so that isn't very useful, so in practical terms the licensce on the patch must be GPL compatible (ie allow modification, redistribution etc).
So in brief, this bill would require movies, games etc to be labelled as to their content. That's not a problem - food is also labeled for content. Minors would not be allowed to buy ones with certain ratings - allowing parents to control what their children are doing. That's definitely a good thing, and doesn't stop the rest of us any. No real loss of freedom there.
On the other hand, I find it hard pressed to believe that violent TV, movies and games are the cause of violence. Most other modern countries have just as much violent media, but very little actual violence. Taking away people's access to powerful weapons would have much more effect, but some people just don't seem to like the idea, and the government seems to listen to whoever is loudest or gives the most of money. So much for democracy.
In physics, authors have published on the web for a long time now. In Aug '91 (yes eight years ago), a pre-print server was set up at Los Alamos . It initially was just for high energy theoretical physics, but now covers a lot of subjects, and is heavily used. Authors send their papers in (normally before sending them to a normal journal), and everyone can see the new papers the following day. These days, every piece of new research (in high energy physics at least) can be found here. Interestingly, this hasn't stopped the journal publishers much. Papers are still sent to them, and most institutions involved in the subject still subscribe to them. The big difference is that now researchers see each others results as soon as they're ready to publish, and that the papers are much easier to get to. Seems to be a good thing.
The huia is unlikely to have any significant impact on the New Zealand ecosystem. I believe it ate only berries, and had no serious predators. If introduced to the wild, it would now face a number of predators, primarily possums, unless released into one of the few possum-free bird sanctuaries. They didn't grow out of control before, and things are only harder for them now. As a side note, many of the native NZ birds have done very poorly over the last 200 years as predators have been introduced, and it seems hard to imagine one causing problems even after a long absence.
In fact, it is now well known that GR _does_ permit time travel. Various people have found configurations that contain closed timelike curves, where you can travel forward in time, and find yourself back in your own past. Unfortunately they are all unphysical for some reason (take an infinite amount of energy to construct, an infinite length of time, or are just really unstable). Still no-one knows of any good reason why something like this shouldn't be possible.
Slashdot Mirror
My wife was in a similar position -- she couldn't remember anything beyond basic algebra from high school, and didn't have the time for classes. She ended up getting a copy of "Practical Algebra: A Self-Teaching Guide" be Shelby and Slavin, and learning from that in what spare time she did have. She enjoyed learning from the book, and now understands algebra very well indeed.
This is easily the best math textbook to learn from that I've come across. The explanations are consistently clear, accessable (my wife almost never had to get me to explain things) and concise. At the same time, this is not a dumbed-down book. The content is simply excellent, and is well presented.
Math education needs to be much more than learning how to multiply. The mechanics of multiplying/ long division etc are sufficiently useful that its worth students learning and practising how to do it, but actually understanding what's math actually means and is useful for is far more useful. Unfortunately, less than half the teachers at primary grade level can teach understanding rather than mechanics, and it's hard to test actual understanding.
Better yet, and even more poorly taught (at least in the USA) is being able to apply what is taught to a new but simple problem, a skill that even many of the top high school graduates don't have. (This is a large part of why many college freshman physics courses have high failure rates.)
These skills require a level of understanding the math and of abstract thinking which is hard to teach, but most teachers don't even bother to try. It's just a whole lot easier to say "this is how to do this sort of problem...". If this was taught consistently, then math would be one of the most useful classes in an education. Without it, it's largely replacable by a calculator.
The students with a natural aptitude for math and abstraction (and those whose parents work to ensure their children do understand and can use what they learn) will do well, find math useful and end up with superior problem solving skills.
As far as I can see, you should be able to release a patch under almost any license you want (the excerpts from the original source that a patch needs should be covered under fair use for any reasonable patch). However, any binary you produce is a derivitive of both the original (GPL) code, and your patch. In this case, the resulting binary would be subject to the copyright restrictions of both the original GPL code, and whatever you put on your own patch, so all the freedoms and restrictions of the GPL apply to the binary.
The only reason I can see to not distribute a patch under the same license as the original code is if you wanted people to be able to do anything with your patch itself, in which case a BSD style license on the patch might make sense. Of course if the licenses contradict each other, then you couldn't distribute the binary at all, so that isn't very useful, so in practical terms the licensce on the patch must be GPL compatible (ie allow modification, redistribution etc).
So in brief, this bill would require movies, games etc to be labelled as to their content. That's not a problem - food is also labeled for content. Minors would not be allowed to buy ones with certain ratings - allowing parents to control what their children are doing. That's definitely a good thing, and doesn't stop the rest of us any. No real loss of freedom there.
On the other hand, I find it hard pressed to believe that violent TV, movies and games are the cause of violence. Most other modern countries have just as much violent media, but very little actual violence. Taking away people's access to powerful weapons would have much more effect, but some people just don't seem to like the idea, and the government seems to listen to whoever is loudest or gives the most of money. So much for democracy.
In physics, authors have published on the web for a long time now. In Aug '91 (yes eight years ago), a pre-print server was set up at Los Alamos . It initially was just for high energy theoretical physics, but now covers a lot of subjects, and is heavily used. Authors send their papers in (normally before sending them to a normal journal), and everyone can see the new papers the following day. These days, every piece of new research (in high energy physics at least) can be found here. Interestingly, this hasn't stopped the journal publishers much. Papers are still sent to them, and most institutions involved in the subject still subscribe to them. The big difference is that now researchers see each others results as soon as they're ready to publish, and that the papers are much easier to get to. Seems to be a good thing.
The huia is unlikely to have any significant impact on the New Zealand ecosystem. I believe it ate only berries, and had no serious predators. If introduced to the wild, it would now face a number of predators, primarily possums, unless released into one of the few possum-free bird sanctuaries. They didn't grow out of control before, and things are only harder for them now. As a side note, many of the native NZ birds have done very poorly over the last 200 years as predators have been introduced, and it seems hard to imagine one causing problems even after a long absence.
In fact, it is now well known that GR _does_ permit time travel. Various people have found configurations that contain closed timelike curves, where you can travel forward in time, and find yourself back in your own past. Unfortunately they are all unphysical for some reason (take an infinite amount of energy to construct, an infinite length of time, or are just really unstable). Still no-one knows of any good reason why something like this shouldn't be possible.