Nope, there were 27000 children in the most recent study. That's not a small data set. Let's try this again.
In the 1970s a researcher ran a bunch of experiments which showed that the mean of a randomly selected set of children would pass Paiget's stage 2) to stage 3) baded on his conservation tests between 8-9yo. The most recent studies of 27000 children (randomly chosen, I suppose), show that they now pass this stage ~11yo. They don't know why.
There are such things at IQ and g (general intelligence) tests. Piaget's tests are not those tests.
Original submitter confused Piaget's tests for general intelligence when performing a "simple" IQ calculation. The two tests are not the same, therefore the results of his IQ extrapolation are bogus.
The two tests are not the same. Apples and Oranges. Pancakes and Sausage. Piaget's developmental conservation tests and general IQ tests. Different beasts. IOW: accurate measurement of the wrong variable leads to the wrong conclusion.
Researcher: Man, these pancakes sure do taste like shit. When I was a boy, pancakes were made with the finest flour and griddled to perfection. *sigh* Today, we get this course pancake like crap. In fact, it tastes just like three year old pancakes!
Baldrson (story submitter): HEY! Look everybody, sausages are 1/4 smaller today than 30 years ago! It says so right here!!! (points to researcher's study).
I didn't read that in the referenced article. I read that in a study of 27K children, 11yo children are "less intelligent" than they were 30 years ago. Someone mentions that the children today are doing about as well as 8year olds then. And then there's some journalistic hand waving about how this represents a serious problem that change within our educational system to resolve.
OK. Now for some real background. The study the researchers are repeating is part of a group of studies done by Jean Piaget back in the late 1960s through the 70s. Piaget was a developmental psychologist was was interested in discerning developmental stages in childhood that could be predicted and potentially nurtured with special education. He broke development down into four stages:
1) Sensimotor Stage: birth -> 2yo (a child who developed object persistence, or the recognition that a physical object persists even when out of the visual field and across time, would pass to the next stage)
2) Pre-Operational Stage: 2yo -> 7-8 (a child who developed conservation skills, recognizing that certain abstract things which appear different are actually the same, would pass to the next stage
3) Concrete Operational Stage: ~8-11yo (a child who developed abstract reasoning, such as manipulation of abstract variables in math or algorithmic reasoning, would pass to the final stage
4) Formal Operational Stage: cognitive adulthood.
This study -- cited in the article -- tests when children move from Pre-Operational to Concrete-Operational stage. They do so with a conservation skills test. In one test the researcher takes a tall and thin beaker and fills it up to a certain amount in front of the child. Then the researcher hands the child a light block and a heavy block and asks the child where they think each will displace the water in the beaker. If the child realizes that both displace the water equally, the child understands conservation of water displacement.
They then move to another test where the child is faced with a tall set of blocks stacked upon one another, and a short and wide set of the same blocks stacked upon one another. The researcher asks the child to use the short and wide blocks to build the same tower as the tall and thin one. If the child realizes that since both contain the same number of blocks it is actually possible for him/her to complete the task, the child understands volume conservation.
In yet another test, the researcher takes one cup of water and pours it into several smaller cups and then asks the child where the water line will be if they pour all the water from the smaller cups back into the larger cup. Ya'll get the idea.
Now, these researchers are testing children today using the same methods as Piaget back in the 70s. What they found is that the mean for transitioning out of Pre-Operational Stage is today later than it was back in the 1970s. They don't know why. Is it due to changes in our educational system? If it due to environmental changes? Hell, how about: does Paiget's development model hold any factual water? *cough!* Are these results meaningful, and what do they mean?
I don't know.
But one thing I do know is that these results say NOTHING about relative IQ differences from then and today because neither study measured IQ!!!! It is a gross misunderstanding of this work to compare the actual results of relative changes in children developing specific conservation skills over time, and then claiming that these results can extrapolate general intelligence changes in children over time. They are not the same!
To sum up, baldrson misses this "IMPORTANT LAB RULE": know what you are measuring and confounds it with a second "IMPORTANT LAB RULE": take accurate measurements. So, now that we have that all cleared up, how 'bout heading over to the pub for a Guinness?
I had a NeXT slab way back in the day. It was a good computer. And somewhat cheaper than a Sun, DEC, or HP Apollo workstation. The DSP in the cube was an advance. And the software -- as seen in Mac OS X -- was certainly nice. But no one else was coding in objective C, and X was the defacto display standard not DPS. Still, I really liked it.
It's small. Most every planet discovered so far has been an object with very large mass - enough to perturb the host star. Gravitational lensing allowed these scientists to detect a planet with much smaller mass. The cool thing is that these astronomers are finding new ways with current land-based technology to image distant small planets around stars. With these advances, some day we may well find a planet giving off a telltale spectroscopic oxygen signature - a real indicator of life. So, baby steps first I guess.
Long ago Digital used to provide the source for VMS on Microfiche so that they could comply with government and business security requirements without really giving up control over their OS crown jewels. Looks like this is a similar move by MS. It's similar to a the legal strategy of information overload - dumping tens of thousands of irrelevant documents into the hands of the opposition to force them to waste time and resources looking for that needle hidden in the proverbial haystack.
At the age of 37, I hope the hell not. Sorry, I have a full time job and a landlording gig on the side. Most of those who attend are adults in the same boat. This ain't on-campus undergrad life in a fraternity. It's for serious adults who want to get a quality education.
Nice troll. However, just to inject some facts on the issue, Harvard Extension is one of twelve degree granting schools at Harvard University. Classes are taught by both tenured and untenured Harvard professors and visiting faculty. Students who receive good marks may also attend regular day Harvard classes. The Extension school has an excellent reputation, can you offer any facts to refute this?
Harvard Extension, the night school at Harvard University, is experimenting with podcasting too. While a much smaller project, I look forward to a future where I can download official audio from classes that I missed due to illness or work schedule conflicts. And kudos to Stanford for opening up access to education and knowledge to the public.
I would call myself recently accepting of fission power - within the last few years. But only because I believe the alternative of social collapse due to energy scarcity is worse than the potential for a nuclear accident. I still think a nuclear accident is likely and might be devastating across a fairly large population. We're damned if we do and damned if we don't. Fission seems the most optimistic answer within a generation or two, but we need a fallback. Of course, this is in addition to wind, PV/ thermal solar, geothermal, biomass, political hot air -- whatever.
Good question. One I'm not qualified to answer. And to be truthful, I haven't spoken with him in many years and have no idea what he would prefer to be called. He's a cool guy, and if he's reading this I hope he remembers me fondly. I guess I don't really care what he wants to be called. He was definitely American black though. He had an accent and played rap in his office. Nobody cared. The guy was damn good and I was glad to learn from him.
Uhhh, I'm no MS apologist, but I'd like to point out that they have been somewhat reasonable about providing security fixes. If you compare those fixes to the Apple updates, a full blown SP release could be considered a new OS upgrade in MacOS X. And MS isn't charging you for that.
Now I still won't run Windows until MS fixes inherent security holes from email and web embedded scripting. I don't like viruses, trojans, and other exploits. But -- from what I saw -- the WMF bug was fixed pretty fast. It wasn't a bug (other than in conspiracy theory land) that existed by design, but an unexpected error no different from what any other OS might experience. I own a Mac. I support Linux at work. I have no idea what Vista will be like, and I doubt I'll buy it. And I still think MS has a shitty history. But sometimes reality intrudes on the MS pile-on. JMO...
I worked with a sysadmin who happened to be African American (well, back then he was "black"). Anyway, the guy was damn smart, had a Masters, and was well respected by the user community. I've worked with and for other's of a variety of ethnicities and generally come to the conclusion that if they knew their stuff they gained respect. Now I can't speak to racism in corporate America - I'm white as a sheet - but I've seen competence and excellence overcome staff level prejudice.
Yeah, well don't feel too bad. Dad was on the thing all the time I so I got the hand-me-down trash-80. Which -- honestly -- was a pretty cool computer as long as you didn't want to play Ultima III.:)
I don't seem to remember any "640K" barrier with the 8088 or 8086. Didn't it support up to 20 address lines? Yup... I thought so. That missing 384K was reserved for ROM, video RAM, and whatever else one might need. And lets not forget the bank switched expanded RAM boards that were around in the day. As one whose family owned an original XT w/ 20MB drive and full 640K from 1983 onward, I can say with assurance that 640K was a whopping amount of RAM in the day. It also cost a buttload.
While I commend you for the good works you've done for your community and personal artistic expression, I think you're confusing the right to release one's work freely with the expectation that others should follow suit. A freelance journalist trying to earn a living by selling copy to a newspaper is under no obligation to give work away freely. Nor is a musician trying to sell CDs -- even on the street corner. The marketing gain in recognition might benefit the writer and the musician to do so. And the community may benefit as a result. But this is the creators choice, not yours or mine. The (US) framers of the constitution had a reasonable intent when they created copyright. That their intent has been warped beyond recognition in the intervening years doesn't justify throwing out copyright as a result. IMO the author, musician, and artist would be grossly disserved by that policy.
You might want to look at the list of distributors for one of his films before believing that. Michael Moore may hold the conviction that people should be free to copy and view his films for free, but I doubt Sony (or the others) would support his beliefs by cutting their revenues. Fahrenheit 9/11 from imdb tells the real story.
No. He probably wants to get paid for work so he can eat, buy a house, and put his kids through school. Society needs some balance between paying people for their work and some means of fair use in order to freely disseminate scholarly and artistic works without corporate intervention. DRM is an obnoxious "solution" to that problem, primarily because it destroys any sense of balance by relegating power in private corporate hands away from the elected public sphere. But that doesn't making finding some legal balance unnecessary. Writers, programmers, photographers, musicians et all still need to eat. The fallacy is in believing that a technical solution in the private sector to this social and legal problem can be found without interfering with the rights of the citizenry for representation. JMO...
Well, each SPE vector unit supports single and double precision FP, and ints. Though if you can't vectorize your code you'll be wasting a good deal of its potential. However, nonlinear editing is well suited to vector code. Each SPE also operates independently of each other and the PPE (the PPC core). Data transfers to/from each SPE happen through independent DMA channels. One can move data in and out of main RAM (slow) or down a set of chained of SPEs (very fast) for processing. Based on what I've read at the IBM developer site I think the Cell is very well suited for nonlinear editing.
This is not to say that it's a panacea chip. With no out of order execution unit developers will have to optimize out as much branching as possible. A Cell target for GCC will help somewhat I suppose. But the PPE alone is no speed demon, for sure. Which makes it a pretty anemic desktop CPU.
From a gaming standpoint, I think MS may have made the better choice with Xenon. Especially for RPG, real time strategy, and game AI. But if you have highly vectorized SP FP code, Cell spanks everything else out there (if the benchmarks IBM claims are true).
Slashdot Mirror
This study has been replicated numerous times over the decades. It's one of the big 'uns. But whatever - we're on the same page. :)
Nope, there were 27000 children in the most recent study. That's not a small data set. Let's try this again.
In the 1970s a researcher ran a bunch of experiments which showed that the mean of a randomly selected set of children would pass Paiget's stage 2) to stage 3) baded on his conservation tests between 8-9yo. The most recent studies of 27000 children (randomly chosen, I suppose), show that they now pass this stage ~11yo. They don't know why.
There are such things at IQ and g (general intelligence) tests. Piaget's tests are not those tests.
Original submitter confused Piaget's tests for general intelligence when performing a "simple" IQ calculation. The two tests are not the same, therefore the results of his IQ extrapolation are bogus.
The two tests are not the same. Apples and Oranges. Pancakes and Sausage. Piaget's developmental conservation tests and general IQ tests. Different beasts. IOW: accurate measurement of the wrong variable leads to the wrong conclusion.
Researcher: Man, these pancakes sure do taste like shit. When I was a boy, pancakes were made with the finest flour and griddled to perfection. *sigh* Today, we get this course pancake like crap. In fact, it tastes just like three year old pancakes!
Baldrson (story submitter): HEY! Look everybody, sausages are 1/4 smaller today than 30 years ago! It says so right here!!! (points to researcher's study).
Get it?
I didn't read that in the referenced article. I read that in a study of 27K children, 11yo children are "less intelligent" than they were 30 years ago. Someone mentions that the children today are doing about as well as 8year olds then. And then there's some journalistic hand waving about how this represents a serious problem that change within our educational system to resolve.
OK. Now for some real background. The study the researchers are repeating is part of a group of studies done by Jean Piaget back in the late 1960s through the 70s. Piaget was a developmental psychologist was was interested in discerning developmental stages in childhood that could be predicted and potentially nurtured with special education. He broke development down into four stages:
1) Sensimotor Stage: birth -> 2yo (a child who developed object persistence, or the recognition that a physical object persists even when out of the visual field and across time, would pass to the next stage)
2) Pre-Operational Stage: 2yo -> 7-8 (a child who developed conservation skills, recognizing that certain abstract things which appear different are actually the same, would pass to the next stage
3) Concrete Operational Stage: ~8-11yo (a child who developed abstract reasoning, such as manipulation of abstract variables in math or algorithmic reasoning, would pass to the final stage
4) Formal Operational Stage: cognitive adulthood.
This study -- cited in the article -- tests when children move from Pre-Operational to Concrete-Operational stage. They do so with a conservation skills test. In one test the researcher takes a tall and thin beaker and fills it up to a certain amount in front of the child. Then the researcher hands the child a light block and a heavy block and asks the child where they think each will displace the water in the beaker. If the child realizes that both displace the water equally, the child understands conservation of water displacement.
They then move to another test where the child is faced with a tall set of blocks stacked upon one another, and a short and wide set of the same blocks stacked upon one another. The researcher asks the child to use the short and wide blocks to build the same tower as the tall and thin one. If the child realizes that since both contain the same number of blocks it is actually possible for him/her to complete the task, the child understands volume conservation.
In yet another test, the researcher takes one cup of water and pours it into several smaller cups and then asks the child where the water line will be if they pour all the water from the smaller cups back into the larger cup. Ya'll get the idea.
Now, these researchers are testing children today using the same methods as Piaget back in the 70s. What they found is that the mean for transitioning out of Pre-Operational Stage is today later than it was back in the 1970s. They don't know why. Is it due to changes in our educational system? If it due to environmental changes? Hell, how about: does Paiget's development model hold any factual water? *cough!* Are these results meaningful, and what do they mean?
I don't know.
But one thing I do know is that these results say NOTHING about relative IQ differences from then and today because neither study measured IQ!!!! It is a gross misunderstanding of this work to compare the actual results of relative changes in children developing specific conservation skills over time, and then claiming that these results can extrapolate general intelligence changes in children over time. They are not the same!
To sum up, baldrson misses this "IMPORTANT LAB RULE": know what you are measuring and confounds it with a second "IMPORTANT LAB RULE": take accurate measurements. So, now that we have that all cleared up, how 'bout heading over to the pub for a Guinness?
I had a NeXT slab way back in the day. It was a good computer. And somewhat cheaper than a Sun, DEC, or HP Apollo workstation. The DSP in the cube was an advance. And the software -- as seen in Mac OS X -- was certainly nice. But no one else was coding in objective C, and X was the defacto display standard not DPS. Still, I really liked it.
Our quad opterons (two dualcore) appear perfectly stable under Linux. Have you tried that as a test to rule out hardware?
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. ..
It's small. Most every planet discovered so far has been an object with very large mass - enough to perturb the host star. Gravitational lensing allowed these scientists to detect a planet with much smaller mass. The cool thing is that these astronomers are finding new ways with current land-based technology to image distant small planets around stars. With these advances, some day we may well find a planet giving off a telltale spectroscopic oxygen signature - a real indicator of life. So, baby steps first I guess.
Long ago Digital used to provide the source for VMS on Microfiche so that they could comply with government and business security requirements without really giving up control over their OS crown jewels. Looks like this is a similar move by MS. It's similar to a the legal strategy of information overload - dumping tens of thousands of irrelevant documents into the hands of the opposition to force them to waste time and resources looking for that needle hidden in the proverbial haystack.
But truth be told... I did laugh when I saw your reply. +5, Funny :)
At the age of 37, I hope the hell not. Sorry, I have a full time job and a landlording gig on the side. Most of those who attend are adults in the same boat. This ain't on-campus undergrad life in a fraternity. It's for serious adults who want to get a quality education.
Nice troll. However, just to inject some facts on the issue, Harvard Extension is one of twelve degree granting schools at Harvard University. Classes are taught by both tenured and untenured Harvard professors and visiting faculty. Students who receive good marks may also attend regular day Harvard classes. The Extension school has an excellent reputation, can you offer any facts to refute this?
Harvard Extension, the night school at Harvard University, is experimenting with podcasting too. While a much smaller project, I look forward to a future where I can download official audio from classes that I missed due to illness or work schedule conflicts. And kudos to Stanford for opening up access to education and knowledge to the public.
Is that why no one can hear you scream?
I would call myself recently accepting of fission power - within the last few years. But only because I believe the alternative of social collapse due to energy scarcity is worse than the potential for a nuclear accident. I still think a nuclear accident is likely and might be devastating across a fairly large population. We're damned if we do and damned if we don't. Fission seems the most optimistic answer within a generation or two, but we need a fallback. Of course, this is in addition to wind, PV/ thermal solar, geothermal, biomass, political hot air -- whatever.
Good question. One I'm not qualified to answer. And to be truthful, I haven't spoken with him in many years and have no idea what he would prefer to be called. He's a cool guy, and if he's reading this I hope he remembers me fondly. I guess I don't really care what he wants to be called. He was definitely American black though. He had an accent and played rap in his office. Nobody cared. The guy was damn good and I was glad to learn from him.
Uhhh, I'm no MS apologist, but I'd like to point out that they have been somewhat reasonable about providing security fixes. If you compare those fixes to the Apple updates, a full blown SP release could be considered a new OS upgrade in MacOS X. And MS isn't charging you for that.
Now I still won't run Windows until MS fixes inherent security holes from email and web embedded scripting. I don't like viruses, trojans, and other exploits. But -- from what I saw -- the WMF bug was fixed pretty fast. It wasn't a bug (other than in conspiracy theory land) that existed by design, but an unexpected error no different from what any other OS might experience. I own a Mac. I support Linux at work. I have no idea what Vista will be like, and I doubt I'll buy it. And I still think MS has a shitty history. But sometimes reality intrudes on the MS pile-on. JMO...
I worked with a sysadmin who happened to be African American (well, back then he was "black"). Anyway, the guy was damn smart, had a Masters, and was well respected by the user community. I've worked with and for other's of a variety of ethnicities and generally come to the conclusion that if they knew their stuff they gained respect. Now I can't speak to racism in corporate America - I'm white as a sheet - but I've seen competence and excellence overcome staff level prejudice.
Yeah, well don't feel too bad. Dad was on the thing all the time I so I got the hand-me-down trash-80. Which -- honestly -- was a pretty cool computer as long as you didn't want to play Ultima III. :)
I don't seem to remember any "640K" barrier with the 8088 or 8086. Didn't it support up to 20 address lines? Yup... I thought so. That missing 384K was reserved for ROM, video RAM, and whatever else one might need. And lets not forget the bank switched expanded RAM boards that were around in the day. As one whose family owned an original XT w/ 20MB drive and full 640K from 1983 onward, I can say with assurance that 640K was a whopping amount of RAM in the day. It also cost a buttload.
Hi.
While I commend you for the good works you've done for your community and personal artistic expression, I think you're confusing the right to release one's work freely with the expectation that others should follow suit. A freelance journalist trying to earn a living by selling copy to a newspaper is under no obligation to give work away freely. Nor is a musician trying to sell CDs -- even on the street corner. The marketing gain in recognition might benefit the writer and the musician to do so. And the community may benefit as a result. But this is the creators choice, not yours or mine. The (US) framers of the constitution had a reasonable intent when they created copyright. That their intent has been warped beyond recognition in the intervening years doesn't justify throwing out copyright as a result. IMO the author, musician, and artist would be grossly disserved by that policy.
You might want to look at the list of distributors for one of his films before believing that. Michael Moore may hold the conviction that people should be free to copy and view his films for free, but I doubt Sony (or the others) would support his beliefs by cutting their revenues. Fahrenheit 9/11 from imdb tells the real story.
No. He probably wants to get paid for work so he can eat, buy a house, and put his kids through school. Society needs some balance between paying people for their work and some means of fair use in order to freely disseminate scholarly and artistic works without corporate intervention. DRM is an obnoxious "solution" to that problem, primarily because it destroys any sense of balance by relegating power in private corporate hands away from the elected public sphere. But that doesn't making finding some legal balance unnecessary. Writers, programmers, photographers, musicians et all still need to eat. The fallacy is in believing that a technical solution in the private sector to this social and legal problem can be found without interfering with the rights of the citizenry for representation. JMO...
Well, each SPE vector unit supports single and double precision FP, and ints. Though if you can't vectorize your code you'll be wasting a good deal of its potential. However, nonlinear editing is well suited to vector code. Each SPE also operates independently of each other and the PPE (the PPC core). Data transfers to/from each SPE happen through independent DMA channels. One can move data in and out of main RAM (slow) or down a set of chained of SPEs (very fast) for processing. Based on what I've read at the IBM developer site I think the Cell is very well suited for nonlinear editing.
This is not to say that it's a panacea chip. With no out of order execution unit developers will have to optimize out as much branching as possible. A Cell target for GCC will help somewhat I suppose. But the PPE alone is no speed demon, for sure. Which makes it a pretty anemic desktop CPU.
From a gaming standpoint, I think MS may have made the better choice with Xenon. Especially for RPG, real time strategy, and game AI. But if you have highly vectorized SP FP code, Cell spanks everything else out there (if the benchmarks IBM claims are true).