When I was in eleventh grade, my school didn't have advanced English courses for eleventh graders, and the chic thing to do was to divide the kids up into groups of four that were composed of one "smart" kid, two "normal" kids and one "dumb" kid. The idea was that they'd all learn from each other, etc., while they did the group project together. What actually happened was that the other three talked while the "smart" kid did all the group work as quickly as possible in order to get back to reading their book.
You'd be surprised how much a little bit of support goes.
Support mechanisms (like tutoring and counselling) are great; students who seek out help when they need it become the kinds of graduates who make universities proud.
I'll readily admit that "slackers" was not a very precise term to use. I'm a slacker too; according to a former professor of mine, the desire to avoid unnecessary work is desirable in a programmer. He attributed to "laziness" the development of modularization, object orientation and reuse.
To rephrase: "An effective way to produce good graduates is to not prevent those who would otherwise be bad graduates from dropping out before they graduate."
Futhermore, universities are usually getting paid for having the reputation of producing good graduates and several get more money from alumni then from current students. If the students are goofing around too much, both revenue streams may soon become dry.
So, it is in their own interest to minimise the negative impact of WLAN in classrooms.
In that scenario, it is not WLAN that causes the problem, it is the students who goof off too much. An effective way to produce good graduates is to help the slackers flunk out early. Forcing students to pay attention is therefore counterproductive. The higher your dropout rate, the more students you can admit, and the greater your odds of admitting someone who will someday make you proud.
Why is it considered a problem that students use the internet during class? It's not like they can't skip class if they want to. If anything, taking notes on a laptop is worse because the noise of typing can be disruptive.
Keeping students focussed during class is not the responsibility of the university. The responsibility of the university is to teach those who want to learn. If the Harvard Business School administration feels that lack of student focus during class time is a problem, then perhaps they should improve their admissions process.
I think of dressing up as manipulating the bigotry of others. When I travel, I get better service when I'm dressed up. When I visit a customer or go to a trade show, dressing up will impress the bigoted. Sometimes, sadly, the opinions of the bigoted matter.
The world would be a better place if everyone judged you on the quality of your work rather than your skin color, ethnicity, or fashion. It's possible to surround oneself with people who don't judge those things, and that's great when it happens, but it is sometimes beneficial to exploit peoples' biases.
The basic idea behind aspect-oriented programming is that you write code that will execute whenever a certain part of your program is reached. The most common example I've seen is that of a debug message that prints when every function is called; you could write the debug message in a separate function or file, and then via aspect-oriented programming not include code to call it in every single function. Instead you'd define an aspect, or something, and have your debug message print whenever the situation that defines that aspect occurs.
The promise of this is that you can save some effort by reducing repetitive function calls. The risk is that control flow can be very difficult to trace. Some people argue that aspect-oriented programming is similar to programming with goto, and I'm inclined to agree with them. It's useful under certain tightly defined circumstances and harmful otherwise.
As the content is being provided "freely," I think it is up to the publishers and the advertisers to decide who can see it and for how long.
That's already the case with existing P2P networks. The content publishers have decided to let anybody see it for an unlimited amount of time (sometimes in violation of local copyright law.)
Nobody is saying that mass transit systems dont burn fossil fuels, but they burn far less on a per person, per mile basis than private transportation.
I see this asserted periodically, but I've heard that it's not necessarily true for ordinary (non-hybrid) city buses that burn diesel fuel -- that all the stops and starts can give fuel efficiency that's actually worse per person than that of automobiles. There are secondary effects in the buses' favor (more people taking buses might lead to fewer traffic jams), but I'd like to see some real data before taking it on faith that mass transit is always better environmentally.
Re:That's what people sayd about O/O in the eighti
on
Microsoft Lauds Scrum
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Nay-say all you want, but if you haven't tried it, then you have nothing productive to say for or against.
Pardon the slight topic drift, but this is crap. Having tried something improves somebody's credibility, but insightful analysis of an activity is possible without engaging in that activity. A criticism of, say, XP doesn't become invalid because the person making it hasn't tried XP. If it's valid, it's valid on its own merit.
In other words, when evaluating ideas, don't weight the speaker too much. Don't weight them too little either, but there's little danger of that, while there's lots of danger of only weighting the speaker and not at all weighting what they're actually saying (which can lead to a "cult of personality".)
Much better to floss, brush, and rinse with alcohol-based mouthwash, and keep food and sugar off of your teeth between brushings. Just like Mom says.
Those activities are appropriate regardless of whether or not fluoride is added to the water supply. They're not an alternative, they're what you're supposed to already be doing.
...I see no mention of the taste. An alternative that tastes like acetaminophen would be enough to get me to brush three times a day.
But it seems like a solution without a problem, as far as geeks are concerned. It's not like brushing takes a long time, or is unpleasant. It's worse to not brush, in the short term and in the long term.
I'd rather say that it would be suitable for a history of science course - not a science course, assuming a curriculum should stay on topic.
In my experience, "history of science" is only differentiated from "science" when you reach the university level. I don't remember when I first learned about phrenology, but it was definitely in science class. I don't know what the appropriate age is for trying to induce critical thinking skills, but if you're old enough to grasp the concept of evolution, you're old enough to understand ID (since ID is just "evolution + god".)
ID can consist of nothing more than saying that those random mutations were actually not random, but caused by god. Obviously it's simply fanciful guessing, but it's hardly opposed to evolutionary theory. It diverges only slightly from the evolutionary views of atheists.
ID isn't testable. It isn't falseafiable. It's not science.
Right, but that's orthogonal to what I wrote. IDers are not creationists, they're a subset of evolutionists.
(A separate discussion is whether or not paleontology constitutes science. I'm skeptical; repeatable experiments are necessary for science, and the fossil record does not constitute 'repeatable experiments'. I don't think various paleontologic hypotheses are necessarily false, but I don't think they're any more scientific than, say, CSI.)
Basically, ID in its entirety is nothing more than a very verbose "Nu-uh!" to evolutionary theory.
This is a huge straw man. ID can consist of nothing more than saying that those random mutations were actually not random, but caused by god. Obviously it's simply fanciful guessing, but it's hardly opposed to evolutionary theory. It diverges only slightly from the evolutionary views of atheists.
...ID is retarded. It says things are so improbable, god's aiding the design of them is the only explanation, or at least a reasonable explanation.
I'm not an ID proponent, but it's hardly unreasonable to say that evolution is improbable. It takes a long time for a reason.
If you already believe in an almighty diety who intervenes in the daily lives of human beings, and you also happen to believe in evolution, then ID is simply being consistent, and it's hard to fault them for that. (The alternative is a "watchmaker" theology, which some people don't hold to.) They're not saying "ID is reasonable, so our god exists" (what you accurately describe as heresy), they're saying "Our god exists, so ID is reasonable." The causality is reversed, or at least that's my perception of it.
Should it be taught in science class? It should probably be taught *about*, so that people are aware of it. It seems like a good case study for a discussion of what does and does not constitute science. I recall learning about all kinds of long-discredited past theories (like phrenology) in science classes.
This should not cause sadness. Because of this controversy, people everywhere -- kids and adults -- will be exposed to the idea that science isn't something that can be arbitrarily redefined by a school board. When they hear somebody say "ID is not science, and here's why," they will be exposed to new ideas that they otherwise might never have learned.
There is no chance that an entire generation of Kansas schoolkids will grow up in a new dark age of scientific misunderstanding. Because of this controversy, science might actually appear interesting to some of them, and that would be good.
If a behavior is morally, ethically and legally acceptable, then it should not be banned. You shouldn't need a reason to carry any given thing onto school property, and the only things that should be banned are things with irreparable consequences, like firearms. If somebody smokes on school property, it's not the end of the world: give them detention or something and the situation has been resolved. If somebody gets shot, then it might be the end of the world for them, so it's legitimate to not allow kids to bring firearms to school. (Whether this extends to less-lethal or nonlethal weapons, and if so, which, is debatable, but that's a topic for another thread.)
It might be splitting hairs to differentiate between smoking and carrying tobacco in your purse, but them's the breaks. If something is morally or ethically unacceptable, then make it legally unacceptable, and if you can't, don't punish those under your authority who do it under legally allowable circumstances.
One of the reasons for releasing closed-source drivers is to avoid revealing that you're violating your competitor's patents. The more obfuscation there is, the less likely you are to be sued, if you are indeed doing something illegal. Releasing documentation does not increase obfuscation, so it's not an option for criminals.
I don't see any reason why it shouldn't be against school rules to have tobacco on school grounds.
How about "There's nothing wrong with having tobacco on school grounds"? Sounds like a good reason to me.
If smoking is banned, which is reasonable, then punish anybody who breaks that rule, not anybody who possesses the means to break a rule. Otherwise, you'd be endorsing banning pens and pencils, since they can be used to poke the eyes out of other students, which is against the rules. In the tobacco case, there is a "substantial noninfringing use" (so to speak) for having tobacco on school grounds: you might have just one purse that you take everywhere, including places where smoking is allowed.
Just because something is labeled "fair tax" does not mean it is fair
That's why I called it "the so-called "fair tax"" (note the quotes and the words "so-called".)
All sales tax based schemes are regressive (unless you start including huge exemptions and income calculations, which defeats the whole purpose of a "simpler tax code").
The so-called "fair tax" scheme is not regressive, because it exempts the first few thousand dollars from taxation, which is all that poor people have to spend. It's a sales tax scheme that only taxes "the rich" (everyone middle class and up).
The red flag it raises in my mind concerns the idea of the government sending a check to everybody once a month. This is not behavior that we want to condition people into considering normal, and I'm not entirely comfortable with the government having the infrastructure to do this (of course they already do, but that's beside the point.) I understand that it might be the most practical way to exempt the poor from taxes, but I'm not convinced that it's not worse than the problem to begin with.
The more "common" notation, "MB", is the abbreviation for "megabyte", which is 10^6 bytes.
Also known as "marketing megabytes" in the storage and networking industries, because they let a bigger-looking number represent the same number of bytes.
Slashdot Mirror
When I was in eleventh grade, my school didn't have advanced English courses for eleventh graders, and the chic thing to do was to divide the kids up into groups of four that were composed of one "smart" kid, two "normal" kids and one "dumb" kid. The idea was that they'd all learn from each other, etc., while they did the group project together. What actually happened was that the other three talked while the "smart" kid did all the group work as quickly as possible in order to get back to reading their book.
Support mechanisms (like tutoring and counselling) are great; students who seek out help when they need it become the kinds of graduates who make universities proud.
To rephrase: "An effective way to produce good graduates is to not prevent those who would otherwise be bad graduates from dropping out before they graduate."
In that scenario, it is not WLAN that causes the problem, it is the students who goof off too much. An effective way to produce good graduates is to help the slackers flunk out early. Forcing students to pay attention is therefore counterproductive. The higher your dropout rate, the more students you can admit, and the greater your odds of admitting someone who will someday make you proud.
Keeping students focussed during class is not the responsibility of the university. The responsibility of the university is to teach those who want to learn. If the Harvard Business School administration feels that lack of student focus during class time is a problem, then perhaps they should improve their admissions process.
The world would be a better place if everyone judged you on the quality of your work rather than your skin color, ethnicity, or fashion. It's possible to surround oneself with people who don't judge those things, and that's great when it happens, but it is sometimes beneficial to exploit peoples' biases.
Ok, never mind.
I'm not familiar with intercal, but it sounds very similar.
The promise of this is that you can save some effort by reducing repetitive function calls. The risk is that control flow can be very difficult to trace. Some people argue that aspect-oriented programming is similar to programming with goto, and I'm inclined to agree with them. It's useful under certain tightly defined circumstances and harmful otherwise.
That's already the case with existing P2P networks. The content publishers have decided to let anybody see it for an unlimited amount of time (sometimes in violation of local copyright law.)
I see this asserted periodically, but I've heard that it's not necessarily true for ordinary (non-hybrid) city buses that burn diesel fuel -- that all the stops and starts can give fuel efficiency that's actually worse per person than that of automobiles. There are secondary effects in the buses' favor (more people taking buses might lead to fewer traffic jams), but I'd like to see some real data before taking it on faith that mass transit is always better environmentally.
Pardon the slight topic drift, but this is crap. Having tried something improves somebody's credibility, but insightful analysis of an activity is possible without engaging in that activity. A criticism of, say, XP doesn't become invalid because the person making it hasn't tried XP. If it's valid, it's valid on its own merit.
In other words, when evaluating ideas, don't weight the speaker too much. Don't weight them too little either, but there's little danger of that, while there's lots of danger of only weighting the speaker and not at all weighting what they're actually saying (which can lead to a "cult of personality".)
Those activities are appropriate regardless of whether or not fluoride is added to the water supply. They're not an alternative, they're what you're supposed to already be doing.
But it seems like a solution without a problem, as far as geeks are concerned. It's not like brushing takes a long time, or is unpleasant. It's worse to not brush, in the short term and in the long term.
In my experience, "history of science" is only differentiated from "science" when you reach the university level. I don't remember when I first learned about phrenology, but it was definitely in science class. I don't know what the appropriate age is for trying to induce critical thinking skills, but if you're old enough to grasp the concept of evolution, you're old enough to understand ID (since ID is just "evolution + god".)
Right, but that's orthogonal to what I wrote. IDers are not creationists, they're a subset of evolutionists.
(A separate discussion is whether or not paleontology constitutes science. I'm skeptical; repeatable experiments are necessary for science, and the fossil record does not constitute 'repeatable experiments'. I don't think various paleontologic hypotheses are necessarily false, but I don't think they're any more scientific than, say, CSI.)
This is a huge straw man. ID can consist of nothing more than saying that those random mutations were actually not random, but caused by god. Obviously it's simply fanciful guessing, but it's hardly opposed to evolutionary theory. It diverges only slightly from the evolutionary views of atheists.
I'm not an ID proponent, but it's hardly unreasonable to say that evolution is improbable. It takes a long time for a reason.
If you already believe in an almighty diety who intervenes in the daily lives of human beings, and you also happen to believe in evolution, then ID is simply being consistent, and it's hard to fault them for that. (The alternative is a "watchmaker" theology, which some people don't hold to.) They're not saying "ID is reasonable, so our god exists" (what you accurately describe as heresy), they're saying "Our god exists, so ID is reasonable." The causality is reversed, or at least that's my perception of it.
Should it be taught in science class? It should probably be taught *about*, so that people are aware of it. It seems like a good case study for a discussion of what does and does not constitute science. I recall learning about all kinds of long-discredited past theories (like phrenology) in science classes.
There is no chance that an entire generation of Kansas schoolkids will grow up in a new dark age of scientific misunderstanding. Because of this controversy, science might actually appear interesting to some of them, and that would be good.
It might be splitting hairs to differentiate between smoking and carrying tobacco in your purse, but them's the breaks. If something is morally or ethically unacceptable, then make it legally unacceptable, and if you can't, don't punish those under your authority who do it under legally allowable circumstances.
One of the reasons for releasing closed-source drivers is to avoid revealing that you're violating your competitor's patents. The more obfuscation there is, the less likely you are to be sued, if you are indeed doing something illegal. Releasing documentation does not increase obfuscation, so it's not an option for criminals.
I think it would be just grand if the school system would impose my morals on an entire generation of youth, but I don't trust them to get it right.
How about "There's nothing wrong with having tobacco on school grounds"? Sounds like a good reason to me.
If smoking is banned, which is reasonable, then punish anybody who breaks that rule, not anybody who possesses the means to break a rule. Otherwise, you'd be endorsing banning pens and pencils, since they can be used to poke the eyes out of other students, which is against the rules. In the tobacco case, there is a "substantial noninfringing use" (so to speak) for having tobacco on school grounds: you might have just one purse that you take everywhere, including places where smoking is allowed.
That's why I called it "the so-called "fair tax"" (note the quotes and the words "so-called".)
The so-called "fair tax" scheme is not regressive, because it exempts the first few thousand dollars from taxation, which is all that poor people have to spend. It's a sales tax scheme that only taxes "the rich" (everyone middle class and up).
The red flag it raises in my mind concerns the idea of the government sending a check to everybody once a month. This is not behavior that we want to condition people into considering normal, and I'm not entirely comfortable with the government having the infrastructure to do this (of course they already do, but that's beside the point.) I understand that it might be the most practical way to exempt the poor from taxes, but I'm not convinced that it's not worse than the problem to begin with.
Also known as "marketing megabytes" in the storage and networking industries, because they let a bigger-looking number represent the same number of bytes.