Boulder, CO is pedestrian-friendly. And bike-friendly (segregated bike paths, often). And the weather is amazing. And we have a pretty good bus system as well.
Most people still drive. I've heard the statistic "20% of trips in Boulder are by bike." That's bullshit. If it's 2% I'll be impressed.
There are cities in which it's easier to believe that 20% of trips are by bike. Amsterdam? It's not people who don't bike--it's Americans. Why is that?
I'm sure there's a chicken-and-egg problem here. People are brought up not biking, so it never occurs to them, so there are no cyclists, so there's no demand for facilities, etc...
We have to start somewhere. The safest thing to do is to make noise, and agitate for better facilities. The most effective thing to do is probably to get out there on your bike, and be visible, and show that there's demand for facilities. And, I hate to say it, try to persuade everyone you know to join you.
Yes, I'm still delighted every time gas prices go up. It means that the roads will be that much safer for bikes.
At least in my field (artificial intelligence), and certainly also in physics and math and probably in a bunch of other fields, when you submit a paper it will have to be in a format specified by the journal or conference. I've seen an awful lot of LaTeX style files that you must use, and often MSWord style files (or whatever they're called in that world) as well, but naught else. I suspect that you'll want to make sure whatever system you adopt can use or port those style files pretty accurately.
If your field doesn't work that way, cool. But there are risks to stepping away from the dominant paradigm. Just be glad, as they force you to choose between two options, that one of them is not Microsoft:)
GPL software is not about making money, but about sharing ideas. When GPL software is illegally distributed, there is no financial damage, but the intercourse of ideas is damaged. The remedy is to force the violating party to share. Of course, there need to be punitive damages--if there's only a 90% chance of getting caught, then you are better off trying to get away with it. So punitive damages could be financial (and therefore somewhat arbitrary) or maybe forcing the violating party to place between 2,142 and 428,571 times the originally GPLed code of its own, proprietary code, under the GPL.
It occurs to me that, given the cost of producing a new vehicle, the objective of vandalising an SUV should not be to make the SUV's owner feel bad enough to commission the construction of yet another car, but rather to hold him up as an example to others, to prevent them from buying SUVs. To that end, deflating tires is fairly visible, whereas leaving a note is less so. Spray paint, egging, etc., would serve this end that much better. As for destroying the SUV, however, the benefits of getting one off the road and of visibly reminding people that SUVs are not without consequences would need to be balanced against the drawback of requiring another vehicle to be built.
I think you've hit upon a fantastic idea: give the SUV drivers some entertaining and enlightening reading material that will keep them from mind-numbing boredom while they re-inflate their tires!
I did a computer science BSE at Princeton, and now I'm a PhD student a U of Colorado, Boulder. Forget assigned reading--Princeton and MIT, at least, have their intro CS problem sets online (anyone interested can track them down pretty easily). As for CU, I'm not going to make it too easy either (don't want our little server to get/.ed) but try searching for FractalGrading and going from there.
My experience at CU (as a TA 3 years ago; things may have changed) is that the emphasis here is on exposing students to C++ syntax, and then seeing an example of how to use it. Students end up lost, unable to think. When they're asked to turn a thought into an algorithm, they start by naming some C++ syntax, and, unsurprisingly, that's about as far as they get. At Princeton, we were given a though, shown how to build an algorithm, shown how what we knew already wasn't quite adequate (ie. taught why we might need some concept), shown the concept, taught a small amount of syntax that would let us program the concept, and then given a programming assignment in which we put it all together.
Basically, at Princeton we learned to think like programmers, whereas at CU we expose students to a large set of tools without rhyme or reason. The result is that people who come in to the CU curriculum already knowing how to program do fine, and the rest struggle and become frustrated. Since grading reflects on the teaching as much as on the students, we basically pass everyone, even though by the end of the intro course half the students wouldn't be able to understand the idea of a linked list, let alone implement one.
Of course, there is a vast difference between the intelligence of the average student here and that at Princeton. But I have seen no research comparing the method of teaching here to the method at an "average good school", and my personal experience is that it doesn't work very well.
What does Al Gore have to do with this? Learn some science already. He's not a scientist, although at least he's trying, which is more than can be said of many.
First the Republicans ignore scientists, commission partisan "studies", and claim that there is no global warming. Now they ignore scientists, commission partisan "studies", and claim that there is global warming, but that it's somehow a good thing? What's next? Ignoring historians, commissioning partisan studies, and claiming it was the Democrats' fault because the Republicans were fighting global warming all along?
If you seriously think that 7 billion people can all live however they want without any social responsibility, you seriously need to pull your head out of your ass. If science is too hard for you, try history.
Sociopathic? Have you heard of global warming? Do you know what causes it? Smog? Air-pollution--induced asthma? War because a certain country has based its whole economy on using far more oil than it can produce? How about this: an SUV in a two-vehicle crash (averaged over 2-vehicle, vehicle-cyclist, and vehicle-pedestrian collisions) is between 2 (small SUVs) and 6 (large pickups) times higher than a car to kill the other party. Since SUVs don't handle nearly as well as cars, you are less likely to be able to avoid a collision in the first place (I don't have numbers for this, but I'm sure you can find some if you care). For what? SUVs are not even safer for their occupants than cars, since (1) they tend to roll much more easily than cars and (2) they are built to lower safety standards, since the laws governing them were designed based on the assumption that they'd be used for pulling stumps on farms, not on 65-mph freeways.
Sure, there are legitimate uses for SUVs. But given the costs to society there are very few.
Not that cars are a whole lot better (factor of 2 for pollution etc, factor of 2-6 for lethality in collisions). But given that our transportation needs are generally quite adequately met by a midsized car, or perhaps a minivan (and maybe a flatbed trailer if we need to haul furniture frequently), buying an SUV usually meets any definition I've heard for sociopathic behaviour.
Using Apple products makes an evil wannabe monopoly stronger. But it's "evil" in the sense of stifling innovation. I can't really come up with an argument for Apple being evil in the deadly and globally destructive way that SUVs are.
The effect you mention is that SUV owners spend a little more time inflating their tires. But it may also remind them that others resent their sociopathic habits. Make them feel unwelcome and many will just become greater assholes, but in doing so will create a more visible cultural divide. Perhaps such a divide will remind people to think about the implications of buying an SUV, if not for society, then at least for themselves. Maybe because of this someone will buy a car rather than an SUV. That's not a lot, but it's not nothing.
The FSF thing uses a different mechanism. Presumably they're hoping that Apple customers will eavesdrop on the conversations, and learn something about Apple that they might want to know? Sadly, instead they'll probably just surf !/. on their iPhones...
Funny--I went to a pretty expensive university, and we never had a single proctor at any exam, ever. Something called an "honor code" or something...
What's really going on here, though, is that universities no longer exist to educate, but rather to certify. It does not seem unreasonable to me that a corporation should be responsible for evaluating a prospective employee. However (perhaps unsurprisingly), corporations would love to be able to offload that little business expense onto someone else.
The mechanism is already in place. The DMCA makes it illegal to own a device that can be used to circumvent copyright protections. Computers certainly qualify, and is it a coincidence that they are also the primary tool of child pornographers? For that matter, I'm pretty sure brains qualify as well. But we're already doing everything we can to eradicate those, or at least keep them away from our great country.
What is the frequency sensitivity of the ears of other animals that evolved in the same area? They talk about other primates only, but it's reasonable to think that different primates were specialised for different tasks. Is sensitivity uniform enough, and are early humans different enough, to suggest that this is important? Since ears are generally useful before vocal folds (I'm assuming), it seems that the shape of ears would have driven the capabilities of voices more than the other way around.
No, we don't need your stupid help MIT. We need you to stay home, and stop playing to be the world police.
Not sure where you went to school, but having spent quite a bit of time at top universities as well as at middle-of-the-road state schools, I have a hunch where part of the confusion might be.
State schools are not internationally known. Nobody tries to get in. They are often bastions of liberal American thought, but still overwhelmed by Americans.
MIT and other famous schools are quite different. People apply to them from all over the world, and the admissions committees and hiring committees choose from the world's finest. MIT still has many (smart, educated) Americans, of course, but international awareness is pervasive. MIT is among the finest in the world. It's already a stretch to say that MIT as a whole is working to further American political agendas, but it's even a stretch to say that MIT is really a part of America. It is as close as you can come to a citizen of the world.
As for good ideas being usurped by our dear old political leadership: perhaps. But that applies to ideas worldwide. Clearly, the answer is to stop having good ideas. Or not. I'd claim that the answer is to publish to the world, so at least anyone who wants to can understand and use what comes out.
I propose only that since voting is a means by which everyone can affect policy, we take advantage of the fact that large numbers of people make any one person's vote irrelevant, as long as trends are wise, on average. As voters go cukoo, others go cukoo in different directions, and still others, hot off the press, start voting.
Keeping an individual on track is a much much harder problem, since you can't rely on averaging anymore. Average over time, perhaps, but we've seen how much damage someone can do in 8 years. Perhaps 1-month terms would help? Especially if combined with a more robust system of checks and balances (which is supposed to provide this, but isn't working very well in the USA right now)...
Or perhaps elect 9 heads of state, and do some load-balancing: new decisions get doled out to them randomly. Of course, the current crop would start trying to create messes for each other to clean up, to make the other people look bad. *sigh*
It seems reasonable that more power should be granted to people more capable of wielding it intelligently/wisely. Measuring intelligence directly per person isn't necessary--voting is a process of averaging, so as long as we do well on average there is no harm done.
For purposes of assimilating knowledge and making decisions, critical thinking skills and an understanding of propaganda techniques (roughly, rhetoric) are probably a good proxy for more abstract concepts like wisdom. Right now, we grant power according to wealth. Is wealth a good measure of wisdom, or even intelligence? On average, probably better than chance. But how much better? If we could answer this question easily, we would not need to ask it. But looking at the directions in which our society is moving, it is clear that wealth is not a particularly great metric.
How to measure wisdom? Intelligence? Critical thinking skill? Something useful? A good and easy system might be: one vote for highschool graduates, 3 for college grads, 9 for MS and similar programs, and 27 for PhDs. Or whatever. PhDs aren't always wiser than the rest of us, but I'd like to hear a plausible argument that they're not generally more capable of using their brains rather than having opinions spoon-fed to them.
That's not armour. That's a weapon. Ok, maybe both.
Actually, the research on small dicks is largely in place. SUVs and pickups are highly correlated with low self-esteem. Not sure why penis size and self-esteem are correlated, but they certainly are, and so while it's not certain that SUV/Pickup drivers tend to have substandard penises, it's rather likely.
The fad these days is Global Warming. With rising gas prices, Oil is another popular one. This article could serve as a reminder that we are coming to the end of a bunch of things: wood, topsoil, clean drinking water, ozone (well, we sort of solved that, at least partially), clean air, open space, people with brains...
Jared Diamond's Collapse is highly recommended reading!
Yep. Take everyone who is responsible for crimes against the American People and ship 'em off to Gitmo. Oh, wait, they own Gitmo. Well, shoot if they ain't planned that one pretty good.
If an entity can do something illegal because it happens to coincide with some would-be dictator's agenda, that's one less thing stopping other entities from breaking laws in order to get favours from future would-be dictators.
I'd agree, but that this isn't about taunting the democrats and telling them they're being stupid. This is, as it always is in the USA, about choosing the lesser of two evils so that the person in power causes the least amount of permanent damage. And, weak sellout though Obama may be, you can bet the other guy is much, much worse.
Education in skills is not the same as education in critical thinking, philosophy, rhetoric, mindset. If we just nuked any country that allowed people who didn't have at least a master's degree to come into contact with religion, we'd be ok.
After reading about Louisiana, I suppose that further proof is all the religious people out there. You can give them all the evidence and reason you want, and they consciously process it, but they are quite powerless against their subconscious decision made years ago.
While inside the brain scanner, the students watched random letters stream across a screen. Whenever they felt the urge, they pressed a button with their right hand or a button with their left hand. Then they marked down the letter that had been on the screen in the instant they had decided to press the button.
What's unclear? Obviously it depends on the decision. I've seen monkey experiments in which the subjects' neurons fired unambiguously a second or so before action was taken, and I've seen people decide subconsciously what car to buy weeks before they stop gathering information that is, in the end, only used to trick their conscious minds into thinking that they've researched the question thoroughly...
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Boulder, CO is pedestrian-friendly. And bike-friendly (segregated bike paths, often). And the weather is amazing. And we have a pretty good bus system as well.
Most people still drive. I've heard the statistic "20% of trips in Boulder are by bike." That's bullshit. If it's 2% I'll be impressed.
There are cities in which it's easier to believe that 20% of trips are by bike. Amsterdam? It's not people who don't bike--it's Americans. Why is that?
I'm sure there's a chicken-and-egg problem here. People are brought up not biking, so it never occurs to them, so there are no cyclists, so there's no demand for facilities, etc...
We have to start somewhere. The safest thing to do is to make noise, and agitate for better facilities. The most effective thing to do is probably to get out there on your bike, and be visible, and show that there's demand for facilities. And, I hate to say it, try to persuade everyone you know to join you.
Yes, I'm still delighted every time gas prices go up. It means that the roads will be that much safer for bikes.
At least in my field (artificial intelligence), and certainly also in physics and math and probably in a bunch of other fields, when you submit a paper it will have to be in a format specified by the journal or conference. I've seen an awful lot of LaTeX style files that you must use, and often MSWord style files (or whatever they're called in that world) as well, but naught else. I suspect that you'll want to make sure whatever system you adopt can use or port those style files pretty accurately.
If your field doesn't work that way, cool. But there are risks to stepping away from the dominant paradigm. Just be glad, as they force you to choose between two options, that one of them is not Microsoft :)
GPL software is not about making money, but about sharing ideas. When GPL software is illegally distributed, there is no financial damage, but the intercourse of ideas is damaged. The remedy is to force the violating party to share. Of course, there need to be punitive damages--if there's only a 90% chance of getting caught, then you are better off trying to get away with it. So punitive damages could be financial (and therefore somewhat arbitrary) or maybe forcing the violating party to place between 2,142 and 428,571 times the originally GPLed code of its own, proprietary code, under the GPL.
It occurs to me that, given the cost of producing a new vehicle, the objective of vandalising an SUV should not be to make the SUV's owner feel bad enough to commission the construction of yet another car, but rather to hold him up as an example to others, to prevent them from buying SUVs. To that end, deflating tires is fairly visible, whereas leaving a note is less so. Spray paint, egging, etc., would serve this end that much better. As for destroying the SUV, however, the benefits of getting one off the road and of visibly reminding people that SUVs are not without consequences would need to be balanced against the drawback of requiring another vehicle to be built.
I think you've hit upon a fantastic idea: give the SUV drivers some entertaining and enlightening reading material that will keep them from mind-numbing boredom while they re-inflate their tires!
I did a computer science BSE at Princeton, and now I'm a PhD student a U of Colorado, Boulder. Forget assigned reading--Princeton and MIT, at least, have their intro CS problem sets online (anyone interested can track them down pretty easily). As for CU, I'm not going to make it too easy either (don't want our little server to get /.ed) but try searching for FractalGrading and going from there.
My experience at CU (as a TA 3 years ago; things may have changed) is that the emphasis here is on exposing students to C++ syntax, and then seeing an example of how to use it. Students end up lost, unable to think. When they're asked to turn a thought into an algorithm, they start by naming some C++ syntax, and, unsurprisingly, that's about as far as they get. At Princeton, we were given a though, shown how to build an algorithm, shown how what we knew already wasn't quite adequate (ie. taught why we might need some concept), shown the concept, taught a small amount of syntax that would let us program the concept, and then given a programming assignment in which we put it all together.
Basically, at Princeton we learned to think like programmers, whereas at CU we expose students to a large set of tools without rhyme or reason. The result is that people who come in to the CU curriculum already knowing how to program do fine, and the rest struggle and become frustrated. Since grading reflects on the teaching as much as on the students, we basically pass everyone, even though by the end of the intro course half the students wouldn't be able to understand the idea of a linked list, let alone implement one.
Of course, there is a vast difference between the intelligence of the average student here and that at Princeton. But I have seen no research comparing the method of teaching here to the method at an "average good school", and my personal experience is that it doesn't work very well.
What does Al Gore have to do with this? Learn some science already. He's not a scientist, although at least he's trying, which is more than can be said of many.
First the Republicans ignore scientists, commission partisan "studies", and claim that there is no global warming. Now they ignore scientists, commission partisan "studies", and claim that there is global warming, but that it's somehow a good thing? What's next? Ignoring historians, commissioning partisan studies, and claiming it was the Democrats' fault because the Republicans were fighting global warming all along?
If you seriously think that 7 billion people can all live however they want without any social responsibility, you seriously need to pull your head out of your ass. If science is too hard for you, try history.
Sociopathic? Have you heard of global warming? Do you know what causes it? Smog? Air-pollution--induced asthma? War because a certain country has based its whole economy on using far more oil than it can produce? How about this: an SUV in a two-vehicle crash (averaged over 2-vehicle, vehicle-cyclist, and vehicle-pedestrian collisions) is between 2 (small SUVs) and 6 (large pickups) times higher than a car to kill the other party. Since SUVs don't handle nearly as well as cars, you are less likely to be able to avoid a collision in the first place (I don't have numbers for this, but I'm sure you can find some if you care). For what? SUVs are not even safer for their occupants than cars, since (1) they tend to roll much more easily than cars and (2) they are built to lower safety standards, since the laws governing them were designed based on the assumption that they'd be used for pulling stumps on farms, not on 65-mph freeways.
Sure, there are legitimate uses for SUVs. But given the costs to society there are very few.
Not that cars are a whole lot better (factor of 2 for pollution etc, factor of 2-6 for lethality in collisions). But given that our transportation needs are generally quite adequately met by a midsized car, or perhaps a minivan (and maybe a flatbed trailer if we need to haul furniture frequently), buying an SUV usually meets any definition I've heard for sociopathic behaviour.
Using Apple products makes an evil wannabe monopoly stronger. But it's "evil" in the sense of stifling innovation. I can't really come up with an argument for Apple being evil in the deadly and globally destructive way that SUVs are.
The effect you mention is that SUV owners spend a little more time inflating their tires. But it may also remind them that others resent their sociopathic habits. Make them feel unwelcome and many will just become greater assholes, but in doing so will create a more visible cultural divide. Perhaps such a divide will remind people to think about the implications of buying an SUV, if not for society, then at least for themselves. Maybe because of this someone will buy a car rather than an SUV. That's not a lot, but it's not nothing.
The FSF thing uses a different mechanism. Presumably they're hoping that Apple customers will eavesdrop on the conversations, and learn something about Apple that they might want to know? Sadly, instead they'll probably just surf !/. on their iPhones...
Funny--I went to a pretty expensive university, and we never had a single proctor at any exam, ever. Something called an "honor code" or something...
What's really going on here, though, is that universities no longer exist to educate, but rather to certify. It does not seem unreasonable to me that a corporation should be responsible for evaluating a prospective employee. However (perhaps unsurprisingly), corporations would love to be able to offload that little business expense onto someone else.
The mechanism is already in place. The DMCA makes it illegal to own a device that can be used to circumvent copyright protections. Computers certainly qualify, and is it a coincidence that they are also the primary tool of child pornographers? For that matter, I'm pretty sure brains qualify as well. But we're already doing everything we can to eradicate those, or at least keep them away from our great country.
What is the frequency sensitivity of the ears of other animals that evolved in the same area? They talk about other primates only, but it's reasonable to think that different primates were specialised for different tasks. Is sensitivity uniform enough, and are early humans different enough, to suggest that this is important? Since ears are generally useful before vocal folds (I'm assuming), it seems that the shape of ears would have driven the capabilities of voices more than the other way around.
No, we don't need your stupid help MIT. We need you to stay home, and stop playing to be the world police.
Not sure where you went to school, but having spent quite a bit of time at top universities as well as at middle-of-the-road state schools, I have a hunch where part of the confusion might be.
State schools are not internationally known. Nobody tries to get in. They are often bastions of liberal American thought, but still overwhelmed by Americans.
MIT and other famous schools are quite different. People apply to them from all over the world, and the admissions committees and hiring committees choose from the world's finest. MIT still has many (smart, educated) Americans, of course, but international awareness is pervasive. MIT is among the finest in the world. It's already a stretch to say that MIT as a whole is working to further American political agendas, but it's even a stretch to say that MIT is really a part of America. It is as close as you can come to a citizen of the world.
As for good ideas being usurped by our dear old political leadership: perhaps. But that applies to ideas worldwide. Clearly, the answer is to stop having good ideas. Or not. I'd claim that the answer is to publish to the world, so at least anyone who wants to can understand and use what comes out.
Yes, but that's a much harder question.
I propose only that since voting is a means by which everyone can affect policy, we take advantage of the fact that large numbers of people make any one person's vote irrelevant, as long as trends are wise, on average. As voters go cukoo, others go cukoo in different directions, and still others, hot off the press, start voting.
Keeping an individual on track is a much much harder problem, since you can't rely on averaging anymore. Average over time, perhaps, but we've seen how much damage someone can do in 8 years. Perhaps 1-month terms would help? Especially if combined with a more robust system of checks and balances (which is supposed to provide this, but isn't working very well in the USA right now)...
Or perhaps elect 9 heads of state, and do some load-balancing: new decisions get doled out to them randomly. Of course, the current crop would start trying to create messes for each other to clean up, to make the other people look bad. *sigh*
It seems reasonable that more power should be granted to people more capable of wielding it intelligently/wisely. Measuring intelligence directly per person isn't necessary--voting is a process of averaging, so as long as we do well on average there is no harm done.
For purposes of assimilating knowledge and making decisions, critical thinking skills and an understanding of propaganda techniques (roughly, rhetoric) are probably a good proxy for more abstract concepts like wisdom. Right now, we grant power according to wealth. Is wealth a good measure of wisdom, or even intelligence? On average, probably better than chance. But how much better? If we could answer this question easily, we would not need to ask it. But looking at the directions in which our society is moving, it is clear that wealth is not a particularly great metric.
How to measure wisdom? Intelligence? Critical thinking skill? Something useful? A good and easy system might be: one vote for highschool graduates, 3 for college grads, 9 for MS and similar programs, and 27 for PhDs. Or whatever. PhDs aren't always wiser than the rest of us, but I'd like to hear a plausible argument that they're not generally more capable of using their brains rather than having opinions spoon-fed to them.
It's offtopic, but it's not a troll. Check your facts before choosing how to mod me down.
That's not armour. That's a weapon. Ok, maybe both.
Actually, the research on small dicks is largely in place. SUVs and pickups are highly correlated with low self-esteem. Not sure why penis size and self-esteem are correlated, but they certainly are, and so while it's not certain that SUV/Pickup drivers tend to have substandard penises, it's rather likely.
The fad these days is Global Warming. With rising gas prices, Oil is another popular one. This article could serve as a reminder that we are coming to the end of a bunch of things: wood, topsoil, clean drinking water, ozone (well, we sort of solved that, at least partially), clean air, open space, people with brains...
Jared Diamond's Collapse is highly recommended reading!
We live in interesting times.
Yep. Take everyone who is responsible for crimes against the American People and ship 'em off to Gitmo. Oh, wait, they own Gitmo. Well, shoot if they ain't planned that one pretty good.
It sets a precedent.
If an entity can do something illegal because it happens to coincide with some would-be dictator's agenda, that's one less thing stopping other entities from breaking laws in order to get favours from future would-be dictators.
I'd agree, but that this isn't about taunting the democrats and telling them they're being stupid. This is, as it always is in the USA, about choosing the lesser of two evils so that the person in power causes the least amount of permanent damage. And, weak sellout though Obama may be, you can bet the other guy is much, much worse.
Education in skills is not the same as education in critical thinking, philosophy, rhetoric, mindset. If we just nuked any country that allowed people who didn't have at least a master's degree to come into contact with religion, we'd be ok.
Um, let me check my notes...
After reading about Louisiana, I suppose that further proof is all the religious people out there. You can give them all the evidence and reason you want, and they consciously process it, but they are quite powerless against their subconscious decision made years ago.
While inside the brain scanner, the students watched random letters stream across a screen. Whenever they felt the urge, they pressed a button with their right hand or a button with their left hand. Then they marked down the letter that had been on the screen in the instant they had decided to press the button.
What's unclear? Obviously it depends on the decision. I've seen monkey experiments in which the subjects' neurons fired unambiguously a second or so before action was taken, and I've seen people decide subconsciously what car to buy weeks before they stop gathering information that is, in the end, only used to trick their conscious minds into thinking that they've researched the question thoroughly...
Of course, the person he takes out is also more likely than chance to be sending a text message.
Tangential query: when two SUVs crash, are the occupants more likely to die than when two cars crash?