EW's list is almost entirely light fiction. Except for a few memoirs, there aren't any non-fiction books, let alone science books. I've enjoyed several of the books on the list, but it might be better titled "100 classic beach books".
I'm not sure if the EW article changed since the Slashdot article was posted, but it doesn't look like EW made any remark about the lack o f science books. I think that was just the submitter's editorial comment.
I'll hire a high school drop-out (or student) with a hunger to learn and an understanding of how to do it independently over a worthless diploma from a college every time.
Well sure, but that's hardly the only choice in the world is it? College is not some industrial process that installs data and skills into empty heads. It is an opportunity for learning, nothing more. Some people take advantage of it some don't. Who would you choose between a slacker, high-school drop-out who finds everything boring, and a college graduate who had a passion for knowledge who had worked hard for four years to extend his knowledge and skills.
I'd also object that college is not simply vocational school, but is supposed to expose you to the history of human knowledge, and the big ideas and events that have given us the civilization we have today. John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and George Washington all thought that was the critical function of a college education in a republic.
Absolutely true. People who regard college as a vocational school should bear this in mind.
A degree is only there to fluff up a resume.
No, some of us went to college because we were curious about the world and its history. As a side effect I did pick up some technical skills that have been useful in my working life.
Learning on your own isn't that difficult
Actually it is. Or rather it can be depending on what you want to learn. I'm a programmer. Most competent programmers can teach themselves the syntax for any language that happens to come up. On the other hand, very few programmers seem to be able to teach themselves algorithmic analysis, or the theory of LR parsers. It's not impossible, and some people do it, but it seems to require a lot more talent and discipline then most people posses. For the big abstractions like that, most of us really seem to benefit from having a teacher or a coach to help. Similarly its just about impossible to teach yourself to speak Chinese, play classical violin, or even to write a persuasive argument. For many activities your own mistakes can remain completely invisible to you, but will be immediately obvious to your teacher, who will point them out to you, and show you how to correct them. The utility of college is simply to make teachers for many subjects readily accessible.
I got my CS degree at an average state college and one of my classmates started the original Google.
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That's a non-sequitur. Nobody claimed that smart people only attend MIT or Cal-Tech. The claim is that the frequency of smart, motivated students is higher at schools like MIT then at an average state university. I didn't have the pleasure of going to MIT, but I have attended both small liberal arts schools and average state universities. At the small liberal arts school most of the students were highly motivated, and very serious about getting the best education they could. The lower-division classes at the average state university were full of kids marking time so they could get their ticket punched. The only question most would ask is "Will this be on the test?". Things got much better in the upper-division classes; the clock watchers seemed to have mostly dropped by the wayside.
It's been a long time since my undergrad days. I've long since come to the conclusion that you can get an excellent education at almost any university, it's just that at the average schools you have to be more disciplined and self-motivated. At schools like MIT, opportunities will be presented to you on a silver platter, and your peers will be encouraging you to take advantage of them, rather then telling you not to be such a grind.
Dear lord, what kind of schools are you enrolling at? I've been around a lot of colleges, and none of them would offer a class like that for credit. A real college might have a class like that available through the student IT help center, but it wouldn't be for credit. If you want some sort of IT certification the vocational schools and "Get your degree on your own schedule" schools may be fine, but in general they aren't the place to go for an actual CS degree. If a school is offering to give you college credit for a typing class, run far away, they are probably a diploma mill. Check out your nearest community college or state university instead.
Plus statistics if you want to do number-crunching.
But calculus is generally a prerequisite for the serious statistics courses. In fact, if you want to take a multivariate stat course you are going to need multivariable calculus, so there is the justification for a four term calculus requirement right there.
The worst part about growing old isn't physical frailty... it's the slow breakdown of cognitive power. Of course, as a 33-year-old I can say this with absolute authority.
I'm sure circumstances vary widely, but my experience is just the opposite. In the last few years my wife and I have lost all four of our parents: hers to heart disease and Parkinson's, mine to heart disease and Alzheimer's. None of them is a picnic, but from what I saw, Parkinson's was a much harder road then the others. The initial diagnosis of Alzheimer's was devastating to my mother, but as the disease progressed she lost track of the fact that she was severely impaired. The world became a very confusing and sometimes frightening place for her, but death and suffering no longer loomed over her. Life was lived minute to minute. Some minutes were good, and some were bad, but they never lasted very long, and there is some comfort in that. My father-in-law had a Parkinson's like condition and retained his mental acuity to the bitter end. For three years he could fully appreciate the gradual process of being buried alive in his own body. He bore it stoically, but you could see how frightening it was.
By contrast, the deaths from heart disease were traumatic, but quickly over.
Engaging in vehement debate using such muddled terms make you look like fools, not to mention confusing the crap out of the lay public.
Actually I think physicists have much the same problem. A zillion years ago when I was studying physics I read an article titled: "On Teaching Newtonian Physics to Aristotelean Minds in an Age of Quantum Operators." An awful lot of people live in an Aristotelean world. I think the real difference is that they know they don't understand physics, but many think they understand biology. If you ask them which falls faster an iron ball or a wooden ball, 7 times out of 10 they'll say "the iron ball". However, if you correct them they'll be diffident and allow that they didn't much like their physics class. If you ask them to define species 99/100 will tell you "animals that can interbreed". If you try to correct them, they'll get quite huffy, and explain that that is what they learned in 7th grade biology, and they are sticking with it.
I don't think they are absurdly stupid, it's just confusing because an Aristotelean world view seems to explain so much of everyday life.
Wouldn't the differenced in dogs and wolves be more of a name classification error then a problem with the definition of species?
Yeah, but that's sort of my point. The classification is mistaken in terms of the original, theoretical, basis for distinguishing species, but the assignment is kept because it is kept, presumably because classifying dogs separately from wolves is useful for other reasons.
Asexual organisms transfer genetic mutations and stuff through chemicals and proteins.
I'm not sure what you are saying here. Genetic information is transmitted via nucleic acids, either DNA or RNA. Those are sure enough chemicals, but they are not proteins. There is a bunch of epigenetic information that is controlled by proteins, but that gets transmitted at the same time as the DNA. Normally asexual bacteria can exchange genetic material (across species no less) in a process called conjugation, but I was thinking of things like rotifers. My understanding is that critters like bdelloid rotifers don't exchange genetic information at any point in their life-cycle.
"Isn't that because dogs are wolves artificially selected for domestication?"
Does it matter? Given your statement that
Being able to interbreed is a sufficient (rather than necessary) condition for being of the same specie.
then wolves and dogs should be classified as being in the same species, but they aren't, and haven't been since Linnaeus set up our modern classification system. The problem is that the folks had all sorts of implicit Aristotelean assumptions that inter-fertility went hand in hand with morphological similarity. Wolves and dogs were morphologically distinct so they were called separate species, even though they could interbreed. Perhaps the early naturalists were unaware that wolves and dogs could and did interbreed. Aristotle was a smart guy, but there was a lot of information he just didn't have.
I
In the end it's just a human definition not a natural law.
What? Specie? Or criterion for belonging to a specie.
I don't see that these can be independent considerations. Throughout history people thought they had clear and objective criteria for assigning organisms to species, but in too many cases later evidence showed the criteria to be flawed or of limited applicability. Heck, we've had to expand from two to six entire kingdoms of life, never mind assigning critters to species.
Part of the problem with this classical definition of species is that we now know that ability to interbreed is not a binary attribute, but a continuum. Birds and lizards are completely infertile, horses and donkeys and lions and tigers are often fertile, but their offspring are usually infertile (female mules are very rarely fertile, female ligers more commonly). It's really a question of how "close" two genomes are. I quote the word "close", because even that is a very complex issue.
This is not to say that it isn't important to understand who is mating with who, but that's why most biologists now work with something like Mayr's definition:
"Species are groups of actually or potentially interbreeding natural populations, which are reproductively isolated from other such groups."
This still doesn't deal with the earlier problem I mentioned of classifying asexual organisms. There you have to depend on morphology or genome similarity.
If they CAN interbreed, they are not different species.
That's the popular notion of the definition of a species, but it turns out not to work very well in detail. You have problems like dogs (Canis familiaris), and wolves (Canis lupus) being pretty inter-fertile. Then there is the problem of asexual organisms. Is every asexual individual its own species? In the end it's just a human definition not a natural law.
The notion of a species is not an expression of a simple natural law, but rather part of a complex human scheme for organizing our observations. Aristotle though that species were eternal unchanging categories. He thought you could distinguish species both by observing distinguishing physical characteristics, and observing who mated with what. The early church promulgated these ideas, and they've become the bedrock of the popular notion of what constitutes a species. Like Aristotle's physics, these ideas work well for many commonly observed cases: house cats don't mate with dogs, lizards don't mate with birds, insects don't mate with mammals. Also like Aristotle's physics, his ideas about species began to fall apart as people looked at the world in more detail.
Historically animals were assigned to different species because they looked very different, but sometimes it turned out they could interbreed freely: dogs and wolves for example. It also turns out that mutual inter-fertility is a continuum rather then a binary characteristic. Birds and lizards never produce offspring, Horses and donkeys can produce offspring, but everybody knows that mules are infertile. Except that once in a blue moon, a female mule will be fertile. Tigers and lions in zoos can sometimes produce fertile offspring. On the other hand, many pairs of humans are mutually infertile, but we certainly don't classify them as different species. From a modern point of view the question of inter-fertility is a question of how much alike two genomes are. That turns out to be a complicated question. Sometimes you can have an entire extra chromosome (Down's syndrome) and yet be able to successfuly mate. On they other hand you may have an unusual gene for a just one protein in the membrane of the egg or sperm and be infertile with 99% of your fellow humans.
By the middle 20th century biologists knew of so many exceptions, caveats, and problems with the classical Aristotelean idea of a species that they moved to the more contemporary definition: "Species are groups of actually or potentially interbreeding natural populations, which are reproductively isolated from other such groups." This definition still has tons of problems. Many organisms are entirely asexual. Does each asexual individual constitute its own species?
In the end it is still an attempt to pigeonhole complex observations into neat categories. Sometimes the pigeonholing provides insight, sometimes it produces confusion. The trick is to remember that how you define a species is a matter of human language, not natural law.
As for the claim that this is chromosones instead of culture: if so how come the percentage of women who are top mathematicians has quadrupled in the last 30 years, and how come the risk-taking differences vary so wildly when psychologists repeat the experiments cross-culturally?
An excellent question. When I entered college in 1974, female math and physics majors were very rare. Out of a student body of around 1000, the college would graduate 20-30 male math and physics majors each year. One woman might graduate in those subjects every other year. There were a lot of folks back then who wrote that asymmetry off as a natural sex-linked biological variation in mathematical aptitude. In 2001 I went back to school for an M.S. in Applied Math, and low and behold, a third of the students in my classes were women, and they didn't seem to be having any more trouble with the material then I was. I recently checked on my undergraduate college and over the last few years they are graduating 7-8 women in math and physics per year while continuing to produce 20-30 male math and physics graduates. I don't think female neuroanatomy or neurochemistry have changed much in the last four decades, so I have to take the "it's just sex-linked genetic variation" argument with several grains of salt.
Oh, please! You don't go to college to learn things. You go to college to get a degree. If you want to learn something, go to the library. Everything I learned in college, I learned there. Classes are useless; I can read the book by myself, thank you very much. The professors are of no help outside of class either, even if you manage to get to see them.
I'm sorry you had a crappy experience in college. Some of us had a very different experience. I did go to college to learn things, and I found the classwork and the professors very helpful. You may be a very talented person who can learn things by reading a book. Some of us need a coach who can keep us honest when we think we've understood something, but actually haven't. Some of us are prone to fooling ourselves. There is nothing like defending your ideas to a skilled and professional critic to keep yourself honest about the depth of your understanding.
You have to set up data splitting and merging, flow control, and checkpointing, all of which are not generalizable
How do you think the deep pipelines on modern superscalar processors get filled? I mean, ever since the Pentium Pro even the x86 architecture has had multiple integer, floating point, and address units that all run in parallel, not to mention instruction reordering.
I said in the last decade. Google was founded in 1998, so I presume PageRank is a bit older than that.
Yeah, about two years older according to the link I provided. Repeating your original statement:
Bullshit. Nobody has developed anything useful in the field of computer science in more than a decade.
Emphasis mine. Exactly how much more did you mean then?
Applying them to spam filtering is new, but it is more of an implementation detail than any significant research breakthrough
But you didn't say there had been no significant research breakthroughs in more then a decade, you said nothing useful had been developed in more then a decade. I submit that PageRange and Bayesian filtering are useful and were developed only slightly more then a decade ago. Those two counter-examples (from off the top of my head) are sufficient to disprove your original statement. If you want to modify your assertion, then we can try again.
Ok, let me clarify. The article is talking about maths in undergraduate CS degrees.
No. Did you read the article? The article is about a gentleman claiming an general, non-algorithmic approach to computer science. For example:
"Mathematicians and computer scientists are pursuing fundamentally different aims, and the mathematician's tools are not as appropriate as was once supposed to the questions of the computer scientist. The primary questions of computer science are not of computational possibilities but of expressional possibilities. Computer science does not need a theory of computation; it needs a comprehensive theory of process expression."
Undergraduate degrees and undergraduate education aren't even mentioned in the article.
First of all, the intent of the lawyer doesn't matter, what matters is the intent and the good faith of the company posting the job
It certainly does matter, and it is in fact all I'm concerned about. Lawyers are officers of the court. They may not advise clients to perpetrate a fraud on the court any more then they can advise clients to destroy evidence in a criminal trial.
The fact that they are trying to minimize the number of crappy responses they are going to get in response to a legally required but useless newspaper ad campaign doesn't change that.
No, their stated goal is not to find a qualified and interested US worker. I quote from the video clip: (at about 1:50):
Our goal is clearly not to find an interested and qualified US worker...
We are going try and find a place where we are complying with the law and hoping and likely not to find qualified applicants
The last quote is self-contradictory because of the good faith search provision. You aren't searching in good faith when you are seeking out the venues least likely to produce qualified candidates. Note also that they are not providing advice to reduce the number of crappy candidates, they are providing advice to reduce the number of qualified candidates.
Good faith" legally means posting in Sunday newspapers, reviewing the resulting applications, and rejecting applicants for not meeting specific requirements.
You completely misunderstand the concept of good faith. It does not mean simply meeting a list of minimal requirements or standards. Posting in Sunday newspapers may be evidence of good faith, but does not itself establish good faith. Good faith is a matter of intent. Posting in Sunday newspapers that you know to be poor sources of candidates, and deliberately shunning venues you know to be good sources of candidates is bad faith, and this is what the lawyers in the video advised.
From the Wikipedia entry on "bad faith"
Generally speaking, courts will not just look at the legal rights of parties in pursuing a transaction or a lawsuit, but will look behind the activity at the motives of the persons attempting to obtain the assistance of the court. If a court feels that the reasons behind the transaction or lawsuit have the effect of abusing the power of the law, or the court, it will generally deny a party the ability to rely on a legal remedy that they will otherwise be entitled to.
In this case the lawyers made explicit motives contrary to the law as it stands.
So, you have compliance with the law and good faith efforts to recruit US residents in general. What else do you want?
We may have reached an impass here. I look at the video and see a lawyer counseling his client on how to present the appearance of following the law while avoiding actually carrying out the obligations of the law. This seems to me the very essense of bad faith and a grave breach of legal ethics. You do not see that. I am not a lawyer, nor I assume are you, so we may not have any way of establishing which of us is correct. What I want is good faith on all occasions (as is required by law).
Actually, the right to enact protectionist laws are limited both by treaties and by universally accepted human rights.
That's a hand wave, not an argument. Can you site any actual treaties that the US is a signatory to that would prohibit our current green card process?
I think you simply don't appreciate how badly it can mess up someone's life if something goes wrong during this phase of the green card application process. People get a job offer, or even work for a company for many years, and then when they finally want to become US citizens, it might all fall apart because of a newspaper ad.
I think this is the crux of the matter: by law the company is required to prefer a US citizen. Yes it might be very hard on the green card applicant, yes it might be very inconvenient for the company, but by the law of the land, those are secondary considerations. Green card applicants do not have the same status as green card holders and an H1-B does not guarentee that you will eventually get a green card no matter how many years you invested in it. Are these protectionist laws? Absolutely. Do you deny the right of nations to enact protectionist laws?
Companies want want US applicants, they simply don't want US applicants in response to newspaper ads connected with green card applications. But by the law they cannot make this distinction! That is why the good faith clause is in the law. If, as the lawyers suggested, they deliberately. choose advertising venues less likely to produce qualified applicants, they are no longer acting in good faith. It matters not a whit why they do it, or how concerned they are for the welfare of the green card applicant, it is breaking the law.
By the way, my beef here is not with the green card applicants, it is with the companies seeking to evade the law, and espcially with lawyers counseling their clients to evade the law.
Nobody is being excluded and everybody can apply for the jobs.
Again this suggests that you have not actually watched the video in question. The lawyers explicitly provide advice on how to eliminiate applications from qualified US citzens. Presumably not every company is so unethical. Your company may have been a model citizen. That does not excuse illegal behavior on the part of other companies.
The company just doesn't want to have reopen the hiring phase once they have started the green card application process, among other things, because they'd probably lose the applicant.
Does the convenience for the company and the desire of the green card applicant automatically trump the law?
The problem here isn't "bad faith" by anybody, it's government regulations that are out of step with the real world.
Did you actually watch the video in question? The lawyers gave explicit suggestions on how to rig the interview and advertising process to avoid getting responses from qualified US citizens. If that isn't bad faith, I don't know what is. This is not just an executive order, or a regulation propounded by a goverment agency, this is an honest-to-gosh law passed by congress. You may not like it, it may be inconvenient, it may even be foolish, but it is the law. You can challenge it court, you can lobby to have it changed, but to simply conspire to evade the law by fraud is corrosive of the rule of law.
An awful lot of Slashdot readers believe that US intellectual property law is out of step with the real world. Are they justified in simply ignoring it?
I can't believe anyone would seriously suggest that we should abandon our investment in an existing employee just to find a US-citizen.
If you are a US company, US law requires you to make a good faith effort to find a US citizen qualified for the job. So yes, I would suggest that you had better be prepared to do just that. You may not like the law, it may even be a foolish law, but then a lot of Slashdot readers don't like the current state of IP law either. Are you prepared to give them a pass on that?
Slashdot Mirror
EW's list is almost entirely light fiction. Except for a few memoirs, there aren't any non-fiction books, let alone science books. I've enjoyed several of the books on the list, but it might be better titled "100 classic beach books".
I'm not sure if the EW article changed since the Slashdot article was posted, but it doesn't look like EW made any remark about the lack o f science books. I think that was just the submitter's editorial comment.
Well sure, but that's hardly the only choice in the world is it? College is not some industrial process that installs data and skills into empty heads. It is an opportunity for learning, nothing more. Some people take advantage of it some don't. Who would you choose between a slacker, high-school drop-out who finds everything boring, and a college graduate who had a passion for knowledge who had worked hard for four years to extend his knowledge and skills.
I'd also object that college is not simply vocational school, but is supposed to expose you to the history of human knowledge, and the big ideas and events that have given us the civilization we have today. John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and George Washington all thought that was the critical function of a college education in a republic.
Absolutely true. People who regard college as a vocational school should bear this in mind.
No, some of us went to college because we were curious about the world and its history. As a side effect I did pick up some technical skills that have been useful in my working life.
Actually it is. Or rather it can be depending on what you want to learn. I'm a programmer. Most competent programmers can teach themselves the syntax for any language that happens to come up. On the other hand, very few programmers seem to be able to teach themselves algorithmic analysis, or the theory of LR parsers. It's not impossible, and some people do it, but it seems to require a lot more talent and discipline then most people posses. For the big abstractions like that, most of us really seem to benefit from having a teacher or a coach to help. Similarly its just about impossible to teach yourself to speak Chinese, play classical violin, or even to write a persuasive argument. For many activities your own mistakes can remain completely invisible to you, but will be immediately obvious to your teacher, who will point them out to you, and show you how to correct them. The utility of college is simply to make teachers for many subjects readily accessible.
That's a non-sequitur. Nobody claimed that smart people only attend MIT or Cal-Tech. The claim is that the frequency of smart, motivated students is higher at schools like MIT then at an average state university. I didn't have the pleasure of going to MIT, but I have attended both small liberal arts schools and average state universities. At the small liberal arts school most of the students were highly motivated, and very serious about getting the best education they could. The lower-division classes at the average state university were full of kids marking time so they could get their ticket punched. The only question most would ask is "Will this be on the test?". Things got much better in the upper-division classes; the clock watchers seemed to have mostly dropped by the wayside.
It's been a long time since my undergrad days. I've long since come to the conclusion that you can get an excellent education at almost any university, it's just that at the average schools you have to be more disciplined and self-motivated. At schools like MIT, opportunities will be presented to you on a silver platter, and your peers will be encouraging you to take advantage of them, rather then telling you not to be such a grind.
But calculus is generally a prerequisite for the serious statistics courses. In fact, if you want to take a multivariate stat course you are going to need multivariable calculus, so there is the justification for a four term calculus requirement right there.
Hey, it looks like you're making a salad! Would you like some help?
I'm sure circumstances vary widely, but my experience is just the opposite. In the last few years my wife and I have lost all four of our parents: hers to heart disease and Parkinson's, mine to heart disease and Alzheimer's. None of them is a picnic, but from what I saw, Parkinson's was a much harder road then the others. The initial diagnosis of Alzheimer's was devastating to my mother, but as the disease progressed she lost track of the fact that she was severely impaired. The world became a very confusing and sometimes frightening place for her, but death and suffering no longer loomed over her. Life was lived minute to minute. Some minutes were good, and some were bad, but they never lasted very long, and there is some comfort in that. My father-in-law had a Parkinson's like condition and retained his mental acuity to the bitter end. For three years he could fully appreciate the gradual process of being buried alive in his own body. He bore it stoically, but you could see how frightening it was.
By contrast, the deaths from heart disease were traumatic, but quickly over.
Actually I think physicists have much the same problem. A zillion years ago when I was studying physics I read an article titled: "On Teaching Newtonian Physics to Aristotelean Minds in an Age of Quantum Operators." An awful lot of people live in an Aristotelean world. I think the real difference is that they know they don't understand physics, but many think they understand biology. If you ask them which falls faster an iron ball or a wooden ball, 7 times out of 10 they'll say "the iron ball". However, if you correct them they'll be diffident and allow that they didn't much like their physics class. If you ask them to define species 99/100 will tell you "animals that can interbreed". If you try to correct them, they'll get quite huffy, and explain that that is what they learned in 7th grade biology, and they are sticking with it.
I don't think they are absurdly stupid, it's just confusing because an Aristotelean world view seems to explain so much of everyday life.
Yeah, but that's sort of my point. The classification is mistaken in terms of the original, theoretical, basis for distinguishing species, but the assignment is kept because it is kept, presumably because classifying dogs separately from wolves is useful for other reasons.
I'm not sure what you are saying here. Genetic information is transmitted via nucleic acids, either DNA or RNA. Those are sure enough chemicals, but they are not proteins. There is a bunch of epigenetic information that is controlled by proteins, but that gets transmitted at the same time as the DNA. Normally asexual bacteria can exchange genetic material (across species no less) in a process called conjugation, but I was thinking of things like rotifers. My understanding is that critters like bdelloid rotifers don't exchange genetic information at any point in their life-cycle.
Does it matter? Given your statement that
then wolves and dogs should be classified as being in the same species, but they aren't, and haven't been since Linnaeus set up our modern classification system. The problem is that the folks had all sorts of implicit Aristotelean assumptions that inter-fertility went hand in hand with morphological similarity. Wolves and dogs were morphologically distinct so they were called separate species, even though they could interbreed. Perhaps the early naturalists were unaware that wolves and dogs could and did interbreed. Aristotle was a smart guy, but there was a lot of information he just didn't have.
I don't see that these can be independent considerations. Throughout history people thought they had clear and objective criteria for assigning organisms to species, but in too many cases later evidence showed the criteria to be flawed or of limited applicability. Heck, we've had to expand from two to six entire kingdoms of life, never mind assigning critters to species.
Part of the problem with this classical definition of species is that we now know that ability to interbreed is not a binary attribute, but a continuum. Birds and lizards are completely infertile, horses and donkeys and lions and tigers are often fertile, but their offspring are usually infertile (female mules are very rarely fertile, female ligers more commonly). It's really a question of how "close" two genomes are. I quote the word "close", because even that is a very complex issue.
This is not to say that it isn't important to understand who is mating with who, but that's why most biologists now work with something like Mayr's definition:
"Species are groups of actually or potentially interbreeding natural populations, which are reproductively isolated from other such groups."
This still doesn't deal with the earlier problem I mentioned of classifying asexual organisms. There you have to depend on morphology or genome similarity.
That's the popular notion of the definition of a species, but it turns out not to work very well in detail. You have problems like dogs (Canis familiaris), and wolves (Canis lupus) being pretty inter-fertile. Then there is the problem of asexual organisms. Is every asexual individual its own species? In the end it's just a human definition not a natural law.
The notion of a species is not an expression of a simple natural law, but rather part of a complex human scheme for organizing our observations. Aristotle though that species were eternal unchanging categories. He thought you could distinguish species both by observing distinguishing physical characteristics, and observing who mated with what. The early church promulgated these ideas, and they've become the bedrock of the popular notion of what constitutes a species. Like Aristotle's physics, these ideas work well for many commonly observed cases: house cats don't mate with dogs, lizards don't mate with birds, insects don't mate with mammals. Also like Aristotle's physics, his ideas about species began to fall apart as people looked at the world in more detail.
Historically animals were assigned to different species because they looked very different, but sometimes it turned out they could interbreed freely: dogs and wolves for example. It also turns out that mutual inter-fertility is a continuum rather then a binary characteristic. Birds and lizards never produce offspring, Horses and donkeys can produce offspring, but everybody knows that mules are infertile. Except that once in a blue moon, a female mule will be fertile. Tigers and lions in zoos can sometimes produce fertile offspring. On the other hand, many pairs of humans are mutually infertile, but we certainly don't classify them as different species. From a modern point of view the question of inter-fertility is a question of how much alike two genomes are. That turns out to be a complicated question. Sometimes you can have an entire extra chromosome (Down's syndrome) and yet be able to successfuly mate. On they other hand you may have an unusual gene for a just one protein in the membrane of the egg or sperm and be infertile with 99% of your fellow humans.
By the middle 20th century biologists knew of so many exceptions, caveats, and problems with the classical Aristotelean idea of a species that they moved to the more contemporary definition: "Species are groups of actually or potentially interbreeding natural populations, which are reproductively isolated from other such groups." This definition still has tons of problems. Many organisms are entirely asexual. Does each asexual individual constitute its own species?
In the end it is still an attempt to pigeonhole complex observations into neat categories. Sometimes the pigeonholing provides insight, sometimes it produces confusion. The trick is to remember that how you define a species is a matter of human language, not natural law.
An excellent question. When I entered college in 1974, female math and physics majors were very rare. Out of a student body of around 1000, the college would graduate 20-30 male math and physics majors each year. One woman might graduate in those subjects every other year. There were a lot of folks back then who wrote that asymmetry off as a natural sex-linked biological variation in mathematical aptitude. In 2001 I went back to school for an M.S. in Applied Math, and low and behold, a third of the students in my classes were women, and they didn't seem to be having any more trouble with the material then I was. I recently checked on my undergraduate college and over the last few years they are graduating 7-8 women in math and physics per year while continuing to produce 20-30 male math and physics graduates. I don't think female neuroanatomy or neurochemistry have changed much in the last four decades, so I have to take the "it's just sex-linked genetic variation" argument with several grains of salt.
I'm sorry you had a crappy experience in college. Some of us had a very different experience. I did go to college to learn things, and I found the classwork and the professors very helpful. You may be a very talented person who can learn things by reading a book. Some of us need a coach who can keep us honest when we think we've understood something, but actually haven't. Some of us are prone to fooling ourselves. There is nothing like defending your ideas to a skilled and professional critic to keep yourself honest about the depth of your understanding.
How do you think the deep pipelines on modern superscalar processors get filled? I mean, ever since the Pentium Pro even the x86 architecture has had multiple integer, floating point, and address units that all run in parallel, not to mention instruction reordering.
Yeah, about two years older according to the link I provided. Repeating your original statement:
Emphasis mine. Exactly how much more did you mean then?
But you didn't say there had been no significant research breakthroughs in more then a decade, you said nothing useful had been developed in more then a decade. I submit that PageRange and Bayesian filtering are useful and were developed only slightly more then a decade ago. Those two counter-examples (from off the top of my head) are sufficient to disprove your original statement. If you want to modify your assertion, then we can try again.
No. Did you read the article? The article is about a gentleman claiming an general, non-algorithmic approach to computer science. For example:
Undergraduate degrees and undergraduate education aren't even mentioned in the article.
Yeah, that PageRank thing is totally useless. I don't use it more then 20 or 30 times a day. Bayesian spam filtering? Nobody uses that.
It certainly does matter, and it is in fact all I'm concerned about. Lawyers are officers of the court. They may not advise clients to perpetrate a fraud on the court any more then they can advise clients to destroy evidence in a criminal trial.
No, their stated goal is not to find a qualified and interested US worker. I quote from the video clip: (at about 1:50):
The last quote is self-contradictory because of the good faith search provision. You aren't searching in good faith when you are seeking out the venues least likely to produce qualified candidates. Note also that they are not providing advice to reduce the number of crappy candidates, they are providing advice to reduce the number of qualified candidates.
You completely misunderstand the concept of good faith. It does not mean simply meeting a list of minimal requirements or standards. Posting in Sunday newspapers may be evidence of good faith, but does not itself establish good faith. Good faith is a matter of intent. Posting in Sunday newspapers that you know to be poor sources of candidates, and deliberately shunning venues you know to be good sources of candidates is bad faith, and this is what the lawyers in the video advised.
From the Wikipedia entry on "bad faith"
In this case the lawyers made explicit motives contrary to the law as it stands.
We may have reached an impass here. I look at the video and see a lawyer counseling his client on how to present the appearance of following the law while avoiding actually carrying out the obligations of the law. This seems to me the very essense of bad faith and a grave breach of legal ethics. You do not see that. I am not a lawyer, nor I assume are you, so we may not have any way of establishing which of us is correct. What I want is good faith on all occasions (as is required by law).
That's a hand wave, not an argument. Can you site any actual treaties that the US is a signatory to that would prohibit our current green card process?
I think this is the crux of the matter: by law the company is required to prefer a US citizen. Yes it might be very hard on the green card applicant, yes it might be very inconvenient for the company, but by the law of the land, those are secondary considerations. Green card applicants do not have the same status as green card holders and an H1-B does not guarentee that you will eventually get a green card no matter how many years you invested in it. Are these protectionist laws? Absolutely. Do you deny the right of nations to enact protectionist laws?
Again this suggests that you have not actually watched the video in question. The lawyers explicitly provide advice on how to eliminiate applications from qualified US citzens. Presumably not every company is so unethical. Your company may have been a model citizen. That does not excuse illegal behavior on the part of other companies.
Does the convenience for the company and the desire of the green card applicant automatically trump the law?
Did you actually watch the video in question? The lawyers gave explicit suggestions on how to rig the interview and advertising process to avoid getting responses from qualified US citizens. If that isn't bad faith, I don't know what is. This is not just an executive order, or a regulation propounded by a goverment agency, this is an honest-to-gosh law passed by congress. You may not like it, it may be inconvenient, it may even be foolish, but it is the law. You can challenge it court, you can lobby to have it changed, but to simply conspire to evade the law by fraud is corrosive of the rule of law.
An awful lot of Slashdot readers believe that US intellectual property law is out of step with the real world. Are they justified in simply ignoring it?
If you are a US company, US law requires you to make a good faith effort to find a US citizen qualified for the job. So yes, I would suggest that you had better be prepared to do just that. You may not like the law, it may even be a foolish law, but then a lot of Slashdot readers don't like the current state of IP law either. Are you prepared to give them a pass on that?