Looking at the pictures, no one looked delighted to be there. Tim Cook in particular looked like he been asked to eat week-old dog shit, to be frank. Attendance is a necssary evil, like your mother making you take cod liver oil to "keep you regular" when you were a kid
These could be the opening shots in a long and messy few years, as tech companies rub up against a thin-skinned and authoritarian lower order primate. But hey, he's a smart guy. Who needs intelligence briefings, eh? Not like that dumb Obama guy. Sad!
While some of these people may indeed be heroic and decent, they are being asked to do some morally questionable things by the people and agencies managing them. There's only so much conflict any thinking person can take before you have to come down one way or another, and it seems that many are either taking the money, or just don't like the reality of some of what they are being asked to do. Which is sad all around.
While this is in principle a nice idea, it also opens up rather nastier possibilities as data capture for identity theft.
Who better for a potential attacker to skim data from that someone who may not know or understand they might be compromised?
Yup,
The Dunning-Kruger Effect in full...ahem...effect.
Asking those who are reading (and believing) this stuff to evaluate how reliable the content is strikes me as being even worse than useless, and actively harmful, because positive feedback on such articles will encourage further propagation. And facebook wil be able to say that audiences rated the articles highly, so they must be ok.
It always struck me (even as an undergrad 25 years ago when we were talking about SR and GR) that this could be the case - that c could be "instanteously" or "episodically" constant, but need not have been the same value for ever. It's not unreasonable to suppose that the value of c could look like a decay curve, or some function whose value tends to the limit we are now seeing over time from some earlier maximum. I just never got around to asking anyone why not at the time - pity.
I suppsoe it goes back to a calculus way fo thinking for me - at any instant in some changing system, even things which are changing may appear from within that system to have fixed, immutable values, even if that's not what they truly are.
"trading specific pieces of knowledge about your habits" - which is nice in principle, though the ability to extrapoloate, and connect it to other data that may already exist about you, can make this rather more than that in practice.
It had to happen eventually. The phone market is maturing, the economies of the developed world are not in the best shape, so people are holding onto phones longer. The developing worklds is not a magic cash cow either. The market for these techologiesis very competitive; there are lots of choices. Apple's revennue groweth has not been a bubble, but it couldn't go on incresing for ever without constraint. It's no wonder that companies like Apple and Google are investigating where the next big change is coming from becasue the market is saturating.
Yes. It's not like people weren't warned about this. The Swift 3 announcement at WWDC back in June made this very very explicit indeed, as indeed did swift.org from even earlier.
Yup, welcome to the wonderful world of price-elastic demand, Netflix.
I laughed at "We think some members perceived the news as an impending new price increase rather than the completion of two years of grandfathering." If you end up paying more than you did before, it's a price increase, even if the company artificially held that cost down for a while. Trying to dress it up any other way just looks a bit...silly
Let's define "bad" as below average at the job. One might then reasonably assume that the distribution of programming skill might approximate a normal distribution. So pretty much half. Just think what the average dev is like, then consider that half of them are even worse than that:)
Well, technically, even investigating officers and forensic examiners are in breach of the law when examining child pornography images during investigations. The law definitely does need some work to give those people the correct protection..
But what is illustrated is the poor state of affairs in this country. The old National Hitech Crime Unit (NHTCU) has gone, folded into SOCA (Serious and Organised Crime Agency). SOCA is meant, as a far s I can discern, to act like a British FBI in many ways but tihs doesn't really seem to have happened at all. In the meantime, local forces don't have the reosurce to do proper invesigation and there's confusion abour what SOCA and other bodies like CEOP (Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre) and IWF have power to enforce. It's a mess.
If our own government doesn't understand (the same people who have such a great grasp on IT they think the ID card systems is oing to be a roaring success) then what chance does anyone else have?
Unfortunately, our teaching friend is probably closer to the truth than you realise. It is true that everyone learns (to some degree) differently and, while I can't speak for colleagues in the US, here in the UK there is a great deal of consideration given to "learning styles" and pedgogic/andragogic theories (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andragogy). While there are a wide spectrum of learning styles, which also includes with special needs (e.g. : dyslexia, dyspraxia, motor disabilities, etc.) in some cases, the way in which material can be introduced is constrained. Many UK institutions now routinely put new staff through this type of training as a conscious effort to codify this professional engagement with learners and how they learn. In all honesty, some of the stuff is horse shit and a restatement of the trivially obvious, but sometimes it is good to be reminded of such things. The Higher Education Teaching Academy is a good place to look in the UK http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/
Consider a subject like history where there are more general tools of analysis and argument. You could talk about the American Civil War, the French Revolution or the Industrial Revolution in a fairly non-linear way. Try do that with mathematics or some branches of natural science and you would just hit a brick wall. Sometimes the method of delivery just has to be linear. Try doing quantum mechanics without knowing about complex numbers, for example.
And, unlike some other areas of learning, maths relies rather more on having foundations of skill and knowledge that can be applied. And as others have said, these skills generally need to be practised. Usually a great deal. I did quite a lot of mathematics during my undergraduate career and now struggle to remember lots of it. If someone asked me to do contour integration now, for example, I'd just wibble.
Blumenthal's restaurant (complete with a research kitchen) The Fat Duck in Bray was named the Worlds' Best Restaurant in 2005 by "Restaurant" magazine (see http://www.theworlds50best.com/). It also came second in 2004, 2006 and 2007. I always enjoyed the columns he wrote for the Guardian (he now writes for the Sunday Times), which I found fun, interesting and not pompous at all, unusually for the food industry.
He's recently done some TV in the UK in a series called "In Search of Perfection", where he tries to put new spins on traditional foods, such as spaghetti Bolognese, Black Forest gateau, roast beef, fish & chips etc..
The piece where he effectively created a sandblaster to coat the Black Forest Gateau with chocolate was something indeed to behold.
I did in fact give a satisfied little yell at that, because it was so very,very, on the money and the absolute distillation of that character in just one sentence.
I started to read HP quite late after not fancying the earlier ones because of the age they were pitched it. While the earlier books are a little simplistic, looking back that's exactly as it should be. The story is told sort-of from Harry's perspective. He starts as a naive 11-year-old and ends as an adult, with all that entails. It's a great way to bring an audience with you and shows a great understanding, as an author, of the way your "typical" reader's mind works. I'm not a typical reader. I read voraciously, though I tend to read fiction rather less than I used to now, only really making an exception when recommended something by those who I know share broadly similar tastes. I'm just as enthused reading HP as I was reading Pullman's His Dark Materials or Brave New World or 1984 or Slaughterhose Five or lots of other supposedly "worthy" books people are supposed to have read.
In fact, I think that I like the final three books best of all because that's the time when the plot really starts to open out. I did tumble two of the major parts of the plot but didn't guess who was going to die. In all, I thought the last book was a really good one, though it did start a little slowly. Once it did, though...
It's also interesting that a few people have mentioned CS Lewis because the end of book seven reminded me a lot of the Aslan scene at Cair Paravel in The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe. I read the Narnia books when I was a child and liked them a lot back then. Reading a couple again recently though it struck me how very much of a time they were, because the language seemed rather stilted and old-fashioned and redolent of a particular type of middle-class snobbery of the time. I did read "Out of The Silent Planet" and the others in he series but found them rather less fun to engage with.
Tolkien, I'm afraid holds no affection from me, but maybe that's because I started by looking at The Silmarillion, which I found dismal (in this I had some sympathy with the humourist Alan Coren (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Coren - taught by JRR at Oxford - who said that he was, though a nice man, quite dreadfully dull).
No it didn't and that was perhaps the point. Unlike the C64 where you had SID to do some of the work, on the humble speccy a programmer had to get creative to squeeze every last bit of performance out of it. Anyone remember the surprise when games like Popeye were released, that seemed to get around the age-old attribute clash problems of old.
Remember, Knight Lore was released on the Spectrum first. I remember running into town to buy it one Christmas just after it was released and being blown away by it when I played it.
If that wasn't enough it had a decent programming environment, a good ecosystem of tools and supporting information for the time. What wasn't to like? The Speccy was my second computer (my first was a ZX80, though I used an uncle's BBC Model B a lot) and is a major part of my late childhood and early teenage years. I feel kind of old now, because most of the undergrads here where I work are younger than the ZX Spectrum.
Speaking as a "relatively" disinterested (and UK-based) bystander, it is at least good to see the music industry's rather heavy-handed, clod-hopping "tactics" (certainly not strategy: how can it be good to alienate and annoy your long-term customer base?) being tested in practical terms, however the decision goes in the US courts.
I would say it's a realisation at all. I suspect he has, like many of us, known this to be the case pretty much from the outset. Whatever many may say about Bill, dumb he most certainly is not, so you can bet that most of the arguments swarming around about DRM will be ones he not only aware of, but has mentally rehearsed many times in his own head before talking about it to meetings.
However, he is at the head of an enormous corporation, with assets to protect and the need to maintain revenues. The decisions are clear: with the MS market model and lock-ins to their software and systems, DRM is a desirable (and possibly even necessary) by-product. It may not be ultimately best for consumers (at least in our eyes), but it is useful for his company. That's his business, you can't blame him for that. His reponsibility is to his shareholders (that's a whole other issue).
That we have a mass marketplace that accepts all of this is more of a worry, but that is the thing that is in our hands. A single dominant vendor or platform is bad for innovation and growth, whether that would be Microsoft, Apple or any other (like a dominant Linux distro). The modern computing world is necessarily heterogeneous and those who accept and evolve in that way will find themselves equipped to deal with the future. And I think Bill Gates is keenly aware of that fact, whatever we may think and however we think Micsrosoft are behaving.
I rather suspect DRM is struggling, but that people like Gates have a great deal invested in preserving at least some of that structure. He may be sitting on the fence just a little to see how things shake out. Not a stupid move in his position, it has to be said.
You don't say where your friend works or where the company is located. However, in the US this may be an issue connected with IT audit and covered under Sarbanes-Oxley (correct me if wrong, I'm in the UK). If any of this data goes anywhere near Europe, you may have to contend with compliance with Data Protection legislation in those states affected. Not pleasant.
I think the post I'm replying to here pretty much says it it though. If he is a consultant he has a professional responsibility to inform the appropriate representatives of the client (he has, at least pertly it seems - do the rest if needed), document and provide evidence of so doing (I hope so). Everything else is up to the company itself.
If they are going to have such a cavalier attitude to such things, make sure he runs like hell and doesn't turn round on the way out of the door, shouting to them why he's leaving as he does.
Disclaimer: I work in a UK university, student experiences may vary wherever you are
It's a tough one, but one thing we have discovered in the past about teaching in our academic unit is that a strong correlation exists between physical attendance and performance in assessment, particularly examination. Those who don't show up for taught sessions (lectures, labs, seminars, tutorials) don't do well. However, those that do shouldn't suffer becasue of that.
I would say that, as a scientist, my first instinct would be to try it and see what happens. I suspect that those who would not make use of more traditional means would not make much effort to with podcast material. Good students would probably find the ability to re-examine and question material more useful. More marginal (and hard-working) students might find opportunity to have multiple opportunities to go over topics they find hardest. To some degree we have found this by having lecture slides available after lectures; podcasting is not substantially different in that respect. And of course there are those, many of whom have posted here, who may not find the lectures all that useful, but do work hard. Giving them the opportunity to scan material is also good.
Much is made of interaction in lectures and this does depend on the material and who is teaching it, but in many cases it is much overrated. Use the podcasts to deliver the base material perhaps and then use seminars/tutorials in a way that help apply or contextualise the material. Those who haven't used it will still struggle of course, but you've given them the chance. After all, they are not children and can make decisions about how best they absorb the material.
The other question that has to be asked is: can the material be usefully delivered in podcast form? If the material doesn't benefit from being podcast or is not in a useful form, the question is (no pun intended) enirtely academic.
Slashdot Mirror
Looking at the pictures, no one looked delighted to be there. Tim Cook in particular looked like he been asked to eat week-old dog shit, to be frank. Attendance is a necssary evil, like your mother making you take cod liver oil to "keep you regular" when you were a kid These could be the opening shots in a long and messy few years, as tech companies rub up against a thin-skinned and authoritarian lower order primate. But hey, he's a smart guy. Who needs intelligence briefings, eh? Not like that dumb Obama guy. Sad!
While some of these people may indeed be heroic and decent, they are being asked to do some morally questionable things by the people and agencies managing them. There's only so much conflict any thinking person can take before you have to come down one way or another, and it seems that many are either taking the money, or just don't like the reality of some of what they are being asked to do. Which is sad all around.
While this is in principle a nice idea, it also opens up rather nastier possibilities as data capture for identity theft. Who better for a potential attacker to skim data from that someone who may not know or understand they might be compromised?
Yup, The Dunning-Kruger Effect in full ...ahem...effect.
Asking those who are reading (and believing) this stuff to evaluate how reliable the content is strikes me as being even worse than useless, and actively harmful, because positive feedback on such articles will encourage further propagation. And facebook wil be able to say that audiences rated the articles highly, so they must be ok.
It always struck me (even as an undergrad 25 years ago when we were talking about SR and GR) that this could be the case - that c could be "instanteously" or "episodically" constant, but need not have been the same value for ever. It's not unreasonable to suppose that the value of c could look like a decay curve, or some function whose value tends to the limit we are now seeing over time from some earlier maximum. I just never got around to asking anyone why not at the time - pity. I suppsoe it goes back to a calculus way fo thinking for me - at any instant in some changing system, even things which are changing may appear from within that system to have fixed, immutable values, even if that's not what they truly are.
"trading specific pieces of knowledge about your habits" - which is nice in principle, though the ability to extrapoloate, and connect it to other data that may already exist about you, can make this rather more than that in practice.
...but it's a pity my typing is shitty today. Sorry
It had to happen eventually. The phone market is maturing, the economies of the developed world are not in the best shape, so people are holding onto phones longer. The developing worklds is not a magic cash cow either. The market for these techologiesis very competitive; there are lots of choices. Apple's revennue groweth has not been a bubble, but it couldn't go on incresing for ever without constraint. It's no wonder that companies like Apple and Google are investigating where the next big change is coming from becasue the market is saturating.
Yes. It's not like people weren't warned about this. The Swift 3 announcement at WWDC back in June made this very very explicit indeed, as indeed did swift.org from even earlier.
Yeah, I quite liked RD 10. It was better than it had any right to be. So, I'll be looking forward to this one.
If they sent some robots to speak as well, perhaps we could all just ignore the car crashes. Maybe someone could have a quick word with Elon...
Yup, welcome to the wonderful world of price-elastic demand, Netflix. I laughed at "We think some members perceived the news as an impending new price increase rather than the completion of two years of grandfathering." If you end up paying more than you did before, it's a price increase, even if the company artificially held that cost down for a while. Trying to dress it up any other way just looks a bit...silly
Let's define "bad" as below average at the job. One might then reasonably assume that the distribution of programming skill might approximate a normal distribution. So pretty much half. Just think what the average dev is like, then consider that half of them are even worse than that :)
Well, technically, even investigating officers and forensic examiners are in breach of the law when examining child pornography images during investigations. The law definitely does need some work to give those people the correct protection..
But what is illustrated is the poor state of affairs in this country. The old National Hitech Crime Unit (NHTCU) has gone, folded into SOCA (Serious and Organised Crime Agency). SOCA is meant, as a far s I can discern, to act like a British FBI in many ways but tihs doesn't really seem to have happened at all. In the meantime, local forces don't have the reosurce to do proper invesigation and there's confusion abour what SOCA and other bodies like CEOP (Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre) and IWF have power to enforce. It's a mess.
If our own government doesn't understand (the same people who have such a great grasp on IT they think the ID card systems is oing to be a roaring success) then what chance does anyone else have?
What would be so creepy about her having a good brain age?
Unfortunately, our teaching friend is probably closer to the truth than you realise. It is true that everyone learns (to some degree) differently and, while I can't speak for colleagues in the US, here in the UK there is a great deal of consideration given to "learning styles" and pedgogic/andragogic theories (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andragogy). While there are a wide spectrum of learning styles, which also includes with special needs (e.g. : dyslexia, dyspraxia, motor disabilities, etc.) in some cases, the way in which material can be introduced is constrained. Many UK institutions now routinely put new staff through this type of training as a conscious effort to codify this professional engagement with learners and how they learn. In all honesty, some of the stuff is horse shit and a restatement of the trivially obvious, but sometimes it is good to be reminded of such things. The Higher Education Teaching Academy is a good place to look in the UK http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/
Consider a subject like history where there are more general tools of analysis and argument. You could talk about the American Civil War, the French Revolution or the Industrial Revolution in a fairly non-linear way. Try do that with mathematics or some branches of natural science and you would just hit a brick wall. Sometimes the method of delivery just has to be linear. Try doing quantum mechanics without knowing about complex numbers, for example.
And, unlike some other areas of learning, maths relies rather more on having foundations of skill and knowledge that can be applied. And as others have said, these skills generally need to be practised. Usually a great deal. I did quite a lot of mathematics during my undergraduate career and now struggle to remember lots of it. If someone asked me to do contour integration now, for example, I'd just wibble.
Blumenthal's restaurant (complete with a research kitchen) The Fat Duck in Bray was named the Worlds' Best Restaurant in 2005 by "Restaurant" magazine (see http://www.theworlds50best.com/). It also came second in 2004, 2006 and 2007. I always enjoyed the columns he wrote for the Guardian (he now writes for the Sunday Times), which I found fun, interesting and not pompous at all, unusually for the food industry. He's recently done some TV in the UK in a series called "In Search of Perfection", where he tries to put new spins on traditional foods, such as spaghetti Bolognese, Black Forest gateau, roast beef, fish & chips etc.. The piece where he effectively created a sandblaster to coat the Black Forest Gateau with chocolate was something indeed to behold.
Oh yes. Abso-f***in'-lutely!
I did in fact give a satisfied little yell at that, because it was so very,very, on the money and the absolute distillation of that character in just one sentence.
I started to read HP quite late after not fancying the earlier ones because of the age they were pitched it. While the earlier books are a little simplistic, looking back that's exactly as it should be. The story is told sort-of from Harry's perspective. He starts as a naive 11-year-old and ends as an adult, with all that entails. It's a great way to bring an audience with you and shows a great understanding, as an author, of the way your "typical" reader's mind works. I'm not a typical reader. I read voraciously, though I tend to read fiction rather less than I used to now, only really making an exception when recommended something by those who I know share broadly similar tastes. I'm just as enthused reading HP as I was reading Pullman's His Dark Materials or Brave New World or 1984 or Slaughterhose Five or lots of other supposedly "worthy" books people are supposed to have read.
In fact, I think that I like the final three books best of all because that's the time when the plot really starts to open out. I did tumble two of the major parts of the plot but didn't guess who was going to die. In all, I thought the last book was a really good one, though it did start a little slowly. Once it did, though...
It's also interesting that a few people have mentioned CS Lewis because the end of book seven reminded me a lot of the Aslan scene at Cair Paravel in The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe. I read the Narnia books when I was a child and liked them a lot back then. Reading a couple again recently though it struck me how very much of a time they were, because the language seemed rather stilted and old-fashioned and redolent of a particular type of middle-class snobbery of the time. I did read "Out of The Silent Planet" and the others in he series but found them rather less fun to engage with.
Tolkien, I'm afraid holds no affection from me, but maybe that's because I started by looking at The Silmarillion, which I found dismal (in this I had some sympathy with the humourist Alan Coren (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Coren - taught by JRR at Oxford - who said that he was, though a nice man, quite dreadfully dull).
No it didn't and that was perhaps the point. Unlike the C64 where you had SID to do some of the work, on the humble speccy a programmer had to get creative to squeeze every last bit of performance out of it. Anyone remember the surprise when games like Popeye were released, that seemed to get around the age-old attribute clash problems of old. Remember, Knight Lore was released on the Spectrum first. I remember running into town to buy it one Christmas just after it was released and being blown away by it when I played it. If that wasn't enough it had a decent programming environment, a good ecosystem of tools and supporting information for the time. What wasn't to like? The Speccy was my second computer (my first was a ZX80, though I used an uncle's BBC Model B a lot) and is a major part of my late childhood and early teenage years. I feel kind of old now, because most of the undergrads here where I work are younger than the ZX Spectrum.
Alleged being the operative word here at present.
Speaking as a "relatively" disinterested (and UK-based) bystander, it is at least good to see the music industry's rather heavy-handed, clod-hopping "tactics" (certainly not strategy: how can it be good to alienate and annoy your long-term customer base?) being tested in practical terms, however the decision goes in the US courts.
...the words "Time Machine" are jumping up and down in front of my face trying to attract my attention. I can't think why that might be.
I would say it's a realisation at all. I suspect he has, like many of us, known this to be the case pretty much from the outset. Whatever many may say about Bill, dumb he most certainly is not, so you can bet that most of the arguments swarming around about DRM will be ones he not only aware of, but has mentally rehearsed many times in his own head before talking about it to meetings.
However, he is at the head of an enormous corporation, with assets to protect and the need to maintain revenues. The decisions are clear: with the MS market model and lock-ins to their software and systems, DRM is a desirable (and possibly even necessary) by-product. It may not be ultimately best for consumers (at least in our eyes), but it is useful for his company. That's his business, you can't blame him for that. His reponsibility is to his shareholders (that's a whole other issue).
That we have a mass marketplace that accepts all of this is more of a worry, but that is the thing that is in our hands. A single dominant vendor or platform is bad for innovation and growth, whether that would be Microsoft, Apple or any other (like a dominant Linux distro). The modern computing world is necessarily heterogeneous and those who accept and evolve in that way will find themselves equipped to deal with the future. And I think Bill Gates is keenly aware of that fact, whatever we may think and however we think Micsrosoft are behaving.
I rather suspect DRM is struggling, but that people like Gates have a great deal invested in preserving at least some of that structure. He may be sitting on the fence just a little to see how things shake out. Not a stupid move in his position, it has to be said.
You don't say where your friend works or where the company is located. However, in the US this may be an issue connected with IT audit and covered under Sarbanes-Oxley (correct me if wrong, I'm in the UK). If any of this data goes anywhere near Europe, you may have to contend with compliance with Data Protection legislation in those states affected. Not pleasant.
I think the post I'm replying to here pretty much says it it though. If he is a consultant he has a professional responsibility to inform the appropriate representatives of the client (he has, at least pertly it seems - do the rest if needed), document and provide evidence of so doing (I hope so). Everything else is up to the company itself.
If they are going to have such a cavalier attitude to such things, make sure he runs like hell and doesn't turn round on the way out of the door, shouting to them why he's leaving as he does.
Disclaimer: I work in a UK university, student experiences may vary wherever you are
It's a tough one, but one thing we have discovered in the past about teaching in our academic unit is that a strong correlation exists between physical attendance and performance in assessment, particularly examination. Those who don't show up for taught sessions (lectures, labs, seminars, tutorials) don't do well. However, those that do shouldn't suffer becasue of that.
I would say that, as a scientist, my first instinct would be to try it and see what happens. I suspect that those who would not make use of more traditional means would not make much effort to with podcast material. Good students would probably find the ability to re-examine and question material more useful. More marginal (and hard-working) students might find opportunity to have multiple opportunities to go over topics they find hardest. To some degree we have found this by having lecture slides available after lectures; podcasting is not substantially different in that respect. And of course there are those, many of whom have posted here, who may not find the lectures all that useful, but do work hard. Giving them the opportunity to scan material is also good.
Much is made of interaction in lectures and this does depend on the material and who is teaching it, but in many cases it is much overrated. Use the podcasts to deliver the base material perhaps and then use seminars/tutorials in a way that help apply or contextualise the material. Those who haven't used it will still struggle of course, but you've given them the chance. After all, they are not children and can make decisions about how best they absorb the material.
The other question that has to be asked is: can the material be usefully delivered in podcast form? If the material doesn't benefit from being podcast or is not in a useful form, the question is (no pun intended) enirtely academic.
If I believed it existed, I'd say we're all going to hell in a basket.
But I don't.
[sits and twiddles thumbs while searching for alternative turn of phrase]