The reasons is simple - socialization. Being a successful adult is as much a function of charisma as a function of intelligence.
If your definition of a "successful adult" means "used car salesman/politician", then maybe. However, I've met a number of extremely successful scientists and none of them gave a damn about being charasmatic.
Just because it's a recent invention doesn't mean it's invalid.
Of course not -- I couldn't be a scientist if I believed that. The point is that he original poster was assuming that having a child do something other than play with toys was a recent invention which was responsible for ills of modern society.
Just because it's a recent invention doesn't mean it's invalid.
Of course not -- I couldn't be a scientist if I believed that. The point is that he original poster was assuming that having a child do something other than play with toys was a recent invention which was responsible for ills of modern society.
Children need to interact with others to learn and develop the social skills to lead normal healthy lives. Teaching children to live lives where work and studying is their sole raison de etre, is part of the reason why society has become as messed up as it is. No wonder the biggest cause of death in young adults these days is suicide, if this is the sort of culture that we are creating.
That's nonsense. "Childhood" as such is purely a twentieth century invention. In the 19th century a nine-year old, if he wasn't born into the idle rich, would have been apprenticed and be well on his way to learning a useful trade. And even the rich child wouldn't be that idle -- he'd been well on his way to learning to read Latin and Greek. Personally, I think that one reason why kids get into drugs today is that their childhood is horribly *boring*. I know I was bored out of my skull before I discovered computers.
was in "Xanadu: the house of the future", an attraction in the Wisconsin Dells. I believe it is closed now, but even in the early '90s an Atari 800 was still controlling all the lights and appliances in the house. How futuristic!
The human genome has yet to be fully sequenced. What you are thinking of is the announcements of several draft sequences, with many missing and erroneous areas. The complete sequence won't be available until next year at the earliest.
Secondly, although I'm all for enthusiasm for genomics, the human genome actually will be (at least for the forseeable future) one of the *least* useful genomes. Why? Because we can't do experiments on humans. When we have sequenced many plants and animals and gotten a good idea of how they work from experiments, then (and only then) will the human genome be of any practical use.
Simply put, with finding out what whole genomes do, you get a pretty precise roadmap of what's going on. Not only that, if you can't zoom in too much on one part of the map, you can go find another map that has a similar part and zoom in on that. Got it?
Well, that's a bit of a stretch. For example, to really understamd what's going on you have to have gene expression information, and you can't get that from the genome -- you have to use microarray data ("gene chips"). And even then you can argue that what you really want to look at is the complete set of proteins and their abdudances (the "proteome") and not the genome at all.
While I certainly agree that analyzing genomes will be something that will take decades, it is somewhat misleading to say that a whole organism is thousands of times more complicated than a virus. Yes, viruses only have a few genes, but this is only because most of their functions are handled by the host organism.
It was picked because
1) it has a small genome -- many plants actually have genomes longer than the human genome.
2) Arabidopsis is is a small, fast growing plant, well suited for experimentation.
It is important that people realize that sequencing a genome is a beginning and not an end. Having a genome means that more sophisticated studies can be done -- it doesn't mean that we now know everything about the plant.
By mapping the genome, are we actually figuring out the underlying structure of what every gene serves to do in a given plant? (more like a decision tree) or are we just figuring out in a vague way what groups of genes do what (more like a bayesian belief net)?
Neither, unfortunately. Basically a genome is analogous to the binary code of an executable -- you can't just look at it and follow the logic of the program (or organism, as the case may be). However, there is a field of study called bioinformatics which attempts to extract useful information from the raw genomic data, and in order to do this, many techniques from AI and machine learning are used, such as Hidden Markov Models.
The Philadelphia Perl Mongers invited me to give a talk about strong typing. If they had not want wanted to hear a talk about that, they would not have invited me to give one
Or at least the person(s) in charge invited you to talk about strong typing. Fair enough. I rather assumed that they invited you for your well known Perl skills and you simply chose the topic yourself.
On the other hand, some of the complaints you dismiss as "tribalism" are quite relevant. "What's wrong with the way Perl does it?" is a perfectly valid question. You *should* have examples prepared that show how weak typing can lead to problems in certain cases. Otherwise why bother?
How would you know to go to the ML users group to find out about ML? How would you know you might be interested in ML?
You could come across some reference on the web, or there could be a presentation in a more general users' group. The point is a Perl users' group isn't appropriate to talk about strong typing and or ML. I like Linux but if I presented a talk about Linux to a Windows users' group, I wouldn't expect a positive reception even if I was polite and never slammed Windows in my talk. It just would be inappropriate.
Nowithstanding that the article describes using ML to illustrate a point, and precisely not to say ML is so great.
Yes, but in all his complaints about "tribalism" he doesn't seem to realize why his presentation may have been inappropriate to its venue.
I haven't actually got the first clue about ML specifically
It's a LISP variant -- not too bad as such things go, although I've never been much of a functional language fan myself. We used it briefly in a programming languages class.
but I've been through my share of languages over the years - substitute your favourite language you don't know about - Lua, Snobol, Forth
Me too. I've been into Forth and I played around with Lua briefly. Languages are fun.
The guy goes to a Perl group and talks to them about the wonders of ML, and is amazed that people get defensive about Perl. What was he *thinking* would happen? Why not discuss ML at the ML users' group and Perl at the Perl users' group? That way the audience will actually be interested in the discussion. Yes, it is possible that a particular programmer uses both ML and Perl, but then they are likely to attend both users' groups, no?
Re:The line between "public" and "private"
on
Profit vs. Science
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· Score: 2
I certainly agree with your feelings as to what *ought* to be done, but really is what Celera has done much different from what has been going on in the tool side of bioinformatics? Yes, *you* have been very good about releasing HMMer's code and so forth, but for example, Kulp has published four or five papers about his "Genie" program, which is a proprietory product of Neomorphic.
If the Newton's handwriting recognition works for you, then great. But one of the reasons the Newton didn't do so well is that for most people (such as me) the recognition was flaky at best. That's why when I owned a Newton I used Grafitti on it -- it was a software product for the Newton long before Palm organizers existed.
You obviously haven't written a non-trivial LaTeX document. If you don't want a paper to look like crud, you *can't* just let LaTeX go its merry way and format things itself (of course that's also kinda true of HTML as well, although its devotees also claim the contrary)
It doesn't help things that the default font of TeX/LaTeX, "Computer Modern", has to win some sort of award for most hideous font ever created (Knuth may be a brilliant computer scientist, but he's not much of a font designer) The very first thing I do in a LaTeX document is call the psfonts package so I can get a professional looking font like Times Roman
Dave Barry is a columnist for the Miami Herald and the author of several funny books (for example, "Dave Barry Does Japan", "Stay Fit and Healthy Until You're Dead", "Dave Barry's Guide to Marriage and/or Sex").
In the '80s, he was just about tied with Douglas Adams in my estimation as the funniest writer alive. Like Adams, his work has slipped somewhat, but every so often, he writes a column that still makes me laugh out loud when reading it. This column was one of them.
On the surface, giving money to traditional charities seems much more worthy -- they deal with life and death situations, after all. However, upon reflection, they may in fact be less worthy because starvation, ethnic cleansing etc., are not in fact the result of lack of money but the result of corrupt bigoted governments. Giving money has essentially no effect on the situation because the corrupt governments will never let the aid get to the people who need it. In the modern age, "famines" are generally artificial and are weapons that governments use against their own people. What the oppressed people need in such countries is revolution, not charity.
On the other hand, giving money to the EFF (or the World Wildlife Fund, etc.) can be more effective, because while their goals maybe seem less important than stopping starvation, their goals are of the type that can be accomplished by the hiring of lobbyists and lawyers -- and that *is* just a matter of money.
Troll? You don't have to be an anti-Microsoft zealot to realize that Microsoft only became a significant player long *after* home computers were common. Really, DOS/Windows machines weren't popular in the home until the early '90s, although they certainly were popular in offices earlier. Apple and Commodore were much more significant in establishing the home computer market.
This isn't just some religious thing. The Gutenberg Bible is important because it was the first book printed with moveable type in the West (The Chinese Empire actually had a moveable type several centuries prior, but as with their invention of gunpowder, they failed to use it effectively -- they were sort of the Xerox PARC of civilizations, I guess).
The thing about moveable type is that it made books afffordable. Like the Internet, it suddenly made a lot of information available to people.
Re:This seems like the natural evolution of astron
on
Creating The UniServer
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· Score: 2
If you start out with mounds of raw data you aren't a scientist.
A scientist starts out with a hypothesis.
This is not true. The father of modern science, Francis Bacon, believed that science should be done by collecting as much data as possible and seeing what conclusions the data support.
Hypothesis driven research is actually in a sense cheating, because in such research the data gathered is biased -- the researcher is not considering all the data which could bear upon the situation but only those data which the researcher believes could support or refute a preconcieved hypothesis. Nevertheless, hypothesis driven research is the norm in science because until recently, that was the only efficient way to do science.
But with new techniques in data mining, we can begin to recapture the promise of Baconian science.
Re:This seems like the natural evolution of astron
on
Creating The UniServer
·
· Score: 2
It is happening in other sciences. For example, my field "bioinformatics" deals with analyzing molecular biological data, much of which is in public databases such as GenBank. Once experimental molecular biologists could be expected to analyze all their data themselves because there just wasn't very much of it. That just isn't true anymore.
I tend to agree with you, but putting museums into.edu really doesn't solve the problem of deciding whether this or that museum is "good enough" because the.edu requirements are extremely strict -- you have to be a US four-year degree granting institution to get into.edu. (I, like most H.P. Lovecraft fans, have always thought that setting up a fake web site for Miskatonic University under miskatonic.edu would be cool, but currently that's not possible)
Slashdot Mirror
The reasons is simple - socialization. Being a successful adult is as much a function of charisma as a function of intelligence.
If your definition of a "successful adult" means "used car salesman/politician", then maybe. However, I've met a number of extremely successful scientists and none of them gave a damn about being charasmatic.
Just because it's a recent invention doesn't mean it's invalid.
Of course not -- I couldn't be a scientist if I believed that. The point is that he original poster was assuming that having a child do something other than play with toys was a recent invention which was responsible for ills of modern society.
Just because it's a recent invention doesn't mean it's invalid.
Of course not -- I couldn't be a scientist if I believed that. The point is that he original poster was assuming that having a child do something other than play with toys was a recent invention which was responsible for ills of modern society.
Children need to interact with others to learn and develop the social skills to lead normal healthy lives. Teaching children to live lives where work and studying is their sole raison de etre, is part of the reason why society has become as messed up as it is. No wonder the biggest cause of death in young adults these days is suicide, if this is the sort of culture that we are creating.
That's nonsense. "Childhood" as such is purely a twentieth century invention. In the 19th century a nine-year old, if he wasn't born into the idle rich, would have been apprenticed and be well on his way to learning a useful trade. And even the rich child wouldn't be that idle -- he'd been well on his way to learning to read Latin and Greek. Personally, I think that one reason why kids get into drugs today is that their childhood is horribly *boring*. I know I was bored out of my skull before I discovered computers.
was in "Xanadu: the house of the future", an attraction in the Wisconsin Dells. I believe it is closed now, but even in the early '90s an Atari 800 was still controlling all the lights and appliances in the house. How futuristic!
The human genome has yet to be fully sequenced. What you are thinking of is the announcements of several draft sequences, with many missing and erroneous areas. The complete sequence won't be available until next year at the earliest.
Secondly, although I'm all for enthusiasm for genomics, the human genome actually will be (at least for the forseeable future) one of the *least* useful genomes. Why? Because we can't do experiments on humans. When we have sequenced many plants and animals and gotten a good idea of how they work from experiments, then (and only then) will the human genome be of any practical use.
Simply put, with finding out what whole genomes do, you get a pretty precise roadmap of what's going on. Not only that, if you can't zoom in too much on one part of the map, you can go find another map that has a similar part and zoom in on that. Got it?
Well, that's a bit of a stretch. For example, to really understamd what's going on you have to have gene expression information, and you can't get that from the genome -- you have to use microarray data ("gene chips"). And even then you can argue that what you really want to look at is the complete set of proteins and their abdudances (the "proteome") and not the genome at all.
While I certainly agree that analyzing genomes will be something that will take decades, it is somewhat misleading to say that a whole organism is thousands of times more complicated than a virus. Yes, viruses only have a few genes, but this is only because most of their functions are handled by the host organism.
It was picked because
1) it has a small genome -- many plants actually have genomes longer than the human genome.
2) Arabidopsis is is a small, fast growing plant, well suited for experimentation.
It is important that people realize that sequencing a genome is a beginning and not an end. Having a genome means that more sophisticated studies can be done -- it doesn't mean that we now know everything about the plant.
By mapping the genome, are we actually figuring out the underlying structure of what every gene serves to do in a given plant? (more like a decision tree) or are we just figuring out in a vague way what groups of genes do what (more like a bayesian belief net)?
Neither, unfortunately. Basically a genome is analogous to the binary code of an executable -- you can't just look at it and follow the logic of the program (or organism, as the case may be). However, there is a field of study called bioinformatics which attempts to extract useful information from the raw genomic data, and in order to do this, many techniques from AI and machine learning are used, such as Hidden Markov Models.
The Philadelphia Perl Mongers invited me to give a talk about strong typing. If they had not want wanted to hear a talk about that, they would not have invited me to give one
Or at least the person(s) in charge invited you to talk about strong typing. Fair enough. I rather assumed that they invited you for your well known Perl skills and you simply chose the topic yourself.
On the other hand, some of the complaints you dismiss as "tribalism" are quite relevant. "What's wrong with the way Perl does it?" is a perfectly valid question. You *should* have examples prepared that show how weak typing can lead to problems in certain cases. Otherwise why bother?
How would you know to go to the ML users group to find out about ML? How would you know you might be interested in ML?
You could come across some reference on the web, or there could be a presentation in a more general users' group. The point is a Perl users' group isn't appropriate to talk about strong typing and or ML. I like Linux but if I presented a talk about Linux to a Windows users' group, I wouldn't expect a positive reception even if I was polite and never slammed Windows in my talk. It just would be inappropriate.
Nowithstanding that the article describes using ML to illustrate a point, and precisely not to say ML is so great.
Yes, but in all his complaints about "tribalism" he doesn't seem to realize why his presentation may have been inappropriate to its venue.
I haven't actually got the first clue about ML specifically
It's a LISP variant -- not too bad as such things go, although I've never been much of a functional language fan myself. We used it briefly in a programming languages class.
but I've been through my share of languages over the years - substitute your favourite language you don't know about - Lua, Snobol, Forth
Me too. I've been into Forth and I played around with Lua briefly. Languages are fun.
The guy goes to a Perl group and talks to them about the wonders of ML, and is amazed that people get defensive about Perl. What was he *thinking* would happen? Why not discuss ML at the ML users' group and Perl at the Perl users' group? That way the audience will actually be interested in the discussion. Yes, it is possible that a particular programmer uses both ML and Perl, but then they are likely to attend both users' groups, no?
I certainly agree with your feelings as to what *ought* to be done, but really is what Celera has done much different from what has been going on in the tool side of bioinformatics? Yes, *you* have been very good about releasing HMMer's code and so forth, but for example, Kulp has published four or five papers about his "Genie" program, which is a proprietory product of Neomorphic.
If the Newton's handwriting recognition works for you, then great. But one of the reasons the Newton didn't do so well is that for most people (such as me) the recognition was flaky at best. That's why when I owned a Newton I used Grafitti on it -- it was a software product for the Newton long before Palm organizers existed.
The Palm keyboard really is the Stowaway. Targus sells the versions for Visors and wince machines, and Palm sells the version for the Palms
You obviously haven't written a non-trivial LaTeX document. If you don't want a paper to look like crud, you *can't* just let LaTeX go its merry way and format things itself (of course that's also kinda true of HTML as well, although its devotees also claim the contrary)
It doesn't help things that the default font of TeX/LaTeX, "Computer Modern", has to win some sort of award for most hideous font ever created (Knuth may be a brilliant computer scientist, but he's not much of a font designer) The very first thing I do in a LaTeX document is call the psfonts package so I can get a professional looking font like Times Roman
Dave Barry is a columnist for the Miami Herald and the author of several funny books (for example, "Dave Barry Does Japan", "Stay Fit and Healthy Until You're Dead", "Dave Barry's Guide to Marriage and/or Sex").
In the '80s, he was just about tied with Douglas Adams in my estimation as the funniest writer alive. Like Adams, his work has slipped somewhat, but every so often, he writes a column that still makes me laugh out loud when reading it. This column was one of them.
On the surface, giving money to traditional charities seems much more worthy -- they deal with life and death situations, after all. However, upon reflection, they may in fact be less worthy because starvation, ethnic cleansing etc., are not in fact the result of lack of money but the result of corrupt bigoted governments. Giving money has essentially no effect on the situation because the corrupt governments will never let the aid get to the people who need it. In the modern age, "famines" are generally artificial and are weapons that governments use against their own people. What the oppressed people need in such countries is revolution, not charity.
On the other hand, giving money to the EFF (or the World Wildlife Fund, etc.) can be more effective, because while their goals maybe seem less important than stopping starvation, their goals are of the type that can be accomplished by the hiring of lobbyists and lawyers -- and that *is* just a matter of money.
Troll? You don't have to be an anti-Microsoft zealot to realize that Microsoft only became a significant player long *after* home computers were common. Really, DOS/Windows machines weren't popular in the home until the early '90s, although they certainly were popular in offices earlier. Apple and Commodore were much more significant in establishing the home computer market.
This isn't just some religious thing. The Gutenberg Bible is important because it was the first book printed with moveable type in the West (The Chinese Empire actually had a moveable type several centuries prior, but as with their invention of gunpowder, they failed to use it effectively -- they were sort of the Xerox PARC of civilizations, I guess).
The thing about moveable type is that it made books afffordable. Like the Internet, it suddenly made a lot of information available to people.
If you start out with mounds of raw data you aren't a scientist.
A scientist starts out with a hypothesis.
This is not true. The father of modern science, Francis Bacon, believed that science should be done by collecting as much data as possible and seeing what conclusions the data support.
Hypothesis driven research is actually in a sense cheating, because in such research the data gathered is biased -- the researcher is not considering all the data which could bear upon the situation but only those data which the researcher believes could support or refute a preconcieved hypothesis. Nevertheless, hypothesis driven research is the norm in science because until recently, that was the only efficient way to do science.
But with new techniques in data mining, we can begin to recapture the promise of Baconian science.
It is happening in other sciences. For example, my field "bioinformatics" deals with analyzing molecular biological data, much of which is in public databases such as GenBank. Once experimental molecular biologists could be expected to analyze all their data themselves because there just wasn't very much of it. That just isn't true anymore.
It doesn't seem to be a Finnish or Swedish name -- does Dana Sobel's "Galileo's Daughter" have anything to do with it?
I tend to agree with you, but putting museums into .edu really doesn't solve the problem of deciding whether this or that museum is "good enough" because the .edu requirements are extremely strict -- you have to be a US four-year degree granting institution to get into .edu. (I, like most H.P. Lovecraft fans, have always thought that setting up a fake web site for Miskatonic University under miskatonic.edu would be cool, but currently that's not possible)