Sorry to nitpick but "proportion of variance within a given phenotype" is not a unit. The argument is silly though, you obviously mean qualitative instead of quantitative in the original post;)
My mistake. If you are going with proportions, the equation is %V_g + %V_e + %V_n = 1. Sorry, its been almost 10 years.
Of course the units of variance is the square of the units you are measuring. If you are measuring height units would be cm^2 and weight the units would be km^2. If you don't know enough statistics to know this, then you probably should not be throwing around terms you don't understand such as quantitative and qualitative. Cliff Notes makes a good starter guide;).
Not exactly. In female mammals one X chromosome in every fetal cell is deactivated early in development. If one X chromosome has black pigment and another has orange pigment the result is a calico or tortoiseshell cat. This is not a "mutation" because it does not involve any actual changes to the genes, half of the cat's male progeny will be black and half tan.
What do you mean by developmental noise? How is that distinguishable from environment? And do other parts of the genome and its phenotypes constitute an environment for a particular gene?
In part, developmental noise is a "none of the above" for variance that can't be explained in other ways. On the other hand, gene expression and protein production is probablistic. This adds another source of variance. It is never as simple as "Trigger X present, make Y".
So for example with calico cats even with twins born from the same litter there will be variations in coat patterns due to the random deactivation of x-chromosomes.
Well, actually I have studied this from both ends and the debate is overstated. Very few people seriosly propose a blank slate theory anymore, nor does Stephen Pinker arge for complete genetic programming. Where there is a debate it is not "if" but "how much".
Bwah? At it's base cloning is basically asexual reproduction of an organism. Making clones of clones is something we did all the time back in my misspent youth training to be a microbiologist. It is something I still do by giving cuttings of "shamrock" and sweedish ivy to friends and relatives. Basically for organisms that already propigate asexually cloning is as simple as taking a cutting and giving it a fresh source of food. There is nothing magical in sexual reproduction that insures good copies. In fact, a large number of mutations are known to only occur during sexual reproduction. Overall, somatic-line cloning is preferred if you want a large number of basically genetically identical individuals.
Of course it is obvious that the clone is not identical. A basic equation in quantitative genetics is:
I honestly don't buy this argument. It seems that more than half of the movies released last year were remakes. Covers of older works are also a staple of the music industry. One of Led Zepplin's biggest singles was a cover of a Memphis Minnie tune from 1929. Shakespeare, Austin and Shelly sell well even though anyone can print a copy.
The industry's current formula is that people will pay money to see even a bad performance of a classic. Mr. Deeds, Psycho, Rear Window, Gone in 60 Seconds, are all examples of the movie industry tapping prior works (heaven help us if someone attempts "Bringing up Baby" or "Desk Set"), and lets not forget that the Disney franchise was built on the Brothers Grim, Hans Christian Anderson and Lewis Carrol.
So I think that they can make money off of public domain works. In fact, a competative market for early 20th century works may even be a good thing for the market.
Perhaps I just work with a better quality of computer users who are aware that piracy can result in getting slapped with huge fines for the organization.
But focusing on gratas as opposed to libertas is missing the point about why we need free software on Windows. By all means, I could be using and distributing gratas software that just fell off the back of the truck, but cost of ownership is only one small reason for adopting open source software.
So why would I want to promote open source software for windows?
1: Because I need software that I can print on CDs and pass out to dozens of students. Software that does not cripple its self after the end of the semester, software that they can install on multiple computers, software that spports existing standards, software that does not suck, software that will not advertise AOL or install spyware, software that will not leave me vulnerable to audits, suits or prosecution.
2: Security. I may be stuck with a proprietary operating system but that does not mean that I should be stuck with a proprietary word processor or email client that runs viruses. I want the hundreds of eyes auditing Mozilla and Open Office code.
3: Standards compliance. I can't expect students to design cross-browser standards compliant web services without using a standards compliant browser.
Oh, it certainly is a great marketing model, one used to great effect by Microsoft to produce vendor lock-in. I'm not convinced that vendor lock-in to linux is all that much more of a better idea than vendor lock-in to another OS.
The basic fact of the computer market is that for some people the best tool, or even the only tool for the job will be a proprietary software package running under a proprietary operating system. The fact that I need a proprietary software package to make a living (in my case Dragon Naturally Speaking) does not obligate me to use a proprietary office suite, a proprietary email client, or proprietary file management tools.
Showing my unix age here, why port most of the gnu unix filesystem utilities to SunOS, AIX and Irix?
How does keeping open source development excusively on a single operating system that runs on only a handful of hardware platforms advancing open source?
Pardon me, I was under the mistaken impression that free software was about empowering all computer users, not just users of your favorite operating system.
People who use windows often pirate copies of commercial software so they don't need or want open source software.
Believe it or not, there are people who prefer to use open source software on windows. Some of these people consider piracy to be ethically problematic.
The biggest point about open source software is not price, but freedom. Even though I get Microsoft products legally for $5 a CD (one perk of university life), I still don't like the closed security model, the license restrictions and the understanding that using the software after I leave the university will require shelling out $400.
The fact that I use (and pay for) some closed source software on windows, does not mean that I should not benefit from open source software when available.
It seems to me that this article just crams together two problems that don't go together: finding out what you can usefully copy and use without asking permission, and filtering out the crap.
At least from what I can tell, creative commons (CC) does not deal with the latter problem, nor is it hostile to publishers. CC just attempts to impose some order on the large number of licenses that appear an the liner notes of music and the frontmatter of print materials. Choosing between the crap is up to other people.
The article also makes the assumption that the primary users of CC will be individual persons producing nothing but poor quality content while looking for a publisher. In contrast, I've found there are quite a few reseach projects and public service agenices allready releasing works under not-for-profit and attribution licenses.
As far as I understand it, a dual licensing scheme allows you to set conditions on proprietary use of your software. So for example, mySQL can say "we will sell you a license to to incorporate our product into your proprietary Internet groupware package, but in return, we get 5 percent of net profits plus the phrase 'powered by mySQL' featured prominently in packaging and sales literature." This leverage is not a central part of the BSD license.
Educational Technology Reseach and Development accepts ASCII but getting APA bibstyle to output to ASCII was beyond my meagre skills in Latex. http://www.aect.org/Intranet/Publications/edtech/s ubguides.html
Journal of the Learning Sciences: http://www.cc.gatech.edu/lst/jls/submitinfo.html The more I look, the more I see MS Word asked for. LaTeX is nice but I've not been able to get clean output in any way other than the latex->dvipdf path. LateX to html converters choke on non-standard bibliography formats. The RTF converter just did not work.
I know that Word and Wordperfect do not come with a reference manager - it is a 3rd party app.
I guess the big question is why are you complaining about Open Office when the functions you want from Word and WordPerfect are produced by ISI Research Soft? It looks as if the problem is not with the open source project but with the bean counters at ISI Research Soft who decided that OO.org support was not profitable enough to produce a plug-in?
The builtin bibliography thingy (for lack of a better word) does absolutely nothing useful, though with a little effort it could. It requires that you manually enter your individual reference information. After that it does nothing with it. It wont enter a citation for you based on the entry, it wont generate a properly formatted reference page(s) based on the entries. Nothing. It just sits there pointlessly.
Hrm, this has not been my experience. This was one of the first features of OpenOffice writer that I got working. My complaint with the built in bibliography manager is not that it does not work, but that it limits you to the OpenOffice citation and bibliography style.
In any case, a reasonable request such as this is ignored, particularly by opensource developers (Sun made a step in the right direction but it was stillborn). The problem is "sexiness". No one wants to do coding if it doesn't seem sexy to them. In a company, on the other hand, you have no option. You are assigned to do this, this and this. You do it, period, whether you think it sexy or not.
Actually, most of the development I see on OpenOffice issuezilla is extremely unsexy. However I disagree that requests for bibliography enhancements have been "ignored". A number of people (including myself) have made requests for enhancement that have been positively received.
In addition, I don't take it as a given that the issue would be much better from a commercial point of view. After all, Endote support for LaTeX is basically broken (it fails to produce valid BibTex files.) Adobe Framemaker is not supported by Endnote and procite. In writing this response I found that Endnote has apparently abandoned the support for formatting ASCII and RTF documents. So while it may be true that open source programmers do not work on new features that are not "sexy" enough, in is more likely that commercial programmers do not work on new features that are not "profitable" enough. I certainly can't think of many reasons why Endnote would suddenly loose functions present in earlier versions.
I've done as you suggest multiple times to no avail. The request is either not "sexy" enough or somehow not important enough. For instance, THE reason that openoffice/staroffice will NOT replace M$ Word or Wordperfect in academia/science is a total lack of ability to handle references and citations. Word and Wordperfect do this beautifully and professionally (good enough for submission and publication in professional journals) through their designed ability to work well with 3rd party apps like EndNote. I have made the request/statement to Stardivision, to Sun when they took it over (twice!), and to Openoffice.org several times over the years to no avail. Thus, these packages are mere toys for use by people who either plagerize (failing to cite references) or people who don't do serious research/writing and thus don't need to give attribution or support their ideas/claims. These tools are for letter writers and memo passers, not college students or researchers or professors.
Um, I think you have it backwards here. Microsoft Office and WordPerfect do not come with any sort of bibliographic funcionality. The reason why 3rd parties such as Endnote and Procite work well with Microsoft Office and Word Perfect is because the companies producing those programs took the time and the money to produce the plug-ins and macros. Given that OpenOffice is scriptable I don't see a major problem with developing plug-ins. There are a large number of Word Processing programs not supported by Endnote including Frame Maker and Note Bene. Endnote just picked the two most popular.
At any rate, the absence of easy plug-ins for Endnote is hardly an excuse for improper citations. The last time I collaborated with a faculty member in my department I spent a few weeks trying to talk him into using endnote before I gave up and just did the bibliography manually. My current papers are being written with Open Office (what do you do when you hate Word but publishers only accept Word?) and using Endnote just requires a few additional steps (paste a temporary citation from endnote, export to rtf, scan and format the bibliography in endnote, import the rtf file.)
He should resign because he's in the way, that is an opinion too you know. He claims to be on our side, but all this time people are discussing it - copyrights and all their consequences are being beaten down our throats all the harder. It is simply time force it so society can get on with the information age.
Hrm, in the way? This is the person who actually set out to design a supreme court challenge to the Sonny Bono laws in the form of Eldridge vs. Ashcroft. Remember that short of a constitutional amendment, copyright can't be wished away?
He is one of the brains behind http://creativecommons.org/ a site that encourages content producers to release works into the public domain or under copyleft licenses?
So here is a person who has spent a career beating back copyright and expanding the intelectual commons. What have you done?
I agree with a system where works that fall out of print[1] would also fall out of copyright, but the fact remains that the United States is a signatory to the Berne Convention, which guarantees at least life plus 50. How hard is it to get out of a copyright treaty?
Just because copyright exists for life+50 (which I also find excessive) does not mean that one can't give it away. The trouble is creating an incentive system for putting works into the public domain.
You can't discuss your mortgage with your banker without mentioning mortgages in some way.
Your middle-school daughter can't ask you for help on a geography report on Nigeria without mentioning Nigeria.
I agree that an e-mail classification system can reduce false positives by including headers in the formula. In fact, applying Bayesian classification to specific header lines emulates the already-known spam blocking techniques, possibly with weaker drawbacks. For instance, Bayes on From: and Reply-To: creates a personal whitelist. Bayes on Received: creates a personal RBL.
My own experience with Baysian filters is that I can forward spam to myself and it treats it as non-spam email. The whitelisting trend of the algorithm outweighs the spam words.
A lot of computer books are already quite expensive and I can see them becoming even more expensive with this model - the lost sales revenue is going to be made up somewhere, right?
Actually, it is quite possible that online availability can increase sales revenue. Most writers are caught in a catch-22. They can't sell books without a reputation and they can't get a reputation unless people buy their books. The ability to "try before you buy" has offers an oportunity to expand the market. I know that I never make a book purchase without reading the introduction, index, and a key chapter in its entirety (thank goodness for bookstores with coffee shops.)
I suppose that cost is a matter of comparison. I spent $60 last year creating a low-quality bound copy of a class reading packet of $40 pages.
The Segway HT is not about what it can do now, but about what it promises about the future of human transportation.
It reminds me of some of the criticisms levied against the first cars: it costs too much, the horse carriage is better, it requires changes to the roads, laws are not ready, it will disturb pedestrian circulation (remember laws from the turn of the last century forcing someone WALKING in front of a car to warn people it was coming?), etc.
However, it should be mentioned that the automobile is only one of a large number of transportation innovations to come out of the turn of the century. What about the Stanley Steamer?, the light rail trolley? the ordinary? the interurban? the zepplin? Heck, the compact car was first unveiled at the '49 New York World's Fair "The World of Tomorow" and needed 25 years and an oil embargo to even get market share.
The point I am making is that the objections have some validity, but it doesn't invalidate the usefulness and promise made by the Segway about future human mobility.
The segway would not bother so many people if it were not so overhyped as something revolutionary. It is not all that revolutionary in terms of battery powered transportation. Small battery powered vehicles have been a niche market for over a decade now and don't appear to be on the virge in the near future.
It's up to the professor to exploit the tools the kids have. For example, what if the professor says "Can somebody do a quick Google search to see what the consequences of the US joining the second world war later would have been?". Admitted, it's a contrived example, but computers are a powerful informational tool, and professors are to teach information. They should exploit this tool.
I guess my reaction to this as someone who plans to teach is that reseach should be done on the student's own time. Ideally, class time should be too full of debate and discussion for this to be useful.
Isn't interesting how a person is never wrong, the rest of the world just don't get it?
I know what rote learning is, the problem is you still run into the transfer problem. The ability to write out a geometric proof by hand in a blue-book test does not necessarily mean that one can perform the proof if presented in a different way, or in a real-life problem-solving context. The transfer problem is a big challenge in education. The trick is not can they do what they just read in the textbook, but can they apply what they just read to other tasks?
Of course it is a useful strategy for getting started, but rote learning has its limitations.
Second, as only one person pointed out, and as has been largely forgotten by the educational system as it stands today -- after presenting the subject matter, it must be drilled, and the drilling must be done such that the learner has to interact with the drill, if only by writing it down with their own hand (NOT by typing/clicking it -- different neural pathway, so doesn't work to embed the information). Why? Because rote learning is how you make the subject matter STICK in kids' brains. And if it's boring at the time, tough -- do you want them to really remember it or not??
Actually rote learning is not always all that great. A well-documented issue with rote learning is the transfer problem where you have kids who can ace the speed drills but blunder the word problems. Rote learning works great for automaticity, but rather poorly for more complex cognitive tasks like writing the 5 paragraph essay or creating a novel geometric proof (one that has not been previously presented.)
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry to nitpick but "proportion of variance within a given phenotype" is not a unit. The argument is silly though, you obviously mean qualitative instead of quantitative in the original post ;)
;).
My mistake. If you are going with proportions, the equation is %V_g + %V_e + %V_n = 1. Sorry, its been almost 10 years.
Of course the units of variance is the square of the units you are measuring. If you are measuring height units would be cm^2 and weight the units would be km^2. If you don't know enough statistics to know this, then you probably should not be throwing around terms you don't understand such as quantitative and qualitative. Cliff Notes makes a good starter guide
Here are some good study notes on quantitative genetics.
Not exactly. In female mammals one X chromosome in every fetal cell is deactivated early in development. If one X chromosome has black pigment and another has orange pigment the result is a calico or tortoiseshell cat. This is not a "mutation" because it does not involve any actual changes to the genes, half of the cat's male progeny will be black and half tan.
What do you mean by developmental noise? How is that distinguishable from environment? And do other parts of the genome and its phenotypes constitute an environment for a particular gene?
In part, developmental noise is a "none of the above" for variance that can't be explained in other ways. On the other hand, gene expression and protein production is probablistic. This adds another source of variance. It is never as simple as "Trigger X present, make Y".
So for example with calico cats even with twins born from the same litter there will be variations in coat patterns due to the random deactivation of x-chromosomes.
If this is a quantitative equation, what are the units?
Proportion of variance within a given phenotype.
Well, actually I have studied this from both ends and the debate is overstated. Very few people seriosly propose a blank slate theory anymore, nor does Stephen Pinker arge for complete genetic programming. Where there is a debate it is not "if" but "how much".
One thing that you "don't do" is clone clones.
Bwah? At it's base cloning is basically asexual reproduction of an organism. Making clones of clones is something we did all the time back in my misspent youth training to be a microbiologist. It is something I still do by giving cuttings of "shamrock" and sweedish ivy to friends and relatives. Basically for organisms that already propigate asexually cloning is as simple as taking a cutting and giving it a fresh source of food. There is nothing magical in sexual reproduction that insures good copies. In fact, a large number of mutations are known to only occur during sexual reproduction. Overall, somatic-line cloning is preferred if you want a large number of basically genetically identical individuals.
Of course it is obvious that the clone is not identical. A basic equation in quantitative genetics is:
phenotype = genetics + environment + developmental noise.
I honestly don't buy this argument. It seems that more than half of the movies released last year were remakes. Covers of older works are also a staple of the music industry. One of Led Zepplin's biggest singles was a cover of a Memphis Minnie tune from 1929. Shakespeare, Austin and Shelly sell well even though anyone can print a copy.
The industry's current formula is that people will pay money to see even a bad performance of a classic. Mr. Deeds, Psycho, Rear Window, Gone in 60 Seconds, are all examples of the movie industry tapping prior works (heaven help us if someone attempts "Bringing up Baby" or "Desk Set"), and lets not forget that the Disney franchise was built on the Brothers Grim, Hans Christian Anderson and Lewis Carrol.
So I think that they can make money off of public domain works. In fact, a competative market for early 20th century works may even be a good thing for the market.
Perhaps I just work with a better quality of computer users who are aware that piracy can result in getting slapped with huge fines for the organization.
But focusing on gratas as opposed to libertas is missing the point about why we need free software on Windows. By all means, I could be using and distributing gratas software that just fell off the back of the truck, but cost of ownership is only one small reason for adopting open source software.
So why would I want to promote open source software for windows?
1: Because I need software that I can print on CDs and pass out to dozens of students. Software that does not cripple its self after the end of the semester, software that they can install on multiple computers, software that spports existing standards, software that does not suck, software that will not advertise AOL or install spyware, software that will not leave me vulnerable to audits, suits or prosecution.
2: Security. I may be stuck with a proprietary operating system but that does not mean that I should be stuck with a proprietary word processor or email client that runs viruses. I want the hundreds of eyes auditing Mozilla and Open Office code.
3: Standards compliance. I can't expect students to design cross-browser standards compliant web services without using a standards compliant browser.
Oh, it certainly is a great marketing model, one used to great effect by Microsoft to produce vendor lock-in. I'm not convinced that vendor lock-in to linux is all that much more of a better idea than vendor lock-in to another OS.
The basic fact of the computer market is that for some people the best tool, or even the only tool for the job will be a proprietary software package running under a proprietary operating system. The fact that I need a proprietary software package to make a living (in my case Dragon Naturally Speaking) does not obligate me to use a proprietary office suite, a proprietary email client, or proprietary file management tools.
Well there are answers to the question of "why windows".
Showing my unix age here, why port most of the gnu unix filesystem utilities to SunOS, AIX and Irix?
How does keeping open source development excusively on a single operating system that runs on only a handful of hardware platforms advancing open source?
Pardon me, I was under the mistaken impression that free software was about empowering all computer users, not just users of your favorite operating system.
Windows already runs more software then linux.
People who use windows often pirate copies of commercial software so they don't need or want open source software.
Believe it or not, there are people who prefer to use open source software on windows. Some of these people consider piracy to be ethically problematic.
The biggest point about open source software is not price, but freedom. Even though I get Microsoft products legally for $5 a CD (one perk of university life), I still don't like the closed security model, the license restrictions and the understanding that using the software after I leave the university will require shelling out $400.
The fact that I use (and pay for) some closed source software on windows, does not mean that I should not benefit from open source software when available.
It seems to me that this article just crams together two problems that don't go together: finding out what you can usefully copy and use without asking permission, and filtering out the crap.
At least from what I can tell, creative commons (CC) does not deal with the latter problem, nor is it hostile to publishers. CC just attempts to impose some order on the large number of licenses that appear an the liner notes of music and the frontmatter of print materials. Choosing between the crap is up to other people.
The article also makes the assumption that the primary users of CC will be individual persons producing nothing but poor quality content while looking for a publisher. In contrast, I've found there are quite a few reseach projects and public service agenices allready releasing works under not-for-profit and attribution licenses.
As far as I understand it, a dual licensing scheme allows you to set conditions on proprietary use of your software. So for example, mySQL can say "we will sell you a license to to incorporate our product into your proprietary Internet groupware package, but in return, we get 5 percent of net profits plus the phrase 'powered by mySQL' featured prominently in packaging and sales literature." This leverage is not a central part of the BSD license.
What journal only accepts word? Until recently, none of the journals I would publish in accepted word files.
i t.html
n ds/subguides.html
s ubguides.html
The Information Society: http://www.slis.indiana.edu/TIS/contributors/subm
Tech Trends: http://www.aect.org/Intranet/Publications/TechTre
Educational Technology Reseach and Development accepts ASCII but getting APA bibstyle to output to ASCII was beyond my meagre skills in Latex. http://www.aect.org/Intranet/Publications/edtech/
Journal of the Learning Sciences: http://www.cc.gatech.edu/lst/jls/submitinfo.html
The more I look, the more I see MS Word asked for. LaTeX is nice but I've not been able to get clean output in any way other than the latex->dvipdf path. LateX to html converters choke on non-standard bibliography formats. The RTF converter just did not work.
I know that Word and Wordperfect do not come with a reference manager - it is a 3rd party app.
I guess the big question is why are you complaining about Open Office when the functions you want from Word and WordPerfect are produced by ISI Research Soft? It looks as if the problem is not with the open source project but with the bean counters at ISI Research Soft who decided that OO.org support was not profitable enough to produce a plug-in?
The builtin bibliography thingy (for lack of a better word) does absolutely nothing useful, though with a little effort it could. It requires that you manually enter your individual reference information. After that it does nothing with it. It wont enter a citation for you based on the entry, it wont generate a properly formatted reference page(s) based on the entries. Nothing. It just sits there pointlessly.
Hrm, this has not been my experience. This was one of the first features of OpenOffice writer that I got working. My complaint with the built in bibliography manager is not that it does not work, but that it limits you to the OpenOffice citation and bibliography style.
In any case, a reasonable request such as this is ignored, particularly by opensource developers (Sun made a step in the right direction but it was stillborn). The problem is "sexiness". No one wants to do coding if it doesn't seem sexy to them. In a company, on the other hand, you have no option. You are assigned to do this, this and this. You do it, period, whether you think it sexy or not.
Actually, most of the development I see on OpenOffice issuezilla is extremely unsexy. However I disagree that requests for bibliography enhancements have been "ignored". A number of people (including myself) have made requests for enhancement that have been positively received.
In addition, I don't take it as a given that the issue would be much better from a commercial point of view. After all, Endote support for LaTeX is basically broken (it fails to produce valid BibTex files.) Adobe Framemaker is not supported by Endnote and procite. In writing this response I found that Endnote has apparently abandoned the support for formatting ASCII and RTF documents. So while it may be true that open source programmers do not work on new features that are not "sexy" enough, in is more likely that commercial programmers do not work on new features that are not "profitable" enough. I certainly can't think of many reasons why Endnote would suddenly loose functions present in earlier versions.
I've done as you suggest multiple times to no avail. The request is either not "sexy" enough or somehow not important enough. For instance, THE reason that openoffice/staroffice will NOT replace M$ Word or Wordperfect in academia/science is a total lack of ability to handle references and citations. Word and Wordperfect do this beautifully and professionally (good enough for submission and publication in professional journals) through their designed ability to work well with 3rd party apps like EndNote. I have made the request/statement to Stardivision, to Sun when they took it over (twice!), and to Openoffice.org several times over the years to no avail. Thus, these packages are mere toys for use by people who either plagerize (failing to cite references) or people who don't do serious research/writing and thus don't need to give attribution or support their ideas/claims. These tools are for letter writers and memo passers, not college students or researchers or professors.
Um, I think you have it backwards here. Microsoft Office and WordPerfect do not come with any sort of bibliographic funcionality. The reason why 3rd parties such as Endnote and Procite work well with Microsoft Office and Word Perfect is because the companies producing those programs took the time and the money to produce the plug-ins and macros. Given that OpenOffice is scriptable I don't see a major problem with developing plug-ins. There are a large number of Word Processing programs not supported by Endnote including Frame Maker and Note Bene. Endnote just picked the two most popular.
At any rate, the absence of easy plug-ins for Endnote is hardly an excuse for improper citations. The last time I collaborated with a faculty member in my department I spent a few weeks trying to talk him into using endnote before I gave up and just did the bibliography manually. My current papers are being written with Open Office (what do you do when you hate Word but publishers only accept Word?) and using Endnote just requires a few additional steps (paste a temporary citation from endnote, export to rtf, scan and format the bibliography in endnote, import the rtf file.)
I think the law would require not only making the spammer liable, but the advertiser buying the spam service as well.
He should resign because he's in the way, that is an opinion too you know. He claims to be on our side, but all this time people are discussing it - copyrights and all their consequences are being beaten down our throats all the harder. It is simply time force it so society can get on with the information age.
Hrm, in the way? This is the person who actually set out to design a supreme court challenge to the Sonny Bono laws in the form of Eldridge vs. Ashcroft. Remember that short of a constitutional amendment, copyright can't be wished away?
He is one of the brains behind http://creativecommons.org/ a site that encourages content producers to release works into the public domain or under copyleft licenses?
So here is a person who has spent a career beating back copyright and expanding the intelectual commons. What have you done?
I agree with a system where works that fall out of print[1] would also fall out of copyright, but the fact remains that the United States is a signatory to the Berne Convention, which guarantees at least life plus 50. How hard is it to get out of a copyright treaty?
Just because copyright exists for life+50 (which I also find excessive) does not mean that one can't give it away. The trouble is creating an incentive system for putting works into the public domain.
You can't discuss your mortgage with your banker without mentioning mortgages in some way.
Your middle-school daughter can't ask you for help on a geography report on Nigeria without mentioning Nigeria.
I agree that an e-mail classification system can reduce false positives by including headers in the formula. In fact, applying Bayesian classification to specific header lines emulates the already-known spam blocking techniques, possibly with weaker drawbacks. For instance, Bayes on From: and Reply-To: creates a personal whitelist. Bayes on Received: creates a personal RBL.
My own experience with Baysian filters is that I can forward spam to myself and it treats it as non-spam email. The whitelisting trend of the algorithm outweighs the spam words.
A lot of computer books are already quite expensive and I can see them becoming even more expensive with this model - the lost sales revenue is going to be made up somewhere, right?
Actually, it is quite possible that online availability can increase sales revenue. Most writers are caught in a catch-22. They can't sell books without a reputation and they can't get a reputation unless people buy their books. The ability to "try before you buy" has offers an oportunity to expand the market. I know that I never make a book purchase without reading the introduction, index, and a key chapter in its entirety (thank goodness for bookstores with coffee shops.)
I suppose that cost is a matter of comparison. I spent $60 last year creating a low-quality bound copy of a class reading packet of $40 pages.
The Segway HT is not about what it can do now, but about what it promises about the future of human transportation.
It reminds me of some of the criticisms levied against the first cars: it costs too much, the horse carriage is better, it requires changes to the roads, laws are not ready, it will disturb pedestrian circulation (remember laws from the turn of the last century forcing someone WALKING in front of a car to warn people it was coming?), etc.
However, it should be mentioned that the automobile is only one of a large number of transportation innovations to come out of the turn of the century. What about the Stanley Steamer?, the light rail trolley? the ordinary? the interurban? the zepplin? Heck, the compact car was first unveiled at the '49 New York World's Fair "The World of Tomorow" and needed 25 years and an oil embargo to even get market share.
The point I am making is that the objections have some validity, but it doesn't invalidate the usefulness and promise made by the Segway about future human mobility.
The segway would not bother so many people if it were not so overhyped as something revolutionary. It is not all that revolutionary in terms of battery powered transportation. Small battery powered vehicles have been a niche market for over a decade now and don't appear to be on the virge in the near future.
It's up to the professor to exploit the tools the kids have. For example, what if the professor says "Can somebody do a quick Google search to see what the consequences of the US joining the second world war later would have been?". Admitted, it's a contrived example, but computers are a powerful informational tool, and professors are to teach information. They should exploit this tool.
I guess my reaction to this as someone who plans to teach is that reseach should be done on the student's own time. Ideally, class time should be too full of debate and discussion for this to be useful.
Isn't interesting how a person is never wrong, the rest of the world just don't get it?
I know what rote learning is, the problem is you still run into the transfer problem. The ability to write out a geometric proof by hand in a blue-book test does not necessarily mean that one can perform the proof if presented in a different way, or in a real-life problem-solving context. The transfer problem is a big challenge in education. The trick is not can they do what they just read in the textbook, but can they apply what they just read to other tasks?
Of course it is a useful strategy for getting started, but rote learning has its limitations.
Second, as only one person pointed out, and as has been largely forgotten by the educational system as it stands today -- after presenting the subject matter, it must be drilled, and the drilling must be done such that the learner has to interact with the drill, if only by writing it down with their own hand (NOT by typing/clicking it -- different neural pathway, so doesn't work to embed the information). Why? Because rote learning is how you make the subject matter STICK in kids' brains. And if it's boring at the time, tough -- do you want them to really remember it or not??
Actually rote learning is not always all that great. A well-documented issue with rote learning is the transfer problem where you have kids who can ace the speed drills but blunder the word problems. Rote learning works great for automaticity, but rather poorly for more complex cognitive tasks like writing the 5 paragraph essay or creating a novel geometric proof (one that has not been previously presented.)