Tell me about it. Experience has taught me to be somewhat cautious with the top-grade applicants when I'm hiring new postgraduate students to my lab.
Now, as an experimentalist, I tend to give personal hobbies like electronics, RC planes/cars, car tuning the same relative weight as the applicant's actualy grades. In other words, if you've been building RC planes all your life but have only mediocre academic success, we'd probably be more interested in you rather than in someone with top grades but no practical hobbies whatsoever.
When I was still a student I felt strongly that the exams per se were rather pointless, particularly in fields where learning bits of knowledge by heart (in chemistry, for instance) was the only key to success.
Open-book exams were better, but I still believe that the best learning experience I ever had was a course in the numerical solving of partial differential equations. No exam but compulsory exercises/computer labs and the writing of an extensive report in which you solve a real-life problem.
Assuming it does that in a sensible manner (not providing false positives without pointing to the reference material) then it's just relieving the examiners from boring repetetive work.
Thank you for saying that out so clearly.
Even false positives are not a problem, because the the human examiner should always check any suspicious report by himself before handing out tough sentences.
Education is about learning, maybe you forgot that
Since when did plagiarising become learning? Learning is taking existing material and working on it to produce new thought, ideas and interpretations.
Sure, you can have long explicit quotes but you must mark them as such. If the anti-cheating detectors flags you for such a paragraph, there's no problem if I can see that you've actually contributed to the report. If there's a real problem with the material, I will still give you a chance to explain yourself to me. I don't see what's the problem here. There are plenty of safeguards in place - no-one gets rejected because "an algorithm said the work is a copy".
We have a problem with otherwise underachiving students turning in word-for-word copies of old high-grade reports. The clever ones will try to modify the wording slightly, change the layout or the figures to confuse the examiners. Bayesian filters will still flag those.
We use anti-cheating detectors too. Why? Because a) cheating is wrong and should be punished, b) the process is fair - everyone flagged by the algorithm gets a chance to explain him/herself to me.
man on mars collecting samples (that may be done by a robot for a fraction of the cost)
I beg to differ. The most important geological findings on the moon were done precisely because of human intuition and the capability to make observations and on-the-spot changes in the original mission plan.
With all due respect to the Hubble which has indeed been one of the best and most productive scientific instruments ever made, I don't think servicing it would be rational.
Hubble's successor is launched in 2010 and any money is definitely better spent on the successor rather than the old Hubble.
Just to correct some ambiguities/mistakes in my own post above.
Apollo 20 was indeed assembled and serves as a memorial to the workers at the Michoud Assembly Plant near New Orleans. The first and second stages on display in Houston were originally slated for Apollo 19. The booster used for Skylab was that of the Apollo 18.
If I remember correctly, two complete Saturn V's were available when the program was cancelled. One of them was turned into Skylab and another into this showpiece. Apollo 20 was never assembled.
and what is this global threat you keep speaking of? again i'll assume environmental. so by your logic we should just pack up and leave when we can no longer live on Earth
Yes. The threat is extinction level impact of an asteroid, supervolcano or a deep-space gamma-ray burst. All these are inevitable and would wipe out all human life on Earth.
We must get off this planet right now. If we're not evolved enough, tough luck. We'll simply repeat all our mistakes somewhere else but at least we'll survive as a race.
"Correcting our ways using our resources" is irrelevant.
and you honestly believe we are facing extinction (environmentally i'll assume) anytime soon?
As long as the human race has no means of getting off this planet, we're facing extinction every day. Deal with the global threat first, then deal with the local problems. It might be brutal, but it's realistic.
3 yr old chinese boy that hasn't eaten in days and drinks shitty water that his government would rather spend money on some wasteful idea that sending a man in space
I wrote a long reply about how futile it is to save a 3 year old chinese boy when the rest of the human evolution is destroyed few weeks later, but fuck it.
The human race comes first. Individuals come second. If we were facing extinction and only the 100 most brilliant/fertile/whatever-the-criteria-is people were to be saved and I wasn't one of them, I'd go along with that.
Furthermore, the money that would be saved by scrapping the space program most definitely would not end up in the "foreign aid" trough. Most likely it would benefit the aerospace/military industries.
The billions invested in the Apollo missions have yielded countless pieces of spin-off technology.
I've seen this claim often, but I've never seen any proof of that. Even NASA is embarrased by some of the claims. For instance teflon was accidentally created by Dr. Roy J. Plunkett while experimenting with refridgerating gases. It was patented by DuPont already in 1945.
You must see some benefits, if only some vague notion of species pride.
Well, fundamentally I see it necessary to get our species off this single-point-of-failure called Earth. Sooner or later we'll be facing an extinction level event (impact, supervolcano, deep-space gamma-ray burst,...) and if we are to survive as species, we need to move out. It will be too late to learn the necessary skills when the disaster is already upon us.
Secondly, because space exploration is as expensive as it is, I see it as a huge opportunity to learn about peaceful cooperation between nation states. Hopefully space exploration will help to blur the lines between nation states and eventually completely eliminate them.
Slashdot Mirror
It is ridiculous to say that I shouldn't be using a computerized tool to catch cheaters when such is readily available.
Now, as an experimentalist, I tend to give personal hobbies like electronics, RC planes/cars, car tuning the same relative weight as the applicant's actualy grades. In other words, if you've been building RC planes all your life but have only mediocre academic success, we'd probably be more interested in you rather than in someone with top grades but no practical hobbies whatsoever.
I'm a physicist and I can tell you that we don't have right and wrong answers either - only theories.
Open-book exams were better, but I still believe that the best learning experience I ever had was a course in the numerical solving of partial differential equations. No exam but compulsory exercises/computer labs and the writing of an extensive report in which you solve a real-life problem.
Thank you for saying that out so clearly.
Even false positives are not a problem, because the the human examiner should always check any suspicious report by himself before handing out tough sentences.
Since when did plagiarising become learning? Learning is taking existing material and working on it to produce new thought, ideas and interpretations.
Sure, you can have long explicit quotes but you must mark them as such. If the anti-cheating detectors flags you for such a paragraph, there's no problem if I can see that you've actually contributed to the report. If there's a real problem with the material, I will still give you a chance to explain yourself to me. I don't see what's the problem here. There are plenty of safeguards in place - no-one gets rejected because "an algorithm said the work is a copy".
We have a problem with otherwise underachiving students turning in word-for-word copies of old high-grade reports. The clever ones will try to modify the wording slightly, change the layout or the figures to confuse the examiners. Bayesian filters will still flag those.
We use anti-cheating detectors too. Why? Because a) cheating is wrong and should be punished, b) the process is fair - everyone flagged by the algorithm gets a chance to explain him/herself to me.
Sigh... yet another completely natural formation that will whip the cydonia-kooks into feeding frenzy for the next ten years.
I beg to differ. The most important geological findings on the moon were done precisely because of human intuition and the capability to make observations and on-the-spot changes in the original mission plan.
For further reference, read Andrew Chaikin's "A Man on the Moon".
It's a sad state of affairs when people actually start to believe that robots could ever replace human explorers.
Hubble's successor is launched in 2010 and any money is definitely better spent on the successor rather than the old Hubble.
Now I can't get that tune out of my head!
Apollo 20 was indeed assembled and serves as a memorial to the workers at the Michoud Assembly Plant near New Orleans. The first and second stages on display in Houston were originally slated for Apollo 19. The booster used for Skylab was that of the Apollo 18.
If I remember correctly, two complete Saturn V's were available when the program was cancelled. One of them was turned into Skylab and another into this showpiece. Apollo 20 was never assembled.
Yes. The threat is extinction level impact of an asteroid, supervolcano or a deep-space gamma-ray burst. All these are inevitable and would wipe out all human life on Earth.
We must get off this planet right now. If we're not evolved enough, tough luck. We'll simply repeat all our mistakes somewhere else but at least we'll survive as a race.
"Correcting our ways using our resources" is irrelevant.
As long as the human race has no means of getting off this planet, we're facing extinction every day. Deal with the global threat first, then deal with the local problems. It might be brutal, but it's realistic.
3 yr old chinese boy that hasn't eaten in days and drinks shitty water that his government would rather spend money on some wasteful idea that sending a man in space
I wrote a long reply about how futile it is to save a 3 year old chinese boy when the rest of the human evolution is destroyed few weeks later, but fuck it.
The human race comes first. Individuals come second. If we were facing extinction and only the 100 most brilliant/fertile/whatever-the-criteria-is people were to be saved and I wasn't one of them, I'd go along with that.
Furthermore, the money that would be saved by scrapping the space program most definitely would not end up in the "foreign aid" trough. Most likely it would benefit the aerospace/military industries.
That's just bollocks. We need to get off this planet - right now.
Feeding the starving people in China will serve no purpose when (not if) we're facing the extinction level event.
I've seen this claim often, but I've never seen any proof of that. Even NASA is embarrased by some of the claims. For instance teflon was accidentally created by Dr. Roy J. Plunkett while experimenting with refridgerating gases. It was patented by DuPont already in 1945.
Well, fundamentally I see it necessary to get our species off this single-point-of-failure called Earth. Sooner or later we'll be facing an extinction level event (impact, supervolcano, deep-space gamma-ray burst,...) and if we are to survive as species, we need to move out. It will be too late to learn the necessary skills when the disaster is already upon us.
Secondly, because space exploration is as expensive as it is, I see it as a huge opportunity to learn about peaceful cooperation between nation states. Hopefully space exploration will help to blur the lines between nation states and eventually completely eliminate them.
I wasn't saying that we went to space and the moon "because we could".
Because we can?
We should go to Mars just because we can. Not because it might make economic sense or serve some social/exploratory benefits.
We (not just the USA but the world) should do it just because we can.
Yeah? Do you recognize her handwriting?
Uhhuh? And how do you know it's hers, Sherlock?
Are you sure? How would you feel if she turned out to be a wrong person - with 500+ hate-mails in her folder next morning?
My point is: of course he's biased/conflicted. So what?
Many posters here seem to be upset that he's written an article when "he has a clear conflict of interest". I don't see any reason for that.