The mousetrap analogy is false. Remove any part and the mousetrap ceases to function as a mousetrap. It does not cease to exist, though. A horse may be born with a pair of stubby wings. The horse can't fly, but as long as the wings don't lessen the horse's chances at survival and reproduction the wings don't do that horse any harm.
Behe's key point is that irreducible complexity can be found at the molecular level. Also, because the wings are not selected for, as they offer no advantage, natural selection can not work to change the wings into something useful.
The reason that Amercians with genetically-based diseases survive is due to human ingenuity and compassion, not evolution.
Before all of you fundamentalist materialists pat each other on the back too much, maybe you can answer the problem of irreducible complexity on the molecular level cited here.
Or haven't you noticed every politician using "God bless America" as a salutation?
Opinion polls almost always find that a vast majority of Americans believe in God.
And remember the scene in Contact where Jody Foster doesn't get selected to visit the aliens (at first) because she doesn't believe in God, thereby making her unpopular?
Amazon's strength is that they've figured out how to present a user experience that online shoppers like and will come back for. I know that Amazon now provides the Toys R Us store, and probably a few others (Borders, maybe?).
Amazon should outsource their warehouses, and get more bricks and mortars to outsource their ecommerce to them.
The bad thing about this is that people will only see the Microsoft lies and not the rebuttals by Lineo and Redhat.
As far as I know, there was no ZDNet article touting the whitepaper before the Lineo and RedHat rebuttals. The article focuses more on the rebuttals than the original M$ paper.
This is an example of Linux winning the PR war. Probably very few people saw the whitepaper before this article, and their first exposure to it is a ZDNet article painting it as an attempt by corrupt M$ to misrepresent their scrappy Linux competitors.
As for M$ having better consumer-level PR, how many consumers think about embedded OSes (or even know what one is)? Hopefully customers in the embedded space take due diligence a little more seriously and are a bit less likely to accept FUD at face value.
Cringely sez APIs are available only to viable companies, but not government or non profits, under the proposed settlement.
So what if a viable business such as RedHat or IBM reads the APIs, then modifies Apache, Samba, Linux, etc. to work well with Windoze. Of course, the GNU license would require that the source code for those changes be made available. But RedHat/IBM/whoever never published the MS API.
Because the kids will know what to do with them, and can teach the teachers.
Yeah! Just like in that magic schoolbus show on PBS! We all know that's what school's really like!
My point is that you don't need to teach kids how to use computers. Teachers are far more likely to need instruction. Kids will be learning from each other very quickly how to do all kinds of things that no teacher ever showed them (for better and worse).
As for kids teaching teachers, I believe it's very common for teachers to ask kids who they know to be computer savvy how to do things on the computer.
And of course, these are mutually exclusive goals.
To some extent, yes. Kids need to learn how to do this stuff "by hand" first, and the vast majority haven't by the time they reach the 6th or 7th grade. Maybe a competency test would be appropriate with the laptops being a reward for exceptional performance, but of course that would be unacceptable as it would damage the self-esteem of the kids that didn't do well enough.
If they can't read and write and do basic math, they shouldn't be allowed into 7th grade period. And if instructional software can be used as good remedial tools for these skills, it may still be a good idea to give lagging students laptops.
And of course, computers and how computers are used haven't changed the slightest since then.
No, not fundamentally. Schoolkids still use their computers primarily for writing essays and playing games. The internet adds socialising and research to the equation (and we all know that if it's on the internet it must be true!), but socialising is really better done face-to-face, and the research is fairly unreliable. What disturbs me the most, though, is watching kids cut and paste a few articles together and turn it in as their own work. Do they get a good grade? Probably. Have they learned anything valuable? No. But of course, our society values the grade over the knowledge, so I guess that's OK.
The research you can do on the Internet is truly a staggering thing. Think back to your days in your-uphill-both-ways-one-room-school-house (don't tell me this doesn't qualify as an exaggeration, either; I'm running out of hardship hyperbole!:). Remember the tedium of learning library card catalogs, microfiche readers, etc.? How long it took to find anything interesting, and how old it was once you found it? Should today's students be forced to "walk-uphill-both-ways" to do research like we did?
Socialising on the Internet can be a good thing if students discover individuals and communities they wouldn't have access to otherwise.
Giving a kid a good grade for pasting together a bunch of articles is a teacher and social problem. It's not the computer's fault.
As for "everything on the Internet's true", everything in books, newspapers, journals and magazines are true and without bias too, right? Teaching students to be critical of ALL media is an indispensible skill for 21st century students. It's not like they won't be exposed to the Internet if they don't have it at school.
The vast majority of teachers don't know what to do with the computers in the computer lab down the hall. How is that going to be improved by putting them in every backpack?
Because the kids will know what to do with them, and can teach the teachers.
Sure, computer literacy is important in the modern world, but so is writing and math.
And of course, these are mutually exclusive goals.
I remember the first computer I ever got to use, a Commodore PET...A few years later we had...some Apple]['s...Did I learn from using them? Sure, but not enough to justify giving every kid their own.
And of course, computers and how computers are used haven't changed the slightest since then. I bet you walked uphill both ways to school, too.
There was recently that linked the rise of the modern word processor with the decline of writing skills in college students.
Witness this sentence as an example.
Thanks for the insightful commentary. Now I'm convinced that it's those durn blasted computers that's keepin' our kids from lernin' nuthin!
Slashdot Mirror
The mousetrap analogy is false. Remove any part and the mousetrap ceases to function as a mousetrap. It does not cease to exist, though. A horse may be born with a pair of stubby wings. The horse can't fly, but as long as the wings don't lessen the horse's chances at survival and reproduction the wings don't do that horse any harm.
Behe's key point is that irreducible complexity can be found at the molecular level. Also, because the wings are not selected for, as they offer no advantage, natural selection can not work to change the wings into something useful.
The reason that Amercians with genetically-based diseases survive is due to human ingenuity and compassion, not evolution.
Best,
-jimbo
Behe refutes this refutation here.
Best,
-jimbo
Refute Michael Behe's arguments about irreducible complexity at the bio-molecular level.
Shouldn't be hard for all of you scientists and thinking people, right?
Best,
-jimbo
Before all of you fundamentalist materialists pat each other on the back too much, maybe you can answer the problem of irreducible complexity on the molecular level cited here.
Best,
-jimbo
Or haven't you noticed every politician using "God bless America" as a salutation?
Opinion polls almost always find that a vast majority of Americans believe in God.
And remember the scene in Contact where Jody Foster doesn't get selected to visit the aliens (at first) because she doesn't believe in God, thereby making her unpopular?
Etc. etc.
-jimbo
You can continue hating Lucas then, because he borrowed it [jitterbug.com] from Flash Gordon.
Great artists steal.
-jimbo
Amazon's strength is that they've figured out how to present a user experience that online shoppers like and will come back for. I know that Amazon now provides the Toys R Us store, and probably a few others (Borders, maybe?).
Amazon should outsource their warehouses, and get more bricks and mortars to outsource their ecommerce to them.
-jimbo
From Dan Kegel's paraphrase of the proposed final judgment:
1. This agreement lets Microsoft keep secret anything having to do with security or copy protection.
Now Bill's emphasis in making security a part of everything makes sense!
-jimbo
The bad thing about this is that people will only see the Microsoft lies and not the rebuttals by Lineo and Redhat.
As far as I know, there was no ZDNet article touting the whitepaper before the Lineo and RedHat rebuttals. The article focuses more on the rebuttals than the original M$ paper.
This is an example of Linux winning the PR war. Probably very few people saw the whitepaper before this article, and their first exposure to it is a ZDNet article painting it as an attempt by corrupt M$ to misrepresent their scrappy Linux competitors.
As for M$ having better consumer-level PR, how many consumers think about embedded OSes (or even know what one is)? Hopefully customers in the embedded space take due diligence a little more seriously and are a bit less likely to accept FUD at face value.
Best,
-jimbo
Cringely sez APIs are available only to viable companies, but not government or non profits, under the proposed settlement.
So what if a viable business such as RedHat or IBM reads the APIs, then modifies Apache, Samba, Linux, etc. to work well with Windoze. Of course, the GNU license would require that the source code for those changes be made available. But RedHat/IBM/whoever never published the MS API.
No problem, right?
-jimbo
Because the kids will know what to do with them, and can teach the teachers.
Yeah! Just like in that magic schoolbus show on PBS! We all know that's what school's really like!
My point is that you don't need to teach kids how to use computers. Teachers are far more likely to need instruction. Kids will be learning from each other very quickly how to do all kinds of things that no teacher ever showed them (for better and worse).
As for kids teaching teachers, I believe it's very common for teachers to ask kids who they know to be computer savvy how to do things on the computer.
And of course, these are mutually exclusive goals.
To some extent, yes. Kids need to learn how to do this stuff "by hand" first, and the vast majority haven't by the time they reach the 6th or 7th grade. Maybe a competency test would be appropriate with the laptops being a reward for exceptional performance, but of course that would be unacceptable as it would damage the self-esteem of the kids that didn't do well enough.
If they can't read and write and do basic math, they shouldn't be allowed into 7th grade period. And if instructional software can be used as good remedial tools for these skills, it may still be a good idea to give lagging students laptops.
And of course, computers and how computers are used haven't changed the slightest since then.
No, not fundamentally. Schoolkids still use their computers primarily for writing essays and playing games. The internet adds socialising and research to the equation (and we all know that if it's on the internet it must be true!), but socialising is really better done face-to-face, and the research is fairly unreliable. What disturbs me the most, though, is watching kids cut and paste a few articles together and turn it in as their own work. Do they get a good grade? Probably. Have they learned anything valuable? No. But of course, our society values the grade over the knowledge, so I guess that's OK.
-jimbo
The vast majority of teachers don't know what to do with the computers in the computer lab down the hall. How is that going to be improved by putting them in every backpack?
Because the kids will know what to do with them, and can teach the teachers.
Sure, computer literacy is important in the modern world, but so is writing and math.
And of course, these are mutually exclusive goals.
I remember the first computer I ever got to use, a Commodore PET...A few years later we had...some Apple]['s...Did I learn from using them? Sure, but not enough to justify giving every kid their own.
And of course, computers and how computers are used haven't changed the slightest since then. I bet you walked uphill both ways to school, too.
There was recently that linked the rise of the modern word processor with the decline of writing skills in college students.
Witness this sentence as an example.
Thanks for the insightful commentary. Now I'm convinced that it's those durn blasted computers that's keepin' our kids from lernin' nuthin!
-jimbo