I'm like you - computer science theory in college and a couple of decades of hobbyist work in electronics.
I know how to make a constant current source from a 317 and knew what you were talking about and how to do it without looking it up....and I'm looking for a job. Contact me from my Slashdot profile if you were serious.
Please consider removing Pons and Fleishmann from your list. Their problem was that they didn't publish a paper; instead, reporting results directly to the mass media. Not the same situation at all.
As a substitute, you can have the Martian canals and Polywater. For some of us, Polywater is still within living memory.
I'm not so concerned with "mistakes" made in the name of science. If the researcher is sincere and proven wrong - even spectacularly wrong, as in the case of N-rays - it's still the normal course for science. We expect the occasional anomalous result (with p.05), mistaken belief, or cognitive dissonance.
I'm more concerned with the mass, organized fraud and incentives for bad science.
It would seem that scientific publishing in the current model is on the way out. Let's look at some of the problems.
Tenure and status are influenced [highly] on publication. Thus, there is an incentive to publish trivial results, to publish results using shaky statistical reasoning, and to publish erroneous and fraudulent results. (Example)
Because of the emphasis on "quantity" instead of "quality", few results are independently verified. (Example)
Journals demand that scientists turn over the rights of publication in order to get published. The journals, in turn, charge outrageous fees to view the work - so high, that most of the work is inaccessible to the general public. (Example)
The fees are growing so large that smaller universities can no longer afford journal subscriptions. (Example)
The journals do not pay for peer review, or editing, or (in the modern age) even printing and binding. So far as anyone can tell, they are rent-seekers; they provide no services of note to the scientists, their readers, or the community in general. (Example)
It is entirely possible to masquerade as a scientific journal. In fact, journal quality is a spectrum that contains completely bogus, slightly spurious, mostly useful, and high quality. Being published by a notable company such as Elsevier is no guarantee of quality. (Example)
There is enormous monetary value in published papers which validate the particular positions or opinions. (Example)
These are just off the top of my head. I'm sure people can find other problems with the current system. Sadly, I can't think of any way to fix the current system. It has so many inherent problems that we should probably transition to a different model, but I don't know what should be.
I just recently reviewed the landscape of document writing systems for a client.
TeX (and LaTeX, and such) are a fine choice for specific purposes. There's a lot of functionality, it's robust and widely used. If you're writing a journal submission paper, it's a good choice.
The publishing landscape has changed. There are now many more types of document (help files, web pages, books, articles, owner's manuals, laws, contracts) that people want to write, and the TeX family is inconvenient for many of them.
XML is a more comprehensive document content specification. It easily covers all of the common document types (including those for which the TeX family is useful) and is extensible in a straightforward manner.
As a specific example, DocBook (a specific XML scheme) covers all cases where TeX is useful, and many more. An XML processing system can convert to any presentation format (HTML, XHTML, PDF, Microsoft Help, Text), and it's straightforward to build converters for new formats.
The drawback of DocBook and XML in general is that installation is a nightmare. So far, there's no "one package install" that gets the author up and running. XML processing is a series of steps, with each step served by one of several open source packages. The author must choose and install software for each step, usually without any indication which is best for his purposes. This only needs to be done once, though. (For open source - paid software packages have this sorted out.)
(For example, see how long it takes you to install DocBook 5.x on a windows system.)
The TeX family is a good choice, but if you're not already using it consider learning a more recent solution.
I've often wondered if people of the modern age would be as affected by an encounter with these creatures as the people of grandfather's time.
Raised on decades of science fiction, horror, twilight zone and outer limits, such an encounter would be grave and dangerous, but perhaps not quite as sanity-altering as it once was. We have context for comparison, the unusual would seem less... incomprehensible.
We're also starting to unravel the scientific basis of these unfathomable entities. I'll just leave this here.
So it's only a justice system when it's convenient for you? Swartz repeatedly committed an offense and refused to cooperate, breaking several laws in the process.
As for the supposed Wall Street crimes, can you link a name with a specific crime ? Last I heard greed and stupidity weren't illegal, so unless your planning to jail all the Americans who knowingly purchased properties they couldn't afford along with the Bankers who approved them knowing they couldn't pay along with the Politicians that loosened the regulations because the public demanded it, then you're just blowing hot air.
You're missing the point, I think.
There are a lot of "big fish" which are ripe for harvesting, yet the justice department spends money and resources pig-piling on the weak and vulnerable. They concentrate on the cases that don't make much of a difference, while giving colossal social injustice a "bye".
To respond to your question directly, HSBC was investigated and found to have a long history of criminal activity, including "... senior bank officials were complicit in the illegal activity.". Prosecutors chose not to press charges, simply because the bank is too important: [Assistant attorney general] Lanny Breuer stating "it could have cost thousands of jobs".
But lets put this into a better context.
Aaron Swartz was harassed to death based on the legal theory that violating a site's TOS is a felony.
At the same time, spammers are allowed to take people's money, despite being relatively easy to track down ("follow the money") and robocall laws are unenforced despite being relatively easy to track down ("follow the money").
The government has excellent tools for following money trails, and could do society a great service by sending a chilling effect to fraudsters.
Instead, they hound a lone engineer to death for violating a TOS.
An eye for an eye leaves one man with one eye, and we know already that in the land of the blind, the one-eye'd man is king.
Yeah, about that...
This "turn the other cheek" thing is great and all, but when taken to extremes it allows (and condones) complete oppression of the meek by the strong.
A more nuanced view might hold that "turn the other cheek" is a recognition that people sometimes make mistakes, and if they're contrite they're deserving of forgiveness.
If they're a self-serving bastard however, society is better served by taking an attitude of stand your ground.
There was a recent incident in NH where an electrician discovered two people breaking into his truck, containing lots of equipment and supplies necessary to his job. He tried to scare them away, they didn't back off, so he beat the crap out of them. Allowing them to continue (the police arrived 45 minutes later) would have seriously affected his ability to make a living.
"Turn the other cheek" has context; it is not universal, to be used in all situations. In the case of Carmen Ortiz, we also have "responsibility for ones actions", "recurrent behaviour", and "value to society".
Those of us who are currently taking edX classes are beta testers and we are paying the beta price of $0.00 to learn from world class educators. I'm sure the STAFF there would appreciate any constructive criticism you can provide.
Myself, I'm a poor beta tester. I spend too much time being in awe of what edX is providing for free to provide much constructive criticism.
I'm actually local to edX and have contacts within that group.
They are swamped with work and generally do not have the time to listen to suggestions for improvement. Furthermore, they have a difficult time believing someone who has experience outside their own expertise - it's sort of like a hobbyist gourmet cook trying to tell an engineer that the food could be better. They concentrate on what they know, and don't consider presentation skills important.
I've never really subscribed to the "you shouldn't complain, it's free" school of thought. You're saying no one should make an assessment of quality based on observations? There's lots of free software that's utter crap. Should we withhold rational analysis because free software gives us access to world-class coders?
Like a venture-financed startup, edX is running on a $60 million investment. They make a lot of decisions that "seem like a good idea", but I wonder if they are the right decisions. They are not spending their own money, and not forced to survive by selling a good product. Without a clear business model, there's a fair chance that they will run out of money and fold.
Contrast and compare with companies that start small and slowly build revenue by making more and better products and services.
Their attrition rate is over 90% for courses (I don't have complete statistics, but I think that's about right). I think that's way too many, and it reflects the poor attempts at translating to the online model.
3) Variable types follow the variable definition instead of preceed
4) if/else, instead of if/fi, if/elsif, or other options.
5) printf is io::println
6)... and so on.
You could almost learn one generic base language and keep a matrix of "differences" which map the generic to the language of interest. How many different ways are there to write a for() loop, anyway?
I'm wondering if we shouldn't just have one generic language, and use different compilers/runtime systems to get various effects.
What's so special about this language anyway, that couldn't be done using C source (perhaps with some extensions) but a different compiler and runtime system?
I've been into the online teaching thing since it went mainstream, almost 2 years ago now. I've taken courses from all of the big online players, and "tasted" several others.
In terms of functionality, they're all pretty good. Where they fall down miserably is in presentation design and logistics.
The edX presentation emphasizes soft colors, rounded corners, italic serif fonts, and such. At the same time, small areas of information are buried within blankets of surrounding style.
For an example, check out the ongoing 802.x discussion forum, and note how much blank screen space there is. In order to get this much blank space, the presentation reduces the list of topics to 10 and hides it behind a slider. The underlying slider data is 15 topics (more or less, depending on the subject length) with the option to "load more" at the bottom.
The overall feel is that you're reading a newspaper through a greeting card with holes cut in the front. Most of the text is hidden, you have to move the card around the page to get all the information. Pretty, but time consuming.
The logistics are a bit uneven, but to be fair most of the players are experimenting with this right now. For the 802.x course ("Electricity and Magnetism" by Walter Lewin) , hour[ish]-long lectures are broken into segments, with a quick quiz between each segment.
It's impossible to get really "into" the lecture as one would get "into" an interesting movie. You'll watch a segment and it's fascinating, you want to see what happens next - Prof. Lewin is a great lecturer - and suddenly you have to stop, break out a calculator, do some calculations, check it twice, do some research on the net, enter the answer and hope you didn't typo a digit or something (the quizzes form part of your grade). Now back to the lecture, pick up where it left off.
Switching gears back-and-forth like this makes it hard to keep track of what's going on in the lecture - sometimes you get less than 5 minutes of watching before you have to stop and calculate some result. The system won't let you go to the next lecture without answering the quiz, and you are scored on the first try. You can't preview the lectures to get an overview, and you can't download them for offline viewing (there are work-arounds though).
Maybe in a couple of years these aspects will be more polished and useful. Throwing the code out as open source will only help, because other players can try different approaches and perhaps better methods of presentation.
You appear to know about biology and related public policy, so let me ask a few questions:
1) Suppose I don't have insurance and get cancer. Why can't I simply opt out of the FAA regulation system? Why can't I get a less tested and less expensive medicine (with informed consent) the same way I would get a less expensive car? Is "death of the patient" really the best outcome?
2) The Hippocratic oath has a statement, words to the effect "first do no harm". Sometimes this is interpreted as "do more good than harm" (example: medicines which cause side effects) and sometimes as "do no harm whatsoever" (patient dies because treatment is not yet vetted, safe treatment but off-label application, &c). Shouldn't these two points of view be reconciled?
3) A car mechanic will give me a diagnosis of what's wrong with my car, and an accurate estimate of what it will take to fix it. He's then bound to that estimate by strong state laws which protect the consumer. If a doctor doesn't get the diagnosis right the first time, I have to pay for a 2nd diagnosis and cure and then possibly a third one until he gets it right. For surgery, you never know ahead of time how much it will cost, or even how many separate bills you will get. Should states have consumer protections laws for medicine, in the manner of automobile repair protections?
4) If not, why?
5) Doctors make educated guesses based on statistical inference. (Example: A Recent Maryland death from rabies. The correct diagnosis was only determined after the patiend had died) An inexpensive broad-spectrum testing grid that identified [for example] 2,000 infectious agents would seem to be the answer, yet FDA testing requirements would make such a product prohibitively expensive. Why shouldn't we have a less-well-tested version which is cheap, and can be used for initial screening?
6) Magnifying glasses are available at the convenience mart. Why can't they sell inexpensive (but with limited functionality) hearing aids? Why are medical devices which do not directly affect the health of the patient (such as hearing aids) so expensive, and why do they require expensive fitting by professionals? Why can't artists build and sell prosthetic hand attachments?
XKCD is running a fascinating comic today which is (among other things) encouraging people to prank Wikipedia as well as hosting a crypto-hash contest.
Fresh, interesting, and a bit insightful. Not at all transparent, childish, silly, or obvious.
One smart creative person outdoing a gaggle of Slashdot editors.
So, here's the other reason to force people to pay to submit to the journal. This weeds out the cranks and trolls...
While this seems reasonable, I would like to point out that:
1) Cranks and trolls are not a problem in academic publishing, it never was a problem, and it isn't expected to be a problem in the future.
2) Cranks and Trolls are well filtered by other aspects of the system. Few cranks and trolls have PHDs, teach at uni, or are working under a grant. Those that manage to overcome these barriers and are easily dealt with on a case-by-case basis.
3) By switching to a "pay to publish" model, your filter is targeting cash-poor researchers, not cranks. Corporations could afford to have their studies published, which would skew overall trends. Drug companies, tobacco companies, and oil companies would have a competitive edge over a uni or grant researcher.
Once we accept that getting rid of the trolls has value to the author, the question is...
4) You are an astroturfer - a paid shill trying to sway the collective opinion by hand-waving and solipsism.
One of the best features of science is that it allows us to make predictions.
For example, to calculate the trajectory of a cannonball we do not need an almanac of cannonball weights cross-referenced by gunpowder loads and indexed by cannon type. We have a handful of formulas for the future behaviour of any projectile based on simple measurements - mass, force, air resistance, and so on. The formulas work for cannonballs as well as electrons as well as planets.
The science of economics also brings us simple formulas which allow us to calculate the precise trajectory of the economy. Such calculations were used by economists of the early 2000's to predict and avert what would have been the worst depression in the history of the US. All the top-level economists were in agreement, who further suggested minor changes in the regulatory structure which are predicted to avoid any such event in the future.
"It would have been obvious in retrospect" said one leading economist.
Unlike gold or silver, bitcoins don't even have a vague amount of price stability that lets them be a store for value. They're purely transactional currency, designed to be hard enough to make that their value probably won't change very much very fast, but easy enough to make that the quantity can expand to support a growing market (at least for a while.)...
Yet another triumph for the science of economics! Instead of vague storytelling such as would be expected from Astrology or Chiromancy, the author outlines a set of assumptions and real-world measurements, then predicts future behaviour using well-established principles and relationships.
His logic is impeccable, the only way to dispute his position is to attack the underlying assumptions. His model clearly predicts that BitCoins are not now and can never be a valid currency, and his position is supported by all the major economists.
Everyone should immediately stop thinking about BitCoins and apply their efforts to something more useful.
My solution is to only encrypt the data, and then only encrypt the data that needs encryption.
I partition the hard drive into system and "user" disks, then make sure that I always save data/do projects on the user disk. That reduces the encryption/backup load immensely. No need to make a backup of the installed programs, or the system executables, or my installed libraries, or browser plugins, or anything like that.
I do monthly backups, but for each project I have a "work" abbreviation that changes directory to the right place and sets everything up for me. (Ie - I type "AIWork" as a command and it cd's to the right directory, adds things to the PATH and LIBS vars, starts emacs, and spawns a remote data display server. Another command "WebWork" is similar, but with different actions.)
Each of these calls a backup routine that makes a copy of the working directory as a first step. Before AIWork is complete, everything in that directory is copied to a disk on another machine. Hard disk failures sometimes happen for electrical reasons, so you should always make copies to a machine with different electrics. (The backup routine knows not to copy non-critical file types, such as.o files)
The backups are file copy operations - if I mess up a file, I only need to navigate to the saved version and grab this morning's copy.
For secret-decoder-ring work I have a TrueCrypt partition in a file that's 1GB long - plenty of space for source files and written documents, but small enough to make a backup of the partition file itself on any day I choose to work on such a project. A little harder to recover trashed files (I have to unencrypt the saved backup before copying things out), but still secure. (Note: I increased this to 2GB just recently. Time marches on!)
Another advantage of this is that the encrypted things are not as prominent in my system. A border crossing ape can ask me to boot my system and log in, and a cursory scan won't show anything unusual. He would have to find the TrueCrypt partition file, recognize it for what it is, and ask me to boot it up. That's assuming that it's even there; it's so small I never carry it physically across the border.
I know this is elaborate, but most of it is done for convenience. There's probably more elegant solutions people will recommend, some open source one-size-fits-all cloud-based workspace management system I'm not using, but it's simple and it works for me. Also, like a 1960's Chevrolet, it's easy to repair and maintain.
I can think of lots of applications for a device attached to your body, and telling time is far down on that list.
(Since I work mostly within view of computers I haven't worn a watch in my professional life ever. Nowadays with smartphones, the need is even less.)
Can bone conduction work with a watch-like device? You could hear your phone ring without disturbing anyone else, and if you could identify the ringtone you could tell how important the call is.
Would body measurements be useful? Heartbeat, temperature and blood oxygenation seem obvious. Would it help your doctor rule out certain diseases to know the characteristics of the fever - spiky/continuous, low/high level, exact date of onset?
Could the device make fitness measurements? Tell how much exercise you're getting per week, let you know when to get out more and which type of exercise best meets your goals?
If there's an embedded accelerometer, can the instrument detect tossing/turning at night? With the blood oxygenation, could it detect sleep apnea? Snoring? Other sleep disorders?
Could the device detect dust levels in the manner of a [non-radioactive] smoke detector? Would this be useful for people to monitor their allergies?
I once worked with a scientist at Berman Gund laboratories (Boston) who was amazed [at the time] that you could put a microprocessor on a lanyard connected to a light sensor mounted on the patient's eyeglasses. He wanted to see if the progression of Retinitis Pigmentosa correlated with the amount of light entering the patient's eyes.
Does the amount of light in a user's environment correlate with depression? With SAD? Does fluorescent light correlate with depression? Does brightness matter or total daily duration?
Will it have a GPS receiver? Could it display an arrow and distance information?
Lots of applications here. Telling time is almost an afterthought.
If memory serves, the US government doesn't consider firing missiles into a foreign country an act of war (used as justification for the missile attacks into Syria).
If firing missiles into a country isn't an act of war, which surely killed foreign citizens at the time, then by that logic it is OK for a country to kill foreign hackers.
Just get the geo-location of their IP address and fire off a couple of missiles. Or (as described here) have agents drive a jeep into the cul-de-sac of the house in question, fire off a bazooka or M47 or other portable "instrument of justice" into the house, and drive off.
I used to suffer from migraines, and discovered that they were caused by Chocolate.
It took a long time to figure this out, because the migraine came 3 days later, so the correlation wasn't obvious. It's very accurate - I can time it to within about 2 hours. I've since found other triggers, such as the fumes from painting my house, but they're rare.
Perhaps making a log of food and environmental factors would turn up a trigger for your migraines. If you want a quick experiment, take a couple of vacation days in a spot that has few environmental triggers (Arizona, say) and eat bland things for the duration (rice, water, oatmeal - whatever is unseasoned and unsweetened).
Slashdot Mirror
...no cash, no credit, no job history.
You're stuck in whatever city they decide to dump you in.
I'm like you - computer science theory in college and a couple of decades of hobbyist work in electronics.
I know how to make a constant current source from a 317 and knew what you were talking about and how to do it without looking it up. ...and I'm looking for a job. Contact me from my Slashdot profile if you were serious.
Please consider removing Pons and Fleishmann from your list. Their problem was that they didn't publish a paper; instead, reporting results directly to the mass media. Not the same situation at all.
As a substitute, you can have the Martian canals and Polywater. For some of us, Polywater is still within living memory.
I'm not so concerned with "mistakes" made in the name of science. If the researcher is sincere and proven wrong - even spectacularly wrong, as in the case of N-rays - it's still the normal course for science. We expect the occasional anomalous result (with p .05), mistaken belief, or cognitive dissonance.
I'm more concerned with the mass, organized fraud and incentives for bad science.
It would seem that scientific publishing in the current model is on the way out. Let's look at some of the problems.
Tenure and status are influenced [highly] on publication. Thus, there is an incentive to publish trivial results, to publish results using shaky statistical reasoning, and to publish erroneous and fraudulent results. (Example)
Because of the emphasis on "quantity" instead of "quality", few results are independently verified. (Example)
Journals demand that scientists turn over the rights of publication in order to get published. The journals, in turn, charge outrageous fees to view the work - so high, that most of the work is inaccessible to the general public. (Example)
The fees are growing so large that smaller universities can no longer afford journal subscriptions. (Example)
The journals do not pay for peer review, or editing, or (in the modern age) even printing and binding. So far as anyone can tell, they are rent-seekers; they provide no services of note to the scientists, their readers, or the community in general. (Example)
It is entirely possible to masquerade as a scientific journal. In fact, journal quality is a spectrum that contains completely bogus, slightly spurious, mostly useful, and high quality. Being published by a notable company such as Elsevier is no guarantee of quality. (Example)
There is enormous monetary value in published papers which validate the particular positions or opinions. (Example)
These are just off the top of my head. I'm sure people can find other problems with the current system. Sadly, I can't think of any way to fix the current system. It has so many inherent problems that we should probably transition to a different model, but I don't know what should be.
I just recently reviewed the landscape of document writing systems for a client.
TeX (and LaTeX, and such) are a fine choice for specific purposes. There's a lot of functionality, it's robust and widely used. If you're writing a journal submission paper, it's a good choice.
The publishing landscape has changed. There are now many more types of document (help files, web pages, books, articles, owner's manuals, laws, contracts) that people want to write, and the TeX family is inconvenient for many of them.
XML is a more comprehensive document content specification. It easily covers all of the common document types (including those for which the TeX family is useful) and is extensible in a straightforward manner.
As a specific example, DocBook (a specific XML scheme) covers all cases where TeX is useful, and many more. An XML processing system can convert to any presentation format (HTML, XHTML, PDF, Microsoft Help, Text), and it's straightforward to build converters for new formats.
(There are also other XML schemas.)
The drawback of DocBook and XML in general is that installation is a nightmare. So far, there's no "one package install" that gets the author up and running. XML processing is a series of steps, with each step served by one of several open source packages. The author must choose and install software for each step, usually without any indication which is best for his purposes. This only needs to be done once, though. (For open source - paid software packages have this sorted out.)
(For example, see how long it takes you to install DocBook 5.x on a windows system.)
The TeX family is a good choice, but if you're not already using it consider learning a more recent solution.
Very well written - thanks for that.
It's the true name of god, spoken at the beginning of creation to bring about the universe and all we know,
Whatever you do, don't play it in reverse!
I've often wondered if people of the modern age would be as affected by an encounter with these creatures as the people of grandfather's time.
Raised on decades of science fiction, horror, twilight zone and outer limits, such an encounter would be grave and dangerous, but perhaps not quite as sanity-altering as it once was. We have context for comparison, the unusual would seem less... incomprehensible.
We're also starting to unravel the scientific basis of these unfathomable entities. I'll just leave this here.
So it's only a justice system when it's convenient for you? Swartz repeatedly committed an offense and refused to cooperate, breaking several laws in the process.
As for the supposed Wall Street crimes, can you link a name with a specific crime ? Last I heard greed and stupidity weren't illegal, so unless your planning to jail all the Americans who knowingly purchased properties they couldn't afford along with the Bankers who approved them knowing they couldn't pay along with the Politicians that loosened the regulations because the public demanded it, then you're just blowing hot air.
You're missing the point, I think.
There are a lot of "big fish" which are ripe for harvesting, yet the justice department spends money and resources pig-piling on the weak and vulnerable. They concentrate on the cases that don't make much of a difference, while giving colossal social injustice a "bye".
To respond to your question directly, HSBC was investigated and found to have a long history of criminal activity, including "... senior bank officials were complicit in the illegal activity.". Prosecutors chose not to press charges, simply because the bank is too important: [Assistant attorney general] Lanny Breuer stating "it could have cost thousands of jobs".
But lets put this into a better context.
Aaron Swartz was harassed to death based on the legal theory that violating a site's TOS is a felony.
At the same time, spammers are allowed to take people's money, despite being relatively easy to track down ("follow the money") and robocall laws are unenforced despite being relatively easy to track down ("follow the money").
The government has excellent tools for following money trails, and could do society a great service by sending a chilling effect to fraudsters.
Instead, they hound a lone engineer to death for violating a TOS.
An eye for an eye leaves one man with one eye, and we know already that in the land of the blind, the one-eye'd man is king.
Yeah, about that...
This "turn the other cheek" thing is great and all, but when taken to extremes it allows (and condones) complete oppression of the meek by the strong.
A more nuanced view might hold that "turn the other cheek" is a recognition that people sometimes make mistakes, and if they're contrite they're deserving of forgiveness.
If they're a self-serving bastard however, society is better served by taking an attitude of stand your ground.
There was a recent incident in NH where an electrician discovered two people breaking into his truck, containing lots of equipment and supplies necessary to his job. He tried to scare them away, they didn't back off, so he beat the crap out of them. Allowing them to continue (the police arrived 45 minutes later) would have seriously affected his ability to make a living.
"Turn the other cheek" has context; it is not universal, to be used in all situations. In the case of Carmen Ortiz, we also have "responsibility for ones actions", "recurrent behaviour", and "value to society".
Those of us who are currently taking edX classes are beta testers and we are paying the beta price of $0.00 to learn from world class educators. I'm sure the STAFF there would appreciate any constructive criticism you can provide.
Myself, I'm a poor beta tester. I spend too much time being in awe of what edX is providing for free to provide much constructive criticism.
I'm actually local to edX and have contacts within that group.
They are swamped with work and generally do not have the time to listen to suggestions for improvement. Furthermore, they have a difficult time believing someone who has experience outside their own expertise - it's sort of like a hobbyist gourmet cook trying to tell an engineer that the food could be better. They concentrate on what they know, and don't consider presentation skills important.
I've never really subscribed to the "you shouldn't complain, it's free" school of thought. You're saying no one should make an assessment of quality based on observations? There's lots of free software that's utter crap. Should we withhold rational analysis because free software gives us access to world-class coders?
Like a venture-financed startup, edX is running on a $60 million investment. They make a lot of decisions that "seem like a good idea", but I wonder if they are the right decisions. They are not spending their own money, and not forced to survive by selling a good product. Without a clear business model, there's a fair chance that they will run out of money and fold.
Contrast and compare with companies that start small and slowly build revenue by making more and better products and services.
Their attrition rate is over 90% for courses (I don't have complete statistics, but I think that's about right). I think that's way too many, and it reflects the poor attempts at translating to the online model.
I know so many languages now!
Rust is a generic language (like C), except:
1) If and while do not need parentheses
2) "let" for local variables (like "my" in perl)
3) Variable types follow the variable definition instead of preceed
4) if/else, instead of if/fi, if/elsif, or other options.
5) printf is io::println
6) ... and so on.
You could almost learn one generic base language and keep a matrix of "differences" which map the generic to the language of interest. How many different ways are there to write a for() loop, anyway?
I'm wondering if we shouldn't just have one generic language, and use different compilers/runtime systems to get various effects.
What's so special about this language anyway, that couldn't be done using C source (perhaps with some extensions) but a different compiler and runtime system?
I've been into the online teaching thing since it went mainstream, almost 2 years ago now. I've taken courses from all of the big online players, and "tasted" several others.
In terms of functionality, they're all pretty good. Where they fall down miserably is in presentation design and logistics.
The edX presentation emphasizes soft colors, rounded corners, italic serif fonts, and such. At the same time, small areas of information are buried within blankets of surrounding style.
For an example, check out the ongoing 802.x discussion forum, and note how much blank screen space there is. In order to get this much blank space, the presentation reduces the list of topics to 10 and hides it behind a slider. The underlying slider data is 15 topics (more or less, depending on the subject length) with the option to "load more" at the bottom.
The overall feel is that you're reading a newspaper through a greeting card with holes cut in the front. Most of the text is hidden, you have to move the card around the page to get all the information. Pretty, but time consuming.
The logistics are a bit uneven, but to be fair most of the players are experimenting with this right now. For the 802.x course ("Electricity and Magnetism" by Walter Lewin) , hour[ish]-long lectures are broken into segments, with a quick quiz between each segment.
It's impossible to get really "into" the lecture as one would get "into" an interesting movie. You'll watch a segment and it's fascinating, you want to see what happens next - Prof. Lewin is a great lecturer - and suddenly you have to stop, break out a calculator, do some calculations, check it twice, do some research on the net, enter the answer and hope you didn't typo a digit or something (the quizzes form part of your grade). Now back to the lecture, pick up where it left off.
Switching gears back-and-forth like this makes it hard to keep track of what's going on in the lecture - sometimes you get less than 5 minutes of watching before you have to stop and calculate some result. The system won't let you go to the next lecture without answering the quiz, and you are scored on the first try. You can't preview the lectures to get an overview, and you can't download them for offline viewing (there are work-arounds though).
Maybe in a couple of years these aspects will be more polished and useful. Throwing the code out as open source will only help, because other players can try different approaches and perhaps better methods of presentation.
You appear to know about biology and related public policy, so let me ask a few questions:
1) Suppose I don't have insurance and get cancer. Why can't I simply opt out of the FAA regulation system? Why can't I get a less tested and less expensive medicine (with informed consent) the same way I would get a less expensive car? Is "death of the patient" really the best outcome?
2) The Hippocratic oath has a statement, words to the effect "first do no harm". Sometimes this is interpreted as "do more good than harm" (example: medicines which cause side effects) and sometimes as "do no harm whatsoever" (patient dies because treatment is not yet vetted, safe treatment but off-label application, &c). Shouldn't these two points of view be reconciled?
3) A car mechanic will give me a diagnosis of what's wrong with my car, and an accurate estimate of what it will take to fix it. He's then bound to that estimate by strong state laws which protect the consumer. If a doctor doesn't get the diagnosis right the first time, I have to pay for a 2nd diagnosis and cure and then possibly a third one until he gets it right. For surgery, you never know ahead of time how much it will cost, or even how many separate bills you will get. Should states have consumer protections laws for medicine, in the manner of automobile repair protections?
4) If not, why?
5) Doctors make educated guesses based on statistical inference. (Example: A Recent Maryland death from rabies. The correct diagnosis was only determined after the patiend had died) An inexpensive broad-spectrum testing grid that identified [for example] 2,000 infectious agents would seem to be the answer, yet FDA testing requirements would make such a product prohibitively expensive. Why shouldn't we have a less-well-tested version which is cheap, and can be used for initial screening?
6) Magnifying glasses are available at the convenience mart. Why can't they sell inexpensive (but with limited functionality) hearing aids? Why are medical devices which do not directly affect the health of the patient (such as hearing aids) so expensive, and why do they require expensive fitting by professionals? Why can't artists build and sell prosthetic hand attachments?
Good post. It's the kind that keeps me coming back to Slashdot.
Thank you.
XKCD is running a fascinating comic today which is (among other things) encouraging people to prank Wikipedia as well as hosting a crypto-hash contest.
Fresh, interesting, and a bit insightful. Not at all transparent, childish, silly, or obvious.
One smart creative person outdoing a gaggle of Slashdot editors.
So, here's the other reason to force people to pay to submit to the journal. This weeds out the cranks and trolls...
While this seems reasonable, I would like to point out that:
1) Cranks and trolls are not a problem in academic publishing, it never was a problem, and it isn't expected to be a problem in the future.
2) Cranks and Trolls are well filtered by other aspects of the system. Few cranks and trolls have PHDs, teach at uni, or are working under a grant. Those that manage to overcome these barriers and are easily dealt with on a case-by-case basis.
3) By switching to a "pay to publish" model, your filter is targeting cash-poor researchers, not cranks. Corporations could afford to have their studies published, which would skew overall trends. Drug companies, tobacco companies, and oil companies would have a competitive edge over a uni or grant researcher.
Once we accept that getting rid of the trolls has value to the author, the question is ...
4) You are an astroturfer - a paid shill trying to sway the collective opinion by hand-waving and solipsism.
This is Slashdot. We're smarter than that.
One of the best features of science is that it allows us to make predictions.
For example, to calculate the trajectory of a cannonball we do not need an almanac of cannonball weights cross-referenced by gunpowder loads and indexed by cannon type. We have a handful of formulas for the future behaviour of any projectile based on simple measurements - mass, force, air resistance, and so on. The formulas work for cannonballs as well as electrons as well as planets.
The science of economics also brings us simple formulas which allow us to calculate the precise trajectory of the economy. Such calculations were used by economists of the early 2000's to predict and avert what would have been the worst depression in the history of the US. All the top-level economists were in agreement, who further suggested minor changes in the regulatory structure which are predicted to avoid any such event in the future.
"It would have been obvious in retrospect" said one leading economist.
Unlike gold or silver, bitcoins don't even have a vague amount of price stability that lets them be a store for value. They're purely transactional currency, designed to be hard enough to make that their value probably won't change very much very fast, but easy enough to make that the quantity can expand to support a growing market (at least for a while.) ...
Yet another triumph for the science of economics! Instead of vague storytelling such as would be expected from Astrology or Chiromancy, the author outlines a set of assumptions and real-world measurements, then predicts future behaviour using well-established principles and relationships.
His logic is impeccable, the only way to dispute his position is to attack the underlying assumptions. His model clearly predicts that BitCoins are not now and can never be a valid currency, and his position is supported by all the major economists.
Everyone should immediately stop thinking about BitCoins and apply their efforts to something more useful.
I'm convinced! How about you?
Well-written, amusing, and insightful.
You deserve mod points but alas, today I have none.
My solution is to only encrypt the data, and then only encrypt the data that needs encryption.
I partition the hard drive into system and "user" disks, then make sure that I always save data/do projects on the user disk. That reduces the encryption/backup load immensely. No need to make a backup of the installed programs, or the system executables, or my installed libraries, or browser plugins, or anything like that.
I do monthly backups, but for each project I have a "work" abbreviation that changes directory to the right place and sets everything up for me. (Ie - I type "AIWork" as a command and it cd's to the right directory, adds things to the PATH and LIBS vars, starts emacs, and spawns a remote data display server. Another command "WebWork" is similar, but with different actions.)
Each of these calls a backup routine that makes a copy of the working directory as a first step. Before AIWork is complete, everything in that directory is copied to a disk on another machine. Hard disk failures sometimes happen for electrical reasons, so you should always make copies to a machine with different electrics. (The backup routine knows not to copy non-critical file types, such as .o files)
The backups are file copy operations - if I mess up a file, I only need to navigate to the saved version and grab this morning's copy.
For secret-decoder-ring work I have a TrueCrypt partition in a file that's 1GB long - plenty of space for source files and written documents, but small enough to make a backup of the partition file itself on any day I choose to work on such a project. A little harder to recover trashed files (I have to unencrypt the saved backup before copying things out), but still secure. (Note: I increased this to 2GB just recently. Time marches on!)
Another advantage of this is that the encrypted things are not as prominent in my system. A border crossing ape can ask me to boot my system and log in, and a cursory scan won't show anything unusual. He would have to find the TrueCrypt partition file, recognize it for what it is, and ask me to boot it up. That's assuming that it's even there; it's so small I never carry it physically across the border.
I know this is elaborate, but most of it is done for convenience. There's probably more elegant solutions people will recommend, some open source one-size-fits-all cloud-based workspace management system I'm not using, but it's simple and it works for me. Also, like a 1960's Chevrolet, it's easy to repair and maintain.
I can think of lots of applications for a device attached to your body, and telling time is far down on that list.
(Since I work mostly within view of computers I haven't worn a watch in my professional life ever. Nowadays with smartphones, the need is even less.)
Can bone conduction work with a watch-like device? You could hear your phone ring without disturbing anyone else, and if you could identify the ringtone you could tell how important the call is.
Would body measurements be useful? Heartbeat, temperature and blood oxygenation seem obvious. Would it help your doctor rule out certain diseases to know the characteristics of the fever - spiky/continuous, low/high level, exact date of onset?
Could the device make fitness measurements? Tell how much exercise you're getting per week, let you know when to get out more and which type of exercise best meets your goals?
If there's an embedded accelerometer, can the instrument detect tossing/turning at night? With the blood oxygenation, could it detect sleep apnea? Snoring? Other sleep disorders?
Could the device detect dust levels in the manner of a [non-radioactive] smoke detector? Would this be useful for people to monitor their allergies?
I once worked with a scientist at Berman Gund laboratories (Boston) who was amazed [at the time] that you could put a microprocessor on a lanyard connected to a light sensor mounted on the patient's eyeglasses. He wanted to see if the progression of Retinitis Pigmentosa correlated with the amount of light entering the patient's eyes.
Light sensors are now cheap and tiny.
Does the amount of light in a user's environment correlate with depression? With SAD? Does fluorescent light correlate with depression? Does brightness matter or total daily duration?
Will it have a GPS receiver? Could it display an arrow and distance information?
Lots of applications here. Telling time is almost an afterthought.
Whups - we launched missiles into Libya, not Syria. Hard to keep these issues straight.
I don't believe we launched missiles into Syria yet - have we?
If memory serves, the US government doesn't consider firing missiles into a foreign country an act of war (used as justification for the missile attacks into Syria).
If firing missiles into a country isn't an act of war, which surely killed foreign citizens at the time, then by that logic it is OK for a country to kill foreign hackers.
Just get the geo-location of their IP address and fire off a couple of missiles. Or (as described here) have agents drive a jeep into the cul-de-sac of the house in question, fire off a bazooka or M47 or other portable "instrument of justice" into the house, and drive off.
Really, it's a no-brainer.
I used to suffer from migraines, and discovered that they were caused by Chocolate.
It took a long time to figure this out, because the migraine came 3 days later, so the correlation wasn't obvious. It's very accurate - I can time it to within about 2 hours. I've since found other triggers, such as the fumes from painting my house, but they're rare.
Perhaps making a log of food and environmental factors would turn up a trigger for your migraines. If you want a quick experiment, take a couple of vacation days in a spot that has few environmental triggers (Arizona, say) and eat bland things for the duration (rice, water, oatmeal - whatever is unseasoned and unsweetened).
You might get lucky, like I did.
So facebook knows all sorts of things about people.
Here's a question: Does facebook know if you're guilty?