then of course, there's the human factor of being able to choose wtf we want to eat. sometimes, it's ok to say 'fuck science, I want a burger and fries.'
For an adult I completely agree...but as an adult you are deemed to be aware of the consequences of your actions whereas children are not. It is reasonable to expect an adult to know that it they eat a burger and chips every day there will be health consequences and so this is likely to temper the enthusiasm of most adults. However a 5 year old is extremely unlikely to be that restrained and will quite likely reason "I like burgers so I'll order one" every single day.
To me this school program sounds enlightened. It lets the kids choose what they want but still monitors them so that if they do make bad choices like burgers every single day they can take corrective action. This is EXACTLY what schools should do: let them make their own choices and then catch them if they make bad ones and the teach them about why the choices are bad. That way when they do become adults they are used to making decisions and, being aware that those decisions have consequences, their decisions will be informed ones.
How can you prove that a system will have fewer accidents without having years of experience with it in operation such as we have with pilots/copilots? So while your statement is completely correct it is also utterly useless....hmmm you don't happen to work writing error messages for Microsoft do you?;-)
Yes, of course computers will cause other errors, but the question isn't whether the computers will be perfect but whether they will be better.
I still want at least one human pilot for the foreseeable future though for three reasons: computers can only deal with things they are programmed for and you cannot foresee all possibilities; redundancy in case the automated system fails and finally as reassurance since automated systems have nothing to loose and will do as they are told but a human pilot's own life is on the line and is far more likely to do what is safe rather than what is best for a company's short term profits.
Also, to GP, the final projects are much preferred; they're more pleasant, more fun...
The question you should be asking is are they better at assessing a student's knowledge of the course material than a final exam? It's great to try and make learning as fun and as pleasant as possible but that is a secondary concern to the learning itself (although the two are not entirely independent). Would you rather go to a doctor with a great bedside manner who was barely competent vs. one who might not be friendly but really knew their medicine?
I applaud the University's declining final exam administration and change in norms.
Applauding change for its own sake is extremely unwise. I find it extremely suspect that nowhere in the article do I see any argument that finals are being dropped to improve the student's education, only that they are being dropped because they are unpopular....which suggests that perhaps the inmates are starting to run the asylum.
Cambridge (and presumably Oxford) suffer from the same type of comparison. However if you compare their 1st class degree fraction with the A level grades (when those meant something) of their intake they have a far lower rate of 1st class degrees than other UK universities. The result was that they ended up being criticised for both having too high and too low a number of 1st class degrees at the same time! I think the principle they employed was that if they could here both sets of complaints with equal volume they were probably about right.
So if 97% of students with 3A's at A-level (or whatever you American's use) when they enter university graduate nationally and Harvard only takes students with 3A's then there is no problem despite the very high graduation rate.
I think the point is that a large enterprise should be wise enough to know the difference, especially if they are making (or saving) big bucks.
Yes the should be but unless you've been living on another planet for the past decade or so you should realize that "large enterprise" and "wise" go together like "banks" and "sensible lending" or "oil companies" and "taking care of the environment" or "CEOs" and "reasonable pay" or.... The best thing to do would be to ask for a donation to help maintain the project. If they are smart they'll support you, if they are stupid they won't and if they are like the RIAA they'll probably sue you for daring to threatening their business model.
I consider this to be a goal worthy of emulation elsewhere and an excellent example of the legitimate use of government authority: protecting those under its authority.
I agree - what surprises/worries me is that this is not the norm i.e. shouldn't the simple default be that UK laws don't hold in the US and vice versa so that you don't need special US laws to spell out that UK laws don't apply. I know I would certainly not want US laws to apply in the UK or Canada.
Once they win in the U.K., they can file suit in the U.S. to collect on a judgment issued by a court in the U.K.
Ok, that's the bit that lost me. Shouldn't the response of the US court be sorry that's a UK judgement go ask the UK court to enforce it (and vice versa). If I were an American I certainly would not want my courts enforcing foreign judgements otherwise you undermine your own sovereignty and there is always the question of bias. US courts are certainly regarded to be biased towards US citizens and I would expect the reverse regarding non-US courts is true from a US perspective.
That--by itself--would involve major legal fees.
If the legal fees are the way they pressure a settlement then the SPEECH act changes nothing. All they will do is sue in the US. They still (presumably) have no chance of winning (just as they presumably had no chance of getting the judgement enforces pre-SPEECH) but the pressure of legal fees is just the same.
Well, unless you happen to be on the same campus, that's not a unique problem! I used a wheeled in whiteboard in a particularly appalling room and fortunately managed to get my class shifted a second time. My challenge for this term is a brand new, very large lecture theatre which uses document cameras rather than whiteboards....should be interesting!
Seriously, bitching that power point results in bad presentations is like complaining that a hammer results in injuries when you smack yourself in the head.
Brilliant analogy! As a physics prof I've had colleagues express surprise that I use electronic slides at all (I actually use OpenOffice since its maths with OOoLatex is far superior to PowerPoint). However I use them as you describe interspersed with more detailed derivations/examples on the whiteboard and while it took a little trial and error to get the balance between the two right it seems to work very well for me now and the students love have the slides as a framework to annotate.
Going to court to defend baseless accusations costs a lot of money...
...and how does changing the burden of proof change that? They can still sue you causing you to deal with the same costly court battle. If your point is to scare someone into shutting up using a costly legal battle then the only solutions are to either not allow them to sue at all or to make fighting a court case far cheaper. Shifting the burden of proof does not solve anything and will give the UK media license to be even more economical with the truth than they already are (so I'm not at all surprise that they favour the reform).
Also, and specifically, have a look at the Simon Singh case.
I'm familiar with the reports of that case and frankly I don't see how changing the libel laws would help. The BCA could still sue him even if they needed to provide the evidence that he was wrong and hence he would still have an expensive legal fight.
Additionally I can just as easily imagine the proposed changes being abused. Big corporation X prints lies to damage small startup Y. Now startup Y has to go through the expense of proving what X said is a lie in order to sue them.
What's broken is the massive expense required to fight a court case not the actual law.
Requiring you to prove the truth of your statements dampens speculation and opinion.
No, it requires you to make it very clear that it is just your speculation and opinion rather than try to pass it off as fact.... something that I am very much in favour of the media being required to do.
Since when did anyone think that free speech is about protection from all consequences?
The two are not independent. While the US government cannot touch you if you criticize it your employer may fire you. So would you risk your livelihood to say something? Particularly in the US where there are minimal to no social benefits losing your job could be considered almost as bad as a prison sentence. What you need for freedom of speech is protection from unreasonable consequences...and that is where it all becomes very murky.
For all the things you might say about American society, my freedom to write "President Obama sucks" is considered so sacred here I can't even describe it.
...and yet saying a prayer in a school is not allowed, or writing the 10 commandments on a courtroom wall is forbidden. Not that I'd particularly want to do either but I'd hardly call that consistent with freedom of speech (or even freedom of religion frankly). Not to mention the various ways employers use to restrict the freedom of speech of their employees. Yes I know you don't have to work for employer X but, particularly in a recession, are you really going to risk your livelihood to speaking out against some political issue your employer strongly supports and risk getting fired? Certainly not all US employers are like that but some are and there are few to no laws against it since in some states you are employed 'at will'. Hence you have what, to most Europeans, would be an intolerable restriction on free speech.
The problem you have is that the US constitution only prevents the US government from taking away certain rights it does not require them to protect those rights from others (mainly companies) who attempt to restrict them via financial penalties.
Sleepycat isn't NEARLY as comprehensive, but simplicity is usually well worth that loss.
When dealing with normal, reasonable people I agree because your audience is trying their best to understand the information you are trying to impart. When dealing with the law your audience is deliberately trying to misinterpret everything you have said to their advantage so you need everything specified absolutely precisely so that there is no possible way they can do that.
Our libel laws in the UK are one thing I truly detest and wish I could have what you Americans do.
Really? You object to being required to be able to prove that what you said is true if it causes someone damage? Personally I think it puts the responsibility in the right place. If you cannot prove that what you are saying is true then why are you presenting it as fact?
There's not much else I prefer in all honesty, but you guys got freedom of speech down cold.
As a brit who lived in the US for several years you ought to try it before making comments like that. Remember that the freedom to say something does not imply freedom from the consequences of saying it and if those consequences are severe enough to put you off saying what you think do you really have true freedom of speech?
Perhaps it is my lack of understanding of law but I fail to see why any firm should care about being sued in a foreign court when they have no presence in that foreign country. First there was the UK spam filtering company sued in the US, now there is this reverse case. Why did the US congress even need to pass the SPEECH act? Aren't US companies protected from UK laws by merely being in the US and not the UK just as the reverse applies? Isn't this what sovereignty means? The only exception would be extradition but that only applies to criminal, not civil cases.
According to TFA, neutrinos shouldn't be altered much by solar flares which seems to be an almost slamdunk argument against the solar flare part of the claim.
While I am extremely sceptical as well they do provide an argument to explain this: some flares are caused by some event in the sun's core. Of course means the rate change would occur (probably substantially) before the flare since the neutrinos would arrive at almost the speed of light whereas the propagation of material/energy to cause a flare would presumably take a lot longer. Without seeing their data, I don't know if they are in agreement with that nor whether they have accounted for cosmic ray activity that (I would guess) could easily be affected by the change in the sun's magnetic field associated with a flare.
I am also surprised that they have not considered Dark Matter since there are more theoretical possibilities there. There are also the strange, oscillations in rates observed by the DAMA experiment which still have not been explained (although again I am very sceptical about it being DM). Nevertheless it would be interesting to see if the decay rate effect is consistent with the DAMA results: having one unexplained result is better than two!
You're comparing apples to oranges. When I book a flight across the world, I don't have to worry about navigation.
Not really we are comparing different types of preparation i.e. plotting a route vs. planning travel. While plane travel is easy this way (I want to go from A to B) before planes you'd have to book trains to the port, possibly a hotel there, the steamer ticket to Europe and then travel from the European port to wherever....and the whole thing again on the return. All this with paper timetables and not over the phone or via computer.
I can't get lost on the plane...
Actually, amazingly enough, you can! There are usually 1-2 tourists per year who turn up at Sydney (Canada) expecting Sydney (Australia). The mystery is that places like London (Canada) don't seem to generate the same level of confusion with London (UK). So without reviewing the route and being aware of world geography you can still go very wrong and people do (when in the US I heard of a similar case with Caracas, Texas vs. Caracas, Venezuela). So again I would argue that technology does not make us more stupid it just lets us be stupid in different ways.
The difference is not the company it is how the feature is marketed. With Amazon they marketed it as a standard feature for everyone to use. What Apple have done is far more cunning by only enabling the feature when the voice over feature for blind users is turned on. If the Author's guild complained about it they would not only get horrendous publicity but since the feature is clearly aimed at helping blind people deliberately blocking it would possibly be illegal in many countries including the US....but I suspect the publicity alone would be enough to stop them.
A lot of these devices seem to prevent planning in general, even for little things.
They do not prevent they just reduce the amount required. This is typical of most technology. A hundred years ago taking a transatlantic trip required a huge amount of planning and was a month or longer proposition. Now you can book a flight online and catch it the following day (usually at a premium price though!) to just about anywhere in the world.
I still think technology isn't helping.
I disagree. Stupid people will always do stupid things with or without technology...it is just that technology affords them the chance to find new, innovative ways to be stupid. If these people are being stupid in a National Park then they are not being stupid somewhere else so while the problem may have shifted to the NPS rangers presumably the police are dealing with fewer daft emergency calls.
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then of course, there's the human factor of being able to choose wtf we want to eat. sometimes, it's ok to say 'fuck science, I want a burger and fries.'
For an adult I completely agree...but as an adult you are deemed to be aware of the consequences of your actions whereas children are not. It is reasonable to expect an adult to know that it they eat a burger and chips every day there will be health consequences and so this is likely to temper the enthusiasm of most adults. However a 5 year old is extremely unlikely to be that restrained and will quite likely reason "I like burgers so I'll order one" every single day.
To me this school program sounds enlightened. It lets the kids choose what they want but still monitors them so that if they do make bad choices like burgers every single day they can take corrective action. This is EXACTLY what schools should do: let them make their own choices and then catch them if they make bad ones and the teach them about why the choices are bad. That way when they do become adults they are used to making decisions and, being aware that those decisions have consequences, their decisions will be informed ones.
How can you prove that a system will have fewer accidents without having years of experience with it in operation such as we have with pilots/copilots? So while your statement is completely correct it is also utterly useless....hmmm you don't happen to work writing error messages for Microsoft do you? ;-)
Yes, of course computers will cause other errors, but the question isn't whether the computers will be perfect but whether they will be better.
I still want at least one human pilot for the foreseeable future though for three reasons: computers can only deal with things they are programmed for and you cannot foresee all possibilities; redundancy in case the automated system fails and finally as reassurance since automated systems have nothing to loose and will do as they are told but a human pilot's own life is on the line and is far more likely to do what is safe rather than what is best for a company's short term profits.
Also, to GP, the final projects are much preferred; they're more pleasant, more fun...
The question you should be asking is are they better at assessing a student's knowledge of the course material than a final exam? It's great to try and make learning as fun and as pleasant as possible but that is a secondary concern to the learning itself (although the two are not entirely independent). Would you rather go to a doctor with a great bedside manner who was barely competent vs. one who might not be friendly but really knew their medicine?
I applaud the University's declining final exam administration and change in norms.
Applauding change for its own sake is extremely unwise. I find it extremely suspect that nowhere in the article do I see any argument that finals are being dropped to improve the student's education, only that they are being dropped because they are unpopular....which suggests that perhaps the inmates are starting to run the asylum.
Don't professors generally assume that you took all the time available to you and didn't procrastinate?
No, because we were once undergraduate students ourselves!
Cambridge (and presumably Oxford) suffer from the same type of comparison. However if you compare their 1st class degree fraction with the A level grades (when those meant something) of their intake they have a far lower rate of 1st class degrees than other UK universities. The result was that they ended up being criticised for both having too high and too low a number of 1st class degrees at the same time! I think the principle they employed was that if they could here both sets of complaints with equal volume they were probably about right.
So if 97% of students with 3A's at A-level (or whatever you American's use) when they enter university graduate nationally and Harvard only takes students with 3A's then there is no problem despite the very high graduation rate.
Its like tipping, nowhere does it say that you -must- tip (unless the tip is included with the bill) but its still common courtesy.
Unless you are in Japan where it is insulting, or Europe where service is included.
I think the point is that a large enterprise should be wise enough to know the difference, especially if they are making (or saving) big bucks.
Yes the should be but unless you've been living on another planet for the past decade or so you should realize that "large enterprise" and "wise" go together like "banks" and "sensible lending" or "oil companies" and "taking care of the environment" or "CEOs" and "reasonable pay" or.... The best thing to do would be to ask for a donation to help maintain the project. If they are smart they'll support you, if they are stupid they won't and if they are like the RIAA they'll probably sue you for daring to threatening their business model.
I consider this to be a goal worthy of emulation elsewhere and an excellent example of the legitimate use of government authority: protecting those under its authority.
I agree - what surprises/worries me is that this is not the norm i.e. shouldn't the simple default be that UK laws don't hold in the US and vice versa so that you don't need special US laws to spell out that UK laws don't apply. I know I would certainly not want US laws to apply in the UK or Canada.
Once they win in the U.K., they can file suit in the U.S. to collect on a judgment issued by a court in the U.K.
Ok, that's the bit that lost me. Shouldn't the response of the US court be sorry that's a UK judgement go ask the UK court to enforce it (and vice versa). If I were an American I certainly would not want my courts enforcing foreign judgements otherwise you undermine your own sovereignty and there is always the question of bias. US courts are certainly regarded to be biased towards US citizens and I would expect the reverse regarding non-US courts is true from a US perspective.
That--by itself--would involve major legal fees.
If the legal fees are the way they pressure a settlement then the SPEECH act changes nothing. All they will do is sue in the US. They still (presumably) have no chance of winning (just as they presumably had no chance of getting the judgement enforces pre-SPEECH) but the pressure of legal fees is just the same.
Well, unless you happen to be on the same campus, that's not a unique problem! I used a wheeled in whiteboard in a particularly appalling room and fortunately managed to get my class shifted a second time. My challenge for this term is a brand new, very large lecture theatre which uses document cameras rather than whiteboards....should be interesting!
Seriously, bitching that power point results in bad presentations is like complaining that a hammer results in injuries when you smack yourself in the head.
Brilliant analogy! As a physics prof I've had colleagues express surprise that I use electronic slides at all (I actually use OpenOffice since its maths with OOoLatex is far superior to PowerPoint). However I use them as you describe interspersed with more detailed derivations/examples on the whiteboard and while it took a little trial and error to get the balance between the two right it seems to work very well for me now and the students love have the slides as a framework to annotate.
Going to court to defend baseless accusations costs a lot of money...
truth is not necessarily a defence against libel - you can prove that what you said is true, and still be found liable.
Not according to the Guardian and I quote:
There are defences in law for libel. The publisher could prove the statement to be true...
Also, and specifically, have a look at the Simon Singh case.
I'm familiar with the reports of that case and frankly I don't see how changing the libel laws would help. The BCA could still sue him even if they needed to provide the evidence that he was wrong and hence he would still have an expensive legal fight.
Additionally I can just as easily imagine the proposed changes being abused. Big corporation X prints lies to damage small startup Y. Now startup Y has to go through the expense of proving what X said is a lie in order to sue them.
What's broken is the massive expense required to fight a court case not the actual law.
Requiring you to prove the truth of your statements dampens speculation and opinion.
No, it requires you to make it very clear that it is just your speculation and opinion rather than try to pass it off as fact.... something that I am very much in favour of the media being required to do.
Since when did anyone think that free speech is about protection from all consequences?
The two are not independent. While the US government cannot touch you if you criticize it your employer may fire you. So would you risk your livelihood to say something? Particularly in the US where there are minimal to no social benefits losing your job could be considered almost as bad as a prison sentence. What you need for freedom of speech is protection from unreasonable consequences...and that is where it all becomes very murky.
For all the things you might say about American society, my freedom to write "President Obama sucks" is considered so sacred here I can't even describe it.
The problem you have is that the US constitution only prevents the US government from taking away certain rights it does not require them to protect those rights from others (mainly companies) who attempt to restrict them via financial penalties.
Sleepycat isn't NEARLY as comprehensive, but simplicity is usually well worth that loss.
When dealing with normal, reasonable people I agree because your audience is trying their best to understand the information you are trying to impart. When dealing with the law your audience is deliberately trying to misinterpret everything you have said to their advantage so you need everything specified absolutely precisely so that there is no possible way they can do that.
Our libel laws in the UK are one thing I truly detest and wish I could have what you Americans do.
Really? You object to being required to be able to prove that what you said is true if it causes someone damage? Personally I think it puts the responsibility in the right place. If you cannot prove that what you are saying is true then why are you presenting it as fact?
There's not much else I prefer in all honesty, but you guys got freedom of speech down cold.
As a brit who lived in the US for several years you ought to try it before making comments like that. Remember that the freedom to say something does not imply freedom from the consequences of saying it and if those consequences are severe enough to put you off saying what you think do you really have true freedom of speech?
Perhaps it is my lack of understanding of law but I fail to see why any firm should care about being sued in a foreign court when they have no presence in that foreign country. First there was the UK spam filtering company sued in the US, now there is this reverse case. Why did the US congress even need to pass the SPEECH act? Aren't US companies protected from UK laws by merely being in the US and not the UK just as the reverse applies? Isn't this what sovereignty means? The only exception would be extradition but that only applies to criminal, not civil cases.
According to TFA, neutrinos shouldn't be altered much by solar flares which seems to be an almost slamdunk argument against the solar flare part of the claim.
While I am extremely sceptical as well they do provide an argument to explain this: some flares are caused by some event in the sun's core. Of course means the rate change would occur (probably substantially) before the flare since the neutrinos would arrive at almost the speed of light whereas the propagation of material/energy to cause a flare would presumably take a lot longer. Without seeing their data, I don't know if they are in agreement with that nor whether they have accounted for cosmic ray activity that (I would guess) could easily be affected by the change in the sun's magnetic field associated with a flare.
I am also surprised that they have not considered Dark Matter since there are more theoretical possibilities there. There are also the strange, oscillations in rates observed by the DAMA experiment which still have not been explained (although again I am very sceptical about it being DM). Nevertheless it would be interesting to see if the decay rate effect is consistent with the DAMA results: having one unexplained result is better than two!
You're comparing apples to oranges. When I book a flight across the world, I don't have to worry about navigation.
Not really we are comparing different types of preparation i.e. plotting a route vs. planning travel. While plane travel is easy this way (I want to go from A to B) before planes you'd have to book trains to the port, possibly a hotel there, the steamer ticket to Europe and then travel from the European port to wherever....and the whole thing again on the return. All this with paper timetables and not over the phone or via computer.
I can't get lost on the plane...
Actually, amazingly enough, you can! There are usually 1-2 tourists per year who turn up at Sydney (Canada) expecting Sydney (Australia). The mystery is that places like London (Canada) don't seem to generate the same level of confusion with London (UK). So without reviewing the route and being aware of world geography you can still go very wrong and people do (when in the US I heard of a similar case with Caracas, Texas vs. Caracas, Venezuela). So again I would argue that technology does not make us more stupid it just lets us be stupid in different ways.
The difference is not the company it is how the feature is marketed. With Amazon they marketed it as a standard feature for everyone to use. What Apple have done is far more cunning by only enabling the feature when the voice over feature for blind users is turned on. If the Author's guild complained about it they would not only get horrendous publicity but since the feature is clearly aimed at helping blind people deliberately blocking it would possibly be illegal in many countries including the US....but I suspect the publicity alone would be enough to stop them.
A lot of these devices seem to prevent planning in general, even for little things.
They do not prevent they just reduce the amount required. This is typical of most technology. A hundred years ago taking a transatlantic trip required a huge amount of planning and was a month or longer proposition. Now you can book a flight online and catch it the following day (usually at a premium price though!) to just about anywhere in the world.
I still think technology isn't helping.
I disagree. Stupid people will always do stupid things with or without technology...it is just that technology affords them the chance to find new, innovative ways to be stupid. If these people are being stupid in a National Park then they are not being stupid somewhere else so while the problem may have shifted to the NPS rangers presumably the police are dealing with fewer daft emergency calls.