This was my experience, starting when I was around 8. Couldn't be bothered to complete my homework once I understood the concepts, turned to programming instead, and wrote a pretty impressive app for a 12 year old, complete with a crude version of what would later become known as a "web service". My high school grades were poor, so I ended up going to a really easy college and graduated valedictorian without breaking a sweat (especially because I had already been programming for a decade while everyone else was working on their homework!) The education I received in college wasn't great, but I heavily supplemented it on my own and emerged very well prepared for grad. school. I guess the message is that you're going to miss people if you only look at certain schools.
It wasn't OSS, but it was still coding.
And hiring people who all think the same way is, in general, a very stupid idea. That's a lot more likely if you hire people that are all taught by the same professors because they've all been taught to think about problems in the same manner.
If they can do the same amount of work in 10 minutes that others do in 2 hours, they should be getting the same compensation because they're worth it. They save the company time and make it more productive. So why should they be paid what is effectively a much lower hourly fee?
What's more, a lot of programmers, good and bad (but I suspect mostly good) have their own projects. In some cases, these are valuable boons to society that may have impact beyond what goes on at the job. If we exhaust our workload before the 8 hour day is up and no one has any additional work to give us, there's no point in keeping us in the office for the rest of the day when we could be working on more productive things. I used to work in a place where I did work for about an hour a day, went around begging for more for another half hour, and gave up and read Godel, Escher, Bach the rest of the day, telling people to let me know when there was more work available. I improved everything I could on the slightest pretenses to create more work for myself, but it just wasn't enough. This went on for about 3 months before I called it quits.
To summarize, stop trying to bring everyone down to the same level and learn to appreciate the people who make your organization move - or they'll eventually leave out of sheer boredom.
As an aside, you can just mentally approximate integrals with sums (and often replace those sums with closed forms of series) rather quickly - it's more a trick of the math than any special ability.
Teaching the scientific method will not interest people in science, nor will it interest them in "good" science over "bad" science, partially because the scientific method is not actually followed rigorously in modern science (Feyerabend goes into this a lot, but all you need to do is spend some time in the scientific community to see it).
What we should do is provide education and try to keep people interested in science in general. Children as a group tend to take interest in science, but most seem to lose it around adolescence. If they remain interested, they'll seek to learn more. If they learn more, they'll hopefully become better able to tell "good" and "bad" science apart.
On everything else, I agree. Trying to explain, for example, what my latest paper is about is an exercise in futility. They don't understand, they don't want to understand, and even trying to understand seems to be a threat to their self-security. This is why they need to be interested from the start: the mark of a scientist is a level of intrigue - a need to understand - sufficient to overpower this "threat".
"I'll never understand it" is the typical reply when I show someone one of my papers, and many of these same papers were praised by reviewers as "well-written". I attempt to clarify, and they dismiss it out-of-hand. Part of the problem is the requirement that scientific language must possess a fairly high degree of sophistication to be published - academic writing is very far from the 5th grade level you're supposed to generally write at to be understood. You can't cater to both the reviewers and the general public, it seems.
I don't talk down to people I show my research, but the very act of presenting the research to them in its unadulterated form is tantamount to talking down without saying anything. For that matter, a lot of scientists won't get much of it either, but there's some sort of unwritten rule that says you're supposed to act as if you understand everything written in any paper you ever read on the first run-through - I guess it's there to preserve scientists' egos or something:)
Pictures, sounds, and video too. Call it hypertext, I guess:)
I've always thought one of the most fascinating potential uses for BCI was in music composition. Mentally "hear" a sound and the sound is suddenly there. No more fussing around trying to figure out what the right note or chord is. Presumably it could work the same way in art.
Complexity classes in general are defined on Universal Turing Machines. What we can say with complete confidence is that problems outside of P are not solvable in polynomial time on such a machine, as thus on any classical computers. The question then becomes whether UTMs are truly ideal computers, as Turing hypothesized, or if we can somehow build a better system.
As mentioned, the shortest path algorithm is polynomial. Perhaps you were thinking of the NP complete Traveling Salesman Problem? Even if it could solve shortest-path instantly, I don't think that would help it solve the TSP; a polynomial factor is nothing in analysis of an exponential algorithm. In fact, most of the time it just gets discarded anyway - that is, O(n^900 5^n) can be considered just O(5^n), because the exponential term dominates the equation. If you analyze a classically exponential solution to the TSP, removing the O(n^2) factor of finding a shortest path wouldn't eliminate the exponential factor of the complexity of the algorithm.
You're attacking a position I've never expressed. I merely presented a fact to refute the claim that this hypothesis was due to Thatcher. Don't presume.
Actually, the hypothesis that atmospheric gases (not sure if CO2 was singled out) could contribute to a greenhouse effect was hypothesized by Fourier (of Fourier transform fame) in 1824, approximately a century before Thatcher was even born.
Would such life depend on water? Well, not liquid water. It wouldn't be made up of combustable carbon chains, either.
Slightly tangential, but I never did understand why we primarily evaluated the life supporting capability of a planet based on whether water could be present. We might know tons about terrestrial life, but we know nothing about how life could begin in a different environment. Our earth-centric assumptions may not hold, even though the same laws of chemistry and physics do.
How are scientists who take a relatively low salary in comparison to what they could make in industry, undergo far more rigorous training, have a job requirement that includes routinely thinking of things no one else has thought of before, and who publish their research for free money-grubbing? Maybe some are in it for patents or something, but that's a very small percentage of scientists.
The reasons for going into science are diverse, and while ego might be among them, money is not. It should be, actually. Perhaps if it were, more people would choose scientific careers. Maybe more people would even adopt scientists as role models.
In my lab, my advisor takes first authorship on journal papers, but takes last authorship on conference papers.
I personally don't care much about the position of my name in the list, though it ticks me off to see other people taking credit for projects that were essentially entirely my work. Actually, I don't really care much about publication at all anymore; it's simply a game with fairly arbitrary rules. I know it could prevent me from obtaining a good career in academia, but I'm going into industry anyway, to continue my research either on the job or on my own time.
Spot on. Best to teach them good science anyway, though; they won't learn it if they have to pick it up on their own. At least if they already have some idea of how it's supposed to be done, they can identify the disparity later.
This sort of thing is surprisingly common in many places and made me rather pessimistic about research as a whole for a while. It's a result of the combination of everything depending on publishing novel work and the fact that work is often reviewed months to years before it is actually published.
As we continue unraveling and manipulating the source code to life, we're going to be able to treat organisms more and more like machines. When people write and propagate computer viruses, the damage is limited to computer systems and data accessible from those systems. If someone decided to write a malicious biological virus, however, there's no real limit to the havoc it could cause - you are the machine this time.
This particular discovery may be relatively innocuous as it is now... but it could facilitate such things.
BTW, I am not one of the people tagging these articles. I merely share some of their concern.
I always thought it highlighted the fact that we, as living organisms, are subject to the effects of these techniques and that we should exercise caution and discretion in applying them to human biology.
There's also an unprecedented level of malicious potential if such developments fall into the wrong hands.
Multitasking when you're bored indicates that you are not being tasked anywhere near capacity and need something to fill the void. I'm not sure it's the same scenario as a context switch.
I suspect that one's actual ability to multitask is actually very much related to that person's working memory - the ability to remember things through distractions. My research group is actually working on such a hypothesis.
My own approach has always been to serially complete tasks, but to switch tasks on the order of hours or days if I can. Distractions, of course, are another beast entirely.
I disagree that writing articles for the gifted is absurd. The segment of the population may be small, but its impact on society is disproportionately large. It's also a very isolated and misunderstood segment, as you're probably aware.
I thought the whole "synthetic organisms are right around the corner" thing yesterday was actually more of an indication.
It's funny: AI people are usually the ones talking about the Singularity, but I bet it's going to be the biologists who realize it first. AI is still sort of mired down and going in 20 directions at once, but medical science appears to be making a string of rapid advances. I can only imagine what's going to happen when we figure out how to start making ourselves smarter. It'll be even more interesting seeing the social ramifications if humanity ends up being split into two "natural" and "GM" camps over it.
At some point, we'll need to draw a line. Where does helping people survive end and eugenics begin?
I was under the impression most smoke detectors contained Americium, actually. All three are alpha emitters, though, so all three should work fairly well. Polonium, however, can be rather toxic.
Slashdot Mirror
This was my experience, starting when I was around 8. Couldn't be bothered to complete my homework once I understood the concepts, turned to programming instead, and wrote a pretty impressive app for a 12 year old, complete with a crude version of what would later become known as a "web service". My high school grades were poor, so I ended up going to a really easy college and graduated valedictorian without breaking a sweat (especially because I had already been programming for a decade while everyone else was working on their homework!) The education I received in college wasn't great, but I heavily supplemented it on my own and emerged very well prepared for grad. school. I guess the message is that you're going to miss people if you only look at certain schools.
It wasn't OSS, but it was still coding.
And hiring people who all think the same way is, in general, a very stupid idea. That's a lot more likely if you hire people that are all taught by the same professors because they've all been taught to think about problems in the same manner.
If they can do the same amount of work in 10 minutes that others do in 2 hours, they should be getting the same compensation because they're worth it. They save the company time and make it more productive. So why should they be paid what is effectively a much lower hourly fee?
What's more, a lot of programmers, good and bad (but I suspect mostly good) have their own projects. In some cases, these are valuable boons to society that may have impact beyond what goes on at the job. If we exhaust our workload before the 8 hour day is up and no one has any additional work to give us, there's no point in keeping us in the office for the rest of the day when we could be working on more productive things. I used to work in a place where I did work for about an hour a day, went around begging for more for another half hour, and gave up and read Godel, Escher, Bach the rest of the day, telling people to let me know when there was more work available. I improved everything I could on the slightest pretenses to create more work for myself, but it just wasn't enough. This went on for about 3 months before I called it quits.
To summarize, stop trying to bring everyone down to the same level and learn to appreciate the people who make your organization move - or they'll eventually leave out of sheer boredom.
As an aside, you can just mentally approximate integrals with sums (and often replace those sums with closed forms of series) rather quickly - it's more a trick of the math than any special ability.
I know some very good programmers who came out of RIT.
Teaching the scientific method will not interest people in science, nor will it interest them in "good" science over "bad" science, partially because the scientific method is not actually followed rigorously in modern science (Feyerabend goes into this a lot, but all you need to do is spend some time in the scientific community to see it).
What we should do is provide education and try to keep people interested in science in general. Children as a group tend to take interest in science, but most seem to lose it around adolescence. If they remain interested, they'll seek to learn more. If they learn more, they'll hopefully become better able to tell "good" and "bad" science apart.
On everything else, I agree. Trying to explain, for example, what my latest paper is about is an exercise in futility. They don't understand, they don't want to understand, and even trying to understand seems to be a threat to their self-security. This is why they need to be interested from the start: the mark of a scientist is a level of intrigue - a need to understand - sufficient to overpower this "threat".
"I'll never understand it" is the typical reply when I show someone one of my papers, and many of these same papers were praised by reviewers as "well-written". I attempt to clarify, and they dismiss it out-of-hand. Part of the problem is the requirement that scientific language must possess a fairly high degree of sophistication to be published - academic writing is very far from the 5th grade level you're supposed to generally write at to be understood. You can't cater to both the reviewers and the general public, it seems.
:)
I don't talk down to people I show my research, but the very act of presenting the research to them in its unadulterated form is tantamount to talking down without saying anything. For that matter, a lot of scientists won't get much of it either, but there's some sort of unwritten rule that says you're supposed to act as if you understand everything written in any paper you ever read on the first run-through - I guess it's there to preserve scientists' egos or something
But it's even worse when they don't release the code.
Pictures, sounds, and video too. Call it hypertext, I guess :)
I've always thought one of the most fascinating potential uses for BCI was in music composition. Mentally "hear" a sound and the sound is suddenly there. No more fussing around trying to figure out what the right note or chord is. Presumably it could work the same way in art.
Complexity classes in general are defined on Universal Turing Machines. What we can say with complete confidence is that problems outside of P are not solvable in polynomial time on such a machine, as thus on any classical computers. The question then becomes whether UTMs are truly ideal computers, as Turing hypothesized, or if we can somehow build a better system.
As mentioned, the shortest path algorithm is polynomial. Perhaps you were thinking of the NP complete Traveling Salesman Problem? Even if it could solve shortest-path instantly, I don't think that would help it solve the TSP; a polynomial factor is nothing in analysis of an exponential algorithm. In fact, most of the time it just gets discarded anyway - that is, O(n^900 5^n) can be considered just O(5^n), because the exponential term dominates the equation. If you analyze a classically exponential solution to the TSP, removing the O(n^2) factor of finding a shortest path wouldn't eliminate the exponential factor of the complexity of the algorithm.
There's a fixed amount of gold.
You're attacking a position I've never expressed. I merely presented a fact to refute the claim that this hypothesis was due to Thatcher. Don't presume.
Actually, the hypothesis that atmospheric gases (not sure if CO2 was singled out) could contribute to a greenhouse effect was hypothesized by Fourier (of Fourier transform fame) in 1824, approximately a century before Thatcher was even born.
Slightly tangential, but I never did understand why we primarily evaluated the life supporting capability of a planet based on whether water could be present. We might know tons about terrestrial life, but we know nothing about how life could begin in a different environment. Our earth-centric assumptions may not hold, even though the same laws of chemistry and physics do.
Developers should be creative too. Problem solving is often an extremely creative process.
Publication count is rather meaningless. Most scholars tend to publish tons of information on the same few topics anyway.
How are scientists who take a relatively low salary in comparison to what they could make in industry, undergo far more rigorous training, have a job requirement that includes routinely thinking of things no one else has thought of before, and who publish their research for free money-grubbing? Maybe some are in it for patents or something, but that's a very small percentage of scientists.
The reasons for going into science are diverse, and while ego might be among them, money is not. It should be, actually. Perhaps if it were, more people would choose scientific careers. Maybe more people would even adopt scientists as role models.
In my lab, my advisor takes first authorship on journal papers, but takes last authorship on conference papers.
I personally don't care much about the position of my name in the list, though it ticks me off to see other people taking credit for projects that were essentially entirely my work. Actually, I don't really care much about publication at all anymore; it's simply a game with fairly arbitrary rules. I know it could prevent me from obtaining a good career in academia, but I'm going into industry anyway, to continue my research either on the job or on my own time.
Spot on. Best to teach them good science anyway, though; they won't learn it if they have to pick it up on their own. At least if they already have some idea of how it's supposed to be done, they can identify the disparity later.
This sort of thing is surprisingly common in many places and made me rather pessimistic about research as a whole for a while. It's a result of the combination of everything depending on publishing novel work and the fact that work is often reviewed months to years before it is actually published.
As we continue unraveling and manipulating the source code to life, we're going to be able to treat organisms more and more like machines. When people write and propagate computer viruses, the damage is limited to computer systems and data accessible from those systems. If someone decided to write a malicious biological virus, however, there's no real limit to the havoc it could cause - you are the machine this time.
This particular discovery may be relatively innocuous as it is now... but it could facilitate such things.
BTW, I am not one of the people tagging these articles. I merely share some of their concern.
I always thought it highlighted the fact that we, as living organisms, are subject to the effects of these techniques and that we should exercise caution and discretion in applying them to human biology.
There's also an unprecedented level of malicious potential if such developments fall into the wrong hands.
Multitasking when you're bored indicates that you are not being tasked anywhere near capacity and need something to fill the void. I'm not sure it's the same scenario as a context switch.
I suspect that one's actual ability to multitask is actually very much related to that person's working memory - the ability to remember things through distractions. My research group is actually working on such a hypothesis.
My own approach has always been to serially complete tasks, but to switch tasks on the order of hours or days if I can. Distractions, of course, are another beast entirely.
I disagree that writing articles for the gifted is absurd. The segment of the population may be small, but its impact on society is disproportionately large. It's also a very isolated and misunderstood segment, as you're probably aware.
I thought the whole "synthetic organisms are right around the corner" thing yesterday was actually more of an indication.
It's funny: AI people are usually the ones talking about the Singularity, but I bet it's going to be the biologists who realize it first. AI is still sort of mired down and going in 20 directions at once, but medical science appears to be making a string of rapid advances. I can only imagine what's going to happen when we figure out how to start making ourselves smarter. It'll be even more interesting seeing the social ramifications if humanity ends up being split into two "natural" and "GM" camps over it.
At some point, we'll need to draw a line. Where does helping people survive end and eugenics begin?
Anyway, just some slightly tangential thoughts.
I was under the impression most smoke detectors contained Americium, actually. All three are alpha emitters, though, so all three should work fairly well. Polonium, however, can be rather toxic.
Religion tends to hold that we are artificially created. So yes, according to that definition.
Nice argument. Do you have a better idea?