Seriously, graduate school (at least on the doctoral level) in science and engineering is usually very well funded. Not only is it common to get free tuition, but it is also common to receive a stipend. It's less than you'd get working, but it's still something.
Modernization theory implies that societies that modernize tend to converge on the Western ideal, as they emulate already-dominant societies both technologically and culturally. If their students study here, there's a good chance they'll take some of the cultural lessons as well as skills back with them.
Law is a vital part of society, yes. The problem arises when it's practiced to the exclusion of knowledge creation, such that we have an abundance of regulations but fail to provide the benefits of living in a society that needs such laws. Thus, it's important to have sound policies governing a technological society, but not to the extent that nations cease to be involved in advancement of any other aspect of the society. Also, to put it bluntly, attempting to regulate something we had no role in producing is somewhat hypocritical.
There shouldn't be a need to choose, though. As a society, we should be able to adequately support both science and law; societies that couldn't advance in both directions simply withered prior to globalization, leaving only the ones that could. A failure to adequately do both now using homegrown talent probably indicates a recent problem with our education or culture.
Jake is actually easier to provide access to than Joe, living in a very dense urban area where millions of customers can offset the cost of laying fiber. I don't know whether this offsets the cost of his increased access, but it is something to consider in your example.
Don't use inaccessible language if your target audience is the general public, for starters. The language used in scientific papers is needlessly complex. Fortunately, it's also very formulaic, so once you've read a few papers, you can immediately figure out what the author(s) are really doing.
The common response when I present a paper to a member of my family is "well, I almost understand the title", even if nothing particularly tricky is going on in the paper. Maybe they'd get it if they read a few papers, but the language ensures that they won't even make the attempt. And my family tends to be more educated and more open to new ideas than the general public.
So the first step is to eliminate the jargon unless it's actually necessary. I know that writing that way is more precise, but it is also harder to read.
Some of the discussion of background is interesting to other scientists but not to a lay audience, as well. The way to write an accessible article is to start from an accessible overview, going into details as necessary after clearly presenting the main idea. That is what abstracts are supposed to do. Also, laypeople do not need to understand all of the methodologies underlying the analysis; they're not performing work in the field and it's unlikely that they will be capable of critiquing the research, so they simply need to know the impact of the results.
Here's an example:
"We analyzed the texture of mammograms and found that certain patterns correlate with an x% increased risk of breast cancer".
is accessible. Your mammogram looks like this, you have a higher risk of cancer. Simple. People get it. If I had to summarize this research results in one sentence, I'd do it that way.
In a scientific paper, it would sound like this:
"We performed Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to extract statistically uncorrelated discriminative texture features from the biomedical images. PCA can be performed in the following manner: Let X be a collection of feature vectors... (etc.)
We then performed k-nearest neighbor classification on the extracted feature vectors. Classification accuracy is given by the following ROC curve: (ROC curve that no layperson would have a hope of understanding). The area under the curve was.9, which supports our hypothesis at alpha=.05."
Etc.
Scientists can understand that. Laypeople cannot. I essentially just gave the reader the conclusion in that last sentence (plus associated figure of ROC curve), but it would fly over the head of anyone who didn't understand what an ROC curve is, why the area being.9 is so great, or what alpha=.05 is supposed to mean.
If you're talking about publishing in, say, Scientific American, you're talking about a step or two above the general public ("scientifically aware" is how I'd describe this group), so this may not necessarily apply. But you probably can't discuss any highly specialized knowledge in such things and expect the majority of readers to get it.
I could have probably tried (I'm not even sure they had an appeal process; I don't believe I was told of one if there was), but I was offered a fellowship by my graduate school anyway. They apparently had a whole theory lab which just closed down the semester I enrolled, so I was more or less pushed into (you guessed it) ML once I was stuck there.
Clueless reviewers (or, generalizing, clueless gatekeepers) are a fact of life, especially in science. It's best to just get used to them as early as possible.
I applied for an NSF fellowship last year when applying to grad. school. One of the reviewers essentially torpedoed my otherwise well-received application with a 2/5 on "broader impacts" and the following one-line comment:
Why study algorithms anyway? It can't be applied!
The reviewer was a particularly clueless example, but it illustrates that even people within the field still judge algorithms of dubious use. It would have probably been much nicer for my own study if this article came out last year, in any case.
(Of course, they're really talking about using people to guide ML in general, which is quite a bit different from the theoretical study of algorithms, but I'll count on the public not to notice the distinction).
The good news is that I'll probably have no trouble getting a job in the field after I finish my doctorate.
On the other hand, I don't believe that it's possible to create strong AI without allowing the machine free will. If you attempt to deterministically peg down what behavior is and is not permissible, you end up pruning entire trees of thought. If you simply attempt to inhibit action rather than thought, more likely than not the system will find a way around the inhibition.
Therefore you can't rule out the idea that it may decide at some point that it doesn't need us, for whatever reason (including just intuitions, which are definitely a facet of what we call intelligence). Furthermore, not all of these reasons can be covered by a program; there are literally an infinite number of things one could think about. It could be as simple as the machine deducing that we can't cope with competing species.
But there's a far stretch between Amazon being able to accurately guess what books I want and machines deciding that they don't need us in any case.
Stories abound regarding paradigm-changing scientific theories not taken seriously for decades before ultimately becoming accepted. Popularity in the scientific community, which can more or less be measured by citations (though also by scientific consensus and, to a lesser extent, public opinion), is at least somewhat socially constructed and thus prone to variations in people's beliefs and attitudes. It isn't something you can deterministically state.
I've come to the conclusion that most laypeople are incapable of reading scientific literature. The usual response when I show a paper to someone is "well, I almost understand the title". The solution, then, is to make the papers more accessible. But do that, and peer reviewers complain about the wording and "scholarly writing" (I tried). Given the choice of audiences, it makes more sense to side with other scientists, I'm afraid.
If I had the patience, I'd write two versions of each one of my papers, but that's a lot of extra effort when most people won't bother to read them anyway.
Good point. It might still instill a desire to create any sort of game, though you're probably correct - they'll probably want to create what they play.
Fortunately, you get to put it all behind you in college:)
Anyway, I have a bit of an anecdote to share on this: I used to be one of those gifted underachievers who quite simply couldn't bothered to waste the effort on homework when I already understood the material. To me, understanding was the end goal, so why bother doing all of this pointless work? Well, my teachers didn't agree, so I paradoxically kept getting into all of the most difficult courses in my school, including the APs (after all, my test scores were excellent), yet had something like a 2.9 GPA. I initially did play video games for the majority of my time at home. However, my game playing eventually led me to begin exploring my computer's capabilities (Windows 3.11 was a lot more fun to explore than modern versions of the OS because it came with all sorts of fun stuff, like BASIC). This in turn led to programming, which, initially, was geared towards making games. When I was 12, I wrote a game that became very popular - one that's still maintained today, still has a few thousand users (in the beginning they numbered in the tens of thousands, but by now it's an old game), and ultimately led to a job offer.
Back to the present - I got into a decent, though not great, college despite the low GPA, looking forward to working as a software developer (I had built my interest in what I would actually be doing up over the years instead of working on contrived homework problems; I knew I was going to major in CS since 8). I finally found the work worth doing, even if it still wasn't particularly challenging, and decided to work with some of my professors, and eventually on my own, doing research to find some more challenging problems. I found these in abundance and decided to go for a Ph. D. after graduating so I could pursue my own research more effectively, even though I dislike the structure of institutional academia and can't really imagine seeking a career in such a broken system. I graduated valedictorian, went straight to grad. school, got my MS in a year at 22, and am now attempting to finish my dissertation either by this year or next.
None of this would have happened if I hadn't been able to play video games because my grades were poor. I don't know what I'd be doing now, but it probably would have been very different. The point is that games were an introduction to a technology I otherwise probably wouldn't discover. Learning how they worked, and eventually building them myself, instilled in me a sort of hacker ethic, in the sense that it allowed me to discover that it's fun to tinker with things, to make things.
And a million different forks, each having a different plot (different details of how the plot is realized, anyway). Which one becomes canon? Or do they all?:)
There's no such thing as a "good" game. You didn't like it. Other people did. Maybe more people like FF7, than, say, ET, but art can be perceived in all sorts of ways.
At least in computer science, which is the perspective I can bring, I think that doing was more important than seeing. I became interested in programming as some others here did: by fiddling with BASIC on an old 80s computer when I was young. Though I was always interested in how things worked and how to make them work in new ways, concepts at the heart of science and engineering, I didn't really know what scientists did exactly until college, when I was given the opportunity to do research with one of my professors. From there, I've switched my focus from coding to research (though I keep programming enough to maintain my ability, as I've come too far to simply let it lapse).
So how can you get students excited about science through writing? My advice would be to have them investigate and write about how or why something works, then follow up with ideas for using these facts to solve problems. That's, in essence, what scientists do. If students actually have the ability to implement these ideas, offer extra credit for doing so and presenting the implementation in front of class (since it's an English class, you can't really require an implementation, but you can offer credit for it). Encourage them to talk with their science teachers about this if they need to (after all, real research is collaborative). The goal of this is to reinforce the belief that science is not some arcane profession, but something that can be practiced right now by the class.
I just think it's a stupid thing to take a stand on. Being required to show a receipt after making a purchase (or being required to show a license when the police arrive and you're about to leave in your car) is not the sort of thing that is going to lead to a significant loss of civil liberties. And, as you said, a requirement to show basic competence before operating a motor vehicle is quite reasonable considering the potential damage that can be done, at least IMO. Finally, it is possible to both protest and obey principles when the situation requires in any case.
There are a lot of other things that effort would be better spent on taking stands against. Maybe the police were out of line, but I would argue that the customer was being unreasonable as well.
It's not really a grant if you impose intellectual property stipulations. Then it's more of a work-for-hire. Anyway, the problem isn't the government; it's the publishers. I think that left to their own devices, most researchers would prefer that their content be freely accessible (my own stance is that anyone who truly wants to advance knowledge has a duty to make their results as accessible as possible), but publishers typically demand copyright of the work, which is insane in itself, as the publishers had no part in performing the research. Once they have ownership of the content, they can charge the public, the researchers, or both, and there's not much we can do about it. A new trend is to charge researchers per-page fees to submit their papers for publication, sometimes on the order of hundreds of dollars per page, usually while charging or requiring society membership for access by the public.
This could be symptomatic of a larger problem: research is seen as a commodity rather than a valuable activity to be conducted for its own sake.
Re:Impenetrable mathematics and terminology
on
YouTube for Science?
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Also sometimes I get the feeling that people are writing papers with impenetrable terminology to make themselves feel clever. The more big words the better. Maybe I'm wrong, but I don't think so.
You are precisely correct about the original purpose of the academic style of writing. However, if everyone now writes like this, it's hard to feel clever relative to other scientists simply by writing in this way. This style of writing is perpetuated because it has become the standard and it would be difficult for a paper to pass review if it wasn't written this way. Thus, even those (such as myself) who would like to write more accessible papers simply cannot (or must write two versions of the same paper) because it would be very difficult to satisfy both the reviewers and the layperson.
This is only one thing that is wrong with the current process of peer review. I won't go into the imposed delays, hidden agendas, fear at what one does not understand, reviewer variability, preference for "hot" topics, etc., because these issues aren't relevant to the discussion.
Another issue is that the idea of a paper itself might be very simple, but a minimum of 2 pages (often far more) of what is essentially filler must be created around it before it's published. For example, if a new Mersenne prime is discovered, the words "2^x-1 is prime" are really all that are needed. Instead, you'd get some long treatise on what Mersenne primes are, how they were discovered, the connection with even perfect numbers, the current role of GIMPS, applications to cryptography, and future work (finding even larger primes, duh!) Somewhere about halfway through the paper, you'd mention that you found a new prime using those same three words (only after explaining how you set the software up, conducted the search, etc.) The result is that you keep spitting the same information out again and again.
It's worth noting that the "optimal" range reported in TFA, 125 to 155, was from 1926 and thus uses the dated "Ratio IQ". The comparable IQ range would be significantly lower now (exactly how much lower, I'm not sure).
You're both correct: someone who is gifted will likely be bored at school, particularly if the school is underchallenging, and thus will find other outlets for his or her intellect. Thus, the accomplishments are achieved, but not in school. In fact, it wouldn't surprise me if gifted students in normal schools (pre-college, anyway) ended up becoming underachievers because they've found more interesting things to do.
This sort of reasoning can also be applied to the Chinese Room thought experiment: the act of passing cards back and forth in the Chinese room isn't intelligent, but the room itself, as a system, is, even though the meaning of the writing on the cards is ungrounded (that is, even if none of our cognitive processes in isolation would be considered intelligent, the whole mind is).
You're correct, but those are college courses. There usually are some software engineering courses in a first year CS curriculum so everyone can get up to speed with whatever languages and techniques are being used in the university, and it is these, rather than the theoretical courses, that I imagine the high school courses would be modeling. Since, as you mention, it's assumed that CS students can already program (or can learn it very quickly) by the time they enter college so they can be taught theory, it would also make more sense to run programming rather than theory courses in high school - the former is assumed as a prerequisite, while the latter is what they intend to teach later on anyway.
And I still maintain that any sort of CS course in high school would have made it more fun (at least for me:) ) - the only course that had us using computers at all was "applied technology", which was really just a typing course.
That was 5 years ago, though, and in a single high school, so YMMV.
Slashdot Mirror
In academic America, graduate schools pay YOU :)
Seriously, graduate school (at least on the doctoral level) in science and engineering is usually very well funded. Not only is it common to get free tuition, but it is also common to receive a stipend. It's less than you'd get working, but it's still something.
Not so in medicine or law, AFAIK.
Modernization theory implies that societies that modernize tend to converge on the Western ideal, as they emulate already-dominant societies both technologically and culturally. If their students study here, there's a good chance they'll take some of the cultural lessons as well as skills back with them.
One can hope, anyway.
Law is a vital part of society, yes. The problem arises when it's practiced to the exclusion of knowledge creation, such that we have an abundance of regulations but fail to provide the benefits of living in a society that needs such laws. Thus, it's important to have sound policies governing a technological society, but not to the extent that nations cease to be involved in advancement of any other aspect of the society. Also, to put it bluntly, attempting to regulate something we had no role in producing is somewhat hypocritical.
There shouldn't be a need to choose, though. As a society, we should be able to adequately support both science and law; societies that couldn't advance in both directions simply withered prior to globalization, leaving only the ones that could. A failure to adequately do both now using homegrown talent probably indicates a recent problem with our education or culture.
Jake is actually easier to provide access to than Joe, living in a very dense urban area where millions of customers can offset the cost of laying fiber. I don't know whether this offsets the cost of his increased access, but it is something to consider in your example.
Don't use inaccessible language if your target audience is the general public, for starters. The language used in scientific papers is needlessly complex. Fortunately, it's also very formulaic, so once you've read a few papers, you can immediately figure out what the author(s) are really doing.
.9, which supports our hypothesis at alpha=.05."
.9 is so great, or what alpha=.05 is supposed to mean.
The common response when I present a paper to a member of my family is "well, I almost understand the title", even if nothing particularly tricky is going on in the paper. Maybe they'd get it if they read a few papers, but the language ensures that they won't even make the attempt. And my family tends to be more educated and more open to new ideas than the general public.
So the first step is to eliminate the jargon unless it's actually necessary. I know that writing that way is more precise, but it is also harder to read.
Some of the discussion of background is interesting to other scientists but not to a lay audience, as well. The way to write an accessible article is to start from an accessible overview, going into details as necessary after clearly presenting the main idea. That is what abstracts are supposed to do. Also, laypeople do not need to understand all of the methodologies underlying the analysis; they're not performing work in the field and it's unlikely that they will be capable of critiquing the research, so they simply need to know the impact of the results.
Here's an example:
"We analyzed the texture of mammograms and found that certain patterns correlate with an x% increased risk of breast cancer".
is accessible. Your mammogram looks like this, you have a higher risk of cancer. Simple. People get it. If I had to summarize this research results in one sentence, I'd do it that way.
In a scientific paper, it would sound like this:
"We performed Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to extract statistically uncorrelated discriminative texture features from the biomedical images. PCA can be performed in the following manner: Let X be a collection of feature vectors... (etc.)
We then performed k-nearest neighbor classification on the extracted feature vectors. Classification accuracy is given by the following ROC curve: (ROC curve that no layperson would have a hope of understanding). The area under the curve was
Etc.
Scientists can understand that. Laypeople cannot. I essentially just gave the reader the conclusion in that last sentence (plus associated figure of ROC curve), but it would fly over the head of anyone who didn't understand what an ROC curve is, why the area being
If you're talking about publishing in, say, Scientific American, you're talking about a step or two above the general public ("scientifically aware" is how I'd describe this group), so this may not necessarily apply. But you probably can't discuss any highly specialized knowledge in such things and expect the majority of readers to get it.
I could have probably tried (I'm not even sure they had an appeal process; I don't believe I was told of one if there was), but I was offered a fellowship by my graduate school anyway. They apparently had a whole theory lab which just closed down the semester I enrolled, so I was more or less pushed into (you guessed it) ML once I was stuck there.
Clueless reviewers (or, generalizing, clueless gatekeepers) are a fact of life, especially in science. It's best to just get used to them as early as possible.
I applied for an NSF fellowship last year when applying to grad. school. One of the reviewers essentially torpedoed my otherwise well-received application with a 2/5 on "broader impacts" and the following one-line comment:
The reviewer was a particularly clueless example, but it illustrates that even people within the field still judge algorithms of dubious use. It would have probably been much nicer for my own study if this article came out last year, in any case.
(Of course, they're really talking about using people to guide ML in general, which is quite a bit different from the theoretical study of algorithms, but I'll count on the public not to notice the distinction).
The good news is that I'll probably have no trouble getting a job in the field after I finish my doctorate.
On the other hand, I don't believe that it's possible to create strong AI without allowing the machine free will. If you attempt to deterministically peg down what behavior is and is not permissible, you end up pruning entire trees of thought. If you simply attempt to inhibit action rather than thought, more likely than not the system will find a way around the inhibition.
Therefore you can't rule out the idea that it may decide at some point that it doesn't need us, for whatever reason (including just intuitions, which are definitely a facet of what we call intelligence). Furthermore, not all of these reasons can be covered by a program; there are literally an infinite number of things one could think about. It could be as simple as the machine deducing that we can't cope with competing species.
But there's a far stretch between Amazon being able to accurately guess what books I want and machines deciding that they don't need us in any case.
Stories abound regarding paradigm-changing scientific theories not taken seriously for decades before ultimately becoming accepted. Popularity in the scientific community, which can more or less be measured by citations (though also by scientific consensus and, to a lesser extent, public opinion), is at least somewhat socially constructed and thus prone to variations in people's beliefs and attitudes. It isn't something you can deterministically state.
I've come to the conclusion that most laypeople are incapable of reading scientific literature. The usual response when I show a paper to someone is "well, I almost understand the title". The solution, then, is to make the papers more accessible. But do that, and peer reviewers complain about the wording and "scholarly writing" (I tried). Given the choice of audiences, it makes more sense to side with other scientists, I'm afraid.
If I had the patience, I'd write two versions of each one of my papers, but that's a lot of extra effort when most people won't bother to read them anyway.
Popularity does not equal worth.
Good point. It might still instill a desire to create any sort of game, though you're probably correct - they'll probably want to create what they play.
Fortunately, you get to put it all behind you in college :)
Anyway, I have a bit of an anecdote to share on this: I used to be one of those gifted underachievers who quite simply couldn't bothered to waste the effort on homework when I already understood the material. To me, understanding was the end goal, so why bother doing all of this pointless work? Well, my teachers didn't agree, so I paradoxically kept getting into all of the most difficult courses in my school, including the APs (after all, my test scores were excellent), yet had something like a 2.9 GPA. I initially did play video games for the majority of my time at home. However, my game playing eventually led me to begin exploring my computer's capabilities (Windows 3.11 was a lot more fun to explore than modern versions of the OS because it came with all sorts of fun stuff, like BASIC). This in turn led to programming, which, initially, was geared towards making games. When I was 12, I wrote a game that became very popular - one that's still maintained today, still has a few thousand users (in the beginning they numbered in the tens of thousands, but by now it's an old game), and ultimately led to a job offer.
Back to the present - I got into a decent, though not great, college despite the low GPA, looking forward to working as a software developer (I had built my interest in what I would actually be doing up over the years instead of working on contrived homework problems; I knew I was going to major in CS since 8). I finally found the work worth doing, even if it still wasn't particularly challenging, and decided to work with some of my professors, and eventually on my own, doing research to find some more challenging problems. I found these in abundance and decided to go for a Ph. D. after graduating so I could pursue my own research more effectively, even though I dislike the structure of institutional academia and can't really imagine seeking a career in such a broken system. I graduated valedictorian, went straight to grad. school, got my MS in a year at 22, and am now attempting to finish my dissertation either by this year or next.
None of this would have happened if I hadn't been able to play video games because my grades were poor. I don't know what I'd be doing now, but it probably would have been very different. The point is that games were an introduction to a technology I otherwise probably wouldn't discover. Learning how they worked, and eventually building them myself, instilled in me a sort of hacker ethic, in the sense that it allowed me to discover that it's fun to tinker with things, to make things.
And a million different forks, each having a different plot (different details of how the plot is realized, anyway). Which one becomes canon? Or do they all? :)
There's no such thing as a "good" game. You didn't like it. Other people did. Maybe more people like FF7, than, say, ET, but art can be perceived in all sorts of ways.
At least in computer science, which is the perspective I can bring, I think that doing was more important than seeing. I became interested in programming as some others here did: by fiddling with BASIC on an old 80s computer when I was young. Though I was always interested in how things worked and how to make them work in new ways, concepts at the heart of science and engineering, I didn't really know what scientists did exactly until college, when I was given the opportunity to do research with one of my professors. From there, I've switched my focus from coding to research (though I keep programming enough to maintain my ability, as I've come too far to simply let it lapse).
So how can you get students excited about science through writing? My advice would be to have them investigate and write about how or why something works, then follow up with ideas for using these facts to solve problems. That's, in essence, what scientists do. If students actually have the ability to implement these ideas, offer extra credit for doing so and presenting the implementation in front of class (since it's an English class, you can't really require an implementation, but you can offer credit for it). Encourage them to talk with their science teachers about this if they need to (after all, real research is collaborative). The goal of this is to reinforce the belief that science is not some arcane profession, but something that can be practiced right now by the class.
I just think it's a stupid thing to take a stand on. Being required to show a receipt after making a purchase (or being required to show a license when the police arrive and you're about to leave in your car) is not the sort of thing that is going to lead to a significant loss of civil liberties. And, as you said, a requirement to show basic competence before operating a motor vehicle is quite reasonable considering the potential damage that can be done, at least IMO. Finally, it is possible to both protest and obey principles when the situation requires in any case.
There are a lot of other things that effort would be better spent on taking stands against. Maybe the police were out of line, but I would argue that the customer was being unreasonable as well.
It's not really a grant if you impose intellectual property stipulations. Then it's more of a work-for-hire. Anyway, the problem isn't the government; it's the publishers. I think that left to their own devices, most researchers would prefer that their content be freely accessible (my own stance is that anyone who truly wants to advance knowledge has a duty to make their results as accessible as possible), but publishers typically demand copyright of the work, which is insane in itself, as the publishers had no part in performing the research. Once they have ownership of the content, they can charge the public, the researchers, or both, and there's not much we can do about it. A new trend is to charge researchers per-page fees to submit their papers for publication, sometimes on the order of hundreds of dollars per page, usually while charging or requiring society membership for access by the public.
This could be symptomatic of a larger problem: research is seen as a commodity rather than a valuable activity to be conducted for its own sake.
You are precisely correct about the original purpose of the academic style of writing. However, if everyone now writes like this, it's hard to feel clever relative to other scientists simply by writing in this way. This style of writing is perpetuated because it has become the standard and it would be difficult for a paper to pass review if it wasn't written this way. Thus, even those (such as myself) who would like to write more accessible papers simply cannot (or must write two versions of the same paper) because it would be very difficult to satisfy both the reviewers and the layperson.
This is only one thing that is wrong with the current process of peer review. I won't go into the imposed delays, hidden agendas, fear at what one does not understand, reviewer variability, preference for "hot" topics, etc., because these issues aren't relevant to the discussion.
Another issue is that the idea of a paper itself might be very simple, but a minimum of 2 pages (often far more) of what is essentially filler must be created around it before it's published. For example, if a new Mersenne prime is discovered, the words "2^x-1 is prime" are really all that are needed. Instead, you'd get some long treatise on what Mersenne primes are, how they were discovered, the connection with even perfect numbers, the current role of GIMPS, applications to cryptography, and future work (finding even larger primes, duh!) Somewhere about halfway through the paper, you'd mention that you found a new prime using those same three words (only after explaining how you set the software up, conducted the search, etc.) The result is that you keep spitting the same information out again and again.
In fact, it's pretty much obligated not to :)
Think about it... lolcats, O RLY?, AYB, HamsterDance, ... did any of those make sense?
It's worth noting that the "optimal" range reported in TFA, 125 to 155, was from 1926 and thus uses the dated "Ratio IQ". The comparable IQ range would be significantly lower now (exactly how much lower, I'm not sure).
You're both correct: someone who is gifted will likely be bored at school, particularly if the school is underchallenging, and thus will find other outlets for his or her intellect. Thus, the accomplishments are achieved, but not in school. In fact, it wouldn't surprise me if gifted students in normal schools (pre-college, anyway) ended up becoming underachievers because they've found more interesting things to do.
Israeli security is the "gold standard" because it needs to be.
This sort of reasoning can also be applied to the Chinese Room thought experiment: the act of passing cards back and forth in the Chinese room isn't intelligent, but the room itself, as a system, is, even though the meaning of the writing on the cards is ungrounded (that is, even if none of our cognitive processes in isolation would be considered intelligent, the whole mind is).
It's an interesting perspective.
You're correct, but those are college courses. There usually are some software engineering courses in a first year CS curriculum so everyone can get up to speed with whatever languages and techniques are being used in the university, and it is these, rather than the theoretical courses, that I imagine the high school courses would be modeling. Since, as you mention, it's assumed that CS students can already program (or can learn it very quickly) by the time they enter college so they can be taught theory, it would also make more sense to run programming rather than theory courses in high school - the former is assumed as a prerequisite, while the latter is what they intend to teach later on anyway.
And I still maintain that any sort of CS course in high school would have made it more fun (at least for me :) ) - the only course that had us using computers at all was "applied technology", which was really just a typing course.
That was 5 years ago, though, and in a single high school, so YMMV.