Iran has elections, but doesn't pick the right person, so it's a dictatorship. Same is true for Venezuela and Gaza, and any country over the past sixty years that made the mistake of voting for left-leaning leaders in the Western Hemisphere.
Any country? Didn't know France, Sweden, Spain and basically all of Western Europe, and also half of South America became dictatorships for having voted for left-leaning leaders at some point in the past sixty years.
Also, am I the only one who is confused on how you can use a standardized test to measure something like creativity? How can you objectively measure something that is so subjective?
Well, obviously you're not creative enough to think how this could be possible!:p
The pressure to take attendance usually comes from the university administration that wants to explore every opportunity to retain students (and their $$$). They believe that attendance is strongly correlated with student success (success meaning not dropping out as far as the administration is concerned), and they're usually quite right.
You would think that students would show up on their own, given the high tuition they pay. Or that only students who know the material or can study well on their own wouldn't show up. But that doesn't seem to be the case in practice.
Taking attendance is a symptom of the dollar-driven university business in North America, combined with the lack of maturity and sense of entitlement of a certain population of students. Taking attendance by RFID is just the logical next step in an already sad situation.
Why should it matter? The rational course of action should be to not invest in perpetual motion, either because you know what it means ("it ain't happening") or because you don't ("could be a hoax").
But imagine if you could combine your tactical sensations (as provided by your wife) with a 3-D goggle that would synchronize the sensations with a visual of Natalie Portman...
Not sure your wife would improve though!
(Besides, I'm not implying you'd be better off with Natalie Portman! Or maybe you already ARE Natalie Portman's husband!):)
What makes you think we are dealing here with/real/ engineers? You don't need to be Thomas Edison to build things that blow up. Some of the things these guys build don't even end up blowing up.
A mediocre engineer is more like someone out of vocational school: someone who learns to use a couple of tools really well, usually through sheer repetition. You don't need to have an open mind to do that, just maybe some facility with calculus and a taste for tinkering.
There's no shortage of mediocre engineers these days, with the pressure put on universities to provide cheap technically-inclined manpower for big corporations.
Now/scientists/, that's different. They're not people who learn to use a tool or who occasionally build one; they're people who try to understand why do tools (or, more generally speaking, things) work the way they work. Now those people need to exhibit critical thinking, and I doubt that you'll find a lot of religious fanatics amongst physicists, biologists, chemists or mathematicians.
What I meant is that when education is viewed as an investment, it is natural to pursue vocational degrees (engineering, law, business) which promise to repay that investment. It is just not a sound investment to study history, sociology or linguistics.
Because of high tuition fees, North Americans view education as an investment, not as the pursuit of knowledge. As a result, we end up at best with a society of soulless engineers for hire (hey I'm on Slashdot and I'm one of them!), i.e. those who went to college, and at worst with an uneducated mass who thinks Africa is a country, i.e. those who didn't or got a cheap education. Where will the next generation of brilliant philosophers, historians, mathematicians, and linguists come from? Probably not North America. And we're all guilty by selfishly not being willing to pay whatever taxes it takes to get rid of tuition fees.
Are you sure? It seems to me that only their search appliance is run on a local server. Google Apps are still only hosted at Google, unfortunately. Your link doesn't say otherwise.
The article is confusing because it doesn't indicate the false negative rate. You basically need to know the entire confusion matrix before inferring anything. This way, you can not only calculate the accuracy and the false positive rate, but you can also calculate the false negative rate, the precision and the recall. Precision and recall are much more useful metrics than recall when it comes to tests like these.
Also, you need to know how much it really costs you to have false negatives and false positives. If you accuse someone erroneously of being a terrorist, and the only inconvenience is a few extra minutes of body search (and the humiliation) at the airport, it *might* still be worth the trouble. If on the other hand you end up sending the poor dude to jail, and he sues you for wrongful conviction, then not so much. You therefore need to have a utility function that assesses the cost of getting it right and wrong both ways (positive and negative). That's basically what is discussed in the other article (the cost of cancer screening tests), albeit in an informal way.
But is school a place for training or for education? If math is taught as a tool then the purpose is to train. I believe Lockhard is arguing that school is a place to awaken curiosity and interest, and therefore it is the art of maths that needs to be taught. I sit in the middle, I think the art part helps to capture the interest, so that they can suffer through the repetitive training part. You start a lecture by bringing up an interesting problem, then you provide the tool to solve the given problem as well as many other ones.
Yeah but the rote learning style only produces robots, not critical thinkers, decision makers and game changers. I agree though that North America is producing neither the former or the latter.
All this discussion regarding who actually won the elections is a strawman. We know the process isn't democratic, since many opposition parties are outlawed, and there are many political prisoners in Iran. There is no real choice presented to the voters, all the candidates subscribe to the premise of an islamic republic, they all want America's doom etc. (Obama said just as much) These candidates do not represent the electors. Therefore the protest is justified. The people are protesting much more than the results of the election, but that's as far as they can go without risking arrest (although it seems that they can't even do that safely).
It wasn't Shawn Fanning, it was the dude behind Nullsoft (whose name escapes me right now), of Winamp fame. Wonder what happened to it (WASTE) and him?
Cars need to be painted anyway, how about painting them all white? I guess the world would be less colorful and a bit boring-looking.It would also make it difficult to find your car in a parking-lot...
Slashdot Mirror
Iran has elections, but doesn't pick the right person, so it's a dictatorship. Same is true for Venezuela and Gaza, and any country over the past sixty years that made the mistake of voting for left-leaning leaders in the Western Hemisphere.
Any country? Didn't know France, Sweden, Spain and basically all of Western Europe, and also half of South America became dictatorships for having voted for left-leaning leaders at some point in the past sixty years.
Correction: the teachers' boss and the parents don't want the teachers to fail students, so the students will get Cs instead of Fs.
Also, am I the only one who is confused on how you can use a standardized test to measure something like creativity? How can you objectively measure something that is so subjective?
Well, obviously you're not creative enough to think how this could be possible! :p
The pressure to take attendance usually comes from the university administration that wants to explore every opportunity to retain students (and their $$$). They believe that attendance is strongly correlated with student success (success meaning not dropping out as far as the administration is concerned), and they're usually quite right.
You would think that students would show up on their own, given the high tuition they pay. Or that only students who know the material or can study well on their own wouldn't show up. But that doesn't seem to be the case in practice.
Taking attendance is a symptom of the dollar-driven university business in North America, combined with the lack of maturity and sense of entitlement of a certain population of students. Taking attendance by RFID is just the logical next step in an already sad situation.
In Korea, In Korea jokes are for old people. :)
Why should it matter? The rational course of action should be to not invest in perpetual motion, either because you know what it means ("it ain't happening") or because you don't ("could be a hoax").
Wolfram Alpha is not a Linux calculator per se, but it's a calculator you can use while on Linux! :)
I'm not joking when I say: I love the idea of a lolcats generator! I'm gonna give this some more thought...
But imagine if you could combine your tactical sensations (as provided by your wife) with a 3-D goggle that would synchronize the sensations with a visual of Natalie Portman...
Not sure your wife would improve though!
(Besides, I'm not implying you'd be better off with Natalie Portman! Or maybe you already ARE Natalie Portman's husband!) :)
OK, so cancer is the cure to Alzheimer's then!
You think Avatar is an adult movie?
What makes you think we are dealing here with /real/ engineers? You don't need to be Thomas Edison to build things that blow up. Some of the things these guys build don't even end up blowing up.
A mediocre engineer is more like someone out of vocational school: someone who learns to use a couple of tools really well, usually through sheer repetition. You don't need to have an open mind to do that, just maybe some facility with calculus and a taste for tinkering.
There's no shortage of mediocre engineers these days, with the pressure put on universities to provide cheap technically-inclined manpower for big corporations.
Now /scientists/, that's different. They're not people who learn to use a tool or who occasionally build one; they're people who try to understand why do tools (or, more generally speaking, things) work the way they work. Now those people need to exhibit critical thinking, and I doubt that you'll find a lot of religious fanatics amongst physicists, biologists, chemists or mathematicians.
Not that spending the time doing this research will affect your productivity or anything! ;)
What I meant is that when education is viewed as an investment, it is natural to pursue vocational degrees (engineering, law, business) which promise to repay that investment. It is just not a sound investment to study history, sociology or linguistics.
Because of high tuition fees, North Americans view education as an investment, not as the pursuit of knowledge. As a result, we end up at best with a society of soulless engineers for hire (hey I'm on Slashdot and I'm one of them!), i.e. those who went to college, and at worst with an uneducated mass who thinks Africa is a country, i.e. those who didn't or got a cheap education. Where will the next generation of brilliant philosophers, historians, mathematicians, and linguists come from? Probably not North America. And we're all guilty by selfishly not being willing to pay whatever taxes it takes to get rid of tuition fees.
I really like both ideas. It is time to get creative with education.
Well, you did! (now what was that reference?)
Are you sure? It seems to me that only their search appliance is run on a local server. Google Apps are still only hosted at Google, unfortunately. Your link doesn't say otherwise.
Obviously I meant to say: "Precision and recall are much more useful metrics than *accuracy* when it comes to tests like these."
... and a utility function too!
The article is confusing because it doesn't indicate the false negative rate. You basically need to know the entire confusion matrix before inferring anything. This way, you can not only calculate the accuracy and the false positive rate, but you can also calculate the false negative rate, the precision and the recall. Precision and recall are much more useful metrics than recall when it comes to tests like these.
Also, you need to know how much it really costs you to have false negatives and false positives. If you accuse someone erroneously of being a terrorist, and the only inconvenience is a few extra minutes of body search (and the humiliation) at the airport, it *might* still be worth the trouble. If on the other hand you end up sending the poor dude to jail, and he sues you for wrongful conviction, then not so much. You therefore need to have a utility function that assesses the cost of getting it right and wrong both ways (positive and negative). That's basically what is discussed in the other article (the cost of cancer screening tests), albeit in an informal way.
But is school a place for training or for education? If math is taught as a tool then the purpose is to train. I believe Lockhard is arguing that school is a place to awaken curiosity and interest, and therefore it is the art of maths that needs to be taught. I sit in the middle, I think the art part helps to capture the interest, so that they can suffer through the repetitive training part. You start a lecture by bringing up an interesting problem, then you provide the tool to solve the given problem as well as many other ones.
Yeah but the rote learning style only produces robots, not critical thinkers, decision makers and game changers. I agree though that North America is producing neither the former or the latter.
All this discussion regarding who actually won the elections is a strawman. We know the process isn't democratic, since many opposition parties are outlawed, and there are many political prisoners in Iran. There is no real choice presented to the voters, all the candidates subscribe to the premise of an islamic republic, they all want America's doom etc. (Obama said just as much) These candidates do not represent the electors. Therefore the protest is justified. The people are protesting much more than the results of the election, but that's as far as they can go without risking arrest (although it seems that they can't even do that safely).
It wasn't Shawn Fanning, it was the dude behind Nullsoft (whose name escapes me right now), of Winamp fame. Wonder what happened to it (WASTE) and him?
Cars need to be painted anyway, how about painting them all white? I guess the world would be less colorful and a bit boring-looking.It would also make it difficult to find your car in a parking-lot...