So the real issue isn't forcing quality of students, it's a way for the university and a 3rd party to scam a little cash before taking the next 2-6 years of your life. People really don't realize how poorly this test reflects ability - when I first took it, I took it cold and got a 1300 on it. I bought a cheapo study guide and then made a 2200 on it.
Wait. You are wrong here.
Dozens and dozens of my friends and acquaintances (and myself) have taken the GRE, and based on their results, I can assert that, given that you study for the test seriously, it reasonably estimates your general aptitude. And that a GRE score is a reasonable measure of your academic skills, which when used along with other application materials, is really useful for admission decisions.
And the GRE Subject Tests are even more useful, since they objectively measure domain-specific knowledge, and tell you how much a student really knows about his subject. (cant rely solely on GPA!)
More importantly, however, there is one very significant positive point about the GRE, which just cannot be put down. The applicants to US Graduate School include a large number of students from dozens of different countries each having its own peculiar education system. Its almost impossible to compare such students coming from schools which the US schools have never even heard of before, let alone having some knowledge about their education quality. The GRE and other standardized tests are most helpful in this area because each and every student across the world has to give the same test, and hence the scores can be used to compare students coming from very different backgrounds.
would be the way IP address have been allocated in chunks to certain holders, forcing the proposal of IPv6 far sooner than it should have needed to be.
Yeah, thats correct. For example, MIT is the only school in the world which has a Class A address, i.e. it has at its disposal 255 cubed addresses. Now does MIT really need that many addresses?
I tried to read up on inertial and non-inertial frames reference. But the definition they give is vague in itself. The inertial frames of reference are those which dont accelerate. But Sir, respect to what?? Since Einstein proved that there is no ether, and there is no absolute frame of reference, how can you prove that a frame is not accelerating?
For example, how can you take the earth as an inertial frame of reference, since the earth is also moving wrt Sun, and Sun is also moving wrt Galaxy, which in turn is also moving. Everything is moving!
I agree that objects on earth are not going hither-thither but that does not prove earth is a perfect inertial frame of reference. This will happen on every body with some gravity.
Earth may be "more inertial" than the rocket, but that again does not prove anything.
Also, the rocket will be non-inertial for a short period of time when it is accelerating and decelerating, otherwise it will have constant velocity.
According to the article, when a person goes in a rocket at speeds comparable to the speed of light, time slows for him, and when he returns he finds himself in the future of the earth.
I have never understood why doesnt the reverse happen?
According to general relativity, there is no absolute frame of reference, so why cant we consider that the earth is actually moving at a very high speed while the rocket is stationary, and that the earth time slows as a result. How can you form asymmetry in the frames of references of the rocket and the earth?
I am at a university in california. Same thing here, the students are not allowed access to the high-tech stuff at the Univ.
But its correct since the the faculty and research assistant students who do research using that stuff are allowed to use it, and that makes for a proper use of it. If you let all access it, it will turn into a pile of junk soon.
This actually makes sence. While you were reading, another person was born in japan, and the population increased from 126,499,999 to 126,500,000. Obviously to 3 significant figures theres a major change.
And then when I was reading the same article after a few hours, seems like the population again started from 126, 499, 999 and went to 126, 500, 000. Similarly for all people who read this article. And similarly for all people who will read this article in the coming decades.
Since there were no mails regarding USC, I thought I would just add one.
Here at USC, the public labs here are filled with three kinds of computers - Win2k, MacOS (sadly no OS X), and Solaris (sadly no Linux).
The sad thing about this all is that except for assignments, everybody uses Win2k/MacOS for regular work. This is sad, and nobody tries using Solaris. They have no other window managers installed also, except CDE. And CDE is not that easy to use for newbies which keeps them away from it.
The ppl who use linux have their own laptops/desktops, and use it from home.
Of course, there are people who are always found on Solaris machines even for regular work! Ppl like me:)
I use Mozilla on Solaris, and it hangs frequently. I use the latest nightly build.
I dont understand whats the matter...
Is there something special you need to do on Solaris to make Mozilla stable?
Do tell me.
Inspite of that, I am a Mozilla fan, and just love it!
And highly opinionated ones, too; when physicist run out of math to talk about in popular-interest books, they tend to start shooting their mouths off and irresponsibly speculating wildly about cosmology. It makes good copy, but frankly, they're only slightly better equipped to speculate about the nature of the universe then you are; if anything, they get to be even more wildly wrong. You gotta seperate the physicist's wanking from the real facts.
In which category are the "A brief history of time", and Stephen Hawking's latest book (i dont remember the name - universe in a nutshell or something)?
If they dont accept TeX, then tell them to shut their magazine and stay shut....! TeX is simply too great for not being accepted. I think if you insist, they will start accepting TeX from now on! However, if all fails, then you can give ppl whom you are going to show for editing, the document in text format, and then do the final submission in PDF.
After carefully weighing all the factors (likelihood of microbial life on Mars, likelihood of said life having a detrimental effect on earth life, likelihood of bacterial vector surviving the trip back to earth, etc.), I have concluded that the answer to this question is...2.06%.
Hey I had a calculator around, and could do much better calculation than you.
But I must say you are damned close.
The correct answer is -
2.06314159314159314159......infinite.
We can end this conversation now; I am never wrong:-)
Same here!!!!
Back to chess, personally, I don't believe the human race has anything to worry about from a pride standpoint, if (when!) Fritz eventually triumphs over Kramnik. But when the world's top Go players are finally defeated, that will be a different story indeed...
Even when the top Go players are defeated by machines, I dont consider that a big success of the machines.....
We can just invent another game with even more complexity, and again, the machines will lag far behind.
I believe that defeating humans in games like these....means nothing to AI.
Games just involve tactically calculating positions, and thats all.
What will be interesting....is when the machines are able to play any strategy game...without human help...and still defeat the human world champion.
Such kind of research is being done...where the program develops its game from itself by using machine learning techniques like neural networks stuff....but so far, they havent been very successful.
When such kind of machines rule strategy games, then I would say its a battle lost..., and we would rather let the computers take over...
To sum up my point, early on in the game there is no one move that will always lead to victory, regardless of the opponent's moves. Hence, the original idea of pre-calculating a decision tree for the entire game and then only picking moves that result in a win simply cannot work.
He he....
Have you done the calculation yourself....?
Who knows....maybe there is a move that will always win......?????
In that case, it will be dependent on who makes the first move.
I mean, when we have two computers playing against each other, who have calculated the entire game of chess, then they both will know that the person who starts first (or second) will always win.
And then the game of chess will stop being played,and so we will simply increase the size of the board, and the number of pieces, and there you go.....:-)
If they again catch up...he he...we will again repeat the same thing.....
And thus chess will never cease to exist in one form or the other....
Besides, how many of us actually get to write the kinds of software that we want for work?! Money isn't everything, especially if it means selling my soul.
I just want to let Slashdot know that the stories in the Science Section are interesting and dont assume that they are not popular seeing the meagre number of comments for it. This is just because news in the area of Science are not as conducive to debates, personal views/opinions, and everything that pushes along the comments, as compared to other stories....
Slashdot readers in general like the Science section and like to read its stories.
So let the Science section continue in the near future....!
Use
"Collapse all sections"
and dont block this topic - science.
this is last year's news!
on
Time Travel
·
· Score: 0
Actually. this professor had disclosed this idea of his one year back! Look at this.
I dont know how Slashdot didnt perform a search on this before posting!
Slashdot Mirror
Wait. You are wrong here.
Dozens and dozens of my friends and acquaintances (and myself) have taken the GRE, and based on their results, I can assert that, given that you study for the test seriously, it reasonably estimates your general aptitude. And that a GRE score is a reasonable measure of your academic skills, which when used along with other application materials, is really useful for admission decisions.
And the GRE Subject Tests are even more useful, since they objectively measure domain-specific knowledge, and tell you how much a student really knows about his subject. (cant rely solely on GPA!)
More importantly, however, there is one very significant positive point about the GRE, which just cannot be put down. The applicants to US Graduate School include a large number of students from dozens of different countries each having its own peculiar education system. Its almost impossible to compare such students coming from schools which the US schools have never even heard of before, let alone having some knowledge about their education quality. The GRE and other standardized tests are most helpful in this area because each and every student across the world has to give the same test, and hence the scores can be used to compare students coming from very different backgrounds.
would be the way IP address have been allocated in chunks to certain holders, forcing the proposal of IPv6 far sooner than it should have needed to be.
Yeah, thats correct. For example, MIT is the only school in the world which has a Class A address, i.e. it has at its disposal 255 cubed addresses. Now does MIT really need that many addresses?
I tried to read up on inertial and non-inertial frames reference. But the definition they give is vague in itself. The inertial frames of reference are those which dont accelerate. But Sir, respect to what?? Since Einstein proved that there is no ether, and there is no absolute frame of reference, how can you prove that a frame is not accelerating?
For example, how can you take the earth as an inertial frame of reference, since the earth is also moving wrt Sun, and Sun is also moving wrt Galaxy, which in turn is also moving. Everything is moving!
I agree that objects on earth are not going hither-thither but that does not prove earth is a perfect inertial frame of reference. This will happen on every body with some gravity.
Earth may be "more inertial" than the rocket, but that again does not prove anything.
Also, the rocket will be non-inertial for a short period of time when it is accelerating and decelerating, otherwise it will have constant velocity.
I am totally confused.
According to the article, when a person goes in a rocket at speeds comparable to the speed of light, time slows for him, and when he returns he finds himself in the future of the earth.
I have never understood why doesnt the reverse happen?
According to general relativity, there is no absolute frame of reference, so why cant we consider that the earth is actually moving at a very high speed while the rocket is stationary, and that the earth time slows as a result. How can you form asymmetry in the frames of references of the rocket and the earth?
I am at a university in california. Same thing here, the students are not allowed access to the high-tech stuff at the Univ.
But its correct since the the faculty and research assistant students who do research using that stuff are allowed to use it, and that makes for a proper use of it. If you let all access it, it will turn into a pile of junk soon.
This actually makes sence. While you were reading, another person was born in japan, and the population increased from 126,499,999 to 126,500,000. Obviously to 3 significant figures theres a major change.
And then when I was reading the same article after a few hours, seems like the population again started from 126, 499, 999 and went to 126, 500, 000. Similarly for all people who read this article. And similarly for all people who will read this article in the coming decades.
Since there were no mails regarding USC, I thought I would just add one. :)
Here at USC, the public labs here are filled with three kinds of computers - Win2k, MacOS (sadly no OS X), and Solaris (sadly no Linux).
The sad thing about this all is that except for assignments, everybody uses Win2k/MacOS for regular work. This is sad, and nobody tries using Solaris. They have no other window managers installed also, except CDE. And CDE is not that easy to use for newbies which keeps them away from it.
The ppl who use linux have their own laptops/desktops, and use it from home.
Of course, there are people who are always found on Solaris machines even for regular work! Ppl like me
I use Mozilla on Solaris, and it hangs frequently. I use the latest nightly build.
I dont understand whats the matter...
Is there something special you need to do on Solaris to make Mozilla stable?
Do tell me.
Inspite of that, I am a Mozilla fan, and just love it!
"The Last Question" by Isaac Asimov.
Hey, how are Asimov's sci-fi novels? I like sci-fi, but have read very little apart from 2001.
And highly opinionated ones, too; when physicist run out of math to talk about in popular-interest books, they tend to start shooting their mouths off and irresponsibly speculating wildly about cosmology. It makes good copy, but frankly, they're only slightly better equipped to speculate about the nature of the universe then you are; if anything, they get to be even more wildly wrong. You gotta seperate the physicist's wanking from the real facts.
In which category are the "A brief history of time", and Stephen Hawking's latest book (i dont remember the name - universe in a nutshell or something)?
If they dont accept TeX, then tell them to shut their magazine and stay shut....!
TeX is simply too great for not being accepted.
I think if you insist, they will start accepting TeX from now on!
However, if all fails, then you can give ppl whom you are going to show for editing, the document in text format, and then do the final submission in PDF.
After carefully weighing all the factors (likelihood of microbial life on Mars, likelihood of said life having a detrimental effect on earth life, likelihood of bacterial vector surviving the trip back to earth, etc.), I have concluded that the answer to this question is...2.06%.
Hey I had a calculator around, and could do much better calculation than you.
But I must say you are damned close.
The correct answer is -
2.06314159314159314159......infinite.
We can end this conversation now; I am never wrong
Same here!!!!
the OpenOffice site has been slashdotted! Not opening any more.....:-)
I still get a tingle whenever a site is slashdotted.
Is there any other site, which is capable of "slashdotting" other sites just because of one link to it??
I totally agree to whatever you said.
Back to chess, personally, I don't believe the human race has anything to worry about from a pride standpoint, if (when!) Fritz eventually triumphs over Kramnik. But when the world's top Go players are finally defeated, that will be a different story indeed...
Even when the top Go players are defeated by machines, I dont consider that a big success of the machines.....
We can just invent another game with even more complexity, and again, the machines will lag far behind.
I believe that defeating humans in games like these....means nothing to AI.
Games just involve tactically calculating positions, and thats all.
What will be interesting....is when the machines are able to play any strategy game...without human help...and still defeat the human world champion.
Such kind of research is being done...where the program develops its game from itself by using machine learning techniques like neural networks stuff....but so far, they havent been very successful.
When such kind of machines rule strategy games, then I would say its a battle lost..., and we would rather let the computers take over...
To sum up my point, early on in the game there is no one move that will always lead to victory, regardless of the opponent's moves. Hence, the original idea of pre-calculating a decision tree for the entire game and then only picking moves that result in a win simply cannot work.
He he....
Have you done the calculation yourself....?
Who knows....maybe there is a move that will always win......?????
In that case, it will be dependent on who makes the first move.
I mean, when we have two computers playing against each other, who have calculated the entire game of chess, then they both will know that the person who starts first (or second) will always win.
And then the game of chess will stop being played,and so we will simply increase the size of the board, and the number of pieces, and there you go.....:-)
If they again catch up...he he...we will again repeat the same thing.....
And thus chess will never cease to exist in one form or the other....
I am glad that somebody apart me ever used QBasic.
QBasic was a cool language, and I used it a lot in my childhood days....when I was learning programming...
But now I just love C/C++....its more structured and coool....i just love it...
Besides, how many of us actually get to write the kinds of software that we want for work?! Money isn't everything, especially if it means selling my soul.
Well Said! I completely agree!
They measure it with respect to Sun I think..
I dont know what you ppl are talking about!!!!
0.05C!!!!! *Are you MAD*?
One-Twentieth the speed of light????????
I was so astounded on seeing this, that I did the math myself.
I dont know how can so many people commit this simple mistake.
As far as I know, 16.5 km/s is just equal to 0.000055C. (Speed of light=300000km/s)
It will not be in our lifetimes that we acheive speeds of OneTwentieth the speed of light.
I just want to let Slashdot know that the stories in the Science Section are interesting and dont assume that they are not popular seeing the meagre number of comments for it. This is just because news in the area of Science are not as conducive to debates, personal views/opinions, and everything that pushes along the comments, as compared to other stories.... Slashdot readers in general like the Science section and like to read its stories. So let the Science section continue in the near future....!
Use "Collapse all sections" and dont block this topic - science.
Actually. this professor had disclosed this idea of his one year back! Look at this. I dont know how Slashdot didnt perform a search on this before posting!
Sorry, was just checking out how it feels to be one of the first commenters in a to-be-big discussion on Slashdot!!!
Slashdot is great!
This link converts from pdf to html, and from many other formats to many others.