You're not teaching them to doubt a source. You're teaching them to use their brains. If you're teaching by rote, chances are (though not always), you're not teaching much of anything. Multiplication tables are garbage, for instance; math is not about being able to calculate random garbage in your head quickly, but even if it were, people will naturally memorize things they see often.
"Critical thinking is a way of deciding whether a claim is true, partially true, or false. Critical thinking is a process that leads to skills that can be learned, mastered and used. Critical thinking is a tool by which one can come about reasoned conclusions based on a reasoned process. This process incorporates passion and creativity, but guides it with discipline, practicality and common sense."
The problem with "teaching critical thinking", then, is that you teach them to decide validity for themselves, but you do NOT teach them to always come to the correct conclusion when the process is complete. If it were about coming to "correct conclusions", rather than "conclusions which appear on the surface to be correct based on the available information", everyone who applied the critical thinking process would always arrive at exactly the same conclusions.
Therefore, you want to maximize "the available information", and turning on the write protect bit on someone's mind before they understand, for example, that "being able to calculate random garbage in your head quickly" is *very* important to knowing whether you have enough money in your pocket to buy the things you have in your shopping basket when you get to the checkout, or whether you're going to look like an ass while you make everyone behind you in line wait while you decide which things to put back to fit your available cash.
is effectively cultural genocide.
Education is not about skill sets, or keeping certain cultures that rely on obedience alive.
I think you really need to look up the term "Cultural Relativism"; not everyone wants to live in an apartment with cable TV, within walking distance of a Walmart, a McDonald's, and a Pizza Hut. Other cultures value other things, and they keep their cultural integrity, often by operating on a different axiomatic basis that has to necessarily exclude some information, but which does not preclude critical thinking within their (different, not necessarily limited) scope.
There are cultures which achieve what they believe to be very fulfilling lives in that way, and tend to have vastly lower suicide rates than our supposedly "superior" culture has; your statement is tantamount to another term you should look up: "Cultural Imperialism".
From the summary..., I figured it was a bunch of ASIMO robots programmed to trundle around the warehouses screaming in the voice of Sgt. R. Lee Ermey's voice "MOVE IT! Move it, MAGGOTS! Work FASTER!"...
Exactly. Why would we ever want to 'teach' people to have critical thinking skills? Schooling is all about indoctrination and rote memorization, and actual thoughts would just get in the way of that.
I think you missed the part where I said that some critical thinking skills are formed on their own; and people should definitely have critical thinking skills; I've been persuaded by another poster that it should be a mandatory grade 12 (High School Senior) course, rather than waiting for the first year of college.
It's counter productive to impair the ability to teach children rote information by teaching them to doubt the source before attempting to teach them the rote information. For non-rote information classes, that's the likely places that self-derived critical thinking skills will develop on their own.
Also see my other post about certain religious sects - I give the example of Amish/Mennonite communities) where doubting your teacher in school becomes the same as doubting your parents and doubting your religious authority. Instilling a high probability of acting on such doubts, which is an opportunity given at 14-16 years of age in those communities, is effectively cultural genocide.
While you may be saying "Good! I'm a rational humanist, and they should be too! I want everyone to be like me!", those cultures embody skill sets that we, as a society, may decide we need some day, in the same way that some - myself included - have argued that kids should be taught to do math without calculators because one EMP, and they won't be able to add anything on their own past "ten fingers" any more.
This is an insightful post. I'm persuaded that it's possible to try to teach this too early, before some foundational knowledge has been instilled. But I'm not sure that it's necessary to delay until the first term of a college, especially since everyone would benefit, not just those that end up going to college. I would support a mandatory course in senior high school year, with some of the principles being touched upon in science classes before that.
That's a reasonable point. People are mandatorily required to attend primary education through grade 12 in the U.S. (with the exception of some "grade 8 then done" Amish/Mennonite communities), and teaching it before they go out into the world is a good idea. It may actually be counter-productive to the continued existence of those communities, so the stop should not be adjusted downward in those instances - throwing doubt about informations sources right before they go on Rumspringa would likely steal many children from their culture and homogonize them into the mainstream.
But wouldn't it be more useful to have a course that emphasizes critical thinking about all types of problems rather than focusing on one specific application of critical thinking?
Teaching critical thinking early is a bad idea.
There is a place and time for shoveling as much information into a child's head as it can possibly hold without exploding. This is when we teach multiplication tables, drill grammar into their thick skulls, teach them basic math up through algebra, spelling, penmanship, history, and so on.
As soon as you teach critical thinking skills, it's like setting the write protect bit: it enables them to make a value judgement on the validity of the information they are being given by the teachers (and other adults), and as soon as you have that, you begin to build distrust of information sources - even ones with good information to impart.
Generally some critical thinking skills form on their own; creative writing, physics, chemistry, debate, and other classes tend to foster their development, regardless of whether or not you are done shoveling the basic stuff into their heads. As soon as that bit is set, you might as well give up trying to program them, you've lost: they're teenagers.
Logic classes belong in the first quarter/semester of your first year of college, and not before.
Yea; I mean, what would a guy who spent most of his life trying to help uplift the poor know about poverty?
Isn't that entire business model predicated on the idea of "trying" rather than "succeeding"? As soon as you succeed, you're basically out of a job, right?
Take them to 1981 and give then an Apple II or a Commodore PET? And a 100 different copies of "Compute" magazine so they can type in their own programs and get immediate gratification from a small amount of code?
What's even more fun is that Tesla Roadster you were able to buy by selling the bugs you find to intelligence agencies, rather than reporting them to the vendor and being sued under the DMCA for reverse engineering their product.
A good trick if you eat out is to immediately ask for a "to go" container, and then put half your restaurant portion into the container, close it, and set it aside. Then enjoy the remainder and the social interaction that usually goes with eating out.
Other people have pointed out that is not the case, but I thought I would address the pregnancy thing.
Pregnancy studies are a high risk/low reward proposition, unless you are talking about fertility, anti-miscarriage or other pregnancy related applications, since including pregnant women in a clinical trial has a really high settlement cost if there's a problem with the pregnancy, and an even higher cost if the baby comes out with a birth defect. As an example, women with hair loss get warned against finesteride, since it acts as a 4-5 reductase suppression agent, which, when it occurs naturally (5-ARD), results in conditions from hypospadias needing surgical correction, all the way to full blown X-Y females (sterile of course).
It's fairly common to warn pregnant women not to take a medication, even if in fact it might be perfectly safe because of the exclusionary nature of the studies. This is purely a legal liability/malpractice issue, not necessarily an issue with the medication itself.
No that's what the summary tries to imply what the research says, count on research from LA being negative towards public transport.
Actually, I read both articles and the summary, and it doesn't seem to be what they are trying to imply at all.
But I agree with the GP that you get more control over people's ability to move around, if you limit them to bicycles or public transportation; for example, the BART stations that have been shut down to try and prevent protests against them shutting of cellular service in order to prevent previous protests, the ability to take busses and trains out of service to limit the ability of people without cars to move around and so on. They also tended to shutdown BART stations near the Occupy movement when it was still going on to any extent. Handy if you are trying to stop a zombie outbreak as well, I guess.
With the exception of short hall train corridors (because BART and CalTrain can't agree to share), and of course the Facebook/Google/Apple/Genentech/etc. busses run by those and similar private companies, public transit is pretty crappy in the SF Bay Area. The incessant BART strikes also tend to discourage use of public transit as well, but that's more about the unions blackmailing the politicians by pissing off voters than it is about controlling peoples movements.
The FDA was very clear about why they stopped it. It wasn't necessarily that the information was misleading, but that it would lead patients to make decisions about their own care without necessarily consulting a doctor, which the FDA thinks is not a good idea -- and I totally see their point, frankly.
The FDA made them stop because doctors dislike being cut out of the loop, and insurance companies like being cut out of the loop even less than the doctors, and they would prefer to have you get the data through a disclosure mechanism which gives your insurance company better actuarial information. "Having a Dr. explain the information to the patients one on one" is just a place to hang that hat.
For example, one of the things that 23andMe can tell you is how well you might respond to one drug versus another, because of your specific genetic makeup. If you take that advice and change the dosage of your medication or switch to a different medication without discussing the issue with your doctor, you could cause yourself serious harm.
Yeah, in case you wondered, people can not self prescribe non-over the counter medications. So that excuse doesn't fly, either, since your doctor will be involved in writing the script for the new medication, and your insurance company will be paying for it, and like mine did, probably try to give you a cheaper generic version of a similar drug in place of the one your doctor actually wrote the script for, and then called it "equivalent". I've had that pulled on me, and been given "generic allergy medication" containing a cornstarch binder in place of the other one - when corn products were why I taking the damn stuff in the first place.
I vote you go with Nightingale, and fix the file organization feature. IT's clear from your FLOSS requirement that you are a fan of Open Source, so send patches: that's what you do with Open Source.
If you don't want to do that because you're not a coder, then you might as well just with a closed source product, since it's not like you'll be looking at the code.
I don't think it's so much about Facebook = the global water cooler" (what a terrible analogy! I'm sure Facebook corporate loves it...).
Some people are simply not going to pay to access your content, and you can shut down every channel possible (you can't, it's an impossible to achieve goal from a technology standpoint), and doing that is not going to convert these people into your customers. This is a "look at all the money we COULD be making IF ONLY these people were willing to pay for our product, which we are SURE they WOULD, if the only way to see the next episode of our reality TV series was to pay us for it!" argument. It's an invalid argument.
For all the "can not fail" systems I've worked on, there has been an identical set of hardware, along with other hardware to simulate load
Yeah gramps, we did all that in history class, along with slideframes and mainrules and all that.
That's obsolete now because cloud and agile and webscale.
Let me know when you get the next G.E. Medical systems MRI system running "in the cloud" rather than on a a local control system and a console in the next room, and then trust your life to the thing. Meanwhile, I think I will probably stick with the medical equipment I've worked on instead.
P.S.: Let me know when your cloud is HIPPA certified.
And then they could ask for a bailout from the Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility (TALF) like Ford Credit did (and on which they still owe money to the Fed): http://useconomy.about.com/od/criticalssues/a/auto_bailout.htm...on second thought, perhaps Ford is not the best role model after all.
At some point in their careers, all programmers, after spending a month hunting down a heap corruption, or a race condition, or some other bug nasty like that, come to the realisation that they are spending more time fixing mistakes than writing code. At this moment, most, but not all programmers follow a very logical path of reasoning. They think to themselves, "well, if this code took me 1 week to write, then 4 to fix, that is five weeks, what if I spent 3 weeks writing it carefully, then it would be done right away and I wouldn't have to fix it, I could have been done two weeks earlier!".
From that moment on, this programmer becomes all but useless to their current and future employers.
There are those who build the prototypes, and those who build the products. The second kind is "Mr./Ms. Right"; the first kind is "Mr./Ms. Right Now".
If your business is about churning your web site design every so often, and you aren't doing a lot of back end processing that requires actual business logic, or if you are a startup that's trying to throw something together in a couple months so that you can get a bite from a V.C. and get the company funded by an Angel or other investor, then you can afford to hire a "Mr./Ms. Right Now", and in fact you should do so.
If on the other hand, you have to have a solid product that's going to either be shipped off to customers, or you're trying to do a Saleforce.com SAAS play to try and generate income, then you need the "Mr./Ms. Right" instead.
I've worked at a number of startups, and at some point, someone has to own the "It Works Bit", and that's not going to be the person who just slaps together prototypes with spit and bailing wire, and hopes for the best. I was most often the person owning that bit, and I've halted updates that would have resulted in the bricking of thousands of units at customer sites, with no way to back it out remotely. I've also reworked a lot of code that should have been written as an FSA, but instead was comparing for NULL everywhere because the young turk who wrote it didn't understand the state his variables were in at any given point. I've also done serious detail work that got one well known company out of a threatened $200M lawsuit. And I've done the necessary work to reverse engineer the requirements for embedded controllers on Samsung and Acer laptops so the trackpad didn't suck (one of the reasons for a recently recalled laptop, apart from the charger problem, is that the trackpads sucked because no one did that job this last time).
Yeah, if all you are doing is a Twitter Clone, then you can be pretty slack about the coding, at least until you get funded, but if you need to have real working code that's not just throw-away website code that won't be around next week anyway, you need "Mr./Ms. Right", not some prototyper.
and cost the local economy tens of millions of dollars by screwing up.
So what? What's BART's incentive to avoid this? The customers will go to a competitor? They'll lose their jobs?
They'll do what they did Thursday and Friday, and flood the roads with drivers who have cars for emergencies, usually take public transit, and are pretty inexperienced as drivers in regular traffic, not just "BART's out traffic". BART isn't really necessary; it's convenient for a lot of people, but once it drops below the convenience threshold, people simply won't use it.
For all the "can not fail" systems I've worked on, there has been an identical set of hardware, along with other hardware to simulate load, on which you could try upgrades before you put them on a live system and cost the local economy tens of millions of dollars by screwing up.
First, the CPUs built into supercomputers today are as good as anybody knows how to make one.
Well, that's wrong... we just aren't commercially manufacturing the ones we know how to make already.
There is no respect in which they are not lightyears more advanced than any custom silicon cray ever put out.
That's true... but only because you intentionally limited us to Si as the substrate. GaAs transistors have a switching speed around 250GHz, which is about 60 times what we get with absurdly cooled and over-clocked silicon.
All our really big supercomputers today are adding a bunch of individual not-even-Krypto-the-wonderdog CPUs together, and then calling it a supercomputer. Have we reached the limits in that scaling? No.
We have reached the limits in the ability to solve big problems that aren't parallelizable, due to the inability to produce individual CPU machines in the supercomputer range, but like I said, that boat sailed years ago.
This looks like a funding fishing expedition for the carbon nanotube processor research that was highlighted at the conference.
Well, yes; some of us are working on that problem...
Yes, people will diew, that doesn't mean I want my risk of dying increased because of some other assholes decisions. And many of those dead kids where in the drunks vehicle. It's not like they even had a choice.
Well, it's certainly your choice of whether or not to get in the vehicle vs. trying to take the keys away, and it's your choice to also be on or near roadways, so it's not all about the assholes.
"predicated on the idea that if someone doesn't die from a drunk driver, or while drunk driving, that they won't die at all; wrong. Way to take it to a non-sensible extreme. I don't want my odds of dying increased. It's pretty simple.
30% of traffic accident deaths are caused by alcohol-impaired-driving. Much lower then in the 70's.
Actually, it's significantly less than the published 32% statistic, if you factor in other drug use from their other statistics. It's fair to say that 32% is due to impaired driving, but since you can drink enough water to induce water intoxication, if you have no other means of getting high, there's no way to completely ban all intoxicants without controlling people's water intake, as well.
Even were we to grant that it was the alcohol, not the heroin, cocaine, or marijuana that actually pushed them over the tipping point from "unsafe driving" to "highway fatality", that means that 68% were NOT alcohol involved fatalities.
So if we are spending societies money on fixing anything, we should concentrate funding on reducing the larger number, right?
Let's start with the fact that 100% of the fatalities were vehicles driven by humans, and 0% were vehicles driven by robots, and work our way forward from there.
setting all else aside, the simple fact that drunk drivers kill more children than anything else on the planet, indicates that something MUST BE DONE.
Well, you could make it a death penalty crime, assuming that you are correct about "something MUST BE DONE". People killed for killing people while driving drunk - minimally, negligent vehicular homicide, which, involving a weapon, is probably upgradeable to second degree murder, is enough to get that penalty in most states which have it. In states which don't, it's enough to get life, and in states where neither would be enforceable, you can argue a civil rights violation, as we did in the 1960's - being dead, the victim can no longer got to the church of their choice, they can no longer go to the theater of their choice, etc.. This was frequently used in the deep South after a lynching of a black person was let off with a "not guilty" verdict (it's where we get the phrase "making a Federal case of it" from).
Practically speaking, we should probably not ticket most "dangerous" behaviour in automobiles, unless they result in injury or property damage, and then when they do, dump a ton of retribution on the perpetrators. That's a bigger disincentive for the behaviour than say a $150 fine and online traffic school for most offendors, when you redefine the offense down from "injury or property damage" to "some near infinitesimal probability of injury or property damage".
Of course, since the real reason is revenue collection, rather than public safety, that doesn't work out so well for the coffers, as opposed to the putative issue to which we are paying lip service as an excuse for the revenue collection.
but what?
how do we fix this?
If we put other options on the table, then "acceptable losses" is one that comes to mind. We accept much higher losses from smoking, pollution, contaminated food, nosocomial infections resulting from hospitalization, job related stress or physical injury, etc., and don't bat an eye. Perhaps we need to accept the fact that we will never succeed in putting PlaySkool bumpers on everything on the entire planet, and that living is a dangerous business.
The idea that this gets "fixed" somehow is predicated on the idea that if someone doesn't die from a drunk driver, or while drunk driving, that they won't die at all; but of course, no one gets out alive. So it's really not a matter of "how", as much as a matter of "when", isn't it?
So maybe this *isn't* as case of "something MUST BE DONE" as much as it is an existential crisis by someone who doesn't yet believe in their own mortality, and is now looking for someone to blame/explain mortality when it happens?
Slashdot Mirror
You're not teaching them to doubt a source. You're teaching them to use their brains. If you're teaching by rote, chances are (though not always), you're not teaching much of anything. Multiplication tables are garbage, for instance; math is not about being able to calculate random garbage in your head quickly, but even if it were, people will naturally memorize things they see often.
"Critical thinking is a way of deciding whether a claim is true, partially true, or false. Critical thinking is a process that leads to skills that can be learned, mastered and used. Critical thinking is a tool by which one can come about reasoned conclusions based on a reasoned process. This process incorporates passion and creativity, but guides it with discipline, practicality and common sense."
The problem with "teaching critical thinking", then, is that you teach them to decide validity for themselves, but you do NOT teach them to always come to the correct conclusion when the process is complete. If it were about coming to "correct conclusions", rather than "conclusions which appear on the surface to be correct based on the available information", everyone who applied the critical thinking process would always arrive at exactly the same conclusions.
Therefore, you want to maximize "the available information", and turning on the write protect bit on someone's mind before they understand, for example, that "being able to calculate random garbage in your head quickly" is *very* important to knowing whether you have enough money in your pocket to buy the things you have in your shopping basket when you get to the checkout, or whether you're going to look like an ass while you make everyone behind you in line wait while you decide which things to put back to fit your available cash.
is effectively cultural genocide.
Education is not about skill sets, or keeping certain cultures that rely on obedience alive.
I think you really need to look up the term "Cultural Relativism"; not everyone wants to live in an apartment with cable TV, within walking distance of a Walmart, a McDonald's, and a Pizza Hut. Other cultures value other things, and they keep their cultural integrity, often by operating on a different axiomatic basis that has to necessarily exclude some information, but which does not preclude critical thinking within their (different, not necessarily limited) scope.
There are cultures which achieve what they believe to be very fulfilling lives in that way, and tend to have vastly lower suicide rates than our supposedly "superior" culture has; your statement is tantamount to another term you should look up: "Cultural Imperialism".
From the summary..., I figured it was a bunch of ASIMO robots programmed to trundle around the warehouses screaming in the voice of Sgt. R. Lee Ermey's voice "MOVE IT! Move it, MAGGOTS! Work FASTER!"...
Exactly. Why would we ever want to 'teach' people to have critical thinking skills? Schooling is all about indoctrination and rote memorization, and actual thoughts would just get in the way of that.
I think you missed the part where I said that some critical thinking skills are formed on their own; and people should definitely have critical thinking skills; I've been persuaded by another poster that it should be a mandatory grade 12 (High School Senior) course, rather than waiting for the first year of college.
It's counter productive to impair the ability to teach children rote information by teaching them to doubt the source before attempting to teach them the rote information. For non-rote information classes, that's the likely places that self-derived critical thinking skills will develop on their own.
Also see my other post about certain religious sects - I give the example of Amish/Mennonite communities) where doubting your teacher in school becomes the same as doubting your parents and doubting your religious authority. Instilling a high probability of acting on such doubts, which is an opportunity given at 14-16 years of age in those communities, is effectively cultural genocide.
While you may be saying "Good! I'm a rational humanist, and they should be too! I want everyone to be like me!", those cultures embody skill sets that we, as a society, may decide we need some day, in the same way that some - myself included - have argued that kids should be taught to do math without calculators because one EMP, and they won't be able to add anything on their own past "ten fingers" any more.
This is an insightful post. I'm persuaded that it's possible to try to teach this too early, before some foundational knowledge has been instilled. But I'm not sure that it's necessary to delay until the first term of a college, especially since everyone would benefit, not just those that end up going to college. I would support a mandatory course in senior high school year, with some of the principles being touched upon in science classes before that.
That's a reasonable point. People are mandatorily required to attend primary education through grade 12 in the U.S. (with the exception of some "grade 8 then done" Amish/Mennonite communities), and teaching it before they go out into the world is a good idea. It may actually be counter-productive to the continued existence of those communities, so the stop should not be adjusted downward in those instances - throwing doubt about informations sources right before they go on Rumspringa would likely steal many children from their culture and homogonize them into the mainstream.
But wouldn't it be more useful to have a course that emphasizes critical thinking about all types of problems rather than focusing on one specific application of critical thinking?
Teaching critical thinking early is a bad idea.
There is a place and time for shoveling as much information into a child's head as it can possibly hold without exploding. This is when we teach multiplication tables, drill grammar into their thick skulls, teach them basic math up through algebra, spelling, penmanship, history, and so on.
As soon as you teach critical thinking skills, it's like setting the write protect bit: it enables them to make a value judgement on the validity of the information they are being given by the teachers (and other adults), and as soon as you have that, you begin to build distrust of information sources - even ones with good information to impart.
Generally some critical thinking skills form on their own; creative writing, physics, chemistry, debate, and other classes tend to foster their development, regardless of whether or not you are done shoveling the basic stuff into their heads. As soon as that bit is set, you might as well give up trying to program them, you've lost: they're teenagers.
Logic classes belong in the first quarter/semester of your first year of college, and not before.
Yea; I mean, what would a guy who spent most of his life trying to help uplift the poor know about poverty?
Isn't that entire business model predicated on the idea of "trying" rather than "succeeding"? As soon as you succeed, you're basically out of a job, right?
Hi, Tim Cook, is that you?
Anonymous usually = slashvertisement...
Take them to 1981 and give then an Apple II or a Commodore PET? And a 100 different copies of "Compute" magazine so they can type in their own programs and get immediate gratification from a small amount of code?
Finding bugs is ALWAYS fun!
What's even more fun is that Tesla Roadster you were able to buy by selling the bugs you find to intelligence agencies, rather than reporting them to the vendor and being sued under the DMCA for reverse engineering their product.
Food is often social and portions are uncontrolled. This is especially true if you eat out a lot to get that social interaction.
There is a rather famous Cornell study that showed people will basically eat what's in front of them until it's gone:
http://foodpsychology.cornell.edu/content/bottomless-bowls-why-visual-cues-portion-size-may-influence-intake
A good trick if you eat out is to immediately ask for a "to go" container, and then put half your restaurant portion into the container, close it, and set it aside. Then enjoy the remainder and the social interaction that usually goes with eating out.
Other people have pointed out that is not the case, but I thought I would address the pregnancy thing.
Pregnancy studies are a high risk/low reward proposition, unless you are talking about fertility, anti-miscarriage or other pregnancy related applications, since including pregnant women in a clinical trial has a really high settlement cost if there's a problem with the pregnancy, and an even higher cost if the baby comes out with a birth defect. As an example, women with hair loss get warned against finesteride, since it acts as a 4-5 reductase suppression agent, which, when it occurs naturally (5-ARD), results in conditions from hypospadias needing surgical correction, all the way to full blown X-Y females (sterile of course).
It's fairly common to warn pregnant women not to take a medication, even if in fact it might be perfectly safe because of the exclusionary nature of the studies. This is purely a legal liability/malpractice issue, not necessarily an issue with the medication itself.
No that's what the summary tries to imply what the research says, count on research from LA being negative towards public transport.
Actually, I read both articles and the summary, and it doesn't seem to be what they are trying to imply at all.
But I agree with the GP that you get more control over people's ability to move around, if you limit them to bicycles or public transportation; for example, the BART stations that have been shut down to try and prevent protests against them shutting of cellular service in order to prevent previous protests, the ability to take busses and trains out of service to limit the ability of people without cars to move around and so on. They also tended to shutdown BART stations near the Occupy movement when it was still going on to any extent. Handy if you are trying to stop a zombie outbreak as well, I guess.
With the exception of short hall train corridors (because BART and CalTrain can't agree to share), and of course the Facebook/Google/Apple/Genentech/etc. busses run by those and similar private companies, public transit is pretty crappy in the SF Bay Area. The incessant BART strikes also tend to discourage use of public transit as well, but that's more about the unions blackmailing the politicians by pissing off voters than it is about controlling peoples movements.
The FDA was very clear about why they stopped it. It wasn't necessarily that the information was misleading, but that it would lead patients to make decisions about their own care without necessarily consulting a doctor, which the FDA thinks is not a good idea -- and I totally see their point, frankly.
The FDA made them stop because doctors dislike being cut out of the loop, and insurance companies like being cut out of the loop even less than the doctors, and they would prefer to have you get the data through a disclosure mechanism which gives your insurance company better actuarial information. "Having a Dr. explain the information to the patients one on one" is just a place to hang that hat.
For example, one of the things that 23andMe can tell you is how well you might respond to one drug versus another, because of your specific genetic makeup. If you take that advice and change the dosage of your medication or switch to a different medication without discussing the issue with your doctor, you could cause yourself serious harm.
Yeah, in case you wondered, people can not self prescribe non-over the counter medications. So that excuse doesn't fly, either, since your doctor will be involved in writing the script for the new medication, and your insurance company will be paying for it, and like mine did, probably try to give you a cheaper generic version of a similar drug in place of the one your doctor actually wrote the script for, and then called it "equivalent". I've had that pulled on me, and been given "generic allergy medication" containing a cornstarch binder in place of the other one - when corn products were why I taking the damn stuff in the first place.
I vote you go with Nightingale, and fix the file organization feature. IT's clear from your FLOSS requirement that you are a fan of Open Source, so send patches: that's what you do with Open Source.
If you don't want to do that because you're not a coder, then you might as well just with a closed source product, since it's not like you'll be looking at the code.
I don't think it's so much about Facebook = the global water cooler" (what a terrible analogy! I'm sure Facebook corporate loves it...).
Some people are simply not going to pay to access your content, and you can shut down every channel possible (you can't, it's an impossible to achieve goal from a technology standpoint), and doing that is not going to convert these people into your customers. This is a "look at all the money we COULD be making IF ONLY these people were willing to pay for our product, which we are SURE they WOULD, if the only way to see the next episode of our reality TV series was to pay us for it!" argument. It's an invalid argument.
Yeah gramps, we did all that in history class, along with slideframes and mainrules and all that.
That's obsolete now because cloud and agile and webscale.
Let me know when you get the next G.E. Medical systems MRI system running "in the cloud" rather than on a a local control system and a console in the next room, and then trust your life to the thing. Meanwhile, I think I will probably stick with the medical equipment I've worked on instead.
P.S.: Let me know when your cloud is HIPPA certified.
Elon Musk should be looking at Ford management and asking himself what they know about making and selling cars that he doesn't.
That's a brilliant Idea! They could introduce a "Tesla Pinto", and have the cars actually explode and kill people, just like Ford: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Pinto#Fuel_tank_defect
And then they could ask for a bailout from the Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility (TALF) like Ford Credit did (and on which they still owe money to the Fed): http://useconomy.about.com/od/criticalssues/a/auto_bailout.htm ...on second thought, perhaps Ford is not the best role model after all.
Maybe the media scrutiny is that Tesla's actually caught fire, and Ford is proactively recalling because there is a potential fire?
Actually, if you read the article, you will see that both sets of vehicles are having approximately one fire per 10,000...
"There have been 12 reported fires but no injuries in the bigger recall of 139,917 Ford Escape vehicles."
At some point in their careers, all programmers, after spending a month hunting down a heap corruption, or a race condition, or some other bug nasty like that, come to the realisation that they are spending more time fixing mistakes than writing code. At this moment, most, but not all programmers follow a very logical path of reasoning. They think to themselves, "well, if this code took me 1 week to write, then 4 to fix, that is five weeks, what if I spent 3 weeks writing it carefully, then it would be done right away and I wouldn't have to fix it, I could have been done two weeks earlier!".
From that moment on, this programmer becomes all but useless to their current and future employers.
There are those who build the prototypes, and those who build the products. The second kind is "Mr./Ms. Right"; the first kind is "Mr./Ms. Right Now".
If your business is about churning your web site design every so often, and you aren't doing a lot of back end processing that requires actual business logic, or if you are a startup that's trying to throw something together in a couple months so that you can get a bite from a V.C. and get the company funded by an Angel or other investor, then you can afford to hire a "Mr./Ms. Right Now", and in fact you should do so.
If on the other hand, you have to have a solid product that's going to either be shipped off to customers, or you're trying to do a Saleforce.com SAAS play to try and generate income, then you need the "Mr./Ms. Right" instead.
I've worked at a number of startups, and at some point, someone has to own the "It Works Bit", and that's not going to be the person who just slaps together prototypes with spit and bailing wire, and hopes for the best. I was most often the person owning that bit, and I've halted updates that would have resulted in the bricking of thousands of units at customer sites, with no way to back it out remotely. I've also reworked a lot of code that should have been written as an FSA, but instead was comparing for NULL everywhere because the young turk who wrote it didn't understand the state his variables were in at any given point. I've also done serious detail work that got one well known company out of a threatened $200M lawsuit. And I've done the necessary work to reverse engineer the requirements for embedded controllers on Samsung and Acer laptops so the trackpad didn't suck (one of the reasons for a recently recalled laptop, apart from the charger problem, is that the trackpads sucked because no one did that job this last time).
Yeah, if all you are doing is a Twitter Clone, then you can be pretty slack about the coding, at least until you get funded, but if you need to have real working code that's not just throw-away website code that won't be around next week anyway, you need "Mr./Ms. Right", not some prototyper.
and cost the local economy tens of millions of dollars by screwing up.
So what? What's BART's incentive to avoid this? The customers will go to a competitor? They'll lose their jobs?
They'll do what they did Thursday and Friday, and flood the roads with drivers who have cars for emergencies, usually take public transit, and are pretty inexperienced as drivers in regular traffic, not just "BART's out traffic". BART isn't really necessary; it's convenient for a lot of people, but once it drops below the convenience threshold, people simply won't use it.
This is really surprising to me.
For all the "can not fail" systems I've worked on, there has been an identical set of hardware, along with other hardware to simulate load, on which you could try upgrades before you put them on a live system and cost the local economy tens of millions of dollars by screwing up.
First, the CPUs built into supercomputers today are as good as anybody knows how to make one.
Well, that's wrong... we just aren't commercially manufacturing the ones we know how to make already.
There is no respect in which they are not lightyears more advanced than any custom silicon cray ever put out.
That's true... but only because you intentionally limited us to Si as the substrate. GaAs transistors have a switching speed around 250GHz, which is about 60 times what we get with absurdly cooled and over-clocked silicon.
Didn't that boat sail with the Cray Y-MP?
All our really big supercomputers today are adding a bunch of individual not-even-Krypto-the-wonderdog CPUs together, and then calling it a supercomputer. Have we reached the limits in that scaling? No.
We have reached the limits in the ability to solve big problems that aren't parallelizable, due to the inability to produce individual CPU machines in the supercomputer range, but like I said, that boat sailed years ago.
This looks like a funding fishing expedition for the carbon nanotube processor research that was highlighted at the conference.
no one gets out alive. . . so far.
Well, yes; some of us are working on that problem...
Yes, people will diew, that doesn't mean I want my risk of dying increased because of some other assholes decisions.
And many of those dead kids where in the drunks vehicle. It's not like they even had a choice.
Well, it's certainly your choice of whether or not to get in the vehicle vs. trying to take the keys away, and it's your choice to also be on or near roadways, so it's not all about the assholes.
"predicated on the idea that if someone doesn't die from a drunk driver, or while drunk driving, that they won't die at all;
wrong. Way to take it to a non-sensible extreme. I don't want my odds of dying increased. It's pretty simple.
30% of traffic accident deaths are caused by alcohol-impaired-driving. Much lower then in the 70's.
Actually, it's significantly less than the published 32% statistic, if you factor in other drug use from their other statistics. It's fair to say that 32% is due to impaired driving, but since you can drink enough water to induce water intoxication, if you have no other means of getting high, there's no way to completely ban all intoxicants without controlling people's water intake, as well.
Even were we to grant that it was the alcohol, not the heroin, cocaine, or marijuana that actually pushed them over the tipping point from "unsafe driving" to "highway fatality", that means that 68% were NOT alcohol involved fatalities.
So if we are spending societies money on fixing anything, we should concentrate funding on reducing the larger number, right?
Let's start with the fact that 100% of the fatalities were vehicles driven by humans, and 0% were vehicles driven by robots, and work our way forward from there.
setting all else aside, the simple fact that drunk drivers kill more children than anything else on the planet, indicates that something MUST BE DONE.
Well, you could make it a death penalty crime, assuming that you are correct about "something MUST BE DONE". People killed for killing people while driving drunk - minimally, negligent vehicular homicide, which, involving a weapon, is probably upgradeable to second degree murder, is enough to get that penalty in most states which have it. In states which don't, it's enough to get life, and in states where neither would be enforceable, you can argue a civil rights violation, as we did in the 1960's - being dead, the victim can no longer got to the church of their choice, they can no longer go to the theater of their choice, etc.. This was frequently used in the deep South after a lynching of a black person was let off with a "not guilty" verdict (it's where we get the phrase "making a Federal case of it" from).
Practically speaking, we should probably not ticket most "dangerous" behaviour in automobiles, unless they result in injury or property damage, and then when they do, dump a ton of retribution on the perpetrators. That's a bigger disincentive for the behaviour than say a $150 fine and online traffic school for most offendors, when you redefine the offense down from "injury or property damage" to "some near infinitesimal probability of injury or property damage".
Of course, since the real reason is revenue collection, rather than public safety, that doesn't work out so well for the coffers, as opposed to the putative issue to which we are paying lip service as an excuse for the revenue collection.
but what?
how do we fix this?
If we put other options on the table, then "acceptable losses" is one that comes to mind. We accept much higher losses from smoking, pollution, contaminated food, nosocomial infections resulting from hospitalization, job related stress or physical injury, etc., and don't bat an eye. Perhaps we need to accept the fact that we will never succeed in putting PlaySkool bumpers on everything on the entire planet, and that living is a dangerous business.
The idea that this gets "fixed" somehow is predicated on the idea that if someone doesn't die from a drunk driver, or while drunk driving, that they won't die at all; but of course, no one gets out alive. So it's really not a matter of "how", as much as a matter of "when", isn't it?
So maybe this *isn't* as case of "something MUST BE DONE" as much as it is an existential crisis by someone who doesn't yet believe in their own mortality, and is now looking for someone to blame/explain mortality when it happens?