Most universities seem to allow the use of their facilities for "consulting" work by staff up to a certain value. Given that no one in their right mind would choose academia for the money, this is in my opinion a sensible way of closing the gap between the salaries offered by universities and businesses. I'm sure if he started to earn more than his salary this way, something would kick in, but if we're talking about small amounts of money, what's the problem? If he offered additional tutorials in the weekends for students who were struggling, would you expect him to do that for free as well? If he wrote a textbook covering the material he teaches, should he not receive any money for that either? The students have paid for a set of services and resources and have every right to access those; this is something extra and he's charging for it. Seems fair enough to me.
Except that they don't learn. They mostly just scrape through the course because we can only fail those who are really clear cut fails, and then they head off to the follow on course without an adequate understanding. In any case, life is too short to learn entirely from your own experiences.
Ah, but let's say that your lecturer really does add something for the students attending the lecture (better visual and better audio at least I suspect, but certainly the possibility of questions and timely announcements). In any case, attending the actual lectures, assuming that they are well planned, encourages you to keep up the pace of the course so you have time to absorb concepts and make connections on your own. Human nature being what it is, a decent proportion of students will skip lectures and "catch up" with the podcasts in their own time. When do you think they're going to do this? I'm guessing for a reasonable number of them, this will occur about a week or so out from the final examination, and I'm talking about students who would have otherwise attended the lecture, not those who would have skipped it anyway. Once you're one podcast behind, what's the point of attending the next lecture until you've seen it? Then when you're two podcasts behind, there's even less reason to attend. And so on and so forth. So the overall performance of the class drops, and the standards probably get dropped to preserve the old pass rate. Letting people learn in their own style and at their own pace is a great idea, but a good lecturer has prepared their lecture schedule so that the majority of students will have enough time to make connections and learn the material. Providing "on demand" lectures breaks this aspect of the course. Why do you think most courses have assignments? Because they are a better measure of performance or because they encourage students to keep up? Same deal with live lectures.
Having lectured for seven years now, I find myself increasingly modifying lectures based on picking up feedback on students' understanding. I would make the point though that the feedback I get is mostly from those in the first four or five rows. Further back, it's harder to pick up on cues. Given that those who would want the podcasts will probably be (a) students who usually sit in the front rows who missed something or want to check a point and (b) students who skipped the lecture and normally sit toward the back of the theatre, this probably isn't too important.
Absolutely not-it is simply suggesting that if such a profile is used, any wannabe terrorist will find a young person to fly out of Sweden and make sure to purchase round-trip tickets in an attempt to duck the "profile." And probably succeed. Suggesting that such people do not exist and such a plot would not be possible is the true folly.
The point is not that such people cannot be terrorists, but that they are less likely to be terrorists. If you have limited resources, you need to decide how best to spend them. There are, I suspect, rather fewer young women from Sweden who would be willing to die for a cause than people from some other groups. If the next attack is based around a young woman from Sweden with a high status career, a husband, and three children, then the value of profiling will be seen as less and the system will eventually correct itself. Basically, profiling is like Bayesian spam filtering; it doesn't always work (with both false positives and negatives) and it needs to adapt over time. But it does provide some information about the likelihood of someone being a terrorist and we would be foolish not to use it if our goal is to prevent potential terrorists from doing certain things. Now if our goal is to control social attitudes, that might change things.
I'll freely admit to it! However, most people (including me) profile on objective and non-bigoted criteria.
So you would react in exactly the same way if a middle-aged black man with visible tatoos and wearing torn clothing was walking toward you in a dark alley as you would if it was a well-dressed, white girl aged around twenty with a cross around her neck? Heck, let's make her a nun just to be even more extreme. If you can honestly say that you would react exactly the same in both cases then congratulations, you're not (as far as I can tell) a bigot.
Now, myself, I generally have found most religions to be shortsighted and ignorant, hence my atheism.
This is an aside, but what has atheism got to do with how religions behave? Atheism is the disbelief in a deity. Either you believe in a deity or you don't.
Yet that is my personal decision, and I've nothing against those who chose otherwise.
This is a pet peeve of mine, so nothing personal in addressing this statement in your post; I could have done the same with plenty of others. So you don't actually believe that you're correct? I really don't buy this "this is my choice and I fully respect people who choose otherwise" thing. If you believe in something (religion, pacificism, vegetarianism, veganism, whatever), then either you believe that this holds only for you or you believe that other people are simply wrong (and how can you respect people for being wrong?). You can't be "open-minded" and believe that your beliefs are correct without qualifying your belief in a ridiculous way (e.g., "men in their thirties with a family history of heart disease should avoid eating meat if their name starts with an A and contains two vowels").
How about (covering several decades):
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (The Beatles);
Tommy (The Who);
The Dark Side of the Moon, The Wall, etc. (Pink Floyd);
Berlin, Magic & Loss, etc. (Lou Reed);
Black Celebration (Depeche Mode);
Disintegration (The Cure);
Electro-Shock Blues (Eels);
The Downward Spiral, The Fragile, etc. (Nine Inch Nails);
American Idiot (Greenday);
The Forgotten Arm (Aimee Mann).
They're not that rare.
I think that computers have actually been able to do real science for at least a little while already.
The computers analize a set of data (observation), they make a series of modifications (hypothesis), they run fitness tests against these modified versions of the data (experiment), then they begin again analizing these results (back to obeservation).
The modifications in this case are random combinations of existing solutions where their selection for the next round is weighted based on their performance. This doesn't really seem to be hypothesis generation to me, or particularly scientific. It's basically almost-random search of the solution space with a bias towards local maxima that might eventually lead to an interesting solution if you throw sufficient computational power at the problem. Given that he uses http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Koza/ "a 1000 node Beowulf cluster, composed of Pentium II and DEC Alpha processors, to do his research" his approach seems more brute force than scientific to me.
Wario Ware: Twisted uses the same technology as the PS3 controller. The wiimote truly adds some "evolution" to a tried and true formula.
Wario Ware: Twisted went one further as it had rumble. It makes a huge difference to the feel of the controller, giving the illusion of resistance as you tilt it. Sony still hasn't caught up with Wario.
Your comparison between some of a jet's engines and one of an application's DLLs isn't entirely valid. A word processor may function just fine for some time before anyone notices that it doesn't have a working thesaurus module or that a 14-pt font prints as 13.8pt, and even then it is still almost as useful for me. Try flying a plane without landing gear and let me know how well it worked when you get back.
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Most universities seem to allow the use of their facilities for "consulting" work by staff up to a certain value. Given that no one in their right mind would choose academia for the money, this is in my opinion a sensible way of closing the gap between the salaries offered by universities and businesses. I'm sure if he started to earn more than his salary this way, something would kick in, but if we're talking about small amounts of money, what's the problem? If he offered additional tutorials in the weekends for students who were struggling, would you expect him to do that for free as well? If he wrote a textbook covering the material he teaches, should he not receive any money for that either? The students have paid for a set of services and resources and have every right to access those; this is something extra and he's charging for it. Seems fair enough to me.
Except that they don't learn. They mostly just scrape through the course because we can only fail those who are really clear cut fails, and then they head off to the follow on course without an adequate understanding. In any case, life is too short to learn entirely from your own experiences.
Maybe this will finally rid the world of "punch the monkey" and its ilk.
Ah, but let's say that your lecturer really does add something for the students attending the lecture (better visual and better audio at least I suspect, but certainly the possibility of questions and timely announcements). In any case, attending the actual lectures, assuming that they are well planned, encourages you to keep up the pace of the course so you have time to absorb concepts and make connections on your own. Human nature being what it is, a decent proportion of students will skip lectures and "catch up" with the podcasts in their own time. When do you think they're going to do this? I'm guessing for a reasonable number of them, this will occur about a week or so out from the final examination, and I'm talking about students who would have otherwise attended the lecture, not those who would have skipped it anyway. Once you're one podcast behind, what's the point of attending the next lecture until you've seen it? Then when you're two podcasts behind, there's even less reason to attend. And so on and so forth. So the overall performance of the class drops, and the standards probably get dropped to preserve the old pass rate. Letting people learn in their own style and at their own pace is a great idea, but a good lecturer has prepared their lecture schedule so that the majority of students will have enough time to make connections and learn the material. Providing "on demand" lectures breaks this aspect of the course. Why do you think most courses have assignments? Because they are a better measure of performance or because they encourage students to keep up? Same deal with live lectures.
Having lectured for seven years now, I find myself increasingly modifying lectures based on picking up feedback on students' understanding. I would make the point though that the feedback I get is mostly from those in the first four or five rows. Further back, it's harder to pick up on cues. Given that those who would want the podcasts will probably be (a) students who usually sit in the front rows who missed something or want to check a point and (b) students who skipped the lecture and normally sit toward the back of the theatre, this probably isn't too important.
Absolutely not-it is simply suggesting that if such a profile is used, any wannabe terrorist will find a young person to fly out of Sweden and make sure to purchase round-trip tickets in an attempt to duck the "profile." And probably succeed. Suggesting that such people do not exist and such a plot would not be possible is the true folly.
The point is not that such people cannot be terrorists, but that they are less likely to be terrorists. If you have limited resources, you need to decide how best to spend them. There are, I suspect, rather fewer young women from Sweden who would be willing to die for a cause than people from some other groups. If the next attack is based around a young woman from Sweden with a high status career, a husband, and three children, then the value of profiling will be seen as less and the system will eventually correct itself. Basically, profiling is like Bayesian spam filtering; it doesn't always work (with both false positives and negatives) and it needs to adapt over time. But it does provide some information about the likelihood of someone being a terrorist and we would be foolish not to use it if our goal is to prevent potential terrorists from doing certain things. Now if our goal is to control social attitudes, that might change things.
I'll freely admit to it! However, most people (including me) profile on objective and non-bigoted criteria.
So you would react in exactly the same way if a middle-aged black man with visible tatoos and wearing torn clothing was walking toward you in a dark alley as you would if it was a well-dressed, white girl aged around twenty with a cross around her neck? Heck, let's make her a nun just to be even more extreme. If you can honestly say that you would react exactly the same in both cases then congratulations, you're not (as far as I can tell) a bigot.
Now, myself, I generally have found most religions to be shortsighted and ignorant, hence my atheism.
This is an aside, but what has atheism got to do with how religions behave? Atheism is the disbelief in a deity. Either you believe in a deity or you don't.
Yet that is my personal decision, and I've nothing against those who chose otherwise.
This is a pet peeve of mine, so nothing personal in addressing this statement in your post; I could have done the same with plenty of others. So you don't actually believe that you're correct? I really don't buy this "this is my choice and I fully respect people who choose otherwise" thing. If you believe in something (religion, pacificism, vegetarianism, veganism, whatever), then either you believe that this holds only for you or you believe that other people are simply wrong (and how can you respect people for being wrong?). You can't be "open-minded" and believe that your beliefs are correct without qualifying your belief in a ridiculous way (e.g., "men in their thirties with a family history of heart disease should avoid eating meat if their name starts with an A and contains two vowels").
How about (covering several decades): Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (The Beatles); Tommy (The Who); The Dark Side of the Moon, The Wall, etc. (Pink Floyd); Berlin, Magic & Loss, etc. (Lou Reed); Black Celebration (Depeche Mode); Disintegration (The Cure); Electro-Shock Blues (Eels); The Downward Spiral, The Fragile, etc. (Nine Inch Nails); American Idiot (Greenday); The Forgotten Arm (Aimee Mann). They're not that rare.
I think that computers have actually been able to do real science for at least a little while already.
The computers analize a set of data (observation), they make a series of modifications (hypothesis), they run fitness tests against these modified versions of the data (experiment), then they begin again analizing these results (back to obeservation).
The modifications in this case are random combinations of existing solutions where their selection for the next round is weighted based on their performance. This doesn't really seem to be hypothesis generation to me, or particularly scientific. It's basically almost-random search of the solution space with a bias towards local maxima that might eventually lead to an interesting solution if you throw sufficient computational power at the problem. Given that he uses http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Koza/ "a 1000 node Beowulf cluster, composed of Pentium II and DEC Alpha processors, to do his research" his approach seems more brute force than scientific to me.Wario Ware: Twisted went one further as it had rumble. It makes a huge difference to the feel of the controller, giving the illusion of resistance as you tilt it. Sony still hasn't caught up with Wario.
Your comparison between some of a jet's engines and one of an application's DLLs isn't entirely valid. A word processor may function just fine for some time before anyone notices that it doesn't have a working thesaurus module or that a 14-pt font prints as 13.8pt, and even then it is still almost as useful for me. Try flying a plane without landing gear and let me know how well it worked when you get back.