Historically, improvements in fishing efficiencies have gone hand-in-hand with fisheries depletion. Better methods just kill more fish. It is difficult to be sanguine about technological improvements; policy changes are more promising.
The simple summary of recent fisheries history is that we are destroying stock after stock, around the world. For more on this,
I recommend a Nature paper by my colleague Ransom Myers, entitled "Rapid worldwide depletion of predatory fish communities" [Nature 2003, vol 423: p280-283]. The paper is somewhat technical, but even if your Statistics are a bit rusty, check out Figure 2, which shows a world map of depletion. To give you a gist (and a chill up your spine), here's a quote from the paper: "Industrialized fisheries typically reduced community biomass by 80% within 15 years of exploitation."
If you don't have an online subscription to Nature.com, you can find the paper and related papers at Myers' website
http://fish.dal.ca/~myers
I am a professor and I certainly am in favour of catching cheaters. But I have a question. Do these students sign a copyright form permitting the company to archive the essays? And, if so, surely the form would not hold up in court, since it would have been coerced. (Sign this form or fail this course.)
Why might students not want their essays stored in a company database?
Good writers might fear that their ideas, or even their words, could be stolen (by all sorts of low-life: disgruntled/underpaid company members, malicious/political hackers, underpaid/jealous professors,...).
Bad writers who are otherwise on a fast track to success might not want folks ever to see their bad writing. Imagine a presidential candidate who wrote total drivel in his undergraduate years... how hard would it be for an opponent to get that drivel and publish it?
Sure, the company could claim the storage was secure against hackers, and they could claim that no employee would ever sell the essays, but any/.er knows that such claims would be hard to trust.
There are probably technological solutions to this problem, involving encryption keys. Folks on/. might have some good ideas on that. For example, how much would it cost, 30 years from now, for a presidential campaign to buy CPU time to break a key that is secure today?
PS. I noticed that the original posting had just one source, and so if folks would like to read more, they might like to check out the
Globe and Mail newspaper website
for more discussion, including of students' thoughts.
The article didn't mention whether Soffice properly imported and exported MSOffice files. This is a crucial requirement in a collaborative environment.
For example... Folks send me MSword docs and expect me to edit them and send them back in MSword. And when I go to a conference, or when I teach a class, the computers will be set up for PowerPoint, not Soffice/OOffice.
Waiting until everybody else switches is not an option, even if it were likely.
Therefore, import and export to the unfortunately-standard MSoft Office suite is crucially important.
The article failed to treat this issue.
My own experience is that OOffice (and, I assume, Soffice) is only gradually approaching the level of adequacy. As of a year ago, neither Soffice nor OOffice were worth the bother; they did a terrible job of important MSWord files containing anything technical (e.g. with Mathematics or with tables). I use OOffice1.4RC3 quite a lot lately, and it seems to be better (simple tables often work, but mathematics does not). Export to PowerPoint is halfway reasonable now, although the fonts get mixed up quite often, and the placement of graphics is incorrect (fields overlap), so that I always have to spend time in powerpoint sanding the rough edges. (And, yes, I have done my part by reporting bugs.)
I've not tried soffice lately, even though we have a site license so I can test it easily without cost. Maybe that, in itself, says something. I know I can get 75% of what I want with OOffice1.4RCx and both past experience and the referred-to article suggests I won't get a whole lot more from Soffice, so why get stuck accidently relying upon commercial additions (of which I assume there must be a nonzero number)?
If you want to collaborate on a same-file basis with 90% of colleagues, use MSOffice. If you want to collaborate with 9% of colleagues, use OOffice. And if you want to collaborate with 1% of colleagues, use Soffice.
Gosh. The plans listed at the linked
discussion
site
are pretty unclear. I mean literally unclear; the site uses dark-grey text over a black background;-)
I see this comment was modded up as
informative.
I think it needs a few funny points, as well. I laughed out loud, at the delightfully unexplained humour.
Right, tex is better. The problem is that other folks use MSword, so sometimes there's no choice. I've even heard some argue that MSword equations look as good as tex, and that's certainly false.
(This comment applies only to the initial remarks about over-complex documents. The rest of panurge's posting is extraodinarily insightful, and I encourage readers to read it a second time, and to comment here.)
I am a university professor, and I've tried OO.o many times, to see if it's ready for prime time. I have found that OO.o falls a bit short even on simple documents. I've been using OO.o for quite a while, and although its problems are fading, they aren't gone. Most recently, I found that font was incorrectly changed in the middle of a simple 3-page document, upon export to MSword. By "simple", I really do mean simple! The document had no tables, no figures, no formulae. Sure, it did have a few words in bold and italic, a few words with yellow underlay, and a few footnotes. But if OO.o cannot export such documents to MSword, then it's not suitable for shared work.
PS.
I didn't report the bug because the document had confidential information. Plus, I had done my opensource duty on a previous bug report (formula export -- fixed in an OO.o upgrade).
PPS. I'll still keep using (and recommending) OO.o for work that doesn't need to be shared, since there seems to be little downside, now that it doesn't crash as soffice used to, a few years back.
I had the same difficulty, and even reported it as a bug. Eventually the problem went away. But I was never sure whether it actually went away, or whether I had created the formula differently.
(You could probably find my bug on the OO bugzilla page by searching on 'formula export'. Perhaps it's actually been fixed by now.)
Your point, though, is 100% valid. If OO.o cannot do formulae, then it's not a credible alternative to msword.
Heck, even
developing
countries might save money by funding open-source efforts instead of paying license fees. Every government desk has a computer on it, and pretty much every one of those is using a microsoft OS... does anybody know what that costs?
This article is insightful and prescient. It also covers a great deal of territory, which means that few readers would fail to find something fascinating in it.
Start your reading with this article, not the "100 year" one. Maybe end with it, too.
Great. Now the guy next to me will be coughing during a quiet section of the performance, just so he can say "hey, that's me" when he plays the concert CD for his friends.
The "Bay" was the Bay of Fundy, which separates Canada and the U.S. The tides there are amongst the highest in the world.
The tidal-power installation wouldn't cause world-wide problems, but it would cause a couple of local problems:
(a) local Canadian wetlands would be altered significantly, harming birds which use them as a stopover point during migration and
(b) sea-level in Boston would be altered by about 10 centimetres (ankle-height).
As I remember it, the latter problem was the clincher, politically.
There is a pilot programme for tidal power in the region, however. It serves about 4000 homes. See this site for more information on this. This site is from the power corporation in Nova Scotia. As for the issue of birds, and other local issues, see this site.
The sort of analysis in the cited article is flawed because it assumes the measurement of some signal that is independent of the measurement technique.
That assumption is wrong.
Rational voters** will adjust their votes as a voting system is adjusted, in order to get the leaders they want.
A traffic analogy: if you change the rules of the road, folks simply adjust their driving to get to their destination on time.
** This won't apply for irrational voters, such as those swayed by which candidate is taller (how often has the shorter US presidential candidate won?). The ratio of rational to irrational voters may be the thing that needs thought and discussion, instead of the details of voting systems.
One of my buddies can play multiple games at the same time, remembering the boards in his head. So the candle is optional for him. Me, I have trouble remembering which way the little horse is allowed to jump!
Since automatic spam filters seem to be somewhat problematic (e.g. the one used at my university has way too many false positives to be useful), I wonder if there might be a new industry for human spam filters?
The question is, how much would you pay to have somebody delete a spam message? If it's 1 cent, and if the person could kill one every 5 seconds (which seems pretty reasonable... I don't even read the whole subjectline before deleting most spam), then we are at about 7 dollars an hour. Given that this is not a high-skill task that could be done from the home (possibly in the third world, where $7/hour is a very high wage), we may have a new industry here.
For less than the price of a coffee per day, a user gets spam-free email, and somebody else gets to pay the rent.
Of course, there is a downside: somebody might pay the anti-spam folks money to look the other way on some messages. And there is a privacy concern.
The abstract
contained a sentence that caught my eye: " The search included not
only electronic modes but also a cursory examination of the older
literature that is not covered in electronic databases"
Do the
Physiologists have amazingly deep databases, or is something funny going on here?
To enjoy the next hour (or week, or month,...) set aside this/. thread and enter into a Dijsktra thread.
Just looking at his U texaspublication list is an awesome (pre-1990s meaning) experience.
Let your eyes scan it, as they would the Grand Canyon. Then wander around the UTexas site, where many publications are online, and start reading. You'll be a better person for it. And you may experience a thrill of understanding, when you see that his hands hold up so much of today's code, as Shakespeare's hands hold up so much of the language and common experience of the English world.
To get a feel for the span of his life's work, consider his thesis title, "Communications with an automatic computer." The word "automatic" was necessary then, to distinguish it from a person with a calculator. The machine he used in his thesis? It had a 32K memory unit. He divided this into what he called "living" and "dead" memory.
Let's hope that his memory will be of the living variety.
Slashdot Mirror
The simple summary of recent fisheries history is that we are destroying stock after stock, around the world. For more on this, I recommend a Nature paper by my colleague Ransom Myers, entitled "Rapid worldwide depletion of predatory fish communities" [Nature 2003, vol 423: p280-283]. The paper is somewhat technical, but even if your Statistics are a bit rusty, check out Figure 2, which shows a world map of depletion. To give you a gist (and a chill up your spine), here's a quote from the paper: "Industrialized fisheries typically reduced community biomass by 80% within 15 years of exploitation."
If you don't have an online subscription to Nature.com, you can find the paper and related papers at Myers' website http://fish.dal.ca/~myers
Why might students not want their essays stored in a company database?
Sure, the company could claim the storage was secure against hackers, and they could claim that no employee would ever sell the essays, but any /.er knows that such claims would be hard to trust.
There are probably technological solutions to this problem, involving encryption keys. Folks on /. might have some good ideas on that. For example, how much would it cost, 30 years from now, for a presidential campaign to buy CPU time to break a key that is secure today?
PS. I noticed that the original posting had just one source, and so if folks would like to read more, they might like to check out the Globe and Mail newspaper website for more discussion, including of students' thoughts.
For example... Folks send me MSword docs and expect me to edit them and send them back in MSword. And when I go to a conference, or when I teach a class, the computers will be set up for PowerPoint, not Soffice/OOffice. Waiting until everybody else switches is not an option, even if it were likely. Therefore, import and export to the unfortunately-standard MSoft Office suite is crucially important.
The article failed to treat this issue.
My own experience is that OOffice (and, I assume, Soffice) is only gradually approaching the level of adequacy. As of a year ago, neither Soffice nor OOffice were worth the bother; they did a terrible job of important MSWord files containing anything technical (e.g. with Mathematics or with tables). I use OOffice1.4RC3 quite a lot lately, and it seems to be better (simple tables often work, but mathematics does not). Export to PowerPoint is halfway reasonable now, although the fonts get mixed up quite often, and the placement of graphics is incorrect (fields overlap), so that I always have to spend time in powerpoint sanding the rough edges. (And, yes, I have done my part by reporting bugs.)
I've not tried soffice lately, even though we have a site license so I can test it easily without cost. Maybe that, in itself, says something. I know I can get 75% of what I want with OOffice1.4RCx and both past experience and the referred-to article suggests I won't get a whole lot more from Soffice, so why get stuck accidently relying upon commercial additions (of which I assume there must be a nonzero number)?
If you want to collaborate on a same-file basis with 90% of colleagues, use MSOffice. If you want to collaborate with 9% of colleagues, use OOffice. And if you want to collaborate with 1% of colleagues, use Soffice.
I thought the idea was to make laptops more and more 2D (thin), and now this :-)
Gosh. The plans listed at the linked discussion site are pretty unclear. I mean literally unclear; the site uses dark-grey text over a black background ;-)
I see this comment was modded up as informative. I think it needs a few funny points, as well. I laughed out loud, at the delightfully unexplained humour.
Or maybe looking at the Java.com pictures of Christina Aguilera (a well-known java coder) has wrecked my eyes.
"Creator of Java"? What's that? How about "the creator of Gosling Emacs"?
Right, tex is better. The problem is that other folks use MSword, so sometimes there's no choice. I've even heard some argue that MSword equations look as good as tex, and that's certainly false.
I am a university professor, and I've tried OO.o many times, to see if it's ready for prime time. I have found that OO.o falls a bit short even on simple documents. I've been using OO.o for quite a while, and although its problems are fading, they aren't gone. Most recently, I found that font was incorrectly changed in the middle of a simple 3-page document, upon export to MSword. By "simple", I really do mean simple! The document had no tables, no figures, no formulae. Sure, it did have a few words in bold and italic, a few words with yellow underlay, and a few footnotes. But if OO.o cannot export such documents to MSword, then it's not suitable for shared work.
PS. I didn't report the bug because the document had confidential information. Plus, I had done my opensource duty on a previous bug report (formula export -- fixed in an OO.o upgrade).
PPS. I'll still keep using (and recommending) OO.o for work that doesn't need to be shared, since there seems to be little downside, now that it doesn't crash as soffice used to, a few years back.
(You could probably find my bug on the OO bugzilla page by searching on 'formula export'. Perhaps it's actually been fixed by now.)
Your point, though, is 100% valid. If OO.o cannot do formulae, then it's not a credible alternative to msword.
Heck, even developing countries might save money by funding open-source efforts instead of paying license fees. Every government desk has a computer on it, and pretty much every one of those is using a microsoft OS... does anybody know what that costs?
This article is insightful and prescient. It also covers a great deal of territory, which means that few readers would fail to find something fascinating in it. Start your reading with this article, not the "100 year" one. Maybe end with it, too.
won't anymore look down at my bald head and laugh ... they'll just look down on my head and laugh.
Great. Now the guy next to me will be coughing during a quiet section of the performance, just so he can say "hey, that's me" when he plays the concert CD for his friends.
The tidal-power installation wouldn't cause world-wide problems, but it would cause a couple of local problems:
- (a) local Canadian wetlands would be altered significantly, harming birds which use them as a stopover point during migration and
- (b) sea-level in Boston would be altered by about 10 centimetres (ankle-height).
As I remember it, the latter problem was the clincher, politically.There is a pilot programme for tidal power in the region, however. It serves about 4000 homes. See this site for more information on this. This site is from the power corporation in Nova Scotia. As for the issue of birds, and other local issues, see this site.
That assumption is wrong. Rational voters** will adjust their votes as a voting system is adjusted, in order to get the leaders they want. A traffic analogy: if you change the rules of the road, folks simply adjust their driving to get to their destination on time.
** This won't apply for irrational voters, such as those swayed by which candidate is taller (how often has the shorter US presidential candidate won?). The ratio of rational to irrational voters may be the thing that needs thought and discussion, instead of the details of voting systems.
One of my buddies can play multiple games at the same time, remembering the boards in his head. So the candle is optional for him. Me, I have trouble remembering which way the little horse is allowed to jump!
Times change.
There used to be this game called chess that required little more than a candle and a keen mind.
The question is, how much would you pay to have somebody delete a spam message? If it's 1 cent, and if the person could kill one every 5 seconds (which seems pretty reasonable ... I don't even read the whole subjectline before deleting most spam), then we are at about 7 dollars an hour. Given that this is not a high-skill task that could be done from the home (possibly in the third world, where $7/hour is a very high wage), we may have a new industry here.
For less than the price of a coffee per day, a user gets spam-free email, and somebody else gets to pay the rent.
Of course, there is a downside: somebody might pay the anti-spam folks money to look the other way on some messages. And there is a privacy concern.
So, am I nuts?
Seriously, though, do American dictionaries spell it "Nucular" yet? Good enough for president after president, good enough for the dictionary.
I guess a negative is that you've got to buy vmware, whereas I imagine winex is free ... but you've got to buy the games too, right?
PS: What's wrong with me? I've never played a computer game, after I got bored with PONG, lo so many years ago.
PS: slipstick = slideruler = I'm gettin' old
Do the Physiologists have amazingly deep databases, or is something funny going on here?
Just looking at his U texaspublication list is an awesome (pre-1990s meaning) experience. Let your eyes scan it, as they would the Grand Canyon. Then wander around the UTexas site, where many publications are online, and start reading. You'll be a better person for it. And you may experience a thrill of understanding, when you see that his hands hold up so much of today's code, as Shakespeare's hands hold up so much of the language and common experience of the English world.
To get a feel for the span of his life's work, consider his thesis title, "Communications with an automatic computer." The word "automatic" was necessary then, to distinguish it from a person with a calculator. The machine he used in his thesis? It had a 32K memory unit. He divided this into what he called "living" and "dead" memory.
Let's hope that his memory will be of the living variety.
To a man I never shall meet, thank you.