There was a guy in university department a few classes below me that had been working for years as... either a doctor or a dentist I believe... some fairly well respected professional degree. At any rate, he developed an quite a bad allergy to some of the materials he had to use fairly often (latex I believe, but I can't really remember). At any rate, instead of changing his specialty he basically just took it as a sign to move on and he came back to school for an computer engineering degree. He's one of the best students in the class and he's just BREEZING through the degree while other people are stuggling. There's a lot to be said for even fairly unrelated experience and a bit of age. Not only that, but all the prof's know and completely respect the guy. It's not easy to go back to school after working for a while, and it shows a real dedication to what you what you want to do.
Meanwhile, 30 is nothing. My eventual plan is to go into academia. I came back for grad school in engineering and by the time I put in the industry time to finish my licence requirements, finish the master's the phd and the postdoc, I'll be lucky if I'm 35 by the time I even start my career.
Talk about hitting the nail right on the head. It's absolutely shocking how we've divided drugs into these "good" and "bad" categories, as if there's actually a difference in the drugs themselves as opposed to just in the way we've been using them. There are scheduled drugs out there that are not addictive and we have yet to prove cause any damage at all, while there are prescription drugs that are highly addictive (valium), giving people strokes (ex vioxx), messing with your blood pressure (ex viagra), giving people hallucinations (halcion) and causing major birth defects (thalidomide). And for what? so we can have erections and sleep better and calm ourselves down. wow.
As an excellent example, how much do you think the gov't has spent already trying to prove that MDMA is neurotoxic? Now, I'm not saying we know for sure one way or the other, but they keep going with the reserach because all these reserachers think that messing with your neurotransmitter levels is bound to cause some problems at some point. ok, valid point, but hello...what the H do they all think SSRIs are doing? And yet we continue to give these drugs to scores of people, children even, and keep them on them for years at a time. Does this sound much safer than some of the illegal drugs out there? Not to me, sorry.
Making alcohol takes very little equipment and knowledge. Sugar+yeast=alcohol. It takes some skill to not get it to taste like garbage, and there is some skill involved in distilling it if you are going that route, but I'd bet there's also some skill involved in breeding and cultivating plants to your liking as well.
Yeah, to be honest, I was a bit disappointed with V2 given how well V1 worked. I was expecting a little more. V2 can barely keep his balance at all on the carpet - he gets into almost a reveberation where every step causes him to sway further and further off balance until he flies right over. He can get up if he's on his back, but most of the time he face plants.
V1, on the other hand, was great. He looked like he was going to fall at some points, but he was as steady as a rock. In fact, I watched him win a battle or two with the cat even. When he turned, a light went on in his hand, which attracted the attention of the cat. The cat would chase the light right under the hand of the robot. The hand, of course, has sensors, and when the robot hits something, it yells "ouch". If the robot was still trying to walk as the cat was under its hand, it would repeately smash the cat with its sensor and yell "ouch" as if it was taunting it. Fantastic.
V2 didn't fare so well. We used to put him in front of the x-mas tree in guard mode to keep the cat out, but by day 3 the cat had figured out that he wasn't so well balance. We'd come downstairs to find the robot often face down on the carpet, still flashing its little lights, and the cat just sitting happily up in the tree.
Gonzo journalism inolves blending fiction with non-fiction
In some cases, yes, Thomson readily admits to having stories that have fictional components In particular, he admitted publicly on numerous occasions that fear & loathing in las vegas was party fictional (probably because it's not the best idea to write an entirely truthful story where you admit to committing a large number of felonies).
BUT, F&L is the exception, not the rule and it was marketed as a novel, not as a journalistic piece. HST did write things that were partly fictional, but the idea behind Gonzo journalism really doesn't have anything to do with fact vs. fiction at all. The idea behind Gonzo journalism is that no journalist can really say that they are completely unbiased about anything, so a gonzo journalist goes completely the other way and writes themselves right into the story, readily admitting and embracing bias and effectively becoming part of the story they are writing about. They aren't fictional though. This is actually something that Thomspon wrote about in some of his books and he is very adamant about it.
The problem with strictly grading the output though, is that sometimes you end up really screwing students for no reason. We had one class that tried this, essentially it would just hit it with some input and then see if the output was correct. You had 10 chances to submit, each one that got rejected was 10% off. I can remember two very distinct problems with the system, the first being the TA's lack of spelling ability and the second being a ridiculusly strict guidelines on the output, some of which was not covered in the handout properly. In particular, I remember getting 10% off because I spelled the word correctly, and the program had the incorrect spelling (got that one back), and another time getting -40% (that's right...NEGATIVE 40%) on an assignment because I couldn't track down the difference between my output and the "correct" output from the system. In the end, it was a problem with whitespace characters (I'd used two spaces or a tab or something, can't really remember). That was absolutely the worst course I've ever taken. If you are planning on writing one of these things, you really have to put in the time to get them right, otherwise they can be more trouble than they are worth.
On the other hand, when I TA'd, we put together an automatic submission system (no testing, just submission), which worked great. But the key part was that in the end we had a real person grading it, the log system caught everything, and the prof was really good with the students who he could see logged in and were having trouble submitting.
Moral of the story is be careful, and don't rely too much on the automatic system to deal with the students for you because you'll never get it perfect, and the students WILL complain if they feel they are being ripped off.
Why does it amaze you that people somehow expect to get what was advertized to them? The majority of users likely have no idea what the speed of a T1 line is or even WHAT a T1 line is. What they do know is that the company says you pay X dollars a month for an X speed line. If you have limited computer experience, wouldn't you be inclined to believe what the company was saying?
There's a reason there are false advertizing laws in a lot of countries. It's because people can't reasonably be expected to have enough knowledge of every product out there to determine what is and is not true about it in the ads. I mean, some are pretty obvious, but for a lot of people, this is not one of them. I mean, think about it...can you honestly say that you would be able to call bullsh*t about false ads for every product you've ever purchased if they were screwing you? probably not.
you make a good point though - a lot of the advertized speeds seem a bit excessive for what the company could really be providing. And it's a good comparison, but I just doubt that the average user would even be able to understand why those speeds are unreasonable.
Clearly 8 weeks is off a bit, but it sure seems like it sometimes. We had a big project deadline at the end of last summer. It had to pass through a few nods and such at the head office in germany, but, of course, we needed input from them on some of the stuff beforehand. Seemed like every time we needed something done, someone we needed was on vacation. Not necessarily all at once, but as the original poster said, it becomes a wee bit difficult to schedule deadlines and meetings so everyone gets their input etc. when vacations are fairly long and staggered across the summer. Seems almost impossible to get together a full project meeting.
got this question once from a clueless sessional
on
Portables as Servers?
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Sorry, a bit OT, but when I saw your question it immediately reminded me of a question I heard from this REALLY clueless sessional at my university. She taught a basic computer class distance ed and basically got the job because she's married to a prof in the department. One of those lecturers that would show up at your office and ask questions about how to do the assignments SHE set. And we're not talking rocket science here folks, we're talking how to use word and excel.
Anyway, at the time I was a TA for the lecture section, which was the same course code, but more like a real course with actual learning. Anywhoo, so she's trying to set up a web site for the course, so students can get web notes or something, and she comes over to ask us if she can set up a web server on her laptop. Seemed like an odd request, but we figured (stupidly) that she had a good reason to do it. So the other TA basically tells her some of the same stuff that was in here...watch the hard drive, put it somewhere it won't get moved around...and then we hit her very basic lack of understanding about ANYTHING having to do with common sense. She asked us if students would have access to the web site when she left for the day and TOOK HER LAPTIOP HOME. I think we held it together pretty well until she left, but I think it was one of the hardest things ever to hold in the sarcasm. I think we sent her over to the university computer services building with instructions to ask them to set up EVERYTHING. And she was the one TEACHING the damn course. I hate to see what happened to the students.
On the other hand though, I LOVE the way OO handles table and picture captions. Picture and caption are held together in a table automatically. In Word, the caption just sits under the figure, and can easily end up on a different page. Or, just as annoying, the picture/table itself ends up formatted as a caption and then gets inserted into the LOT/LOF, which is beyond stupid. Never had these problems with OO.
On the other hand, I find that Word handles document formatting styles better. Might just be because I have more experience with Word, but I find that OO styles sometimes exhibit some bizare behaviour - changing from one style to the other randomly etc. Not quite sure what causes this though.
As a side note, the one thing that I did find a bit strange about OO was the opening screen. It's nice that all the apps are bundled, but what's the deal with opening to a big grey screen with nothing on it? I mean, it's not that hard to figure out if you're around computers a lot, but I used to teach a 1st year intro computers class where we had some total newbies work with OO for one of the labs. The vast majority of the class opened up the program for the first time and had no idea where to go from there.
For that matter, why not also include a section on diagrams themselves? Especially in engineering, a lot of the material can be best expressed as some sort of diagram. I can't tell you the number of times I've had to wade through endless paragraphs that would have been much clearer and easier to understand as a flow chart or wiring diagram. I honestly can't think of anything worse than attempting to read through and understand pages of "wire 3 is connected to pin 2 (function x) on the microcontroller. Port x pin 1 is connected to blah. Port x pin 2 is connected to blah...." It's horrible. I know it may be a bit different than what you were thinking, but if you could clear up little formatting and presentation issues like when a digram or table would be best, and what should be put in the appendices vs. the text, I'm sure it would make a lot of papers much easier to read.
Best of luck in your course. It sounds like a great idea and I hope it catches on with other schools.
ok...well then let me just come back and tell you what I'VE seen. The females in my program (comp eng) are just as intelligent and dedicated as any of the males. I have yet to see anyone net themselves a man and then run fleeing from the department. Engineering (and comp sci for that matter) are not really easy programs to get into, and at least in canada you need to start planning your course path in grade 10 to get into the correct stream for a university program. When I started the university entrance average was hovering around the 90 mark with scholarships and funding starting higher than that. Five out of the six required grade 13 courses were set as pre-req's for the program, all with pre-requisites starting in grade 10. I worked quite hard in both high school and university to get the marks required to get the funding and scholarships I needed to get through school, as did most of the other people in this program. This wasn't just a last minute choice, nor do I think it could be for a lot of the people in this field. You don't just wake up one day and think "gee, there are lots of hot guys in engineering...maybe I should do that".
And yes, sorry, I do find it a bit insulting when someone insinuates that my degree would be worthless unless I had found a husband to top it off. Yeah yeah, you're just talking about what you've seen, but you offered it as a reason that women go into tech fields. For a lot of people that's really not true at all. That WAS a generalization - taking a small sample of what you've seen and suggesting that it might be widely applied to a majority. You can preface it all you want with "this is only my observation", but that doesn't make it any less a generalization. If you really thought it wasn't univerally appicable, then you wouldn't have posted it.
I know you're just trying to talk about what you've seen, but when you throw your own observations out in a public forumn, you have to realize that there are people out there who will disagree. And sorry if the fact that I disagree with you is insulting, but you must have expeceted it since you already know that "women will jump all over the conversational grenade screaming".
It's not just CS guys...when I was in my undergraduate I was a TA for a first year computer course (intro to computer applications). It used to be this bird course (all word/excel crap), but the prof really beefed it up, and we started teaching basic UNIX, html and css and some access database stuff. Not rocket science, but definately more than a lot of the students had seen before (or probably even cared to see in the course). Well, sure enough, I come in on the first day and there's a guy sitting in the second row mouthing to his friend about girls and computers like he's some kind of computer god. I'm doing the lab and he's making comments. Well, fast forward about 30 minutes and I look over and he's looking really confused...I go over, and he's not even in the right program, but he's still trying desperatly to follow the lab. He was lost right from the start, but wouldn't ask. I hope it really hurt his big ego when I fixed his stuff up in like 2 minutes, and I hope it hurt even more when he had to come find me at the end of the lab to figure out what he had missed.
How about going the other way too? I don't know about anyone else, but I just came back to grad school (same place as my undergrad). My undergrad classes were usually pretty male-dominated (me and 1 or two other females), but now I'm finding my classes are bordering on 50-50. It's a way smaller sample size, but it seems like just about every girl in undergrad went on to grad school.
oh please...yeah, every woman you've ever met is an incompetant moron. And every male is god's gift to programming. Just LOOK at your post - it's rife with negative stereotypes about women in technical fields. And we're wondering why women don't feel comfortable going into technical programs? Look no further.
It's not just this post either. I can't tell you how many patronizing comments I got during my undergrad. Male students who would make these degrading comments about women and computers. Meanwhile I'm pulling off 90's and they're barely passing. Talk's cheap. Just because you say women are stupid and ignorant about tech stuff doesn't mean it's true.
I'd hardly say that's the motivation in most cases. I really doubt that girls are fleeing out of high school and getting into whatever program they can find that will net them a husband and then transferring out. Joining the cheerleading squad is hardly the same as getting yourself into a four-five year degree just so you can find a husband.
Oh, and incidentally, I AM a girl in comp eng, and I did meet a nice comp eng boy during my undergrad. It happens. I find comp sci students and engineering students often date within their programs becuase they are so many classes together and becuase they understand (and probably share) your odd schedule and workload. Now I'm back in grad school, and I don't think I could be loving it more - I really am a computer geek at heart. <sarcasm>Oh, but sure glad I found that boy, 'cause otherwise it really wasn't worth it.</sarcasm>.
That's why there are so many spelling/grammar nazis on slashdot. If we don't, in a matter of just a few years, we'll get to the point where nobody can understand anything.
Really? I was under the impression that we had so many grammar/spelling nazis on slashdot because it's easier to pick on someone for typos and grammar problems than it is to come up with a rational argument against what was said. I doubt it has the noble purpose you suggest. It seems to me to be just a way to assert your linguistic superiority.
Actually, I was in ottawa about a week ago and saw a guy in a suit driving one around the sidewalks. Looks like fun if you can swing the cost. Plus, you're not sweaty when you get there. Kind of negates the whole exercise thing, but it might be nice to get some fresh air and actually get out in the morning.
You know, I don't know where those stats came from, and they may well be true, but it sure doesn't seem like it. And this is coming from someone who commutes to work every day in a car and has never been in an accident, but got hit while riding a bicycle. Although, admittedly, I don't ride much anymore.
Here's the thing - no matter what anyone says about how "bicycles are vehicles" when I'm in my car, driving at 60 down the road, they sure don't SEEM like vehicles. My CAR is a vehicle. It is big, and heavy and moves fast. A bike is small and slow and so light you can actually pick it up and carry it. A car offers a measure of protection, bikes just don't. In a fight between my car and your bike, my car will always win.
Honestly, when I'm driving, I try to leave as much space as possible between my car and a bike and I think a lot of people do the same. It's dangerous becuase it crowds the other lanes and forces people into quick lane changes that can be dangerous to the cars as well as to the cyclist. I've been told (and told off) about this before because "bicycles are vehicles" and "cars shouldn't have to do this", but there is always that fear that something bad is going to happen, and the cyclist may need some space. How do I know that the bike won't hit a rock/grate/curb and tip right on over? Fall into the road, and if I'm too close, guess where my right tire is...yeah, that's right...not somewhere good. So I clear away. Because let's face it...even if you've given the bike space, if the biker falls into your car it is ALWAYS the car's fault.
Look, I don't mean to be down on cycling - I really admire people who ride instead of taking cars - it's great for the environment and for health. But when I'm in my car, it also seems like a great big giant hazard.
Or even ask a prof in another department. When I did my final project we worked with a prof in the human kinetics department. Grabbed a bio engineering student and did a project designing a vision system for a robot that was being used on a study of human knee joints. They had funding for the project, and they let us use their amazing robot. The drawback was that there were so many people in the lab that we could only really work at night, which became a little bit of a problem at the end of the semester when we started getting really sick from lack of sleep, but overall it was great. Just find a department with some sweet equipment and see if they need anything.
It's not like you can just configure your we server in a "no stealing" mode...you're serving these images to other computers...how do you expect to stop people from taking copies if they want them? I'm not trying to be a prick here, I'm just interested - a while ago I taught a computer class (beginner) where we asked them to design web pages. I wanted to put up a sample because the instructions were fairly long and sort of hard to follow, but I coudn't find a good way to stop people from taking the source code so it never went up. There are things you can do to make it more difficult, but really, if you're viewing something from the web, then your computer has access to it. If your computer has access, then so do you.
Back when I was in school we had labs with big red buttons like this (I think most labs do). Push the button and all the power to the lab is cut. It really wasn't hard to reset (nothing like the parent's system), but push it at the wrong time (friday night) and you could wait days for the lab to come back up (monday morning when the tech came in and reset it). The buttons were highly visible so that people could get to them / see them in an emergency, but it also meant they were easy to push.
Anyway, this one time we were in the lab, working on one of our labs for class, which was clearly designed by a man who had not actually done the lab (it was set up as a do this one thing for 5 sensors for 10 different trials on these 5 different surfaces for 3 different angles in 10 different lighting conditions plus some other stuff - if you actually did all the trials as requested, even if you worked all day every day there wouldn't be enough time from the time it was assigned to the time it was to be handed in). Anyway, we'd finally got a respectable sample, but it had taken 3 full nights in the lab to get them done. I had been working for about 4 hours on these graphs, which WERE saved on the computer in a big matlab file. Just as I'm doing a save to the network drive, this moron walks into the room and leans right on the button. Power goes off. When it comes back up the file was wiped off the hard drive (computers wiped every reboot) and the network version had been totally corrupted by the failed save.
I was halfway to tears, but the words that were coming out of my mouth more indicated extreem anger (I would have made a sailor blush). He just backed away and went out the door and I didn't see him in the lab for a good three days.
As a disclaimer...I really have no professional knowledge about gender differences, and I have never actually taken a formal IQ test, but I've done some informal testing, so I know sort of how the tests are done.
That being said, I think I may be able to offer a suggestion here, which people may or may not find to be accurate, but holds in my experience.
I'm not sure we can talk about a single test defining "intellegence". There are so many different aspects to it that giving it a single number is deceptive. In fact, I'd venture to say that the test doesn't cover all the aspects and this might be the reason for the differences in scores.
I am definately of the mindset that women and men think somewhat differently. I can't put my finger on exactly what this difference is, but I have noticed it on occasion. For example, despite the fact that we have a very similar background and schooling, I have noticed that when I design code, the structure tends to be somewhat different than most of the males in my group. A lot of them will look at a problem from one angle, and I will try to approach it from another angle entirely. How much of this is actually attributable to gender differences, I'm not sure, but there does seem to be a slight difference in the way that males and females think.
That being said, the IQ test is rather old and comes from a day when mostly men were controlling academia and things like IQ testing. The tests were designed by men. If men were designing the tests, would it not then be reasonable to assume that the tests might be more geared towards men?
As a sort of aside - when I was in university, my best friend was this incredibly intelligent girl down my hall. I'm talking genius level here - top of her class in high school, top of her program at graduation, awards and scholarships being thrown at her etc. etc. and she barely even had to study for anything because just going to class was usually enough for her to get just about everything. BUT...the one class she really struggled with was CAD design. Because she absolutely could not picture 3D things in 2D. Hand her a 3-view and it was like 3 totally different objects until she sat down and bent up the paper and got it into a 3D form. Her brain just didn't work that way. Put her down at an IQ test and you'd find her scrunching up the paper, really struggling with some of the geometry stuff, but her down in front of a slighly differently designed test and she'd probably beat the pants off of the vast majority of the people I know. Not great at an IQ test, but definately not unintelligent by any stretch of the imagination.
I think we need to be careful when we make these types of generalizations...and I'm not just talking about applying these general findings to single people although that is important to recognize. More that it is important to recognize that these tests measure aspects of intelligence, but the tendancy is to take this as a measure of overall intelligence in all areas, which is does not necessarily cover.
Slashdot Mirror
There was a guy in university department a few classes below me that had been working for years as ... either a doctor or a dentist I believe ... some fairly well respected professional degree. At any rate, he developed an quite a bad allergy to some of the materials he had to use fairly often (latex I believe, but I can't really remember). At any rate, instead of changing his specialty he basically just took it as a sign to move on and he came back to school for an computer engineering degree. He's one of the best students in the class and he's just BREEZING through the degree while other people are stuggling. There's a lot to be said for even fairly unrelated experience and a bit of age. Not only that, but all the prof's know and completely respect the guy. It's not easy to go back to school after working for a while, and it shows a real dedication to what you what you want to do.
Meanwhile, 30 is nothing. My eventual plan is to go into academia. I came back for grad school in engineering and by the time I put in the industry time to finish my licence requirements, finish the master's the phd and the postdoc, I'll be lucky if I'm 35 by the time I even start my career.
Talk about hitting the nail right on the head. It's absolutely shocking how we've divided drugs into these "good" and "bad" categories, as if there's actually a difference in the drugs themselves as opposed to just in the way we've been using them. There are scheduled drugs out there that are not addictive and we have yet to prove cause any damage at all, while there are prescription drugs that are highly addictive (valium), giving people strokes (ex vioxx), messing with your blood pressure (ex viagra), giving people hallucinations (halcion) and causing major birth defects (thalidomide). And for what? so we can have erections and sleep better and calm ourselves down. wow.
As an excellent example, how much do you think the gov't has spent already trying to prove that MDMA is neurotoxic? Now, I'm not saying we know for sure one way or the other, but they keep going with the reserach because all these reserachers think that messing with your neurotransmitter levels is bound to cause some problems at some point. ok, valid point, but hello...what the H do they all think SSRIs are doing? And yet we continue to give these drugs to scores of people, children even, and keep them on them for years at a time. Does this sound much safer than some of the illegal drugs out there? Not to me, sorry.
Making alcohol takes very little equipment and knowledge. Sugar+yeast=alcohol. It takes some skill to not get it to taste like garbage, and there is some skill involved in distilling it if you are going that route, but I'd bet there's also some skill involved in breeding and cultivating plants to your liking as well.
Yeah, to be honest, I was a bit disappointed with V2 given how well V1 worked. I was expecting a little more. V2 can barely keep his balance at all on the carpet - he gets into almost a reveberation where every step causes him to sway further and further off balance until he flies right over. He can get up if he's on his back, but most of the time he face plants.
V1, on the other hand, was great. He looked like he was going to fall at some points, but he was as steady as a rock. In fact, I watched him win a battle or two with the cat even. When he turned, a light went on in his hand, which attracted the attention of the cat. The cat would chase the light right under the hand of the robot. The hand, of course, has sensors, and when the robot hits something, it yells "ouch". If the robot was still trying to walk as the cat was under its hand, it would repeately smash the cat with its sensor and yell "ouch" as if it was taunting it. Fantastic.
V2 didn't fare so well. We used to put him in front of the x-mas tree in guard mode to keep the cat out, but by day 3 the cat had figured out that he wasn't so well balance. We'd come downstairs to find the robot often face down on the carpet, still flashing its little lights, and the cat just sitting happily up in the tree.
In that case, why does slashdot spend so much time basing MS? why not just let OS software speak for itself?
Gonzo journalism inolves blending fiction with non-fiction
In some cases, yes, Thomson readily admits to having stories that have fictional components In particular, he admitted publicly on numerous occasions that fear & loathing in las vegas was party fictional (probably because it's not the best idea to write an entirely truthful story where you admit to committing a large number of felonies).
BUT, F&L is the exception, not the rule and it was marketed as a novel, not as a journalistic piece. HST did write things that were partly fictional, but the idea behind Gonzo journalism really doesn't have anything to do with fact vs. fiction at all. The idea behind Gonzo journalism is that no journalist can really say that they are completely unbiased about anything, so a gonzo journalist goes completely the other way and writes themselves right into the story, readily admitting and embracing bias and effectively becoming part of the story they are writing about. They aren't fictional though. This is actually something that Thomspon wrote about in some of his books and he is very adamant about it.
More about gonzo here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gonzo
The problem with strictly grading the output though, is that sometimes you end up really screwing students for no reason. We had one class that tried this, essentially it would just hit it with some input and then see if the output was correct. You had 10 chances to submit, each one that got rejected was 10% off. I can remember two very distinct problems with the system, the first being the TA's lack of spelling ability and the second being a ridiculusly strict guidelines on the output, some of which was not covered in the handout properly. In particular, I remember getting 10% off because I spelled the word correctly, and the program had the incorrect spelling (got that one back), and another time getting -40% (that's right...NEGATIVE 40%) on an assignment because I couldn't track down the difference between my output and the "correct" output from the system. In the end, it was a problem with whitespace characters (I'd used two spaces or a tab or something, can't really remember). That was absolutely the worst course I've ever taken. If you are planning on writing one of these things, you really have to put in the time to get them right, otherwise they can be more trouble than they are worth.
On the other hand, when I TA'd, we put together an automatic submission system (no testing, just submission), which worked great. But the key part was that in the end we had a real person grading it, the log system caught everything, and the prof was really good with the students who he could see logged in and were having trouble submitting.
Moral of the story is be careful, and don't rely too much on the automatic system to deal with the students for you because you'll never get it perfect, and the students WILL complain if they feel they are being ripped off.
Why does it amaze you that people somehow expect to get what was advertized to them? The majority of users likely have no idea what the speed of a T1 line is or even WHAT a T1 line is. What they do know is that the company says you pay X dollars a month for an X speed line. If you have limited computer experience, wouldn't you be inclined to believe what the company was saying?
There's a reason there are false advertizing laws in a lot of countries. It's because people can't reasonably be expected to have enough knowledge of every product out there to determine what is and is not true about it in the ads. I mean, some are pretty obvious, but for a lot of people, this is not one of them. I mean, think about it...can you honestly say that you would be able to call bullsh*t about false ads for every product you've ever purchased if they were screwing you? probably not.
you make a good point though - a lot of the advertized speeds seem a bit excessive for what the company could really be providing. And it's a good comparison, but I just doubt that the average user would even be able to understand why those speeds are unreasonable.
Clearly 8 weeks is off a bit, but it sure seems like it sometimes. We had a big project deadline at the end of last summer. It had to pass through a few nods and such at the head office in germany, but, of course, we needed input from them on some of the stuff beforehand. Seemed like every time we needed something done, someone we needed was on vacation. Not necessarily all at once, but as the original poster said, it becomes a wee bit difficult to schedule deadlines and meetings so everyone gets their input etc. when vacations are fairly long and staggered across the summer. Seems almost impossible to get together a full project meeting.
Sorry, a bit OT, but when I saw your question it immediately reminded me of a question I heard from this REALLY clueless sessional at my university. She taught a basic computer class distance ed and basically got the job because she's married to a prof in the department. One of those lecturers that would show up at your office and ask questions about how to do the assignments SHE set. And we're not talking rocket science here folks, we're talking how to use word and excel.
Anyway, at the time I was a TA for the lecture section, which was the same course code, but more like a real course with actual learning. Anywhoo, so she's trying to set up a web site for the course, so students can get web notes or something, and she comes over to ask us if she can set up a web server on her laptop. Seemed like an odd request, but we figured (stupidly) that she had a good reason to do it. So the other TA basically tells her some of the same stuff that was in here...watch the hard drive, put it somewhere it won't get moved around...and then we hit her very basic lack of understanding about ANYTHING having to do with common sense. She asked us if students would have access to the web site when she left for the day and TOOK HER LAPTIOP HOME. I think we held it together pretty well until she left, but I think it was one of the hardest things ever to hold in the sarcasm. I think we sent her over to the university computer services building with instructions to ask them to set up EVERYTHING. And she was the one TEACHING the damn course. I hate to see what happened to the students.
On the other hand though, I LOVE the way OO handles table and picture captions. Picture and caption are held together in a table automatically. In Word, the caption just sits under the figure, and can easily end up on a different page. Or, just as annoying, the picture/table itself ends up formatted as a caption and then gets inserted into the LOT/LOF, which is beyond stupid. Never had these problems with OO.
On the other hand, I find that Word handles document formatting styles better. Might just be because I have more experience with Word, but I find that OO styles sometimes exhibit some bizare behaviour - changing from one style to the other randomly etc. Not quite sure what causes this though.
As a side note, the one thing that I did find a bit strange about OO was the opening screen. It's nice that all the apps are bundled, but what's the deal with opening to a big grey screen with nothing on it? I mean, it's not that hard to figure out if you're around computers a lot, but I used to teach a 1st year intro computers class where we had some total newbies work with OO for one of the labs. The vast majority of the class opened up the program for the first time and had no idea where to go from there.
For that matter, why not also include a section on diagrams themselves? Especially in engineering, a lot of the material can be best expressed as some sort of diagram. I can't tell you the number of times I've had to wade through endless paragraphs that would have been much clearer and easier to understand as a flow chart or wiring diagram. I honestly can't think of anything worse than attempting to read through and understand pages of "wire 3 is connected to pin 2 (function x) on the microcontroller. Port x pin 1 is connected to blah. Port x pin 2 is connected to blah...." It's horrible. I know it may be a bit different than what you were thinking, but if you could clear up little formatting and presentation issues like when a digram or table would be best, and what should be put in the appendices vs. the text, I'm sure it would make a lot of papers much easier to read.
Best of luck in your course. It sounds like a great idea and I hope it catches on with other schools.
ok...well then let me just come back and tell you what I'VE seen. The females in my program (comp eng) are just as intelligent and dedicated as any of the males. I have yet to see anyone net themselves a man and then run fleeing from the department. Engineering (and comp sci for that matter) are not really easy programs to get into, and at least in canada you need to start planning your course path in grade 10 to get into the correct stream for a university program. When I started the university entrance average was hovering around the 90 mark with scholarships and funding starting higher than that. Five out of the six required grade 13 courses were set as pre-req's for the program, all with pre-requisites starting in grade 10. I worked quite hard in both high school and university to get the marks required to get the funding and scholarships I needed to get through school, as did most of the other people in this program. This wasn't just a last minute choice, nor do I think it could be for a lot of the people in this field. You don't just wake up one day and think "gee, there are lots of hot guys in engineering...maybe I should do that".
And yes, sorry, I do find it a bit insulting when someone insinuates that my degree would be worthless unless I had found a husband to top it off. Yeah yeah, you're just talking about what you've seen, but you offered it as a reason that women go into tech fields. For a lot of people that's really not true at all. That WAS a generalization - taking a small sample of what you've seen and suggesting that it might be widely applied to a majority. You can preface it all you want with "this is only my observation", but that doesn't make it any less a generalization. If you really thought it wasn't univerally appicable, then you wouldn't have posted it.
I know you're just trying to talk about what you've seen, but when you throw your own observations out in a public forumn, you have to realize that there are people out there who will disagree. And sorry if the fact that I disagree with you is insulting, but you must have expeceted it since you already know that "women will jump all over the conversational grenade screaming".
It's not just CS guys...when I was in my undergraduate I was a TA for a first year computer course (intro to computer applications). It used to be this bird course (all word/excel crap), but the prof really beefed it up, and we started teaching basic UNIX, html and css and some access database stuff. Not rocket science, but definately more than a lot of the students had seen before (or probably even cared to see in the course). Well, sure enough, I come in on the first day and there's a guy sitting in the second row mouthing to his friend about girls and computers like he's some kind of computer god. I'm doing the lab and he's making comments. Well, fast forward about 30 minutes and I look over and he's looking really confused...I go over, and he's not even in the right program, but he's still trying desperatly to follow the lab. He was lost right from the start, but wouldn't ask. I hope it really hurt his big ego when I fixed his stuff up in like 2 minutes, and I hope it hurt even more when he had to come find me at the end of the lab to figure out what he had missed.
How about going the other way too? I don't know about anyone else, but I just came back to grad school (same place as my undergrad). My undergrad classes were usually pretty male-dominated (me and 1 or two other females), but now I'm finding my classes are bordering on 50-50. It's a way smaller sample size, but it seems like just about every girl in undergrad went on to grad school.
oh please...yeah, every woman you've ever met is an incompetant moron. And every male is god's gift to programming. Just LOOK at your post - it's rife with negative stereotypes about women in technical fields. And we're wondering why women don't feel comfortable going into technical programs? Look no further.
It's not just this post either. I can't tell you how many patronizing comments I got during my undergrad. Male students who would make these degrading comments about women and computers. Meanwhile I'm pulling off 90's and they're barely passing. Talk's cheap. Just because you say women are stupid and ignorant about tech stuff doesn't mean it's true.
I'd hardly say that's the motivation in most cases. I really doubt that girls are fleeing out of high school and getting into whatever program they can find that will net them a husband and then transferring out. Joining the cheerleading squad is hardly the same as getting yourself into a four-five year degree just so you can find a husband.
Oh, and incidentally, I AM a girl in comp eng, and I did meet a nice comp eng boy during my undergrad. It happens. I find comp sci students and engineering students often date within their programs becuase they are so many classes together and becuase they understand (and probably share) your odd schedule and workload. Now I'm back in grad school, and I don't think I could be loving it more - I really am a computer geek at heart. <sarcasm>Oh, but sure glad I found that boy, 'cause otherwise it really wasn't worth it.</sarcasm>.
That's why there are so many spelling/grammar nazis on slashdot. If we don't, in a matter of just a few years, we'll get to the point where nobody can understand anything.
Really? I was under the impression that we had so many grammar/spelling nazis on slashdot because it's easier to pick on someone for typos and grammar problems than it is to come up with a rational argument against what was said. I doubt it has the noble purpose you suggest. It seems to me to be just a way to assert your linguistic superiority.
I moved from eDonkey / eMule to bit torrent...Is it back in style again?
Actually, I was in ottawa about a week ago and saw a guy in a suit driving one around the sidewalks. Looks like fun if you can swing the cost. Plus, you're not sweaty when you get there. Kind of negates the whole exercise thing, but it might be nice to get some fresh air and actually get out in the morning.
You know, I don't know where those stats came from, and they may well be true, but it sure doesn't seem like it. And this is coming from someone who commutes to work every day in a car and has never been in an accident, but got hit while riding a bicycle. Although, admittedly, I don't ride much anymore.
Here's the thing - no matter what anyone says about how "bicycles are vehicles" when I'm in my car, driving at 60 down the road, they sure don't SEEM like vehicles. My CAR is a vehicle. It is big, and heavy and moves fast. A bike is small and slow and so light you can actually pick it up and carry it. A car offers a measure of protection, bikes just don't. In a fight between my car and your bike, my car will always win.
Honestly, when I'm driving, I try to leave as much space as possible between my car and a bike and I think a lot of people do the same. It's dangerous becuase it crowds the other lanes and forces people into quick lane changes that can be dangerous to the cars as well as to the cyclist. I've been told (and told off) about this before because "bicycles are vehicles" and "cars shouldn't have to do this", but there is always that fear that something bad is going to happen, and the cyclist may need some space. How do I know that the bike won't hit a rock/grate/curb and tip right on over? Fall into the road, and if I'm too close, guess where my right tire is...yeah, that's right...not somewhere good. So I clear away. Because let's face it...even if you've given the bike space, if the biker falls into your car it is ALWAYS the car's fault.
Look, I don't mean to be down on cycling - I really admire people who ride instead of taking cars - it's great for the environment and for health. But when I'm in my car, it also seems like a great big giant hazard.
Or even ask a prof in another department. When I did my final project we worked with a prof in the human kinetics department. Grabbed a bio engineering student and did a project designing a vision system for a robot that was being used on a study of human knee joints. They had funding for the project, and they let us use their amazing robot. The drawback was that there were so many people in the lab that we could only really work at night, which became a little bit of a problem at the end of the semester when we started getting really sick from lack of sleep, but overall it was great. Just find a department with some sweet equipment and see if they need anything.
It's not like you can just configure your we server in a "no stealing" mode...you're serving these images to other computers...how do you expect to stop people from taking copies if they want them? I'm not trying to be a prick here, I'm just interested - a while ago I taught a computer class (beginner) where we asked them to design web pages. I wanted to put up a sample because the instructions were fairly long and sort of hard to follow, but I coudn't find a good way to stop people from taking the source code so it never went up. There are things you can do to make it more difficult, but really, if you're viewing something from the web, then your computer has access to it. If your computer has access, then so do you.
Back when I was in school we had labs with big red buttons like this (I think most labs do). Push the button and all the power to the lab is cut. It really wasn't hard to reset (nothing like the parent's system), but push it at the wrong time (friday night) and you could wait days for the lab to come back up (monday morning when the tech came in and reset it). The buttons were highly visible so that people could get to them / see them in an emergency, but it also meant they were easy to push.
Anyway, this one time we were in the lab, working on one of our labs for class, which was clearly designed by a man who had not actually done the lab (it was set up as a do this one thing for 5 sensors for 10 different trials on these 5 different surfaces for 3 different angles in 10 different lighting conditions plus some other stuff - if you actually did all the trials as requested, even if you worked all day every day there wouldn't be enough time from the time it was assigned to the time it was to be handed in). Anyway, we'd finally got a respectable sample, but it had taken 3 full nights in the lab to get them done. I had been working for about 4 hours on these graphs, which WERE saved on the computer in a big matlab file. Just as I'm doing a save to the network drive, this moron walks into the room and leans right on the button. Power goes off. When it comes back up the file was wiped off the hard drive (computers wiped every reboot) and the network version had been totally corrupted by the failed save.
I was halfway to tears, but the words that were coming out of my mouth more indicated extreem anger (I would have made a sailor blush). He just backed away and went out the door and I didn't see him in the lab for a good three days.
As a disclaimer...I really have no professional knowledge about gender differences, and I have never actually taken a formal IQ test, but I've done some informal testing, so I know sort of how the tests are done.
That being said, I think I may be able to offer a suggestion here, which people may or may not find to be accurate, but holds in my experience.
I'm not sure we can talk about a single test defining "intellegence". There are so many different aspects to it that giving it a single number is deceptive. In fact, I'd venture to say that the test doesn't cover all the aspects and this might be the reason for the differences in scores.
I am definately of the mindset that women and men think somewhat differently. I can't put my finger on exactly what this difference is, but I have noticed it on occasion. For example, despite the fact that we have a very similar background and schooling, I have noticed that when I design code, the structure tends to be somewhat different than most of the males in my group. A lot of them will look at a problem from one angle, and I will try to approach it from another angle entirely. How much of this is actually attributable to gender differences, I'm not sure, but there does seem to be a slight difference in the way that males and females think.
That being said, the IQ test is rather old and comes from a day when mostly men were controlling academia and things like IQ testing. The tests were designed by men. If men were designing the tests, would it not then be reasonable to assume that the tests might be more geared towards men?
As a sort of aside - when I was in university, my best friend was this incredibly intelligent girl down my hall. I'm talking genius level here - top of her class in high school, top of her program at graduation, awards and scholarships being thrown at her etc. etc. and she barely even had to study for anything because just going to class was usually enough for her to get just about everything. BUT...the one class she really struggled with was CAD design. Because she absolutely could not picture 3D things in 2D. Hand her a 3-view and it was like 3 totally different objects until she sat down and bent up the paper and got it into a 3D form. Her brain just didn't work that way. Put her down at an IQ test and you'd find her scrunching up the paper, really struggling with some of the geometry stuff, but her down in front of a slighly differently designed test and she'd probably beat the pants off of the vast majority of the people I know. Not great at an IQ test, but definately not unintelligent by any stretch of the imagination.
I think we need to be careful when we make these types of generalizations...and I'm not just talking about applying these general findings to single people although that is important to recognize. More that it is important to recognize that these tests measure aspects of intelligence, but the tendancy is to take this as a measure of overall intelligence in all areas, which is does not necessarily cover.