I can't understand the privatization of payments online. Governments used to be the primary supplier of moneys which everybody had the right to use and everyone had to accept. But online only the private sector (credit cards, paypal, etc) is providing the means of payment.
Anyway, all these folks should use Bitcoin:
http://www.bitcoin.org/
It is peer-to-peer and anonymous. The tricky part involves converting it to traditional currencies but it currently has parity with the dollar, as reported earlier on Slashdot.
How many times have aboriginal tribesman / animals fled to high ground when there wasn't an impending tsunami? This I would like to know before I start believing in a sixth sense.
I sure hope Khan doesn't find out about this plan. Although, maybe if he does, we can send the dead scripts from Enterprise to the budding planet and resurrect a franchise...
Why not bring those CDs down to the wood shop and gather additional observations on the ability of CDs to handle speed? Its surely more amusing than building a bread box. And, with 115,241 observations, I'm pretty sure the central limit theorem will give you a more reliable sample estimate of the true failure point.
From The New Yorker, 5/31/2004
SEARCH AND DESTROY
By James Surowiecki
If you go to the Internet search engine Google, type in "miserable failure," and click on the "I'm feeling lucky" icon, you will be directed not to an article about "Ishtar" or the 1962 Mets but, rather, to the White House Web site and the official biography of President George W. Bush. Congratulations. You've been Google-bombed.
A Google bomb goes off when people conspire to have a particular phrase (in this case, "miserable failure") link to a given Web page, effectively tying the phrase to the page. Other famous Google bombs include one linking "more evil than Satan himself" to Microsoft's home page and, currently, one that links "weapons of mass destruction" to a page that reads, "The weapons you are looking for are currently unavailable. . . . Click the Regime Change button, or try again later."
Google bombing may be a party trick, something to amuse office workers as they trudge through the day, but it exemplifies one of the biggest challenges that Google faces as it heads toward its multibillion-dollar I.P.O. Google is as much a ranking system as a search engine. It is more efficient than any other site at analyzing information and making decisions about its importance. Google is successful not because if you search for "Enron" it will return 1.75 million pages that contain the word but because, of those 1.75 million, the most relevant are right at the top. In large part, Google does this by relying on the collective intelligence of the Web itself. At the core of Google's technology is a voting system. Every link from one Web site to another is treated as a vote; sites that get more votes are considered more valuable and, in Google's system, are weighted to have more influence. Google also takes hundreds of other factors into consideration, such as font size and the location of words on the page. But, fundamentally, the Web pages that Google says are best are the pages that the Web as a whole thinks are best.
Google's success has created a problem, though: if you have a voting system, people are going to try to manipulate it. Google bombing is the innocent face of this. Less innocent is the industry dedicated to helping Web sites maximize their Google rankings-the racket known as "search engine optimization." Some American companies have armies of programmers toiling away in Bangalore solely to boost their Google rankings. Much of what the "optimizers" do is reasonable, helping companies do a better job of presenting content, using keywords, and building pages to which others will want to link. (These are termed "white hat" tactics.) But there are also plenty of black hats-known as "index spammers"-who have simply adapted the methods and tricks of the old political machines.
In the days of Boss Tweed, people were encouraged to vote early and often, dead men were placed on the voting rolls, and citizens were paid for their votes. On the Web, companies "cloak," which means, among other things, that they disguise the real content of their sites, in an attempt to fool Google into thinking that a page is relevant to a search. Deep-pocketed players pay other sites to link to their sites, to foster an illusion of popularity. Some companies set up "link farms"-a host of interconnected Web sites that exist primarily to link to each other. A big company with a major Internet presence, for instance, can buy thousands of domain names, set up Web sites, and effectively create thousands of links out of nothing.
Google, of course, knows about all this. In its recent I.P.O. filing, it said that the threat from index spammers was "ongoing and increasing," and so it has embarked on a campaign to outsmart them. A couple of weeks ago, for instance, it essentially banned a company called WhenU because of its cloaking tactics. (WhenU's Web site will no longer appear if you search for the company on Google.) To stymie the cheaters, Google issues periodic revisions to its algorithm, and companies breathlessly await the subsequent changes in their rankings. (Th
Did anyone else notice that the byline is designed to obscure the true identity of the author? Here is the byline:
By Brock N. Meeks
Cheif Washington correspondent
MSNBC
Its hard to work out this puzzle, because the truth is well-hidden, but I think I've cracked it. I'm willing to bet that this was written by MSNBC's Chief Washington correspondent.
When bylines have typos, I'm pretty sure its a sign that the republic is falling...
In 2001, the United States Naval Academy began an Information Technology major in order to help prepare its graduates for IT-related decisions. In 2005, the first group students will obtain Bachelor of Science degrees in Information Technology.
The major is housed in the Computer Science department, but there are courses designed specifically for IT students and faculty uniquely dedicated to the major. More information is available at the link above.
Perhaps Army and Air Force have similar programs in their respective academies??
Minor correction to this comment. The U. S. economy hasn't been going into "deeper and deeper recession," since 2001. Below, I have included real GDP growth rates for the past 13 quarters (source: U. S. Burea of Economic Analysis).
If these numbers show anything, it is that the recession reached its lowest point in 2001 and the U. S. has been in a recovery since then. Admittedly, the recovery has recently weakened.
While the downturn in the recording industry's sales may be partially explained by recession, I'm not certain if that is the whole story. Have sales been recovering in the past year or so? I doubt it.
"Their technique is based on the immersion of silica in a bath of molten calcium chloride salt at 850 C..."
The secret step in this process involves gently applying a loofa to the silica while it is bathing. Molten calcium chloride salt sounds irritating, but throw in a naturally occuring sponge and you've got yourself a fiesta!
Nice addition to the discussion. I think I can contribute here. First, the submission gives 2.5% as the minimum value of growth; economists refer to this as the "natural" rate of growth. It is the level of growth such that, if the economy grows above this value, the unemployment rate will decline.
You can estimate this value. In the U. S., recent estimates are in the neighborhood of 3.3% (see Blanchard's Macroeconomics, 3rd ed., p. 183).
I agree with the reviewer, though. The U. S. is nowhere near this rate of growth; therefore, unemployment rates will not decline anytime soon.
There is also a subtle issue of delays in labor markets in response to booms and busts. In all likelihood, it will take around three quarters after any increase in output growth for the condition in labor markets to improve. I think we'll all need to remain patient for a while longer.
Thank you for your comments, it is always nice to hear from faculty members in other disciplines who have some experience in these things.
I'm quite certain that giving out good grades is not even close to a necessary condition for high evaluations. If I gave this impression, I apologize. However, many trails lead to high evaluations. The harder, and more honest one (the one which I choose to travel) entails sticking to the grades earned by students and honestly performing as an effective teacher. In the end, this will show up in evals.
The other, easier, trail entails buying grades. I'm afraid that all too often, chairpersons and administrators fail to ask which path led to the high evaluations, although it is nice to hear that your institution has considered this.
I do think you are right, though. Late dropping will generally inject positive drift in grade averages.
I had not thought of research grants as providing competitive pressures in higher ed, but I believe you're quite right on this.
One complication in your analysis, though, lies in the fact that competition may also be driving the grade inflation in the sense that students might leave a school for its competitors if grade performance is unsatisfactorily low, thereby withdrawing their tuition dollar. This may not be true, though. Low grades would most likely only cause a student to switch majors so that grade inflation pressure is mostly at the departmental level.
You are exactly right about this. However, one can not easily maintain anonymity on student evals (as is often the case) and simultaneously tie a student's grade to his/her rating of the class.
This is the reason why your proposal is rarely done, although I think it makes a lot of sense in theory...
I'm a faculty member in the social sciences.
The dirty secret behind grade inflation is that it is a direct result of the emphasis placed on student evaluations of teaching by a department.
One of the easiest ways to get high evaluations is by loosening grading standards. In a department which places a significant weight on student evaluations, individual faculty members will often achieve high evaluations by passing out high grades. The reason for high evaluations is rarely investigated in such departments, those who receive strong student evaluations are simply praised as effective teachers.
My experience suggests that natural sciences and engineering departments rarely place a high weight on student evaluations (they're far more interested in research grant success of individual faculty, i. e. outside $$$$$). As a result, faculty in such disciplines don't "buy" high student evals with high grades. They don't need to.
I know this sounds a bit cynical, but I think this is how this stuff works.
Slashdot Mirror
I can't understand the privatization of payments online. Governments used to be the primary supplier of moneys which everybody had the right to use and everyone had to accept. But online only the private sector (credit cards, paypal, etc) is providing the means of payment. Anyway, all these folks should use Bitcoin: http://www.bitcoin.org/ It is peer-to-peer and anonymous. The tricky part involves converting it to traditional currencies but it currently has parity with the dollar, as reported earlier on Slashdot.
Gene Simmons had access to this technology and used it on Tom Selleck in 1985: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7d6Djog2B-c&t=1m10s
How many times have aboriginal tribesman / animals fled to high ground when there wasn't an impending tsunami? This I would like to know before I start believing in a sixth sense.
I sure hope Khan doesn't find out about this plan. Although, maybe if he does, we can send the dead scripts from Enterprise to the budding planet and resurrect a franchise ...
Why not bring those CDs down to the wood shop and gather additional observations on the ability of CDs to handle speed? Its surely more amusing than building a bread box. And, with 115,241 observations, I'm pretty sure the central limit theorem will give you a more reliable sample estimate of the true failure point.
I wonder if your shop teach has the cojones ...
From The New Yorker, 5/31/2004 SEARCH AND DESTROY By James Surowiecki If you go to the Internet search engine Google, type in "miserable failure," and click on the "I'm feeling lucky" icon, you will be directed not to an article about "Ishtar" or the 1962 Mets but, rather, to the White House Web site and the official biography of President George W. Bush. Congratulations. You've been Google-bombed. A Google bomb goes off when people conspire to have a particular phrase (in this case, "miserable failure") link to a given Web page, effectively tying the phrase to the page. Other famous Google bombs include one linking "more evil than Satan himself" to Microsoft's home page and, currently, one that links "weapons of mass destruction" to a page that reads, "The weapons you are looking for are currently unavailable. . . . Click the Regime Change button, or try again later." Google bombing may be a party trick, something to amuse office workers as they trudge through the day, but it exemplifies one of the biggest challenges that Google faces as it heads toward its multibillion-dollar I.P.O. Google is as much a ranking system as a search engine. It is more efficient than any other site at analyzing information and making decisions about its importance. Google is successful not because if you search for "Enron" it will return 1.75 million pages that contain the word but because, of those 1.75 million, the most relevant are right at the top. In large part, Google does this by relying on the collective intelligence of the Web itself. At the core of Google's technology is a voting system. Every link from one Web site to another is treated as a vote; sites that get more votes are considered more valuable and, in Google's system, are weighted to have more influence. Google also takes hundreds of other factors into consideration, such as font size and the location of words on the page. But, fundamentally, the Web pages that Google says are best are the pages that the Web as a whole thinks are best. Google's success has created a problem, though: if you have a voting system, people are going to try to manipulate it. Google bombing is the innocent face of this. Less innocent is the industry dedicated to helping Web sites maximize their Google rankings-the racket known as "search engine optimization." Some American companies have armies of programmers toiling away in Bangalore solely to boost their Google rankings. Much of what the "optimizers" do is reasonable, helping companies do a better job of presenting content, using keywords, and building pages to which others will want to link. (These are termed "white hat" tactics.) But there are also plenty of black hats-known as "index spammers"-who have simply adapted the methods and tricks of the old political machines. In the days of Boss Tweed, people were encouraged to vote early and often, dead men were placed on the voting rolls, and citizens were paid for their votes. On the Web, companies "cloak," which means, among other things, that they disguise the real content of their sites, in an attempt to fool Google into thinking that a page is relevant to a search. Deep-pocketed players pay other sites to link to their sites, to foster an illusion of popularity. Some companies set up "link farms"-a host of interconnected Web sites that exist primarily to link to each other. A big company with a major Internet presence, for instance, can buy thousands of domain names, set up Web sites, and effectively create thousands of links out of nothing. Google, of course, knows about all this. In its recent I.P.O. filing, it said that the threat from index spammers was "ongoing and increasing," and so it has embarked on a campaign to outsmart them. A couple of weeks ago, for instance, it essentially banned a company called WhenU because of its cloaking tactics. (WhenU's Web site will no longer appear if you search for the company on Google.) To stymie the cheaters, Google issues periodic revisions to its algorithm, and companies breathlessly await the subsequent changes in their rankings. (Th
By Brock N. Meeks
Cheif Washington correspondent
MSNBC
Its hard to work out this puzzle, because the truth is well-hidden, but I think I've cracked it. I'm willing to bet that this was written by MSNBC's Chief Washington correspondent.
When bylines have typos, I'm pretty sure its a sign that the republic is falling ...
The major is housed in the Computer Science department, but there are courses designed specifically for IT students and faculty uniquely dedicated to the major. More information is available at the link above.
Perhaps Army and Air Force have similar programs in their respective academies??
If these numbers show anything, it is that the recession reached its lowest point in 2001 and the U. S. has been in a recovery since then. Admittedly, the recovery has recently weakened.
While the downturn in the recording industry's sales may be partially explained by recession, I'm not certain if that is the whole story. Have sales been recovering in the past year or so? I doubt it.
2000-Q1: 2.6 .6
.6
.3
2000-Q2: 4.8
2000-Q3:
2000-Q4: 1.1
2001-Q1: -
2001-Q2: -1.6
2001-Q3: -
2001-Q4: 2.7
2002-Q1: 5.0
2002-Q2: 1.3
2002-Q3: 4.0
2002-Q4: 1.4
2003-Q1: 1.4
"Their technique is based on the immersion of silica in a bath of molten calcium chloride salt at 850 C ..."
The secret step in this process involves gently applying a loofa to the silica while it is bathing. Molten calcium chloride salt sounds irritating, but throw in a naturally occuring sponge and you've got yourself a fiesta!
In the U. S. and the majority of economies, output is conventionally measured by real GDP.
Nice addition to the discussion. I think I can contribute here. First, the submission gives 2.5% as the minimum value of growth; economists refer to this as the "natural" rate of growth. It is the level of growth such that, if the economy grows above this value, the unemployment rate will decline.
You can estimate this value. In the U. S., recent estimates are in the neighborhood of 3.3% (see Blanchard's Macroeconomics, 3rd ed., p. 183).
I agree with the reviewer, though. The U. S. is nowhere near this rate of growth; therefore, unemployment rates will not decline anytime soon.
There is also a subtle issue of delays in labor markets in response to booms and busts. In all likelihood, it will take around three quarters after any increase in output growth for the condition in labor markets to improve. I think we'll all need to remain patient for a while longer.
Thank you for your comments, it is always nice to hear from faculty members in other disciplines who have some experience in these things.
I'm quite certain that giving out good grades is not even close to a necessary condition for high evaluations. If I gave this impression, I apologize. However, many trails lead to high evaluations. The harder, and more honest one (the one which I choose to travel) entails sticking to the grades earned by students and honestly performing as an effective teacher. In the end, this will show up in evals.
The other, easier, trail entails buying grades. I'm afraid that all too often, chairpersons and administrators fail to ask which path led to the high evaluations, although it is nice to hear that your institution has considered this.
I do think you are right, though. Late dropping will generally inject positive drift in grade averages.
I had not thought of research grants as providing competitive pressures in higher ed, but I believe you're quite right on this. One complication in your analysis, though, lies in the fact that competition may also be driving the grade inflation in the sense that students might leave a school for its competitors if grade performance is unsatisfactorily low, thereby withdrawing their tuition dollar. This may not be true, though. Low grades would most likely only cause a student to switch majors so that grade inflation pressure is mostly at the departmental level.
You are exactly right about this. However, one can not easily maintain anonymity on student evals (as is often the case) and simultaneously tie a student's grade to his/her rating of the class. This is the reason why your proposal is rarely done, although I think it makes a lot of sense in theory...
I'm a faculty member in the social sciences. The dirty secret behind grade inflation is that it is a direct result of the emphasis placed on student evaluations of teaching by a department. One of the easiest ways to get high evaluations is by loosening grading standards. In a department which places a significant weight on student evaluations, individual faculty members will often achieve high evaluations by passing out high grades. The reason for high evaluations is rarely investigated in such departments, those who receive strong student evaluations are simply praised as effective teachers. My experience suggests that natural sciences and engineering departments rarely place a high weight on student evaluations (they're far more interested in research grant success of individual faculty, i. e. outside $$$$$). As a result, faculty in such disciplines don't "buy" high student evals with high grades. They don't need to. I know this sounds a bit cynical, but I think this is how this stuff works.