According to this link: http://www.cbpp.org/9-24-02pov.htm the median FAMILY income in 2001 was $42K. Keep in mind that this is based on family household data, not individual incomes. Also remember that medians are not as sensitive to extreme scores (some person making 20 million dollars) the way averages are.
Pascal really is a great language for beginners. Anybody remember "Lightspeed Pascal" later "Think Pascal" for the Mac? What a great programming environment! I had a great book to go with it too called "The Fear and Loathing Guide to Mac Pascal." Good times, good times...
One thing that should be verifiable is the two speeding tickets that are referred to in the story. That doesn't make the rest of the story true, but it would be an interesting place to start.
Each professor is different. I've seen instructors that would throw a fit if you were drinking a can of pop in a lecture. My old advisor would pitch a fit if someone quietly got up and left the hall to use the bathroom. "I'M SORRY IF I'M BORING YOU!!!!" My sociology professor was my all-time favorite, but he would also stop lecture and make a snotty comment if someone got up and left in a hall with 300+ students!
The important distinction between operant and classical conditioning is the extent to which action is required on the part of the learner. If you have to actually do something to produce the outcome, then that's operant conditioning. Since the boy had to stick the knife into the socket, to some extent you're right, it's operant. In classical conditioning the learning is reflexive and requires no action on the part of the learner. Just the presence of the stimulus produces the outcome. Pavlov's dogs salivated whenever you rang the bell, they didn't have to do anything themselves. They associated the presence of a previously neutral stimlus (bell) with a particular outcome (access to food). On the other hand, many might consider your example to be classical conditioning, since a procedure like this might be very likely to produce a general fear of electrical sockets. So now the kid just won't go near a light socket period. What he's learned might not so much be "don't stick a knife in an electrical socket" so much as "electrical outlets suck." Here's a similar operant example: once you get sick on tecquila, you don't have to actually drink it to get queasy. Just the sight of the bottle or the smell of the tecquila might be enough to make you feel a little sick. Rather than quibble over whether it's operant or classical conditioning, it might be easier simply to refer to it as conditioning and let it go at that. Or not.
I don't find any income figures for workers in the report you cite. In fact in the index it says "EC5 Total payroll and benefits - Not Reported." If I'm missing them, could you please point them out to me? You mention mid 30's, but mid 30 whats (e.g., euros, pesos, dollars)? Is this an arithmetic mean that you're referring to with your mid 30's claim? If so, keep in mind that they tend to be sensitive to extreme values in the distribution. The only interesting thing I found in the report was that workers were not supposed to work more than 60 hours per week and must get at least one 24 hour period free every 7 days. To their credit they mention that they have relied upon outside parties (e.g., UNICEF) to verify compliance with child-labor standards.
If you're thinking about attending a research institution, always keep what NoData says in this parent article in mind. Undergraduates are at the bottom of priorities at these institutions. I was in grad school for 8 years, and in all that time my academic advisor taught 2 undergraduate courses by himself. It just wasn't a priority. If a professor can publish/get grants, who cares if he/she can teach? Just pay some grad student to cover the course. That might cost $2K to $4K, depending upon the school. In that same time a good professor could easily bring in 20x the grant money.
I think you're spot on. When I was a poor grad student I copied anything I could get my hands on: music, software, whatever. When I was young I wanted a lot and had very little. Now I'm older, and I'm a long, long, long way from being anything close to even well-to-do. But now I have a little money and it seems there's nothing to buy. I wouldn't like to sit here now and judge college/grad students who eat ramen every night and download music. I'd do the same in their place.
I suspect that it will mostly be a series of conditional probabilities. I knew him at the U. of Illinois, when I was starting out as a grad student. I first met him when he was trying to get an IBM XT working for my advisor (who was the ultimate anti-geek). Neither Gottman nor his grad student could access the hard disk to load any software. He recommended my advisor return the thing because "the hard disk was broke." My advisor asked me to look at it. I'd never used IBM/DOS before, just my trusty Apple II, so I RTFM. I got it running in a couple of minutes and Gottman asked me, "How did you do that?" Um, I read the instructions... He's hard-core math geeky, but not too computer geeky.
I agree wholeheartedly. I bought a $225 KDS 19" monitor from an office supply store then dragged it the 8 blocks home on a luggage carrier because I lived in San Francisco and couldn't afford a car. That was 4 years ago and since then I've moved the KDS to North Carolina and I've bought 2 Samsung SyncMasters. The KDS is by far my favorite. Better picture and much smaller footprint. I bought my dad one too and it runs great as well. I'd buy KDS again.
"...how we speak shows largely how we think..." That's true to some extent, but linguists have had to back away from the Whorfian hypothesis in recent decades. The Whorfian hypothesis was the theory that language influenced thought. If an Eskimo has more words for snow (this idea has also been successfully challenged in recent years, just do a Google search) it stood to reason that he/she thinks about snow differently than an Englishman for example. Eleanor Rosch did some research with the Dani in New Guinea that suggests this might not be true. While the Dani only have 2 words for different colors in their language, Rosch found that they were quite competent at differentiating a wide range of colors, and that they could successfully remember colors that they didn't have words for either.
Speaking of sex-addicted.. Wouldn't this type of AI have dramatic implications for the phone sex industry? Actually, now that I think about it most calls could probably be handled by generating a response to, "What are you wearing now?"
Agreed, why pile on the guy? He had a vision and ran with it. It's nothing to gloat over if he falls on hard times.
I worked for an electrical contractor that helped overhaul his building (an old 19th century textile mill) in Manchester NH in the early '80s. Dean Kamen is a gentleman and a scholar, and he was polite to everyone, even lowly working class scruffs such as myself. When we worked at some other places (DEC comes to mind) the tech people looked at us like we were lepers.
Trivia: His dad was a comic book artist back in the day. He did the movie poster for CreepShow and I think CreepShow II. You can see his signature in the corner. Dean Kamen had a big copy of it framed in his lab. His folks were (deservedly) very proud of him.
He's a nice guy, and I wish him the best of luck in the future.
I think this is a bad idea for San Francisco, but you're right about the trees, they are not very old. I think the 100 year figure is also quite out of line. I can't remember the name, but there's an old Humphrey Bogart movie where he breaks out of San Quentin and slips into San Francisco. Great shots of old San Francisco, and when they briefly show the Presido, it's pretty shocking to compare how bald it was then (1930s) and how many trees there are today.
I signed up with PacBell about 4 years ago. They stuck me with a crappy USB DSL modem, and crappy software to go along with it. Since I had a roomate who wanted to share internet access, I had to start from scratch. After wrestling quite unsuccessfully with software solutions for Wintel machines, I went out and bought a "real" (ethernet) DSL modem, rewired the pins on the DSL wall box, and bought a Linksys switch with built-in hub. The USB modem and PacBell software went into the closet never to be seen again. Even PacBell support people would tell me their software was pretty crappy, and that 3rd party alternatives were better.
Amazon in general seems as nutty as a fruitcake. I regularly get email messages notifying me that shipment of items has been delayed for stuff I've already received! HELLO! Today I'm informed that a DVD is "beckoning" me from my wish list when I already purchased it and watched it 2 weeks ago. HELLO! HELLO! Somebody over there needs to get the collective act together.
Interesting, but I suspect that has nothing to do with it. 1. Personally I've eaten a lot of rabbit myself, so one person's religious symbol can be another person's entree (or both), even within a culture. 2. Lobster is definitely on the menu in China, and they have lots of ways to prepare it. 3. I'm confident the average Chinese person can tell the difference between a lobster and a crayfish.
I played Asheron's Call (online RPG published by Microsoft) for about 2 years. Then one day, poof, you can't log on to play the game without Passport. I guess you could argue that I didn't have to play that game, but after a 2 year investment... Personally, I'd call that an example of being forced to sign up for passport. It actually adds a step in the logon process, slowing things down for me.
I've been Mac oriented since 1985. One of the things said by the more clueless in those days was that the Mac was a cute toy to play games on, but you couldn't do real work on it (i.e., run Lotus). I guess they were thinking about the games available for the Apple II series, because comparatively there never were many games for the Mac. As more and more good games came out for the PC, I bought a Gateway around 1993, but only to play games on. Those were the days! Darklands, Master of Orion, Masters of Magic, really great games. I still do all my work on my Macs, but I have a Wintel machine at home to play games on, and I have a Wintel machine in the office to get email (stupid exchange system) and to do some web browsing.
Lifestreams orders information by date - imagine that you remember writing a memo just before Easter vacation this year. Then, you would scan documents created around that time period, and hopefully find it in a few seconds.
That's it? Sort by date? This reminds me of the time that Bill Gates was on Letterman and started slobbering about "the future of computing." Gates says something visionary like "You'll be able to listen to a baseball game no matter where you are in the world!" Letterman - "Ever hear of a radio, Bill?" Gates - "No, you don't understand, you can even store the broadcast and call it up to listen to it whenever you want in the future." Letterman - "Ever hear of a tape recorder?"
Slashdot Mirror
couldn't Perl do their job for free?
Probably, but she always makes such an ass of herself at office parties...According to this link: http://www.cbpp.org/9-24-02pov.htm the median FAMILY income in 2001 was $42K. Keep in mind that this is based on family household data, not individual incomes. Also remember that medians are not as sensitive to extreme scores (some person making 20 million dollars) the way averages are.
Pascal really is a great language for beginners. Anybody remember "Lightspeed Pascal" later "Think Pascal" for the Mac? What a great programming environment! I had a great book to go with it too called "The Fear and Loathing Guide to Mac Pascal." Good times, good times...
One thing that should be verifiable is the two speeding tickets that are referred to in the story. That doesn't make the rest of the story true, but it would be an interesting place to start.
Each professor is different. I've seen instructors that would throw a fit if you were drinking a can of pop in a lecture. My old advisor would pitch a fit if someone quietly got up and left the hall to use the bathroom. "I'M SORRY IF I'M BORING YOU!!!!" My sociology professor was my all-time favorite, but he would also stop lecture and make a snotty comment if someone got up and left in a hall with 300+ students!
Excuse me, I meant to say that the tecquila example was classical conditioning, not operant. Obviously I should just shut up.
The important distinction between operant and classical conditioning is the extent to which action is required on the part of the learner. If you have to actually do something to produce the outcome, then that's operant conditioning. Since the boy had to stick the knife into the socket, to some extent you're right, it's operant. In classical conditioning the learning is reflexive and requires no action on the part of the learner. Just the presence of the stimulus produces the outcome. Pavlov's dogs salivated whenever you rang the bell, they didn't have to do anything themselves. They associated the presence of a previously neutral stimlus (bell) with a particular outcome (access to food). On the other hand, many might consider your example to be classical conditioning, since a procedure like this might be very likely to produce a general fear of electrical sockets. So now the kid just won't go near a light socket period. What he's learned might not so much be "don't stick a knife in an electrical socket" so much as "electrical outlets suck." Here's a similar operant example: once you get sick on tecquila, you don't have to actually drink it to get queasy. Just the sight of the bottle or the smell of the tecquila might be enough to make you feel a little sick. Rather than quibble over whether it's operant or classical conditioning, it might be easier simply to refer to it as conditioning and let it go at that. Or not.
I don't find any income figures for workers in the report you cite. In fact in the index it says "EC5 Total payroll and benefits - Not Reported." If I'm missing them, could you please point them out to me? You mention mid 30's, but mid 30 whats (e.g., euros, pesos, dollars)? Is this an arithmetic mean that you're referring to with your mid 30's claim? If so, keep in mind that they tend to be sensitive to extreme values in the distribution. The only interesting thing I found in the report was that workers were not supposed to work more than 60 hours per week and must get at least one 24 hour period free every 7 days. To their credit they mention that they have relied upon outside parties (e.g., UNICEF) to verify compliance with child-labor standards.
If you're thinking about attending a research institution, always keep what NoData says in this parent article in mind. Undergraduates are at the bottom of priorities at these institutions. I was in grad school for 8 years, and in all that time my academic advisor taught 2 undergraduate courses by himself. It just wasn't a priority. If a professor can publish/get grants, who cares if he/she can teach? Just pay some grad student to cover the course. That might cost $2K to $4K, depending upon the school. In that same time a good professor could easily bring in 20x the grant money.
Without Soul Train or American Bandstand?
I think you're spot on. When I was a poor grad student I copied anything I could get my hands on: music, software, whatever. When I was young I wanted a lot and had very little. Now I'm older, and I'm a long, long, long way from being anything close to even well-to-do. But now I have a little money and it seems there's nothing to buy. I wouldn't like to sit here now and judge college/grad students who eat ramen every night and download music. I'd do the same in their place.
I suspect that it will mostly be a series of conditional probabilities. I knew him at the U. of Illinois, when I was starting out as a grad student. I first met him when he was trying to get an IBM XT working for my advisor (who was the ultimate anti-geek). Neither Gottman nor his grad student could access the hard disk to load any software. He recommended my advisor return the thing because "the hard disk was broke." My advisor asked me to look at it. I'd never used IBM/DOS before, just my trusty Apple II, so I RTFM. I got it running in a couple of minutes and Gottman asked me, "How did you do that?" Um, I read the instructions... He's hard-core math geeky, but not too computer geeky.
I agree wholeheartedly. I bought a $225 KDS 19" monitor from an office supply store then dragged it the 8 blocks home on a luggage carrier because I lived in San Francisco and couldn't afford a car. That was 4 years ago and since then I've moved the KDS to North Carolina and I've bought 2 Samsung SyncMasters. The KDS is by far my favorite. Better picture and much smaller footprint. I bought my dad one too and it runs great as well. I'd buy KDS again.
I second that. Kurt Russell in most anything is a hit. I also especially liked him in John Carpenter's "The Thing."
"...how we speak shows largely how we think..." That's true to some extent, but linguists have had to back away from the Whorfian hypothesis in recent decades. The Whorfian hypothesis was the theory that language influenced thought. If an Eskimo has more words for snow (this idea has also been successfully challenged in recent years, just do a Google search) it stood to reason that he/she thinks about snow differently than an Englishman for example. Eleanor Rosch did some research with the Dani in New Guinea that suggests this might not be true. While the Dani only have 2 words for different colors in their language, Rosch found that they were quite competent at differentiating a wide range of colors, and that they could successfully remember colors that they didn't have words for either.
Speaking of sex-addicted.. Wouldn't this type of AI have dramatic implications for the phone sex industry? Actually, now that I think about it most calls could probably be handled by generating a response to, "What are you wearing now?"
Agreed, why pile on the guy? He had a vision and ran with it. It's nothing to gloat over if he falls on hard times. I worked for an electrical contractor that helped overhaul his building (an old 19th century textile mill) in Manchester NH in the early '80s. Dean Kamen is a gentleman and a scholar, and he was polite to everyone, even lowly working class scruffs such as myself. When we worked at some other places (DEC comes to mind) the tech people looked at us like we were lepers. Trivia: His dad was a comic book artist back in the day. He did the movie poster for CreepShow and I think CreepShow II. You can see his signature in the corner. Dean Kamen had a big copy of it framed in his lab. His folks were (deservedly) very proud of him. He's a nice guy, and I wish him the best of luck in the future.
I think this is a bad idea for San Francisco, but you're right about the trees, they are not very old. I think the 100 year figure is also quite out of line. I can't remember the name, but there's an old Humphrey Bogart movie where he breaks out of San Quentin and slips into San Francisco. Great shots of old San Francisco, and when they briefly show the Presido, it's pretty shocking to compare how bald it was then (1930s) and how many trees there are today.
I'm an ACTOR, not a STAGEHAND...
I signed up with PacBell about 4 years ago. They stuck me with a crappy USB DSL modem, and crappy software to go along with it. Since I had a roomate who wanted to share internet access, I had to start from scratch. After wrestling quite unsuccessfully with software solutions for Wintel machines, I went out and bought a "real" (ethernet) DSL modem, rewired the pins on the DSL wall box, and bought a Linksys switch with built-in hub. The USB modem and PacBell software went into the closet never to be seen again. Even PacBell support people would tell me their software was pretty crappy, and that 3rd party alternatives were better.
Amazon in general seems as nutty as a fruitcake. I regularly get email messages notifying me that shipment of items has been delayed for stuff I've already received! HELLO! Today I'm informed that a DVD is "beckoning" me from my wish list when I already purchased it and watched it 2 weeks ago. HELLO! HELLO! Somebody over there needs to get the collective act together.
Interesting, but I suspect that has nothing to do with it. 1. Personally I've eaten a lot of rabbit myself, so one person's religious symbol can be another person's entree (or both), even within a culture. 2. Lobster is definitely on the menu in China, and they have lots of ways to prepare it. 3. I'm confident the average Chinese person can tell the difference between a lobster and a crayfish.
I played Asheron's Call (online RPG published by Microsoft) for about 2 years. Then one day, poof, you can't log on to play the game without Passport. I guess you could argue that I didn't have to play that game, but after a 2 year investment... Personally, I'd call that an example of being forced to sign up for passport. It actually adds a step in the logon process, slowing things down for me.
I've been Mac oriented since 1985. One of the things said by the more clueless in those days was that the Mac was a cute toy to play games on, but you couldn't do real work on it (i.e., run Lotus). I guess they were thinking about the games available for the Apple II series, because comparatively there never were many games for the Mac. As more and more good games came out for the PC, I bought a Gateway around 1993, but only to play games on. Those were the days! Darklands, Master of Orion, Masters of Magic, really great games. I still do all my work on my Macs, but I have a Wintel machine at home to play games on, and I have a Wintel machine in the office to get email (stupid exchange system) and to do some web browsing.
Lifestreams orders information by date - imagine that you remember writing a memo just before Easter vacation this year. Then, you would scan documents created around that time period, and hopefully find it in a few seconds.
That's it? Sort by date? This reminds me of the time that Bill Gates was on Letterman and started slobbering about "the future of computing." Gates says something visionary like "You'll be able to listen to a baseball game no matter where you are in the world!" Letterman - "Ever hear of a radio, Bill?" Gates - "No, you don't understand, you can even store the broadcast and call it up to listen to it whenever you want in the future." Letterman - "Ever hear of a tape recorder?"