I don't think it's entirely lack of understanding; part of it is, but part of it is having ulterior motives for their social network, which includes a design requirement that it's got to somehow 'synergize' with their search business.
For large employers, there's also the meta-skill of showing some amount of self-discipline and aptitude for following rules and navigating bureaucracies. A degree is in part a certification that you've successfully followed a series of requirements and tasks for four years. That's harder to replicate in these DIY educational approaches, because not being huge and bureaucratic is sort of the whole point of the alternative approaches.
In tech there seems to still be enough of a shortage of skilled people that people without degrees do get hired regularly, though not as easily as people with degrees. Silicon Valley startups seem to already consider "some cool projects on GitHub" to be the moral equivalent of a bachelor's degree...
I tentatively agree, but I think the entrance of "big-name" universities into this experiment potentially changes things, if they keep standards up. Anything with the name MIT or Stanford associated with it has some amount of built-in cachet. I think that even if it's not a regular degree, but Stanford-with-an-asterisk, employers, and especially smaller and less rigid employers like we often find in technology, will be willing to consider it if Stanford does a reasonable job with it.
I can especially imagine employers with specific needs taking it seriously, e.g. someone needing a data analyst may consider certification in 2 statistics and 2 machine-learning classes from Stanford good enough for the job.
I agree on the final result, but there may be something interesting in the symmetries developed, which the researchers seem to suggest involved some interesting and/or novel techniques. If true, that could have broader applications; reducing seemingly large search spaces to equivalent smaller search spaces by taking advantages of symmetries is a recurring motif in computational X for lots of X, so if they have new techniques there that could be useful.
As a resident of a boring, low-crime suburb, I can say with a reasonable degree of certainty that none of the upper-middle-class, professional-job-working, 100-lbs-overweight people in this suburb have ever shot a gun.
Indeed, and I'd guess that the conservative columnist who wrote this piece would, in other circumstances, be railing about the need for tort reform, as nuisance lawsuits make it hard for our hard-working American businessmen to sell products. I wonder what he'd think of a widespread general strategy of using small-claims-court filings to go after misleading advertising from all types of companies.
Hybrids are probably overhyped, but I thought most educated consumers these days realized that they got the biggest efficiency gains in two types of driving: 1) lower-speed, stop-and-go city traffic, where they can mainly use the electric drivetrain, and sometimes turn off the engine entirely for brief periods; and 2) constant-speed highway travel, where they mainly use the gas engine, but one that can be made smaller due to being able to rely on the electric assist when needed. Yes, if you frequently accelerate at higher speeds, you'll use both the electric and gas engines and not save much. Do people not know this?
I would've thought that NASA-written code (not licensed from contractors) would be in the public domain as a U.S. federal government work, just like NASA photographs are. Is there a reason that isn't the case?
Under modern case law there's a positive right to assistance of counsel in a criminal case (and this was true even earlier for federal criminal cases, where a right to counsel has been recognized since the 19th century).
So do you believe that the U.S. Constitution is wrong when it gives criminal defendants a positive right to assistance of counsel, paid for by the state if the defendant cannot afford one? Rather than just the right not to be prevented from hiring a lawyer?
The first major push for computers in schools had more than just some computers. In addition to putting the Apple IIs (usually) into school computer labs, there were also initiatives like MECC to produce useful software for them, research from educators like Seymour Papert on how to use them to teach technical skills, etc.
By the late 80s this had mostly withered away, so that when my own high school in the 1990s replaced its Apple IIs with Macintosh LCs, the main thing they were used for besides word processing was... running the old Apple II software on the IIe attachment card.
China's government is probably the most engineer-dominated government in the world, in contrast to the lawyer-dominated Western governments, and it has definite technocratic tendencies. I'd say a lot of western engineers who otherwise dislike the government (e.g. its position on free speech) do admire some of its technocratic infrastructure achievements, like its rapid deployment of high-speed rail.
More generally it's kind of the natural outcome of a certain engineering mindset which looks for optimized supply chains, economies of scale, evidence/data-based decision making, etc. There's an alternate, more messy/decentralized engineering mindset though, perhaps better labeled "hacker mindset" than "engineering mindset", which is more about DIY, free-form experimentation, etc., and less technocratic in its orientation (though not necessarily libertarian in the American sense either; plenty are more lefty-anarchist leaning).
As best as I can trace their history, it looks like they come from the generic consumer-advocacy nonprofit space. I believe they were set up in the 1990s as a project of the Utility Consumers' Action Network, a San-Diego-based organization that mainly distributes information about utility services to the general public, as well as advocating for public-friendly policies. One of the utilities they traditionally monitored were the phone companies, and with the rise of the internet in the 1990s, they started collecting and distributing information about ISPs, and more generally some information about how to use the internet without getting scammed/etc. Seems to have later spun off into an independent or semi-independent group.
It doesn't even say that anything particularly interesting was cited from Facebook. Lawyers often pad these kinds of filings with just-to-be-safe evidence, and Facebook is probably an easy source of evidence for all sorts of mundane things that wouldn't necessarily even be challenged at all. "Bob is, as of our last knowledge, in possession of the couple's former Honda Civic [attach a printed out & dated Facebook photo of Bob washing his car]" and that kind of stuff.
If I understand the paper correctly, there are configurations where the zero-velocity surfaces of the sun and a planet coincide at some points, so an object orbiting the sun can transfer to a planetary orbit at one of the intersections without any other energy input, and then transfer back out again at the same or another intersection, again without any other energy input. Figure 1 on page 8 of the PDF has an illustration of some cases.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think it's entirely lack of understanding; part of it is, but part of it is having ulterior motives for their social network, which includes a design requirement that it's got to somehow 'synergize' with their search business.
As a fan of propaganda videogames, this is relevant to my interests.
The lead author of the study is 51, so you can't really blame her for overlooking a few details...
Fun fact: that is actually legal in some cases...
For large employers, there's also the meta-skill of showing some amount of self-discipline and aptitude for following rules and navigating bureaucracies. A degree is in part a certification that you've successfully followed a series of requirements and tasks for four years. That's harder to replicate in these DIY educational approaches, because not being huge and bureaucratic is sort of the whole point of the alternative approaches.
In tech there seems to still be enough of a shortage of skilled people that people without degrees do get hired regularly, though not as easily as people with degrees. Silicon Valley startups seem to already consider "some cool projects on GitHub" to be the moral equivalent of a bachelor's degree...
I tentatively agree, but I think the entrance of "big-name" universities into this experiment potentially changes things, if they keep standards up. Anything with the name MIT or Stanford associated with it has some amount of built-in cachet. I think that even if it's not a regular degree, but Stanford-with-an-asterisk, employers, and especially smaller and less rigid employers like we often find in technology, will be willing to consider it if Stanford does a reasonable job with it.
I can especially imagine employers with specific needs taking it seriously, e.g. someone needing a data analyst may consider certification in 2 statistics and 2 machine-learning classes from Stanford good enough for the job.
I agree on the final result, but there may be something interesting in the symmetries developed, which the researchers seem to suggest involved some interesting and/or novel techniques. If true, that could have broader applications; reducing seemingly large search spaces to equivalent smaller search spaces by taking advantages of symmetries is a recurring motif in computational X for lots of X, so if they have new techniques there that could be useful.
As a resident of a boring, low-crime suburb, I can say with a reasonable degree of certainty that none of the upper-middle-class, professional-job-working, 100-lbs-overweight people in this suburb have ever shot a gun.
Indeed, and I'd guess that the conservative columnist who wrote this piece would, in other circumstances, be railing about the need for tort reform, as nuisance lawsuits make it hard for our hard-working American businessmen to sell products. I wonder what he'd think of a widespread general strategy of using small-claims-court filings to go after misleading advertising from all types of companies.
Hybrids are probably overhyped, but I thought most educated consumers these days realized that they got the biggest efficiency gains in two types of driving: 1) lower-speed, stop-and-go city traffic, where they can mainly use the electric drivetrain, and sometimes turn off the engine entirely for brief periods; and 2) constant-speed highway travel, where they mainly use the gas engine, but one that can be made smaller due to being able to rely on the electric assist when needed. Yes, if you frequently accelerate at higher speeds, you'll use both the electric and gas engines and not save much. Do people not know this?
They have their own custom license, the NASA Open Source Agreement.
I would've thought that NASA-written code (not licensed from contractors) would be in the public domain as a U.S. federal government work, just like NASA photographs are. Is there a reason that isn't the case?
Under modern case law there's a positive right to assistance of counsel in a criminal case (and this was true even earlier for federal criminal cases, where a right to counsel has been recognized since the 19th century).
So do you believe that the U.S. Constitution is wrong when it gives criminal defendants a positive right to assistance of counsel, paid for by the state if the defendant cannot afford one? Rather than just the right not to be prevented from hiring a lawyer?
A 3.2-rc7 kernel is already in Debian's experimental repository fwiw.
The first major push for computers in schools had more than just some computers. In addition to putting the Apple IIs (usually) into school computer labs, there were also initiatives like MECC to produce useful software for them, research from educators like Seymour Papert on how to use them to teach technical skills, etc.
By the late 80s this had mostly withered away, so that when my own high school in the 1990s replaced its Apple IIs with Macintosh LCs, the main thing they were used for besides word processing was... running the old Apple II software on the IIe attachment card.
By the end of the video the cat is pretty annoyed and trying to attack the robot...
China's government is probably the most engineer-dominated government in the world, in contrast to the lawyer-dominated Western governments, and it has definite technocratic tendencies. I'd say a lot of western engineers who otherwise dislike the government (e.g. its position on free speech) do admire some of its technocratic infrastructure achievements, like its rapid deployment of high-speed rail.
More generally it's kind of the natural outcome of a certain engineering mindset which looks for optimized supply chains, economies of scale, evidence/data-based decision making, etc. There's an alternate, more messy/decentralized engineering mindset though, perhaps better labeled "hacker mindset" than "engineering mindset", which is more about DIY, free-form experimentation, etc., and less technocratic in its orientation (though not necessarily libertarian in the American sense either; plenty are more lefty-anarchist leaning).
As best as I can trace their history, it looks like they come from the generic consumer-advocacy nonprofit space. I believe they were set up in the 1990s as a project of the Utility Consumers' Action Network, a San-Diego-based organization that mainly distributes information about utility services to the general public, as well as advocating for public-friendly policies. One of the utilities they traditionally monitored were the phone companies, and with the rise of the internet in the 1990s, they started collecting and distributing information about ISPs, and more generally some information about how to use the internet without getting scammed/etc. Seems to have later spun off into an independent or semi-independent group.
Fwiw, previous coverage on Slashdot of related products:
Human Exoskeletons Getting Closer (March 2009)
Elder-Assist Robotic Suits, From the Real Cyberdyne (October 2009)
eLEGS Exoskeleton Allows Paraplegics To Walk (October 2010)
It doesn't even say that anything particularly interesting was cited from Facebook. Lawyers often pad these kinds of filings with just-to-be-safe evidence, and Facebook is probably an easy source of evidence for all sorts of mundane things that wouldn't necessarily even be challenged at all. "Bob is, as of our last knowledge, in possession of the couple's former Honda Civic [attach a printed out & dated Facebook photo of Bob washing his car]" and that kind of stuff.
I realize it's not widely known in the west, but it's an important database in Mongolia.
The demoscene is sort of like that, with stuff like contests for producing impressive 3d graphics in under 4k executables.
If I understand the paper correctly, there are configurations where the zero-velocity surfaces of the sun and a planet coincide at some points, so an object orbiting the sun can transfer to a planetary orbit at one of the intersections without any other energy input, and then transfer back out again at the same or another intersection, again without any other energy input. Figure 1 on page 8 of the PDF has an illustration of some cases.