You have a problem in the concept of omniscience. Omniscience means knowing all that is knowable. If you have free will, what you will do in any given circumstance is not necessarily knowable to a certainty. Omniscience is knowing to a certainty that which is knowable.
It is the same with omnipotence. Can god make a rock so heavy that he/she can't lift it? That's just a paradox of language; not doable.
All these linguistic paradoxes are actually the outlines of our reality. God's reality maybe a superset of our own.
BTW, I don't much believe... God can think and choose what he/she wants. Thank God (or whatever) I can think and choose what I want.
P.S. God can't make a square-circle either. It doesn't make God less than omnipotent. Since God probably doesn't exist, it probably makes no difference.
Well said! Thinking is an activity susceptible to this malady/protection wherever humans keep track of history. Mod points in abundance to you if I had them.
I agree. Full support of mice would be a good start. I have about five different mice on different computers in my family . All that works is the right, left, and scroll button on these mice. In Windows I also have back and forward and some other functions. I use Ubuntu and Fedora for myself. I miss the full functionality of the mouse buttons.
I know I'm a bit of a newb when it comes to these matters but I wonder why ALL the buttons can't be programmable arbitrarily?
Hey! Call the CDC. I did. I was possibly exposed to a nasty parasite and the local doctors didn't satisfy me. I went up to Mayo. The doctor there at the exit interview said, "Go home. You've had the best that white man's medicine has to offer. Go home. Put it out of your mind."
I went home. This was before the internet, by the way. I did some more research and found that there was one more blood test that could be done. Only the CDC could do the lab work. As it turned out the guy from Mayo was right in this respect, the test, if positive showed I was infected, if negative, the test was inconclusive. Naturally, it was negative and inconclusive. I did get some serious help from the CDC though. The expert there explained the test, the findings, the odds of a false negative. She also told me that if I were infected that I didn't have much of a chance as there was at the time only on surgeon in the States with any experience with this problem. She indicated that given the time frames involved the surgery would likely be unsuccessful. (I'd be dead.)
I determined that I'd put it behind me as I could do nothing further about it. That was 15 or 20 years ago. I remember reading that sometimes 30 years elapses before the problem becomes acute (and fatal). It could make a person crazy. Denial is the only available defense.
Echinococcus granulosus... look it up for your own nightmares.
I only revisited my little nightmare to tell you that you can call them and that in the past, they were as helpful as technology and time allowed.
People in technical occupations tend to be observant of rules and procedures. This classic little tome gives the don'ts and dos in the simplest possible format. My writing was tranformed practically overnight just by reading and following what this book suggests.
I had already had the courses, had graduated, and was in the workforce for some years when I came across the book. It made such an impression on me that I went to the trouble of bringing it to the attention, rather forcefully, of the profs that I still had access to.
The Elements of Style. There is no substitute. I read it again every few years.
The humor of the triumvirate of Jesus, Bush, and Hitler aside, what is needed here is a longer view.
So what if there is some vandalism. Yes, vandalism is bad. What is important is whether the Wikipedia is useful. I find it useful, not perfect. How many people on this planet are using it now? As more and more people use it, the ethos of actually valuing it will increase. Right now amongst certain kiddies and manics there is some "cool" or "control" that arises from vandalizing or posting a screed. Gradually, over a few years that will change. A time will come when being able to add something useful to the WP will be a source of satisfaction and pride. Vandalizing and hectoring posts will lose their value.
I have been able to anonymously edit a few pages. I found a few spelling and grammatical errors. I fixed them. The update was immediate. It was a good thing.
So someone vandalizes and the page oscillates between content and junk. Pages that oscillate like that can be locked on the latest reasonable rendition and the backing and forthing can be moved to the discussion tab. In some entries the discussion tab is incredibly informative.
Is it the end? Not by a long, long shot. Time and patience will win out for all users.
You may be correct. I did the same but came away with a little different instinct.
I recognize a pattern I have seen before. When a person gets under this kind of pressure and scrutiny, they have a tendency to over explain, giving ever extending details right on out into the minutia.
Here's why. They feel very vulnerable to fallacious but effective attack of "you got one thing wrong, so everything might be wrong" or the "you left one thing out, so what else are you hiding." They feel compelled to try and head off these attacks by being excessively expository and detailed, giving their writing that edge of paranoia.
You may be right. But remember, just because he comes across as paranoid, doesn't mean they aren't after him. It also doesn't mean that the conspiracy to cover up this supposed problem is only his imagination.
Uhhh.... The people who fall out of the sky with it... and their families... And their employer's or employees... Oh! And friends. Let's not forget the friends.
Hey! He was ~not~ snitching. He was not just an engineer. He was Chief Engineer.
"Mangan was drawn by the firm's potential. His future seemed bright in February 2004 when he was hired as chief engineer at a salary of $100,000, plus $25,000 in moving expenses."
If the facts bear out his version, he was performing the very responsibilities for which he was hired. In that case, he'd be a hero by any measure.
If the facts do not bear out his case, he will no doubt be personally and professionally destroyed.
He may be in the latter situation in any event.
Performing your responsibilities is ~not~ snitching. It may be painful. Its reward may be scorn, derision, and spite but it is not snitching. The reward should be recognition, admiration, and promotion but you only have to read Whistleblowers to know the truth of it.
If only we could all focus on the real issue. It's learning not teaching. Learning should drive teaching not the reverse. That, unfortunately, is most often not the case.
As some in this long list of posts have noted, children and most adults are motivated, strongly motivated, to learn. They DO learn. They learn by the means that best fit their own talents and shortcomings when they are left to learn on their own.
School is a different matter. 'Sit down. Stop talking. Watch this. Listen to this. Stop moving your feet. Don't fiddle with that pencil. Write this. Recite that.' This atmosphere only fits a small percent of the population comfortably.
If a child or an adult learns better by singing numbers aloud to do times tables, he or she has a problem in school.
Somebody wrote that paddling should be brought back. I'm sure the singing math student would soon stop singing or feel the paddle. Hitting children is no solution to anything. A long time ago when I was a teacher in a middle school, I arrived thinking paddling was ok. I was called upon to be a "paddling witness" on a few occasions. I learned from that and many other experiences that hitting people to achieve order is not an effective solution, particularly when the punishment and the crime are distant in time and location. As a practical matter corporal punishment is a failure as a method of discipline and control. That is my experience.
There are levels of improvement worth discussing. Are we talking local improvements? Regional improvements? National improvements? Global improvements? Each of these have a different answer. The first improvement that would affect all these domains would be to have learning drive teaching.
Local improvements would be best served by focusing on better learning evironments and opportunities in reading, communications, and math. This triumvirate, properly structured, would provide the basis for focusing on common sense reasoning skills as well as a little formal reasoning.
Regional improvements would best be served by improving the learning environment and learning opportunities related to the regional community, citizenship, local history, basic economics, local ecology, and the job market. Once the job market is seriously part of the curriculum, opportunities to focus on specific learning specialties should be available. The sciences, math, technology, and trade or career opportunities should emerge as choices.
National opportunities would follow the regional model but expand to include opportunities to learn government, law, regulation and enforcement, economics and more.
Global opportunities would also follow the regional and national models, expanding the previous opportunities to learn about international implications of the matters already learned.
Finally, somewhere in the mix from local to regional would be the learning opportunities for those human endeavors that transcend (or at least ignore) practicality, dance, music, athletics, visual arts such as painting, photography, cinematography, and games such as checkers, chess, poker, backgammon, Zoombinis, Red Alert, Myst and lots more.
Learn about it. Read Mel Levine's books. Read about Summerhill. Read about the successes AND failures in home schooling. Home schooling has yet to show itself to be any better than other schooling when looked at with a broader view than just the outstanding successes. There are outstanding successes in public schooling too. Clearly, we are not pointing at those outstanding successes and saying everything is ok. We shouldn't do it with home schooling either. Youngsters deserve better than that.
The article's premise of per capita innovation is not very useful. Consider if we were to just look at a portion of the technology tree, health care. Would innovations per capita over all history be a useful measure of the continued rate of health care innovations today? I think not.
The absolute rate of innovation is more relevant for a few reasons.
Here's one.
Dissemination of innovation begets innovation. The rate of change influence the rate of change.
Any innovation today can potentially benefit everyone in a relatively short time frame. In the period he touts as the peak an innovation often would take 50 years or more to reach relative universality. Today a useful innovation will reach universality in a tenth the time.
Around 1999 I saw an LCD monitor prototype, about 200mmX200MM in a glass encased cabinet at a technology meeting. It was guarded by a security guard as well. Today, if I have the means, I can go out and buy an 19" LCD monitor for about $400.00.
How long was it for everyone to be able to buy a generally useful camera from the invention of photography?
A more complex benchmark would be more appropriate. Something like the rate of innovation per years of education per per capita would seem to me more relevant.
Oops sentence in the wrong paragraph. My bad proofing. Redux:
I worked in a middle school at the time and the school, for whatever reason, purchased a TI94x. Nobody in the building was remotely interested so I got to play with it all I wanted. I was and still am a fan of Programmed Instruction ala Susan Markle.
I wrote several tutorials for the amusement of the students and myself. It was so successful that I approached the district administration about it. I got a sympathetic hearing from the guy in charge of curriculum. Together we wroted a demonstration program in RPG for one of the eariest system 34/36/38 series of machines. It was the precursor to system 34 I think. I remember him telling me that RPG was a brand new language. (heh!)
It was a tutorial in English because the administrator was a former English teacher. The district, a blue collar area, didn't think that they could go further in it as they didn't think the community would accept it.
Being a computer ignoramus at the time, I didn't know anything about U of I's Plato system. I learned later that it was already in full bloom.
As to the issue of "unstructured input," that's a smokescreen. All input gets structured for analysis. Once the input device acquires the response, it is structured. This whole concept of unstructured is ridiculous. It is also exactly what they will hang their hat on. There is no such thing as unstructured input. Or more accurately, all input is unstructured until acquired by an input sensor.
Every input device begins the process of structuring and eventual analysis. The use of any input device is just a logical and obvious extension of the programmed instruction methodology. The computer was similarly an obvious extension of the paper and pencil methods of PI. [ Reply to This ]
I worked in a middle school at the time and the school, for whatever reason, purchased a TI94x. Nobody in the building was remotely interested so I got to play with it all I wanted. I was and still am a fan of Programmed Instruction ala Susan Markle. I remember him telling me that RPG was a brand new language. (heh!)
I wrote several tutorials for the amusement of the students and myself. It was so successful that I approached the district administration about it. I got a sympathetic hearing from the guy in charge of curriculum. Together we wroted a demonstration program in RPG for one of the eariest system 34/36/38 series of machines. It was the precursor to system 34 I think.
It was a tutorial in English because the administrator was a former English teacher. The district, a blue collar area, didn't think that they could go further in it as they didn't think the community would accept it.
Being a computer ignoramus at the time, I didn't know anything about U of I's Plato system. I learned later that it was already in full bloom.
As to the issue of "unstructured input," that's a smokescreen. All input gets structured for analysis. Once the input device acquires the response, it is structured. This whole concept of unstructured is ridiculous. It is also exactly what they will hang their hat on. There is no such thing as unstructured input. Or more accurately, all input is unstructured until acquired by an input sensor.
Every input device begins the process of structuring and eventual analysis. The use of any input device is just a logical and obvious extension of the programmed instruction methodology. The computer was similarly an obvious extension of the paper and pencil methods of PI.
First as somebody already said, when the baby comes home sleep, more than anything, will be the most important issue for your wife and you. For the first couple of weeks your sleep and especially your wife's sleep will be interrupted. So, the most important strategy is to be able to sleep when the baby sleeps.
If your wife nurses, she will most likely be a wreck for the first month. Nursing is terribly hard on her sleep. You get a break but she takes the pain. Treat her with care.
Here's what we did and it worked out pretty well. From about the age of newborn to about two months, we had the baby in a cradle at night in OUR bedroom. That way, after the first few paranoid nights, we relaxed and slept when the baby allowed. For most babies, gaining to about ten pounds leads to sleeping longer at night and if you are a bit lucky, through the night.
Have a plush chair or another cradle setup for the baby out where you will spend the day. I just put casters on our cradle. During that early time the cradle could go where we wanted to be. The baby wants a lot of holding time. Get one of those sling thingies for the baby to be attached to you. They are great.
After the baby was about 2-3 months s/he did crib time in his/her own bedroom in a regular crib that is good until about the age of 2 years. Around then they get athletic enough and smart enough to climb out. While they are not crawling or scooting around, have a really comfortable chair or something in the babies room that you can snooze in comfortably for those times when the baby is ill and your paranoia is off the scale. DON'T BRING THE BABY IN YOUR BED TO SLEEP after it is out of the cradle. If you must provide additional comfort to the child, you go in there.
When the baby moves into his/her own room, now is the time to install audio monitors. My youngest daughter just put one video cam onto the crib for her newborn son. But both of them found that the problem was not the cam but what to do with the cam data. Sending it to their computers made them feel visually tied to their displays. The idea of sending to a handheld or a phone hasn't come up but I suspect the same outcome. The advantage of the audio is that it can run in the background and not require anything more of you than to clip the receiver on your belt or jeans or skirt, I suppose. So, the video has gotten little use but the audio is very useful.
I could write you a ton more detail but the bottom line is that if the child isn't in your immediate presence and your mental health is important to you and you need some surveillance, audio is the way to go. Remember you're not looking for a high fidelity system just something that lets you hear the baby breathing and moving around. You can get systems from Toys R Us and Babies R Us that will do this job admirably.
If this video thing has come up because you are both returning to work, the remark that somebody made about having a babysitter that you need to surveil may be a problem is right on. Your baby is defenseless and long range surveillance won't be anything but evidence if things go wrong. I just got done doing about 3 years of babysitting my older daughter's kids. These little ones can really test a person's self control. You must have someone you trust enough without the surveillance.
Good luck and best wishes to you and your wife on a wonderful adventure that lies before the two of you.
I have owned two Kodaks. They were excellent. The werer so good, in fact, my son stole them from me. I wound up with a Fuji.
The Fuji is ok for snaps but nothing I have used matches the clarity and color of the Kodaks I had. I'm no pro so these were their midrange cameras. I give the model numbers but my son has them. They cost between $400 and $500.
I have to laugh at my son's strategy. Buy dad a gift of a Fuji, while he's puzzled make off with the Kodaks!
Oh, and yes I've use a few others, Minolta, Sony, etc.
This is the question to ask. I often wondered what CA's software graveyard policy was. I assumed that they must have some kind of money making strategy with each. They all just disappeared.
This just seems to be a quasi-new twist on their consistent strategy of putting applications to death.
First, kudos to the prof for doing what he thought best for his students.
Second, for those sneering at Word, I have done commercial work in Word in single files from a few bytes to over 100MB. I did it that way because my clients asked for it in that format, No other format was of interest to them nor were suggestions for alternate methods such as simple HTML considered. Their personnel could handle hyperlinks just fine in Word, thank you.
It's what your audience and clients want that counts. I did over 50 manuals for one client, all stable all successful.
Open office is a good set of apps. HTML is a good presentation method. The same applies to the application methods and applications available in Microsoft Office.
I'm retired now and moving over to Linux for fun. I don't have to satisfy any clients so fooling around in Linux is fine. Maybe someday OO will be on a par with MO. But, right now as close as OO is, it isn't quite there.
If you work with business documentation, you better know MO.
Our family plays Ultima Online. Only Mom doesn't play. She will hardly touch the computer. She does watch us occasionally.
Ages and genders: 60M, 22M, 19F, 30M, 28F, 34M...
There's more but you get the idea. We all started shortly after UO beta'ed. You can play while on the phone if you have one of those unlimited weekend kind of packages. We have played with headsets but it didn't persist. Maybe with the newer packages it would. I was on just this morning redoing a house with my son. He's 500 miles from me but we cooperated online like we were sitting side by side.
Here are some advantages of this game. It is a persistent world in which you can build or buy a presence. You can have a house, do house furnishing and related artsy, fartsy stuff that the more creative and less aggressive find fun. You can be a crafter and eschew violence and combat or you can chew on your competitors and do combat and participate in all out wars if you like. You can treasure hunt. Go team or go solo for your adventures. You can set up a store and sell if you feel there's an unrequited commercial side to your personality.
Drawbacks are that you have to ante up between $10 and $15 a month per account. People that want to be online together must have their own account. Our accounts have varied from a low of 2 when we started years ago to a high of 7. We are back at 7 accounts. You have to be ok with a game view in which you looking down on the landscape from a viewpoint above. If you are interested in player vs. player combat, you better have a pretty fast machine or you won't stand a chance. A fast connection is a definite plus but not as important as a fast computer.
You can buy UO at Best Buy or whatever and build your accounts from scratch or you can buy them on eBay and forgo the building. You do have to get the client software somewhere. There are player run shards (UO worlds) that are free but I don't know much about them.
We really have a lot of laughs when we are all on together.
Slashdot Mirror
You have a problem in the concept of omniscience. Omniscience means knowing all that is knowable. If you have free will, what you will do in any given circumstance is not necessarily knowable to a certainty. Omniscience is knowing to a certainty that which is knowable.
It is the same with omnipotence. Can god make a rock so heavy that he/she can't lift it? That's just a paradox of language; not doable.
All these linguistic paradoxes are actually the outlines of our reality. God's reality maybe a superset of our own.
BTW, I don't much believe... God can think and choose what he/she wants. Thank God (or whatever) I can think and choose what I want.
P.S. God can't make a square-circle either. It doesn't make God less than omnipotent. Since God probably doesn't exist, it probably makes no difference.
$$ profit isn't the only profit that a business can go after. The balanced score card approach lets you select what you think is important and balance out the demands of your business to promote your goals. Here are a few books about it. http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_gw/103-1114922-0828644?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=Balanced+score+card&x=0&y=0
Uh... Excuse me! It is GEOrgian music. NOT gregorian chant!
Welcome to Largest
GEORGIAN Music Collection in Internet.
What a disappointment! I was all set for some neums in song.T
WoW!
Well said! Thinking is an activity susceptible to this malady/protection wherever humans keep track of history. Mod points in abundance to you if I had them.
Thank YOU!
I agree. Full support of mice would be a good start. I have about five different mice on different computers in my family . All that works is the right, left, and scroll button on these mice. In Windows I also have back and forward and some other functions. I use Ubuntu and Fedora for myself. I miss the full functionality of the mouse buttons.
I know I'm a bit of a newb when it comes to these matters but I wonder why ALL the buttons can't be programmable arbitrarily?
Hey! Call the CDC. I did. I was possibly exposed to a nasty parasite and the local doctors didn't satisfy me. I went up to Mayo. The doctor there at the exit interview said, "Go home. You've had the best that white man's medicine has to offer. Go home. Put it out of your mind."
I went home. This was before the internet, by the way. I did some more research and found that there was one more blood test that could be done. Only the CDC could do the lab work. As it turned out the guy from Mayo was right in this respect, the test, if positive showed I was infected, if negative, the test was inconclusive. Naturally, it was negative and inconclusive. I did get some serious help from the CDC though. The expert there explained the test, the findings, the odds of a false negative. She also told me that if I were infected that I didn't have much of a chance as there was at the time only on surgeon in the States with any experience with this problem. She indicated that given the time frames involved the surgery would likely be unsuccessful. (I'd be dead.)
I determined that I'd put it behind me as I could do nothing further about it. That was 15 or 20 years ago. I remember reading that sometimes 30 years elapses before the problem becomes acute (and fatal). It could make a person crazy. Denial is the only available defense.
Echinococcus granulosus... look it up for your own nightmares.
I only revisited my little nightmare to tell you that you can call them and that in the past, they were as helpful as technology and time allowed.
Here's another vote for the Elements of Style.
People in technical occupations tend to be observant of rules and procedures. This classic little tome gives the don'ts and dos in the simplest possible format. My writing was tranformed practically overnight just by reading and following what this book suggests.
I had already had the courses, had graduated, and was in the workforce for some years when I came across the book. It made such an impression on me that I went to the trouble of bringing it to the attention, rather forcefully, of the profs that I still had access to.
The Elements of Style. There is no substitute. I read it again every few years.
The humor of the triumvirate of Jesus, Bush, and Hitler aside, what is needed here is a longer view.
So what if there is some vandalism. Yes, vandalism is bad. What is important is whether the Wikipedia is useful. I find it useful, not perfect. How many people on this planet are using it now? As more and more people use it, the ethos of actually valuing it will increase. Right now amongst certain kiddies and manics there is some "cool" or "control" that arises from vandalizing or posting a screed. Gradually, over a few years that will change. A time will come when being able to add something useful to the WP will be a source of satisfaction and pride. Vandalizing and hectoring posts will lose their value.
I have been able to anonymously edit a few pages. I found a few spelling and grammatical errors. I fixed them. The update was immediate. It was a good thing.
So someone vandalizes and the page oscillates between content and junk. Pages that oscillate like that can be locked on the latest reasonable rendition and the backing and forthing can be moved to the discussion tab. In some entries the discussion tab is incredibly informative.
Is it the end? Not by a long, long shot. Time and patience will win out for all users.
You may be correct. I did the same but came away with a little different instinct.
I recognize a pattern I have seen before. When a person gets under this kind of pressure and scrutiny, they have a tendency to over explain, giving ever extending details right on out into the minutia.
Here's why. They feel very vulnerable to fallacious but effective attack of "you got one thing wrong, so everything might be wrong" or the "you left one thing out, so what else are you hiding." They feel compelled to try and head off these attacks by being excessively expository and detailed, giving their writing that edge of paranoia.
You may be right. But remember, just because he comes across as paranoid, doesn't mean they aren't after him. It also doesn't mean that the conspiracy to cover up this supposed problem is only his imagination.
Uhhh.... The people who fall out of the sky with it... and their families... And their employer's or employees... Oh! And friends. Let's not forget the friends.
Maybe not the funeral directors though.
Hey! He was ~not~ snitching. He was not just an engineer. He was Chief Engineer.
"Mangan was drawn by the firm's potential. His future seemed bright in February 2004 when he was hired as chief engineer at a salary of $100,000, plus $25,000 in moving expenses."
If the facts bear out his version, he was performing the very responsibilities for which he was hired. In that case, he'd be a hero by any measure.
If the facts do not bear out his case, he will no doubt be personally and professionally destroyed.
He may be in the latter situation in any event.
Performing your responsibilities is ~not~ snitching. It may be painful. Its reward may be scorn, derision, and spite but it is not snitching. The reward should be recognition, admiration, and promotion but you only have to read Whistleblowers to know the truth of it.
If only we could all focus on the real issue. It's learning not teaching. Learning should drive teaching not the reverse. That, unfortunately, is most often not the case.
As some in this long list of posts have noted, children and most adults are motivated, strongly motivated, to learn. They DO learn. They learn by the means that best fit their own talents and shortcomings when they are left to learn on their own.
School is a different matter. 'Sit down. Stop talking. Watch this. Listen to this. Stop moving your feet. Don't fiddle with that pencil. Write this. Recite that.' This atmosphere only fits a small percent of the population comfortably.
If a child or an adult learns better by singing numbers aloud to do times tables, he or she has a problem in school.
Somebody wrote that paddling should be brought back. I'm sure the singing math student would soon stop singing or feel the paddle. Hitting children is no solution to anything. A long time ago when I was a teacher in a middle school, I arrived thinking paddling was ok. I was called upon to be a "paddling witness" on a few occasions. I learned from that and many other experiences that hitting people to achieve order is not an effective solution, particularly when the punishment and the crime are distant in time and location. As a practical matter corporal punishment is a failure as a method of discipline and control. That is my experience.
There are levels of improvement worth discussing. Are we talking local improvements? Regional improvements? National improvements? Global improvements? Each of these have a different answer. The first improvement that would affect all these domains would be to have learning drive teaching.
Local improvements would be best served by focusing on better learning evironments and opportunities in reading, communications, and math. This triumvirate, properly structured, would provide the basis for focusing on common sense reasoning skills as well as a little formal reasoning.
Regional improvements would best be served by improving the learning environment and learning opportunities related to the regional community, citizenship, local history, basic economics, local ecology, and the job market. Once the job market is seriously part of the curriculum, opportunities to focus on specific learning specialties should be available. The sciences, math, technology, and trade or career opportunities should emerge as choices.
National opportunities would follow the regional model but expand to include opportunities to learn government, law, regulation and enforcement, economics and more.
Global opportunities would also follow the regional and national models, expanding the previous opportunities to learn about international implications of the matters already learned.
Finally, somewhere in the mix from local to regional would be the learning opportunities for those human endeavors that transcend (or at least ignore) practicality, dance, music, athletics, visual arts such as painting, photography, cinematography, and games such as checkers, chess, poker, backgammon, Zoombinis, Red Alert, Myst and lots more.
Learn about it. Read Mel Levine's books. Read about Summerhill. Read about the successes AND failures in home schooling. Home schooling has yet to show itself to be any better than other schooling when looked at with a broader view than just the outstanding successes. There are outstanding successes in public schooling too. Clearly, we are not pointing at those outstanding successes and saying everything is ok. We shouldn't do it with home schooling either. Youngsters deserve better than that.
Learning not teaching.
Learning makes us human.
The article's premise of per capita innovation is not very useful. Consider if we were to just look at a portion of the technology tree, health care. Would innovations per capita over all history be a useful measure of the continued rate of health care innovations today? I think not.
The absolute rate of innovation is more relevant for a few reasons.
Here's one.
Dissemination of innovation begets innovation. The rate of change influence the rate of change.
Any innovation today can potentially benefit everyone in a relatively short time frame. In the period he touts as the peak an innovation often would take 50 years or more to reach relative universality. Today a useful innovation will reach universality in a tenth the time.
Around 1999 I saw an LCD monitor prototype, about 200mmX200MM in a glass encased cabinet at a technology meeting. It was guarded by a security guard as well. Today, if I have the means, I can go out and buy an 19" LCD monitor for about $400.00.
How long was it for everyone to be able to buy a generally useful camera from the invention of photography?
A more complex benchmark would be more appropriate. Something like the rate of innovation per years of education per per capita would seem to me more relevant.
the same folks who run POTUS Bush's town hall meetings...
Oops sentence in the wrong paragraph. My bad proofing. Redux:
I worked in a middle school at the time and the school, for whatever reason, purchased a TI94x. Nobody in the building was remotely interested so I got to play with it all I wanted. I was and still am a fan of Programmed Instruction ala Susan Markle.
I wrote several tutorials for the amusement of the students and myself. It was so successful that I approached the district administration about it. I got a sympathetic hearing from the guy in charge of curriculum. Together we wroted a demonstration program in RPG for one of the eariest system 34/36/38 series of machines. It was the precursor to system 34 I think. I remember him telling me that RPG was a brand new language. (heh!)
It was a tutorial in English because the administrator was a former English teacher. The district, a blue collar area, didn't think that they could go further in it as they didn't think the community would accept it.
Being a computer ignoramus at the time, I didn't know anything about U of I's Plato system. I learned later that it was already in full bloom.
As to the issue of "unstructured input," that's a smokescreen. All input gets structured for analysis. Once the input device acquires the response, it is structured. This whole concept of unstructured is ridiculous. It is also exactly what they will hang their hat on. There is no such thing as unstructured input. Or more accurately, all input is unstructured until acquired by an input sensor.
Every input device begins the process of structuring and eventual analysis. The use of any input device is just a logical and obvious extension of the programmed instruction methodology. The computer was similarly an obvious extension of the paper and pencil methods of PI.
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I worked in a middle school at the time and the school, for whatever reason, purchased a TI94x. Nobody in the building was remotely interested so I got to play with it all I wanted. I was and still am a fan of Programmed Instruction ala Susan Markle. I remember him telling me that RPG was a brand new language. (heh!)
I wrote several tutorials for the amusement of the students and myself. It was so successful that I approached the district administration about it. I got a sympathetic hearing from the guy in charge of curriculum. Together we wroted a demonstration program in RPG for one of the eariest system 34/36/38 series of machines. It was the precursor to system 34 I think.
It was a tutorial in English because the administrator was a former English teacher. The district, a blue collar area, didn't think that they could go further in it as they didn't think the community would accept it.
Being a computer ignoramus at the time, I didn't know anything about U of I's Plato system. I learned later that it was already in full bloom.
As to the issue of "unstructured input," that's a smokescreen. All input gets structured for analysis. Once the input device acquires the response, it is structured. This whole concept of unstructured is ridiculous. It is also exactly what they will hang their hat on. There is no such thing as unstructured input. Or more accurately, all input is unstructured until acquired by an input sensor.
Every input device begins the process of structuring and eventual analysis. The use of any input device is just a logical and obvious extension of the programmed instruction methodology. The computer was similarly an obvious extension of the paper and pencil methods of PI.
First as somebody already said, when the baby comes home sleep, more than anything, will be the most important issue for your wife and you. For the first couple of weeks your sleep and especially your wife's sleep will be interrupted. So, the most important strategy is to be able to sleep when the baby sleeps.
If your wife nurses, she will most likely be a wreck for the first month. Nursing is terribly hard on her sleep. You get a break but she takes the pain. Treat her with care.
Here's what we did and it worked out pretty well. From about the age of newborn to about two months, we had the baby in a cradle at night in OUR bedroom. That way, after the first few paranoid nights, we relaxed and slept when the baby allowed. For most babies, gaining to about ten pounds leads to sleeping longer at night and if you are a bit lucky, through the night.
Have a plush chair or another cradle setup for the baby out where you will spend the day. I just put casters on our cradle. During that early time the cradle could go where we wanted to be. The baby wants a lot of holding time. Get one of those sling thingies for the baby to be attached to you. They are great.
After the baby was about 2-3 months s/he did crib time in his/her own bedroom in a regular crib that is good until about the age of 2 years. Around then they get athletic enough and smart enough to climb out. While they are not crawling or scooting around, have a really comfortable chair or something in the babies room that you can snooze in comfortably for those times when the baby is ill and your paranoia is off the scale. DON'T BRING THE BABY IN YOUR BED TO SLEEP after it is out of the cradle. If you must provide additional comfort to the child, you go in there.
When the baby moves into his/her own room, now is the time to install audio monitors. My youngest daughter just put one video cam onto the crib for her newborn son. But both of them found that the problem was not the cam but what to do with the cam data. Sending it to their computers made them feel visually tied to their displays. The idea of sending to a handheld or a phone hasn't come up but I suspect the same outcome. The advantage of the audio is that it can run in the background and not require anything more of you than to clip the receiver on your belt or jeans or skirt, I suppose. So, the video has gotten little use but the audio is very useful.
I could write you a ton more detail but the bottom line is that if the child isn't in your immediate presence and your mental health is important to you and you need some surveillance, audio is the way to go. Remember you're not looking for a high fidelity system just something that lets you hear the baby breathing and moving around. You can get systems from Toys R Us and Babies R Us that will do this job admirably.
If this video thing has come up because you are both returning to work, the remark that somebody made about having a babysitter that you need to surveil may be a problem is right on. Your baby is defenseless and long range surveillance won't be anything but evidence if things go wrong. I just got done doing about 3 years of babysitting my older daughter's kids. These little ones can really test a person's self control. You must have someone you trust enough without the surveillance.
Good luck and best wishes to you and your wife on a wonderful adventure that lies before the two of you.
I have owned two Kodaks. They were excellent. The werer so good, in fact, my son stole them from me. I wound up with a Fuji.
The Fuji is ok for snaps but nothing I have used matches the clarity and color of the Kodaks I had. I'm no pro so these were their midrange cameras. I give the model numbers but my son has them. They cost between $400 and $500.
I have to laugh at my son's strategy. Buy dad a gift of a Fuji, while he's puzzled make off with the Kodaks!
Oh, and yes I've use a few others, Minolta, Sony, etc.
This is the question to ask. I often wondered what CA's software graveyard policy was. I assumed that they must have some kind of money making strategy with each. They all just disappeared. This just seems to be a quasi-new twist on their consistent strategy of putting applications to death.
Because of these: $,$$$.$$
First, kudos to the prof for doing what he thought best for his students.
Second, for those sneering at Word, I have done commercial work in Word in single files from a few bytes to over 100MB. I did it that way because my clients asked for it in that format, No other format was of interest to them nor were suggestions for alternate methods such as simple HTML considered. Their personnel could handle hyperlinks just fine in Word, thank you.
It's what your audience and clients want that counts. I did over 50 manuals for one client, all stable all successful.
Open office is a good set of apps. HTML is a good presentation method. The same applies to the application methods and applications available in Microsoft Office.
I'm retired now and moving over to Linux for fun. I don't have to satisfy any clients so fooling around in Linux is fine. Maybe someday OO will be on a par with MO. But, right now as close as OO is, it isn't quite there.
If you work with business documentation, you better know MO.
Flame away!
Our family plays Ultima Online. Only Mom doesn't play. She will hardly touch the computer. She does watch us occasionally.
Ages and genders: 60M, 22M, 19F, 30M, 28F, 34M...
There's more but you get the idea. We all started shortly after UO beta'ed. You can play while on the phone if you have one of those unlimited weekend kind of packages. We have played with headsets but it didn't persist. Maybe with the newer packages it would. I was on just this morning redoing a house with my son. He's 500 miles from me but we cooperated online like we were sitting side by side.
Here are some advantages of this game. It is a persistent world in which you can build or buy a presence. You can have a house, do house furnishing and related artsy, fartsy stuff that the more creative and less aggressive find fun. You can be a crafter and eschew violence and combat or you can chew on your competitors and do combat and participate in all out wars if you like. You can treasure hunt. Go team or go solo for your adventures. You can set up a store and sell if you feel there's an unrequited commercial side to your personality.
Drawbacks are that you have to ante up between $10 and $15 a month per account. People that want to be online together must have their own account. Our accounts have varied from a low of 2 when we started years ago to a high of 7. We are back at 7 accounts. You have to be ok with a game view in which you looking down on the landscape from a viewpoint above. If you are interested in player vs. player combat, you better have a pretty fast machine or you won't stand a chance. A fast connection is a definite plus but not as important as a fast computer.
You can buy UO at Best Buy or whatever and build your accounts from scratch or you can buy them on eBay and forgo the building. You do have to get the client software somewhere. There are player run shards (UO worlds) that are free but I don't know much about them.
We really have a lot of laughs when we are all on together.
Look up the title "The Sands of Iwo Jima" ... When Hollywood violence was still sanitized.