As you move into the top tiers of schools, the ratio of duds to doers declines.
Actually, that's a non sequitur. President Bush graduated from Yale; many people called him a dud, but hey, he got the top job the country has to offer and he got to spend the legal limit of 8 years at it.
I'll bypass the issue of whether Bush was a dud or a doer, and point out that either way he's a single case. That's what we statisticians call an "anecdote", and would only be a valid counterargument if I had claimed that all top tier school graduates are doers, or all are duds. So actually, your comment is the non sequitur.
My personal opinion regarding Stanford, Yale, Harvard, etc. is that their graduates have rich parents or rich financial backers (including special scholarships).
I was fortunate enough to go to a couple of those top schools, and have taught at a variety of campuses since. Neither I nor most of my friends had rich parents or financial backers, although there certainly were plenty of people who were well off. However, the biggest difference I've observed between the top tier schools and the lower ones was in the distribution of student performance. The best students are the same at every campus I've ever been on, but the top schools have proportionally fewer students at the low end of the distribution.
This type of system will never dominate the top engineering/science schools. The key to a top notch eng/sci school is extremely knowledgeable faculty that know how to teach and know what material/projects are important for students. Maybe that's why this StraighterLine company focuses mostly on freshman courses...
I agree completely. It has always been possible to get almost all of the material found in a typical undergrad curriculum from your public library, and there have always been people who have done so. So why doesn't everybody get educated that way? Because most of us need the guidance and structure provided by a curriculum, not to mention the dedicated blocks of time that you have to carve out of your life if you're not a full time student. There's also the trusted agent certification aspect. Schools with top reputations still produce some duds, but there's a reason people value an education from Harvard, Stanford, Cambridge, Berkeley, MIT,... As you move into the top tiers of schools, the ratio of duds to doers declines. (How's that for alliteration?)
I'm the guy he's responding to, and there was nothing trollish about his post! You and I may disagree with him, but a legitimate difference of opinion is not trolling. Modding it "troll" is really pathetic.
No, they sued and won for the right to fire employees for refusing to lie to you.
A distinction without a difference. It's an uncontested matter of court record that they ordered the producers to knowingly include false information in a news documentary. By prevailing in the law suit, they have established their right to do so again. Do you think they have discontinued the practice after getting a favorable court ruling?
Yeah, I'd trust the BBC any day of the week over "news" reported by a Murdoch mouthpiece. In case there are people who remain unaware of it, Fox News sued and won for the right to lie to you. That's why it's popular in some circles to call it Faux News.
One could also make the counter-argument -- that it's the very involvement of government that gives Comcast their monopoly in the first place. Ever ask yourself why you can't just find some investors and start up a cable company to compete with them?
And the answer is found in Econ 101 - significant barriers to entry (massive infrastructure requirement) and the inefficiency of duplicating expensive infrastructure. It's the same reason that you don't find duplicate toll roads paralleling each other. This type of system naturally gravitates to a monopoly - whoever gets there first has a huge advantage over latecomers, and can drive them out of business by undercutting their prices, after which "hello monopoly pricing!"
Partisan politics doesn't enter into it until you get one group of people who have as their religion "free market always bad" facing off against another group whose religion is "free market always good". The truth of the matter is that it varies from business to business, product to product. Adjust policy accordingly - if the system has high barriers to entry or increasing returns to scale, regulate it to level the playing field and/or protect consumers. If it has low barriers to entry and decreasing returns to scale, let competitors duke it out in the free market.
You're confusing two orthogonal concepts - static typing and strong typing. Python, Ruby, Smalltalk, and lisp are all strongly typed, but the type enforcement occurs at runtime rather than compile time. C and C++ require that variables have compile time type definitions, but then can do all sorts of implicit conversions so they are statically but weakly typed.
We are already why to the right on the Laffer Curve and going further to the right is just going to push up unemployment more.
No, we are not way over to the right on the Laffer curve - that belief is Laffable. The US had some of its highest marginal tax rates - up around 90% - between WWII and the Kennedy administration, to pay down the war debt. The economy grew, and the debt got paid down. We're currently nowhere near the level of debt-to-GDP ratio we faced at the end of the second world war, and have nowhere near the level of marginal tax rates we had then, so to put it bluntly the prognostications of economic doom and gloom from fine fellows such as yourself strike me as nothing but fear tactics.
Here's a fun exercise - go grab the numbers from your favorite legitimate source for debt, GDP, and which party had control of the white house, congress, and the senate. Put them all together in a spreadsheet or stats package. Generate the debt-to-GDP ratio, and plot that side by side with who was making the laws and policies. If you really want to do it right, you should lag the ratio by a year because the economy has some inertia, and it takes a little time for new policies to get a toehold. You'll probably be surprised at what you see.
Hooray for new math!
ne...e...ew math!
It won't do you a bit of good
to review math.
'Cause it's so simple,
so very simple,
that only a child can do it!
15 km high superstructure? Pretty good place to start if you are working on a space-elevator-thingy.
Not really. A space elevator works by having its center of gravity at the distance for geosynchronous orbit (or slightly beyond, once you've hooked to the ground). That's about 22,300 miles. To build it, you start at the geosynchronous orbit and start spooling material simultaneously towards the earth and away, so the center of mass remains geosynchronous.
15km isn't a drop in the bucket by that measure. At 15km above a fixed point on earth, you're nowhere close to orbital velocity, whereas if you can climb up to 22,300 miles, you're at orbital velocity. And if you climb higher and time it right, you get a slingshot start to go other places.
I'm not saying that a 15km tower couldn't have valid uses, but it's not going to unlock planetary travel for us.
These are low-wage worker bees. The one thing they know for sure is that they won't get into trouble if they follow protocol. Do you really expect them to think? I'm not saying I like the result, but it's clear to me that if a TSA worker has a choice between your discomfort resulting from following protocol, and his if he breaks protocol and the outcome catches somebody's attention, he'll stick with protocol every time.
If convicted of burglary, yes. But the summary merely states that "he had been charged with burglary".*...
*Whether or not he commited the crime may be in the article, but you know we can't read that.
As a matter of fact, yes you can. Pay particular attention to the part that says "Safety reported recovering some $474 worth of stolen goods from him."
It's interesting that he went on to become a lawyer in California. I can understand him not wanting the information publicly available, I would seek another lawyer if I knew his background.
That's a stupid comment if there ever was one. I mean, as kids, you're supposed to know that you're doing something stupid?
If the guy cited in the summary were a minor I'd agree with you. However, if he were a minor the paper couldn't print his name. But a college age kid doing burglary? Yeah, he should know he's doing something stupid.
If the fossils are 47 million years old, they had about 45 million years in which to migrate. Plenty of time to forward their mail, even if the postmasters were Italian.
There is no "Naval Postgraduate Academy," it's the "Naval Postgraduate School". If the authors of the article couldn't be bothered to take 15 seconds to confirm that with Google, it makes me wonder what else is incorrect in their writeup.
How is inertia going to power sensors, communications gear, and attitude gyros? They're not talking about fuel for propulsion, they're talking about fuel to keep the onboard equipment working.
How about Students, give students an anonymous evaluation form to put their feelings of teachers on them, then when the time comes to get rid of unnecessary teachers, its easier to get rid of the ones where the students can't learn in. [...]
Because most students can't objectively evaluate what they learned relative to what they need to know, and turn evaluations into a popularity contest.
About 20 years ago I was teaching an upper division university course with a probability/statistics prerequisite. Two professors alternated teaching the prereq course. One of them got teaching evaluations that several times earned him teaching awards at the campus level. The other one got panned for being "unreasonable in his expectations", "nitpicky in his grading", and having exams that "weren't identical to the homework problems". The objective reality was, when I got a group from the award winning instructor they didn't know the things they were supposed to know before taking my course. The second instructor's students breezed through my course, having been well prepared. My own teaching evaluations alternated between low (when Prof. Awardwinner taught the prereq) and high (when it was Prof. Ogre) -- Awardwinner's students thought it was unreasonable of me to expect them to know the prereq material.
I'd argue that the correct measure of a teacher isn't student satisfaction or happiness, it's mastery of the material. If an instructor can give students happiness along with mastery, that's wonderful, but I'd rather see them learning the material than thinking the instructor is their pal. Teaching, like parenting, is about giving students what they need rather than what they want.
But back to the original subject, I suspect Apple's desire for custom chips comes not from a desire to save power (there are already many viable low-power CPUs and chipsets available) but rather a desire to fight off Hackintosh clones (OSX running on non-apple hardware, such as the Dell mini 9 or generic desktop PCs).
This doesn't make sense to me for their desktop machines. If that's their plan, they have to either 1) have all of the standard chipset for a commodity PC plus their proprietary chips and duplicate functionality, or 2) lose Windows compatibility because some subset of the operations are being pushed onto proprietary chips, and Windows doesn't speak their instruction set. Option 1 would increase the complexity on their motherboards and increase power usage, and I'd bet pretty strongly that they're not going to go with option 2.
The author of the article mentioned that boxes of punched cards inevitably got dropped, and had to be restored to their proper order. Since many programmers ignored the sequence numbers in cols 72-80, or forgot them, a simple quick-fix trick was to draw a diagonal stripe across the top of the deck with a magic marker.
The problem is that it's hard to pin down the advantages in a manner that people will "get it".
I don't know how many times I've shown (honestly so and in a way the people were just gobsmacked...) those advantages- and people will still use XP or Vista...
Then you're probably committing a classic blunder - you're telling them about the things you care about instead of the things they care about.
That's what's wrong with the wining Linux ad. People who are already Linux users are not the target audience, and picking an ad Linux users think is cool isn't going to make a dent in the mindset of other folks.
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As you move into the top tiers of schools, the ratio of duds to doers declines.
Actually, that's a non sequitur. President Bush graduated from Yale; many people called him a dud, but hey, he got the top job the country has to offer and he got to spend the legal limit of 8 years at it.
I'll bypass the issue of whether Bush was a dud or a doer, and point out that either way he's a single case. That's what we statisticians call an "anecdote", and would only be a valid counterargument if I had claimed that all top tier school graduates are doers, or all are duds. So actually, your comment is the non sequitur.
My personal opinion regarding Stanford, Yale, Harvard, etc. is that their graduates have rich parents or rich financial backers (including special scholarships).
I was fortunate enough to go to a couple of those top schools, and have taught at a variety of campuses since. Neither I nor most of my friends had rich parents or financial backers, although there certainly were plenty of people who were well off. However, the biggest difference I've observed between the top tier schools and the lower ones was in the distribution of student performance. The best students are the same at every campus I've ever been on, but the top schools have proportionally fewer students at the low end of the distribution.
This type of system will never dominate the top engineering/science schools. The key to a top notch eng/sci school is extremely knowledgeable faculty that know how to teach and know what material/projects are important for students. Maybe that's why this StraighterLine company focuses mostly on freshman courses...
I agree completely. It has always been possible to get almost all of the material found in a typical undergrad curriculum from your public library, and there have always been people who have done so. So why doesn't everybody get educated that way? Because most of us need the guidance and structure provided by a curriculum, not to mention the dedicated blocks of time that you have to carve out of your life if you're not a full time student. There's also the trusted agent certification aspect. Schools with top reputations still produce some duds, but there's a reason people value an education from Harvard, Stanford, Cambridge, Berkeley, MIT,... As you move into the top tiers of schools, the ratio of duds to doers declines. (How's that for alliteration?)
I'm the guy he's responding to, and there was nothing trollish about his post! You and I may disagree with him, but a legitimate difference of opinion is not trolling. Modding it "troll" is really pathetic.
No, they sued and won for the right to fire employees for refusing to lie to you.
A distinction without a difference. It's an uncontested matter of court record that they ordered the producers to knowingly include false information in a news documentary. By prevailing in the law suit, they have established their right to do so again. Do you think they have discontinued the practice after getting a favorable court ruling?
Yeah, I'd trust the BBC any day of the week over "news" reported by a Murdoch mouthpiece. In case there are people who remain unaware of it, Fox News sued and won for the right to lie to you. That's why it's popular in some circles to call it Faux News.
One could also make the counter-argument -- that it's the very involvement of government that gives Comcast their monopoly in the first place. Ever ask yourself why you can't just find some investors and start up a cable company to compete with them?
And the answer is found in Econ 101 - significant barriers to entry (massive infrastructure requirement) and the inefficiency of duplicating expensive infrastructure. It's the same reason that you don't find duplicate toll roads paralleling each other. This type of system naturally gravitates to a monopoly - whoever gets there first has a huge advantage over latecomers, and can drive them out of business by undercutting their prices, after which "hello monopoly pricing!"
Partisan politics doesn't enter into it until you get one group of people who have as their religion "free market always bad" facing off against another group whose religion is "free market always good". The truth of the matter is that it varies from business to business, product to product. Adjust policy accordingly - if the system has high barriers to entry or increasing returns to scale, regulate it to level the playing field and/or protect consumers. If it has low barriers to entry and decreasing returns to scale, let competitors duke it out in the free market.
You're confusing two orthogonal concepts - static typing and strong typing. Python, Ruby, Smalltalk, and lisp are all strongly typed, but the type enforcement occurs at runtime rather than compile time. C and C++ require that variables have compile time type definitions, but then can do all sorts of implicit conversions so they are statically but weakly typed.
We are already why to the right on the Laffer Curve and going further to the right is just going to push up unemployment more.
No, we are not way over to the right on the Laffer curve - that belief is Laffable. The US had some of its highest marginal tax rates - up around 90% - between WWII and the Kennedy administration, to pay down the war debt. The economy grew, and the debt got paid down. We're currently nowhere near the level of debt-to-GDP ratio we faced at the end of the second world war, and have nowhere near the level of marginal tax rates we had then, so to put it bluntly the prognostications of economic doom and gloom from fine fellows such as yourself strike me as nothing but fear tactics.
Here's a fun exercise - go grab the numbers from your favorite legitimate source for debt, GDP, and which party had control of the white house, congress, and the senate. Put them all together in a spreadsheet or stats package. Generate the debt-to-GDP ratio, and plot that side by side with who was making the laws and policies. If you really want to do it right, you should lag the ratio by a year because the economy has some inertia, and it takes a little time for new policies to get a toehold. You'll probably be surprised at what you see.
When the government starts censoring things, I find that it is usually because of national security issues more than anything else.
I've seen quite the opposite. Censoring is much more likely to be about covering your ass than about national security.
"This is so simple, even a child can do it! Someone get me a child, I can't make heads nor tails of it!"
Sounds like Tom Lehrer's song "New Math".
Hooray for new math!
ne...e...ew math!
It won't do you a bit of good
to review math.
'Cause it's so simple,
so very simple,
that only a child can do it!
... PRL list (preferred roaming list).
This message was brought to you by the Department of Redundancy Department.
15 km high superstructure? Pretty good place to start if you are working on a space-elevator-thingy.
Not really. A space elevator works by having its center of gravity at the distance for geosynchronous orbit (or slightly beyond, once you've hooked to the ground). That's about 22,300 miles. To build it, you start at the geosynchronous orbit and start spooling material simultaneously towards the earth and away, so the center of mass remains geosynchronous.
15km isn't a drop in the bucket by that measure. At 15km above a fixed point on earth, you're nowhere close to orbital velocity, whereas if you can climb up to 22,300 miles, you're at orbital velocity. And if you climb higher and time it right, you get a slingshot start to go other places.
I'm not saying that a 15km tower couldn't have valid uses, but it's not going to unlock planetary travel for us.
Why do you need an Adjustable Rate Mortgage to power it?
Too many idiots write specifications in terms of products vs protocols.
Why think when you can follow protocol?
These are low-wage worker bees. The one thing they know for sure is that they won't get into trouble if they follow protocol. Do you really expect them to think? I'm not saying I like the result, but it's clear to me that if a TSA worker has a choice between your discomfort resulting from following protocol, and his if he breaks protocol and the outcome catches somebody's attention, he'll stick with protocol every time.
What are all these dangerous chemicals of which you speak???
I dare you to try drinking them!
If convicted of burglary, yes. But the summary merely states that "he had been charged with burglary".*...
*Whether or not he commited the crime may be in the article, but you know we can't read that.
As a matter of fact, yes you can. Pay particular attention to the part that says "Safety reported recovering some $474 worth of stolen goods from him."
It's interesting that he went on to become a lawyer in California. I can understand him not wanting the information publicly available, I would seek another lawyer if I knew his background.
That's a stupid comment if there ever was one. I mean, as kids, you're supposed to know that you're doing something stupid?
If the guy cited in the summary were a minor I'd agree with you. However, if he were a minor the paper couldn't print his name. But a college age kid doing burglary? Yeah, he should know he's doing something stupid.
If the fossils are 47 million years old, they had about 45 million years in which to migrate. Plenty of time to forward their mail, even if the postmasters were Italian.
There is no "Naval Postgraduate Academy," it's the "Naval Postgraduate School". If the authors of the article couldn't be bothered to take 15 seconds to confirm that with Google, it makes me wonder what else is incorrect in their writeup.
How is inertia going to power sensors, communications gear, and attitude gyros? They're not talking about fuel for propulsion, they're talking about fuel to keep the onboard equipment working.
How about Students, give students an anonymous evaluation form to put their feelings of teachers on them, then when the time comes to get rid of unnecessary teachers, its easier to get rid of the ones where the students can't learn in. [...]
Because most students can't objectively evaluate what they learned relative to what they need to know, and turn evaluations into a popularity contest.
About 20 years ago I was teaching an upper division university course with a probability/statistics prerequisite. Two professors alternated teaching the prereq course. One of them got teaching evaluations that several times earned him teaching awards at the campus level. The other one got panned for being "unreasonable in his expectations", "nitpicky in his grading", and having exams that "weren't identical to the homework problems". The objective reality was, when I got a group from the award winning instructor they didn't know the things they were supposed to know before taking my course. The second instructor's students breezed through my course, having been well prepared. My own teaching evaluations alternated between low (when Prof. Awardwinner taught the prereq) and high (when it was Prof. Ogre) -- Awardwinner's students thought it was unreasonable of me to expect them to know the prereq material.
I'd argue that the correct measure of a teacher isn't student satisfaction or happiness, it's mastery of the material. If an instructor can give students happiness along with mastery, that's wonderful, but I'd rather see them learning the material than thinking the instructor is their pal. Teaching, like parenting, is about giving students what they need rather than what they want.
But back to the original subject, I suspect Apple's desire for custom chips comes not from a desire to save power (there are already many viable low-power CPUs and chipsets available) but rather a desire to fight off Hackintosh clones (OSX running on non-apple hardware, such as the Dell mini 9 or generic desktop PCs).
This doesn't make sense to me for their desktop machines. If that's their plan, they have to either 1) have all of the standard chipset for a commodity PC plus their proprietary chips and duplicate functionality, or 2) lose Windows compatibility because some subset of the operations are being pushed onto proprietary chips, and Windows doesn't speak their instruction set. Option 1 would increase the complexity on their motherboards and increase power usage, and I'd bet pretty strongly that they're not going to go with option 2.
The author of the article mentioned that boxes of punched cards inevitably got dropped, and had to be restored to their proper order. Since many programmers ignored the sequence numbers in cols 72-80, or forgot them, a simple quick-fix trick was to draw a diagonal stripe across the top of the deck with a magic marker.
The problem is that it's hard to pin down the advantages in a manner that people will "get it".
I don't know how many times I've shown (honestly so and in a way the people were just gobsmacked...) those advantages- and people will still use XP or Vista...
Then you're probably committing a classic blunder - you're telling them about the things you care about instead of the things they care about.
That's what's wrong with the wining Linux ad. People who are already Linux users are not the target audience, and picking an ad Linux users think is cool isn't going to make a dent in the mindset of other folks.