Vote for your third party candidate as #1 then you can avoid "wasting" your vote by ranking the others. If your #1 choice doesn't make it, then at least you still have a say in the remaining candidates.
Most importantly, everyone can see how many people voted for your third party, since nobody will vote for a more popular party as #1 thinking it would be wasted. =Smidge=
One would assume that, since the author's name is specifically tied to an article (ie non-anonymous) then there will be some minimal degree of accountability for the content. If a real name is required, then you would filter out a lot of the anonymous psuedo-babble. Also, shit articles would, in theory, find themselves at the bottom of the pile.
One thing I don't totally agree with is the sentiment "competition of ideas is a good thing." For conversational, social and political topics this is certainly true, but the same can not be said for ALL subjects. Where science is concerned, for example, not all "ideas" have the same value.
It will be interesting to see how this pans out. Regardless, I can't see how it could end up WORSE than Wikipedia and it's still as free as anything else (ie ads don't cost the visitor any relevant amount of money) =Smidge=
1) This is worse than Wikipedia... how, exactly? One would think that ad revenue would be proportional to the relevancy and quality of the article content. The only question I have is who gets a cut of the money if someone makes a major revision to an article.
2) Can you absolutely quantify how much it costs you to visit a page with a Google ad banner? Wikipedia isn't free either - SOMEBODY has to pay for it. At some level everything needs to be paid for.
Don't forget that an external UV light is required, rather than the skin glowing all by itself. The hair blocks the UV light from getting to the skin, and any glow from what little does get through it blocked on the way out.
1) The Know-It-All: Suck it up and deal with it. 2) The Know-Nothing: Suck it up and deal with it. 3) Mr. Entitlement: Suck it up and deal with it. 4) The Finger-Pointer: Suck it up and deal with it. 5) The Twentysomething Whiz Kid: Suck it up and deal with it.
In a lab, maybe. In practice, commerically, not so much. 15% is more like it, but that's when they're new. After a time they drop to about 12%, so that's what you design at. Then 85-90% for the inverter unless you're using direct DC.
You also say "700 W/m^2 during the day" - what part of the day? Those measurements (available at your local weather data collection agency) are figured for surfaces perpendicular to the direction of sunlight. Do you plan to install a tracking mount for your panels? If not you have to derate the capacity. =Smidge=
Well, if the vandalism includes things like changing the route number and destination sign, so the bus takes you somewhere you didn't want to go, maybe you SHOULD stop using it.
My point is it is not possible to know what is valid and what isn't unless you already know the information, so it becomes a serious problem when administrators ACTIVELY create bias in articles - especially articles that are difficult to quantify in solid facts like articles about religion, politics, and people.
Actually, as I understand it, there is accountability, but it is not based in hierarchy nor in authority. This bugs some people. Others just shrug and use it.
It is community based.
So a wiki admin is accountable to the wiki community in much the same way that a monarch is accountable to his public? That's not really accountable at all.
What's the likelihood of getting an admin thrown out for power abuse (and general douchebaggery) if that admin is popular among the other staff? I've never even heard of second-hand accounts of this happening. What's the likelihood of throwing out an unpopular admin regardless of actual performance? I'd suspect it's so likely it might even be spontaneous. That's the crux of the problem. At least with corrupt politicians they have to go through the trouble of rigging an election to keep their jobs.
-----
I had a pretty lengthy debate about the relative merits and "truthiness" of Wikipedia. I think most reasonable people would not take it as an authority on anything. However, even though wikipedia explicitly states no claims to validity, there is no doubt that people visit it with at least SOME expectation that the information they get will be valid. It is touted as an encyclopedia - an all encompassing, typically factual collection of knowledge. They sell the fact that anyone can edit it to correct mistakes and that many eyes and many opinions help to eliminate bias. People expect articles to be written by or at least corrected by those who know what thet're talking about. Whenever someoen defends WP these are exactly the drums they beat.
You never see anything about Wikipedia being inaccurate unless you click the very small link at the bottom of the page that says "Disclaimers." Nobody would use an encyclopedia if they weren't at least somewhat sure the information they find in it is correct. Even if it is common sense that anyone could write anything, and therefore you can't trust it. A lot of effort goes into maintaining a public image of authority while downplaying the ugly truth of the matter.
That said, though, I use wikipedia several times a day and usually (but not always) employ that information without any further research, usually because the purpose of that information is of little consequence. I don't think I'm unique in that matter, but that only reinforces the image of an authoritative source. =Smidge=
Point is, it is a useful source of information. If you don't have the critical skills to determine where it is not useful, you should ask your Mom for help in using it.
Unless the article is CLEARLY bias, the only way to know if an article is useless is to already know more than the article. How would you know that an article is missing some detail? If you know enough to determine a particular article is not adequate, why are you looking it up on Wikipedia in the first place?
The real problem is - as outlined in this article and others - when you DO know more than Wikipedia, and try to fix it, people can actively prevent you from doing so. Not just random people undoing your edits, but admins banning you, locking articles and deleting your articles. There is ZERO accountability on the part of the admins and other staff. Zero. Ultimately the usefullnes and credability of Wiipedia rests in the hands of anonymous, appointed staffers who don't have to answer to anyone.
Make admins accountable for the content of the articles. Not necessarily the factual/technical accuracy, since it seems unreasonable for an admin to be an expert on every subject they might watch over, but the impartiality of both the tone and accessability of the articles. Most of all, remove their anonimity and provide a proper mechanism for outing the bad apples.
Wikipedia should be the encyclopedia anyone can edit, not just the people whom the admins agree with. =Smidge=
Nope, just an AC that copy-pasted a paragraph from the article that far too many mods are not going to read and waste their points thinking he's being original and intelligent.
"...the new design achieves an operation speed of 250MHz; double that of conventional MRAMs and almost equivalent to that of recent LSI-embedded SRAM."
Doesn't say anything about size though, assuming you mean physical size/bit density. =Smidge=
You, sir, are an idiot. Chances are you didn't know that.
Unless, of course, you care to explain in reasoned, non-assholish language how improving a student's access and means of organizing information negates the need for structured lessons and human interaction. =Smidge=
I agree that, to a very large level, it is well-intentioned buy wasteful spending to cram computers into every classroom. I've personally been witness to hundreds of millions of dollar's worth of "network infrastructure upgrades" across several school districts, and it's a damn shame because nobody uses it. (Special "clean" power for computers installed in raceways with special orange outlets, 4 per workstation? The teacher plugged her mini fridge and coffee pot into one and used a chain of surge protectors from a normal wall outlet for the computers...)
Anyway, while a bit of a daydream I can see a potential at least.
1) The laptop as a replacement for textbooks. Able to be updated and searched. Also, carrying around one XO laptop is better than managing a half dozen books, and if the computers get recycled after 8th grade then the long term costs could level out.
2) It allows a student to keep more organized. Notes and assignments could be kept on the device and mirrored at a school or even district level server (the XO supports handwriting input). No more "forgetting your homework" since everything is in the computer. ("What happens if the student leaves it home" argument is irrelevant since that applies to notebooks too). Update school announcements and calendar events.
3) Media distribution to students. Imagine those typically boring films you had to watch, only being able to pause and rewind at your leisure and even take it home to study. Audio and video recordings/pictures from field trips or lessons. Combine this with those digital whiteboards and stream the info right to the laptops (already done in some places). A student could potentially take an entire day's worth of lessons home and replay them. Unit supports USB and wireless so storage isn't much of an issue on or off school grounds.
4) Parental monitoring. With the ability to record a log of daily use, if not entire lessons, the parents will have a better understanding of what goes on in the classroom (for better or worse). This assumes the parent actually bothers to access the laptop and check, of course, but it makes possible what is currently impossible or at least wildly impractical.
5) Electronic grading. With the ability to distribute and collect most assignments digitally, the entire process becomes simpler. One copy of an assignment can be distributed to any number of students and they can be submitted as soon as they are complete (cutoff times/due dates are easily implemented). Records of grades are easily maintained and accessed. Plagiarism is easier to detect using DIFF-like utilities, and I'd even support some kind of DRM-esque scheme to help detect or even prevent (something that is difficult to do with paper). Tests can be administered by providing a collection of questions that are presented in a different order for each student, with randomized answers for multiple-guess type exams. Beats scan-trons and makes cheating nearly impossible.
Again, all pure daydreaming on my part. None of this gets in the way of teaching the basics either, which I agree is most important. $200 per student seems a better deal than central labs, too. I've seen initiatives that have 1 computer for every 5 students, which is also about right for a computer lab since only one class can use it at a time. If the backend stuff is more or less the same, you can get five to ten $200 laptops for the cost of a single, normal desktop workstation - pretty significant savings - and each student has access all day. =Smidge=
Well, if the numbers were burned into their retinas like that, then wouldn't the apparent position of the "ghost" numbers be relative to where the chimp was looking? In other words, that only helps as long as the eyes and head don't move relative to the monitor.
They saw nine numbers displayed on a computer screen. When they touched the first number, the other eight turned into white squares. The test was to touch all these squares in the order of the numbers that used to be there.
Results showed that the chimps, while no more accurate than the people, could do this faster.
I requoted that part because the test they are talking about is important.
If you can see these numbers on the screen for any length of time you want, then "reaction" becomes irrelevant. I interpret this portion of the article to say the chimps could perform at the same accuracy as the humans while taking less time to memorize and recall the numbers' locations. That certainly sounds like "better" short-term memory to me... increased speed without loss of accuracy.
The SECOND test also involved remembering the location of five numbers on the screen and recalling these locations in the correct order, except the subjects had less than a second to study them. This test indicates that the chimp was again able to memorize the pattern faster and with more accuracy than humans. =Smidge=
In my areas they're offering 50/20 service for $90/mo with annual contract. That's about double what I'm currently paying for Cable, but I only get 15/5 with that (plus the magic bandwidth cap if you dare use all of it for any length of time)
VERY Temping... maybe in the springtime... =Smidge=
You say that until, one day, they develop a protein on the outer membrane and clump together. Then they start sharing excess food materials or other beneficial chemicals, and finally start to reproduce not as individuals but as a collection of cells (budding)... Maybe you'd have a new species of Hydra on your hands.
So what I said is somehow irrelevant because I, myself, didn't perform the test?
You realize I didn't just pull this test out of my ass, but it's actually a fairly common experiment for those who study biology though the exact process might differ. I don't have to perform the experiment because it's already been performed ad-nausium.
One of your pitfalls is the definition of "species." The scientific classification of a species is actually very arbitrary, and exactly where one species begins and another ends depends entirely on the type of organism you're referring to.
The other pitfall is you fail to grasp the geological timescales over which complex organisms (such as mammals) evolve. Speciation occurs when you have a group of whatever that is split up and evolve separately. If the population stays in contact and they keep interbreeding, then mutations get smeared throughout and there is no speciation event.
Just because your cat never gave birth to a baby horse does not conclude that eventually the descendants of your cat would split into two or more mutually incompatible populations of cat-like creatures.
I strongly suggest you research something called "ring species" before you get so bent out of shape.
And just as you said, Scientific theory can be proven wrong at any time. There's a trick to this, though - since scientific theory is based on observation and testing, even if it is proven "wrong" it is not necessarily wrong. At best, the theory can still be applied as long as you understand its limitations. At worst, the theory altered so it accounts for both the old and new evidence.
Newtonian Physics is a great example; For over a hundred years people believed that F=ma. It was the law. Moreover, it was accurate such that you could do useful things with it. Then Einstein came along with his relativity theory and E=mc^2. Suddenly, F=ma was no longer correct, because mass became a function of velocity! It rocked the scientific community to the very core and turned everything we had believed for the past hundred years on it's head.
But everything we built with the idea that F-ma didn't suddenly stop working, did it? This is because science doesn't need FAITH to work. Even if Newtonian physics has been proven to be faulty, it's still "correct" and useful providing you know the limitations (ie: aren't anywhere near the speed of light.) =Smidge=
Slashdot Mirror
Instant Runoff Elections solve this problem.
Vote for your third party candidate as #1 then you can avoid "wasting" your vote by ranking the others. If your #1 choice doesn't make it, then at least you still have a say in the remaining candidates.
Most importantly, everyone can see how many people voted for your third party, since nobody will vote for a more popular party as #1 thinking it would be wasted.
=Smidge=
Unfortunately for you, your GF can speak, and it may be dangerous to disregard her "advice."
=Smidge=
I'd rather have my Companion Cube!
=Smidge=
One would assume that, since the author's name is specifically tied to an article (ie non-anonymous) then there will be some minimal degree of accountability for the content. If a real name is required, then you would filter out a lot of the anonymous psuedo-babble. Also, shit articles would, in theory, find themselves at the bottom of the pile.
One thing I don't totally agree with is the sentiment "competition of ideas is a good thing." For conversational, social and political topics this is certainly true, but the same can not be said for ALL subjects. Where science is concerned, for example, not all "ideas" have the same value.
It will be interesting to see how this pans out. Regardless, I can't see how it could end up WORSE than Wikipedia and it's still as free as anything else (ie ads don't cost the visitor any relevant amount of money)
=Smidge=
Two thoughts come to mind:
1) This is worse than Wikipedia... how, exactly? One would think that ad revenue would be proportional to the relevancy and quality of the article content. The only question I have is who gets a cut of the money if someone makes a major revision to an article.
2) Can you absolutely quantify how much it costs you to visit a page with a Google ad banner? Wikipedia isn't free either - SOMEBODY has to pay for it. At some level everything needs to be paid for.
=Smidge=
Don't forget that an external UV light is required, rather than the skin glowing all by itself. The hair blocks the UV light from getting to the skin, and any glow from what little does get through it blocked on the way out.
=Smidge=
1) The Know-It-All: Suck it up and deal with it.
2) The Know-Nothing: Suck it up and deal with it.
3) Mr. Entitlement: Suck it up and deal with it.
4) The Finger-Pointer: Suck it up and deal with it.
5) The Twentysomething Whiz Kid: Suck it up and deal with it.
The Dream User: Keep dreaming.
=Smidge=
...Some people have too much time on their hands.
=Smidge=
Would you say it's like rain on your wedding day?
(Sorry BadAnalogyGuy, I can't help but feel you dropped the ball on that one.)
=Smidge=
Solar panels are about 30% efficient
In a lab, maybe. In practice, commerically, not so much. 15% is more like it, but that's when they're new. After a time they drop to about 12%, so that's what you design at. Then 85-90% for the inverter unless you're using direct DC.
You also say "700 W/m^2 during the day" - what part of the day? Those measurements (available at your local weather data collection agency) are figured for surfaces perpendicular to the direction of sunlight. Do you plan to install a tracking mount for your panels? If not you have to derate the capacity.
=Smidge=
It's also the only compression method that, when compressing RIAA material, actually improves the quality of the recording!
=Smidge=
Well, if the vandalism includes things like changing the route number and destination sign, so the bus takes you somewhere you didn't want to go, maybe you SHOULD stop using it.
=Smidge=
So a wiki admin is accountable to the wiki community in much the same way that a monarch is accountable to his public? That's not really accountable at all.
What's the likelihood of getting an admin thrown out for power abuse (and general douchebaggery) if that admin is popular among the other staff? I've never even heard of second-hand accounts of this happening. What's the likelihood of throwing out an unpopular admin regardless of actual performance? I'd suspect it's so likely it might even be spontaneous. That's the crux of the problem. At least with corrupt politicians they have to go through the trouble of rigging an election to keep their jobs.
-----
I had a pretty lengthy debate about the relative merits and "truthiness" of Wikipedia. I think most reasonable people would not take it as an authority on anything. However, even though wikipedia explicitly states no claims to validity, there is no doubt that people visit it with at least SOME expectation that the information they get will be valid. It is touted as an encyclopedia - an all encompassing, typically factual collection of knowledge. They sell the fact that anyone can edit it to correct mistakes and that many eyes and many opinions help to eliminate bias. People expect articles to be written by or at least corrected by those who know what thet're talking about. Whenever someoen defends WP these are exactly the drums they beat.
You never see anything about Wikipedia being inaccurate unless you click the very small link at the bottom of the page that says "Disclaimers." Nobody would use an encyclopedia if they weren't at least somewhat sure the information they find in it is correct. Even if it is common sense that anyone could write anything, and therefore you can't trust it. A lot of effort goes into maintaining a public image of authority while downplaying the ugly truth of the matter.
That said, though, I use wikipedia several times a day and usually (but not always) employ that information without any further research, usually because the purpose of that information is of little consequence. I don't think I'm unique in that matter, but that only reinforces the image of an authoritative source.
=Smidge=
Point is, it is a useful source of information. If you don't have the critical skills to determine where it is not useful, you should ask your Mom for help in using it.
Unless the article is CLEARLY bias, the only way to know if an article is useless is to already know more than the article. How would you know that an article is missing some detail? If you know enough to determine a particular article is not adequate, why are you looking it up on Wikipedia in the first place?
The real problem is - as outlined in this article and others - when you DO know more than Wikipedia, and try to fix it, people can actively prevent you from doing so. Not just random people undoing your edits, but admins banning you, locking articles and deleting your articles. There is ZERO accountability on the part of the admins and other staff. Zero. Ultimately the usefullnes and credability of Wiipedia rests in the hands of anonymous, appointed staffers who don't have to answer to anyone.
Make admins accountable for the content of the articles. Not necessarily the factual/technical accuracy, since it seems unreasonable for an admin to be an expert on every subject they might watch over, but the impartiality of both the tone and accessability of the articles. Most of all, remove their anonimity and provide a proper mechanism for outing the bad apples.
Wikipedia should be the encyclopedia anyone can edit, not just the people whom the admins agree with.
=Smidge=
Smidge204: Moderation +3; 60% Insightful; 20% Offtopic; 20% Informative
game kid: Moderation +1; 100% Insightful
=Smidge=
Nope, just an AC that copy-pasted a paragraph from the article that far too many mods are not going to read and waste their points thinking he's being original and intelligent.
Nothing to see here, move along...
=Smidge=
From the article:
"...the new design achieves an operation speed of 250MHz; double that of conventional MRAMs and almost equivalent to that of recent LSI-embedded SRAM."
Doesn't say anything about size though, assuming you mean physical size/bit density.
=Smidge=
You, sir, are an idiot. Chances are you didn't know that.
Unless, of course, you care to explain in reasoned, non-assholish language how improving a student's access and means of organizing information negates the need for structured lessons and human interaction.
=Smidge=
I agree that, to a very large level, it is well-intentioned buy wasteful spending to cram computers into every classroom. I've personally been witness to hundreds of millions of dollar's worth of "network infrastructure upgrades" across several school districts, and it's a damn shame because nobody uses it. (Special "clean" power for computers installed in raceways with special orange outlets, 4 per workstation? The teacher plugged her mini fridge and coffee pot into one and used a chain of surge protectors from a normal wall outlet for the computers...)
Anyway, while a bit of a daydream I can see a potential at least.
1) The laptop as a replacement for textbooks. Able to be updated and searched. Also, carrying around one XO laptop is better than managing a half dozen books, and if the computers get recycled after 8th grade then the long term costs could level out.
2) It allows a student to keep more organized. Notes and assignments could be kept on the device and mirrored at a school or even district level server (the XO supports handwriting input). No more "forgetting your homework" since everything is in the computer. ("What happens if the student leaves it home" argument is irrelevant since that applies to notebooks too). Update school announcements and calendar events.
3) Media distribution to students. Imagine those typically boring films you had to watch, only being able to pause and rewind at your leisure and even take it home to study. Audio and video recordings/pictures from field trips or lessons. Combine this with those digital whiteboards and stream the info right to the laptops (already done in some places). A student could potentially take an entire day's worth of lessons home and replay them. Unit supports USB and wireless so storage isn't much of an issue on or off school grounds.
4) Parental monitoring. With the ability to record a log of daily use, if not entire lessons, the parents will have a better understanding of what goes on in the classroom (for better or worse). This assumes the parent actually bothers to access the laptop and check, of course, but it makes possible what is currently impossible or at least wildly impractical.
5) Electronic grading. With the ability to distribute and collect most assignments digitally, the entire process becomes simpler. One copy of an assignment can be distributed to any number of students and they can be submitted as soon as they are complete (cutoff times/due dates are easily implemented). Records of grades are easily maintained and accessed. Plagiarism is easier to detect using DIFF-like utilities, and I'd even support some kind of DRM-esque scheme to help detect or even prevent (something that is difficult to do with paper). Tests can be administered by providing a collection of questions that are presented in a different order for each student, with randomized answers for multiple-guess type exams. Beats scan-trons and makes cheating nearly impossible.
Again, all pure daydreaming on my part. None of this gets in the way of teaching the basics either, which I agree is most important. $200 per student seems a better deal than central labs, too. I've seen initiatives that have 1 computer for every 5 students, which is also about right for a computer lab since only one class can use it at a time. If the backend stuff is more or less the same, you can get five to ten $200 laptops for the cost of a single, normal desktop workstation - pretty significant savings - and each student has access all day.
=Smidge=
Well, if the numbers were burned into their retinas like that, then wouldn't the apparent position of the "ghost" numbers be relative to where the chimp was looking? In other words, that only helps as long as the eyes and head don't move relative to the monitor.
=Smidge=
I requoted that part because the test they are talking about is important.
If you can see these numbers on the screen for any length of time you want, then "reaction" becomes irrelevant. I interpret this portion of the article to say the chimps could perform at the same accuracy as the humans while taking less time to memorize and recall the numbers' locations. That certainly sounds like "better" short-term memory to me... increased speed without loss of accuracy.
The SECOND test also involved remembering the location of five numbers on the screen and recalling these locations in the correct order, except the subjects had less than a second to study them. This test indicates that the chimp was again able to memorize the pattern faster and with more accuracy than humans.
=Smidge=
They can't even keep people from breaking in and stealing their expresso supplies! No wonder they have so much trouble with security...
=Smidge=
In my areas they're offering 50/20 service for $90/mo with annual contract. That's about double what I'm currently paying for Cable, but I only get 15/5 with that (plus the magic bandwidth cap if you dare use all of it for any length of time)
VERY Temping... maybe in the springtime...
=Smidge=
You say that until, one day, they develop a protein on the outer membrane and clump together. Then they start sharing excess food materials or other beneficial chemicals, and finally start to reproduce not as individuals but as a collection of cells (budding)... Maybe you'd have a new species of Hydra on your hands.
=Smidge=
So what I said is somehow irrelevant because I, myself, didn't perform the test?
You realize I didn't just pull this test out of my ass, but it's actually a fairly common experiment for those who study biology though the exact process might differ. I don't have to perform the experiment because it's already been performed ad-nausium.
One of your pitfalls is the definition of "species." The scientific classification of a species is actually very arbitrary, and exactly where one species begins and another ends depends entirely on the type of organism you're referring to.
The other pitfall is you fail to grasp the geological timescales over which complex organisms (such as mammals) evolve. Speciation occurs when you have a group of whatever that is split up and evolve separately. If the population stays in contact and they keep interbreeding, then mutations get smeared throughout and there is no speciation event.
Just because your cat never gave birth to a baby horse does not conclude that eventually the descendants of your cat would split into two or more mutually incompatible populations of cat-like creatures.
I strongly suggest you research something called "ring species" before you get so bent out of shape.
And just as you said, Scientific theory can be proven wrong at any time. There's a trick to this, though - since scientific theory is based on observation and testing, even if it is proven "wrong" it is not necessarily wrong. At best, the theory can still be applied as long as you understand its limitations. At worst, the theory altered so it accounts for both the old and new evidence.
Newtonian Physics is a great example; For over a hundred years people believed that F=ma. It was the law. Moreover, it was accurate such that you could do useful things with it. Then Einstein came along with his relativity theory and E=mc^2. Suddenly, F=ma was no longer correct, because mass became a function of velocity! It rocked the scientific community to the very core and turned everything we had believed for the past hundred years on it's head.
But everything we built with the idea that F-ma didn't suddenly stop working, did it? This is because science doesn't need FAITH to work. Even if Newtonian physics has been proven to be faulty, it's still "correct" and useful providing you know the limitations (ie: aren't anywhere near the speed of light.)
=Smidge=