We let people with minimal training perform a complex operation at high speeds when one person's mistake can endanger dozens of innocent lives.
A common mass accident causer: everyone's cruising along at the 'accepted limit' when they approach a stand of trees on a sunny but cold day. In the stand of trees the road is shaded and much cooler and black ice has formed. The unskilled drivers slam on their brakes and go flying all over the place, woo hoo.
Or you hit the skilled driver who slows down to 50mph because he/she knows what a stand of trees on a cold day is likely to mean...
A good idea would be to restrict unskilled drivers to well under the speed limit until they gain enough skill to handle going 65-70mph without endangering others.
How do you know the speed limits are arbitrary? What is your training in civil engineering, law enforcement, emergency medicine?
When I grew up, people in my suburban neighborhood usually drove well below the speed limit, they were more worried about hitting some kid or pet than getting someplace a few minutes earlier.
Now I'd guess you don't have children or pets or have them and don't care about them, so this will all sound like "bwaaah bwaap bwaa" to you. It used to be pretty safe for kids and pets in suburbia (and other residential areas)--not because of LE, but because of greater general levels of 'common' sense.
Hopefully this technology will let us reclaim our streets from teenaged (physically and/or mentally) hotheads who's horsepower is more than double their emotional IQ.
More damage is caused by the speeder slamming on the brakes when they encounter traffic going the speed limit, avoiding an obstacle, etc. The faster a person is going when they slam on their brakes, the more heat and friction the road is subjected to.
And of course when drivers clip curbs, gaurd rails, signs, safty cones, etc., the faster they are going the more damage they do (these minor accidents often aren't reported, so they don't make it into speed related accident stats).
It's pretty clear if you stop to think about it and perhaps apply a little of your understanding of physics, materials science, and engineering to the question.
'accepted' of course by people who know little to nothing about road engineering, automotive engineering, or in many cases driving.
Having the rules made up by people who don't understand the game they are playing may make sense to you, but it seems pretty stupid to me.
The 'guy going 65 in a 50' is a problem when he encounters traffic going 50 or some other unexpected road hazard, and can't stop in time, of course. Blaming the 'guy going 50' is like blaming a shooting victim for getting in the way of bullet.
Our results show that the risk of involvement in a casualty crash is more than twice as great when travelling 10 km/h above the average speed of non-crash involved vehicles and nearly six times as great when travelling 20 km/h above that average speed. The mechanisms explored for this increase in risk (where higher speeds are associated with longer stopping distances, increased crash energy and more likely loss of control) also suggest that a reduction in the absolute speed of traffic is much more important in reducing crash frequency than a reduction in traffic speed differences.
http://www.atsb.gov.au/road/rpts/cr204/index.cfm
The finding that uniform speed reduces accidents makes sense (a lot of accidents are caused by speeding drivers suddenly coming on slower traffic) and points to the benefits of an automated traffic control system.
because there isn't enough enforcement to make moderate speeding a negative stimulus.
However, it is very well established that higher speeds cause more accidents and more and greater injuries, cause more wear on roads, and of course use more fuel.
In the first two, many of the costs are born by directly by society, so people who obey the speed limit and non-drivers subsidize speeders.
With a more automated system of negative stimulus like automated ticket assignments to speeders, this cost would be more fairly distributed (speeders would pay their fair share) and/or speeding would be reduced (the negative stimulus would nearly always result from speeding).
Seems to me a and a fair thing, it isn't like speeding is a right, esp. where speed limits are determined by democraticly elected governments--if we had this then speed limits could be set to the actual limit the road is designed for, and folks who drive above it assessed their share of the increased costs.
if the study is honest and the answer is the former?
Discovering and promoting ways in which technology can be used to help students to "actually learn more" surely would help education out even more than the latter.
you need new textbooks every year because the textbook publishers rearrange the contents every year. Often they don't put much of anything new in, and often the new stuff is pointless fluff.
But this means it is a nightmare for teachers to let students use old textbooks, because every year the chapter numbers and page numbers are different.
PS, Dr. James Paul Gee makes a good (research based) case that you're doing a good deal of learning while playing games:-).
My book covers 36 good learning principles built into good games like System Shock 2, Rise of Nations, Arcanum, or even Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation. But there are many more. Let me just give a few examples. First, humans are terrible at learning when you give them lots and lots of verbal information ahead of time out of any context where it can be applied. Games give verbal information "just in time" when and where it can be used and "on demand" as the player realizes he or she needs it.
How many research studies has Stoll conducted? How many in using technology in education?
If you read his research, you'll learn a bit about astronomy, but find that what he is saying about computers in education is just his personal opinion.
Stoll's claiming "computers don't belong in schools" should be taken with about the same weight as if Richard Mayer claimed astronomy was better without telescopes.
There is a good deal that technology can offer when used with appropriate pedagogy. A few things from esearch and anectdotes:
students who feel 'out of place' in a class due to their religious or political beleifs tend to interact more via email or discussion boards.
discussion boards can enable more thoughtful responses than time pressured in-class discussions, and allow teachers to see just who has been participating and directly evaluate a student's quantity and quality of participation.
students in one part of the world can also interact directly with students in another part of the world, via email, discussion boards, chat, and now things like skype (VOIP). A couple of examples from the literature are language classes and suburban teacher candidates interacting with inner city teachers.
Of course, schools may pay too much for technology and have insufficient resources left for support, fortunatly the open source world can help here, for instance Moodle is a very powerful open source learning management system, aviable alternative to very expensive systems like Blackboard and WebCT that leaves $$$ left over to support teachers and students in using it and also to develop courses with properly designed (for elearning/online learning) pedagogy.
Another place to look for answers is the work of Dr. Richard Mayer, who has done a number of very well designed studies showing how to use multimedia technology effectively, as well as demonstrating that when used appropriatly it can be more effective than traditional methods of teaching (and how when used improperly it can be a hindrence to learning:-).
PS, Cliff Stoll is a good writer and certainly knows a bit about technology, but he has little experience or training in education. His claiming "computers don't belong in schools" should be taken with about the same weight as if Mayer claimed astronomy was better without telescopes.
My goodness, did you get a yummy? What I've been 'fed' comes from graduate work in genetics, which included hundreds of 'on topic' peer reviewed journal articles.
Which article showed daphnia "changing back" to a previous genome?
How did they know what genome to "change back" too?
How do you know it was reversion rather than convergence?
you see that there was no "changing back", there was a change to a new morphology with smaller spines and helmets when the predator's numbers fell.
Which is predicted by evolution: change the selection pressure on an organism and the organism adapts (or goes extinct if it can't adapt fast enough).
When enough adaptations add up, you have a new species (which is just an intellectual construct to descibe a certain amount of observed differences).
it's like "microgravity" or "microrelativity", a construct of our minds, a false category.
"Microevolution" is the same thing as "Macroevolution", just that microevolution is what we 'see' in a few (human) generations, just like we don't get to 'see' what happens if we drop the Moon or accelerate to lightspeed.
that it occurs is evidence of evolution in action, lots of adaptation leads to speciation.
Also, show me a mutation that was for the better of the species.
Pesticide/herbicide resistence, happens with increasing frequency. Predicted by evolution: change the environment and a mutation that confers an advantage in dealing with the new environment will rapidly spread through the population.
Scientists are worried as this single mutation unexpectedly provides the fly (Drosophila melanogaster) with resistance to a range of commonly available, but chemically unrelated, pesticides.
Researchers at the University of Melbourne and the Centre for Environmental Stress and Adaptation Research (CESAR) that made the discovery believe the mutation arose in Drosophila soon after the introduction of DDT and has since spread throughout the world.
as any experiment run to 'proove' relativity or gravity.
Obviously we don't orbit a Moon in the lab to proove that gravity affects very large objects the same way it affects small ones, nor do we need to demonstrate more than a few microseconds time difference due to velocity to demonstrate relativity.
Adaptation is the mechanism of evolution, and it can be demonstrated in the lab. As soon as you can demonstrate a supernatural force creating a new kind (in a controlled experiment), you'll have something 'scientific' to crow about.
The fact that closely related species can interbreed and produce offspring (sometimes sterile--Liger, sometimes fertile--Wolf-Coyote) is another clear demonstration of evolution, as is it when these offspring are sterile. If all kinds were created, there would be no (scientific) reason why this pattern would be there.
require registration, click the big "login as guest" button and read away (not sure why the article just sends you to the main page, but you can click the "Using Moodle" link and search for skype to find the discussions).
for instance in a Moodle course, an instructor can invite a guest lecturor in via skype, let students ask questions, and archive the 'show' for review.
This is also great for discussions and presentations in distance education, where the cost of interacting with means besides text has been very high before skype and other voip apps.
Of course the usual laws regarding recording apply: you have to let everyone being recorded know ahead of time.
Are telephones "ominous" because one can record them? In education, folks record coference calls and video conferences all the time, to be able to do this is generally seen as more of a 'feature' than a 'bug'.
To be able to do it affordably using skype and an open source course management system like Moodle is great!
If a person has a terminal disease, somatic changes may or may not help, but they aren't likely to cause more damage than the disease.
And by the time they have a terminal (or even chronic) disease, you can get a pretty good idea how "the organism will express it's genes".
Treating disease in somatic cells is a much different issue from creating new lines of plants/animals/humans via changing germ line cells--at least in organisms that reproduce sexually.
in 500 years, and between then and now millions of people suffer painful deaths to avoid changing something that might be helpful in the case of your hypothetical event?
Anyway, there is the whole somatic vs. germ line thing, if genetic engineering is limited to somatic cells, changes won't be passed on to children (unless we start reproducing via mitosis).
In the case of specific genetic diseases
on
Precision Gene Editing
·
· Score: 2, Informative
like the 'bubble boy' defect mentioned in the article, we often know the specific bit of code that causes the problem.
"IL-7 signalling pathway
Most cases of SCID are derived from mutations in the c chain in the receptors for interleukins IL-2, IL-4, IL-7, IL-9 and IL-15. These interleukins and their receptors form part of the IL-7 signalling pathway.
The IL-2 receptor (IL-2R) gene is located on the X chromosome and mutation of this gene causes X-linked SCID.
Janus kinase-3 (JAK3) is an enzyme that mediates transduction of the c signal. Mutation of its gene also causes SCID."
IOW, where do you go when you run out of cool big cat names? They've got cougar (a step down from tiger? just another puma?) & lion and then cats get alot less impressive...
Where are they going to go if they abandon cats? To the dogs? Not much room for upgrade there. To the ungulates? Maybe to easy to make accusations of bloat (OS XI--Water Buffaloe!). To the sea? OS XV--"Blue Whale!". It starts to get a bit less impressive..
Maybe they will go mythical? OS XX--Gryphon! Unicorn--Dragon, hmm, now we're getting somewhere....
Slashdot Mirror
It has nothing to do with skill.
We let people with minimal training perform a complex operation at high speeds when one person's mistake can endanger dozens of innocent lives.
A common mass accident causer: everyone's cruising along at the 'accepted limit' when they approach a stand of trees on a sunny but cold day. In the stand of trees the road is shaded and much cooler and black ice has formed. The unskilled drivers slam on their brakes and go flying all over the place, woo hoo.
Or you hit the skilled driver who slows down to 50mph because he/she knows what a stand of trees on a cold day is likely to mean...
A good idea would be to restrict unskilled drivers to well under the speed limit until they gain enough skill to handle going 65-70mph without endangering others.
Driving is after all a privilege, not a right.
we need technology like this.
How do you know the speed limits are arbitrary? What is your training in civil engineering, law enforcement, emergency medicine?
When I grew up, people in my suburban neighborhood usually drove well below the speed limit, they were more worried about hitting some kid or pet than getting someplace a few minutes earlier.
Now I'd guess you don't have children or pets or have them and don't care about them, so this will all sound like "bwaaah bwaap bwaa" to you. It used to be pretty safe for kids and pets in suburbia (and other residential areas)--not because of LE, but because of greater general levels of 'common' sense.
Hopefully this technology will let us reclaim our streets from teenaged (physically and/or mentally) hotheads who's horsepower is more than double their emotional IQ.
heat wears out asphalt.
More damage is caused by the speeder slamming on the brakes when they encounter traffic going the speed limit, avoiding an obstacle, etc. The faster a person is going when they slam on their brakes, the more heat and friction the road is subjected to.
And of course when drivers clip curbs, gaurd rails, signs, safty cones, etc., the faster they are going the more damage they do (these minor accidents often aren't reported, so they don't make it into speed related accident stats).
It's pretty clear if you stop to think about it and perhaps apply a little of your understanding of physics, materials science, and engineering to the question.
'accepted' of course by people who know little to nothing about road engineering, automotive engineering, or in many cases driving.
Having the rules made up by people who don't understand the game they are playing may make sense to you, but it seems pretty stupid to me.
The 'guy going 65 in a 50' is a problem when he encounters traffic going 50 or some other unexpected road hazard, and can't stop in time, of course. Blaming the 'guy going 50' is like blaming a shooting victim for getting in the way of bullet.
http://www.atsb.gov.au/road/rpts/cr204/index.cf
The finding that uniform speed reduces accidents makes sense (a lot of accidents are caused by speeding drivers suddenly coming on slower traffic) and points to the benefits of an automated traffic control system.
because there isn't enough enforcement to make moderate speeding a negative stimulus.
However, it is very well established that higher speeds cause more accidents and more and greater injuries, cause more wear on roads, and of course use more fuel.
In the first two, many of the costs are born by directly by society, so people who obey the speed limit and non-drivers subsidize speeders.
With a more automated system of negative stimulus like automated ticket assignments to speeders, this cost would be more fairly distributed (speeders would pay their fair share) and/or speeding would be reduced (the negative stimulus would nearly always result from speeding).
Seems to me a and a fair thing, it isn't like speeding is a right, esp. where speed limits are determined by democraticly elected governments--if we had this then speed limits could be set to the actual limit the road is designed for, and folks who drive above it assessed their share of the increased costs.
if the study is honest and the answer is the former?
Discovering and promoting ways in which technology can be used to help students to "actually learn more" surely would help education out even more than the latter.
Cliff is an astronmer and a sysadmin, not an teacher or an educational researcher.
Why would anyone think his opinion on a subject he has no training in and hasn't done any actual research on is worth a reading (or publishing?).
Next up, teacher with 20 years experience says astronomers don't need telescopes, read all about it...
But this means it is a nightmare for teachers to let students use old textbooks, because every year the chapter numbers and page numbers are different.
PS, Dr. James Paul Gee makes a good (research based) case that you're doing a good deal of learning while playing games:-).
How many research studies has Stoll conducted? How many in using technology in education?
If you read his research, you'll learn a bit about astronomy, but find that what he is saying about computers in education is just his personal opinion.
Stoll's claiming "computers don't belong in schools" should be taken with about the same weight as if Richard Mayer claimed astronomy was better without telescopes.
students who feel 'out of place' in a class due to their religious or political beleifs tend to interact more via email or discussion boards.
discussion boards can enable more thoughtful responses than time pressured in-class discussions, and allow teachers to see just who has been participating and directly evaluate a student's quantity and quality of participation.
students in one part of the world can also interact directly with students in another part of the world, via email, discussion boards, chat, and now things like skype (VOIP). A couple of examples from the literature are language classes and suburban teacher candidates interacting with inner city teachers.
Of course, schools may pay too much for technology and have insufficient resources left for support, fortunatly the open source world can help here, for instance Moodle is a very powerful open source learning management system, aviable alternative to very expensive systems like Blackboard and WebCT that leaves $$$ left over to support teachers and students in using it and also to develop courses with properly designed (for elearning/online learning) pedagogy.
Another place to look for answers is the work of Dr. Richard Mayer, who has done a number of very well designed studies showing how to use multimedia technology effectively, as well as demonstrating that when used appropriatly it can be more effective than traditional methods of teaching (and how when used improperly it can be a hindrence to learning:-).
PS, Cliff Stoll is a good writer and certainly knows a bit about technology, but he has little experience or training in education. His claiming "computers don't belong in schools" should be taken with about the same weight as if Mayer claimed astronomy was better without telescopes.
My goodness, did you get a yummy? What I've been 'fed' comes from graduate work in genetics, which included hundreds of 'on topic' peer reviewed journal articles. Which article showed daphnia "changing back" to a previous genome? How did they know what genome to "change back" too? How do you know it was reversion rather than convergence?
you see that there was no "changing back", there was a change to a new morphology with smaller spines and helmets when the predator's numbers fell. Which is predicted by evolution: change the selection pressure on an organism and the organism adapts (or goes extinct if it can't adapt fast enough). When enough adaptations add up, you have a new species (which is just an intellectual construct to descibe a certain amount of observed differences).
it's like "microgravity" or "microrelativity", a construct of our minds, a false category.
"Microevolution" is the same thing as "Macroevolution", just that microevolution is what we 'see' in a few (human) generations, just like we don't get to 'see' what happens if we drop the Moon or accelerate to lightspeed.
Also, show me a mutation that was for the better of the species.
Pesticide/herbicide resistence, happens with increasing frequency. Predicted by evolution: change the environment and a mutation that confers an advantage in dealing with the new environment will rapidly spread through the population.
http://www.innovations-report.com/html/reports/
Them pesky biologists! Cut their funding, that'll teach 'em to contradict your gut feelings about the world!
as any experiment run to 'proove' relativity or gravity.
Obviously we don't orbit a Moon in the lab to proove that gravity affects very large objects the same way it affects small ones, nor do we need to demonstrate more than a few microseconds time difference due to velocity to demonstrate relativity.
Adaptation is the mechanism of evolution, and it can be demonstrated in the lab. As soon as you can demonstrate a supernatural force creating a new kind (in a controlled experiment), you'll have something 'scientific' to crow about.
The fact that closely related species can interbreed and produce offspring (sometimes sterile--Liger, sometimes fertile--Wolf-Coyote) is another clear demonstration of evolution, as is it when these offspring are sterile. If all kinds were created, there would be no (scientific) reason why this pattern would be there.
require registration, click the big "login as guest" button and read away (not sure why the article just sends you to the main page, but you can click the "Using Moodle" link and search for skype to find the discussions).
p e&id=5
You can do that as a guest, too:-).
For example: http://moodle.org/mod/forum/search.php?search=sky
Remember, click the 'login as guest' button.
for instance in a Moodle course, an instructor can invite a guest lecturor in via skype, let students ask questions, and archive the 'show' for review.
This is also great for discussions and presentations in distance education, where the cost of interacting with means besides text has been very high before skype and other voip apps.
Of course the usual laws regarding recording apply: you have to let everyone being recorded know ahead of time.
Are telephones "ominous" because one can record them? In education, folks record coference calls and video conferences all the time, to be able to do this is generally seen as more of a 'feature' than a 'bug'.
To be able to do it affordably using skype and an open source course management system like Moodle is great!
germ line changes.
If a person has a terminal disease, somatic changes may or may not help, but they aren't likely to cause more damage than the disease.
And by the time they have a terminal (or even chronic) disease, you can get a pretty good idea how "the organism will express it's genes".
Treating disease in somatic cells is a much different issue from creating new lines of plants/animals/humans via changing germ line cells--at least in organisms that reproduce sexually.
in 500 years, and between then and now millions of people suffer painful deaths to avoid changing something that might be helpful in the case of your hypothetical event?
Anyway, there is the whole somatic vs. germ line thing, if genetic engineering is limited to somatic cells, changes won't be passed on to children (unless we start reproducing via mitosis).
like the 'bubble boy' defect mentioned in the article, we often know the specific bit of code that causes the problem.
n odeficiency
"IL-7 signalling pathway
Most cases of SCID are derived from mutations in the c chain in the receptors for interleukins IL-2, IL-4, IL-7, IL-9 and IL-15. These interleukins and their receptors form part of the IL-7 signalling pathway.
The IL-2 receptor (IL-2R) gene is located on the X chromosome and mutation of this gene causes X-linked SCID.
Janus kinase-3 (JAK3) is an enzyme that mediates transduction of the c signal. Mutation of its gene also causes SCID."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severe_combined_immu
against it?:-). Even smart people may sound dumb when they are trying to make dumb arguments.
And it's already translated into Australian (heck it's even translated into US for us 'mericans:-)!
This shows how far behind the Mac world is:) (my tablet is my PC, not attached to it).
J :www.zdnet.co.uk/i/z/rv/2002/11/toshiba-tablet-i2. jpg
http://images.google.com/images?q=tbn:mku3zxZpikY
Now if you want a mac where you can draw/write directly on the screen, you can buy a wacom monitor/tablet and carry all that around.
Which is sad, XP is horrible, but the tablet PC hardware is very very nice.
Wish I could run X on it.
OS 10.42-- "Kodkod"? (6lb wildcat)
OS 10.43--"Housecat"?
OS 10.44--"Ocelot"
IOW, where do you go when you run out of cool big cat names? They've got cougar (a step down from tiger? just another puma?) & lion and then cats get alot less impressive...
Where are they going to go if they abandon cats? To the dogs? Not much room for upgrade there. To the ungulates? Maybe to easy to make accusations of bloat (OS XI--Water Buffaloe!). To the sea? OS XV--"Blue Whale!". It starts to get a bit less impressive..
Maybe they will go mythical? OS XX--Gryphon! Unicorn--Dragon, hmm, now we're getting somewhere....