Since the PBS app is made to look like the website or vice versa, this intelligent point unfortunately has no relation to the current dicussion. PBS is not thinking about human factors at all. They're thinking about keeping exactly the same over-wigeted look on all platforms.
Re:Mobile apps and screen sizes, legit problem
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Why PBS Won't Do Android
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I used to work with one of these people. I liked him a lot. But he came from the advertising world and from printed media. He was used (years of experience) to being able to start a project with a SIZE.
So the first thing he did on any web project was define a box of a fixed size, and float it in the middle of the page. Change the page size all you liked, the content stayed the same size.
Then he nailed down all the fonts so you couldn't adjust them. He used pictures for text all over the place, because they looked exactly like the fonts he was using, so there was no difference. You wouldn't change the font yourself, right? You'd never know.
And you see this all the time, on the web. Not sure if all the culprits come from print media, but they seem to have that same urge: Control the experience. Completely. Utterly ignore the fact that people have bigger and smaller screens, disabilities which cause them to prefer different font sizes or colors, etc.
It's missing the obvious, trivial user interface items like last broadcast date on shows that make finding new content other than the featured content REALLY painful. It's eye-candy heavy and usability light. The video player (the absolute core of the thing, really) has always crashed on my iPad, even though they've clearly changed their core player software (from one crashing system to another).
They should be making a much simpler, rock solid app. It's their fear of their eye-candy not looking the same which is driving this, or their fear of not being able to be sure that their ads will show.
NPR's iPhone app suffers from the same usability issues, though thanksfully isn't laden with eye-candy.
Science/math folks easily understand when non-science folk get things wrong. It's obvious. And so we know they need better science ed.
What's harder to see and not as clear cut is when science/engineering people (usually the low to mid-level people) are boring people who cannot think. Dull, spudly people you don't want to work with.
They don't need to take the humanities for the reasons from the article, they need to take the humaninties because they want to. When you find you don't want to, change colleges, change courses. You're getting a crap education when history isn't fun.
Yes, skip Plato. Skip the oldest deadest white guys. You can read the cliff notes there. But when you go to IIT you know to do your damnedest to avoid the required COBOL class they taught until something like 10 years ago. You know to skip the into to programming class they still try to make you take. Colleges make money on the stock crap. Skip that when you can. Skip the intros. You can get that from a book.
Whereas small group seminars in the humanities are chances to try to think. They teach you how to talk and integrate information from the news and from different countries/cultures. Take a class on Melville. Take a class on the history of detective fiction. And take linguistics, polysci and art. Otherwise why the hell are you wasteing your money going to a University? Go to a trade school. Be a drone. Reach the mid-level and stagnate. Because that's who you want to be.
Don't bitch about the humanities versions of the COBOL class without bitching about the CS department's COBOL class in the same breath. It's the same thing. Don't bitch about well-educated humanities people being morons without looking in the mirror and seeing the disfunctional troll you personally sculpted by avoiding investigating culture all your life.
The essence of this is by far the best idea here. Build a sound booth. Whether it's egg-shaped or a tardis-shaped box, it's doable and can be very quiet. Make sure there's a window so you can see the fire alarm, though.
Until we sequence a good representitive sample of Neanderthals, this is premature. You could look for mitochondrial progession, and make some judgements about that (see the complete cock-up the Eve hypothesis people made of this in the late 80's) but right now we have the genome of ONE Neanderthal. ONE!
This is a group of people which ranged across Africa, Asia, Europe and Australia and were there for a long time. There's a lot of genetic variation possible. We don't know how much, because we have nothing to compare against.
"Theories that modern humans simply outbred them and replaced them are viable"
Of course they're not. It impies that there wasn't enough food for Neanderthals, once the modern HS came on the scene. Humans (including Neanderthals) are omnivores with big enough brains to adapt to different food sources, and to move on when there's not enough food in one place. The Earth is BIG, and there were lots of prey animals and plants. There are plenty of places Neanderthals could have held out. Remember, the above hypothesis doesn't require them to starve on 99% of the planet. It requires them to starve EVERYWHERE.
They had to have been assimilated or killed. They may have been reduced in number by diminishing food sources, but that wouldn't have eliminated them.
No, if it does, then the data will reflect it. They might be right in their testable hypothesis, and wrong on their guess at causality.
You can't prove anything about the size f the visual cortex in the Neanderthals, so you'd be comparing apples to smoke anyhow. Their paper says "Big eyes means stupid." That's testable.
This is just another in a long string of pointless Neanderthal speculation articles. This one made the mistake of having a testable hypothesis. Finaly, one that can be shown to be a waste of paper!
According to the article the reactors currently "each produce about 25 thermal kilowatts" so already they produce.. let's see... assuming they get 100% efficiency in their steam engines... they made more than $1.75 an hour.
Watch the videos you can find of it around. It's very scary. Does nothing, of course, but it's VERY scary. And that will keep your family's store safe.
The obvious answer is DataHand. Nothing else seems so well designed. But you can't get one anymore, and if you could they'd be more than you could afford. They always were, even when they were making them.
People who love their iPhones usually bought them. There are two things going on there. Firstly, it's a self-selecting group. They bought into the idea of the ads they saw for the phone. Secondly, they spent money on it. When you make a purchase, you tend to self-justify. You think what you bought was the best, because otherwise you got suckered. No one likes that, so we tell ourselves we won. What we have is the best.
I was handed an iPhone by my company. It's really nice to have a free phone and I appreciate it hugely. Yes, it's a ball and chain to the company, but if they hadn't given me the phone, they'd be calling me on my personal phone anyhow.
But I hate the iPhone. Hate it. My antipathy for it was nonexistent when I got it. It was way better (in some ways) than the crappy blackberry it replaced. But over time, I've grown more and more frustrated with the potential of the thing which is squandered. Every little thing about it annoys me.
My wife has an android phone. I am so envious. There's still much to hate there, but not nearly as much, and there seems to be progress on Android. Something which annoys you might actually get fixed. On the iPhone, you must learn to love it, for it will never change.
Read the constitution. While it doesn't say "you can't tell them how to vote" it does say that the electors annouce their decision. So the implication is that you can't tell them how to vote. You can appoint them any way you like, though, so there's no constitutional demand to hold an election for president. The govenor of Ohio can simply appoint a bunch of Republicans as electors, if the Ohio constitution/legislature allows it. But the govenor of Ohio shouldn't be able to tell them how to vote. But he does. Which is probably unconstitutional.
You are right to keep your child away from computers and TV. Yes, you could get your child to be good at video games like your pal, but it turns out that's not really a skill you need to be a successful and happy person.
Buy more books and keep him away from computers for another 8 years or so.
This is so wrong it's offensive. You need to get your facts in order before you say such absurd things.
The manufacturers of Coke and Pepsi are in competition.
We're never goig to get anywhere with them through voting. I think we should apply anti-trust legislation to them. Did you know that they own the debates? Together (yes, they work together on it) they manage and own the "presidential debates" we see on TV. It used to be run by the league of women voters, but the two parties, who share power and whose only real enemy is a third party, leveraged it away from them. You cannot have another voice in the discussion. Hell, you cannot even have a discussion.
You think they don't leave kids behind in China or Japan or Korea? I think the dirty little secret of all those international achievment comparisons is that most of the countries doing better than us are only testing the kids who got on the college track, while we include everyone in our metrics. I wonder where we'd come out in a fair comparison.
I suspect they do, but the real dirty secrets in Japan and Korea (and perhaps China) are that
a. It's not what you learn in college, it's what college you go to. There's much less incentive to do well once you get into the best college you can. So for many kids education really stops at the end of high school. b. This means that they cram what's done in the States in ten years (from first grade to about sophmore in college) into roughly eight. They do this by cramming after school, on weekends, etc. c. Children in Korea and Japan are horribly overstressed and generally very unhappy. d. Some of the cliches you hear about creative work, thinking as opposed to cramming, etc. are true.
Confucianism has oriented these societies towards test taking and fact memorization as a culture for 1500 years. Societally, they're good at it. But it takes toll on their kids, and it delivers high quality goods on a multiple-choice test, but not fantasically well when you're trying to create something. (Note that many Koreans and Japanese then go on to do well in colloge, learn lots there, learn to write, learn to create, etc. But they do this is spite of the system, not because of it.)
Another dirty secret is that acheivement comparisons between Eastern (or some Eastern anyhow) systems and the US education system compare apples to oranges. US advanced ed. is not about making kids that test well, it's about making thinkers and writers. It's still doing a great job of that, if you ignore all the people going to college now who wouldn't have 50 years ago. Those peope now go to college to learn a trade and get rooked. That's not what US higher Ed. is about.
US public primary ed. (and virtually all Western primary Ed) is aimed at making workers and always has been. It's doing a great job of that, assuming all our jobs include the ability to say "want fries with that?" Truely it is. When something keeps "failing" so consistently, you need to take a step back and realize it's not failing in the eyes of everyone, or there'd be general concensus to fix the problem. Western public primary ed. is succeeding, as far as many people are concerned. They don't use it directly, and they like the current outcome, though they'd like the same outcome cheaper, thank you very much.
They can hire the top 5% from US colleges as the real thinkers and the top 30% of Asian schools (more H1B's, please) to be the semi-clever layer, but they'll always need people to offer to supersize their meal, and the more of those people competing with each other there are in the pool, the cheaper such workers will be.
Bizarre, because the now dominiant language of Turkey, Turkish, isn't Indo-European. So it spread everywhere, but was pushed out of it's own back yard.
Slashdot Mirror
Since the PBS app is made to look like the website or vice versa, this intelligent point unfortunately has no relation to the current dicussion. PBS is not thinking about human factors at all. They're thinking about keeping exactly the same over-wigeted look on all platforms.
I used to work with one of these people. I liked him a lot. But he came from the advertising world and from printed media. He was used (years of experience) to being able to start a project with a SIZE.
So the first thing he did on any web project was define a box of a fixed size, and float it in the middle of the page. Change the page size all you liked, the content stayed the same size.
Then he nailed down all the fonts so you couldn't adjust them. He used pictures for text all over the place, because they looked exactly like the fonts he was using, so there was no difference. You wouldn't change the font yourself, right? You'd never know.
And you see this all the time, on the web. Not sure if all the culprits come from print media, but they seem to have that same urge: Control the experience. Completely. Utterly ignore the fact that people have bigger and smaller screens, disabilities which cause them to prefer different font sizes or colors, etc.
The iPad app is crap.
It's missing the obvious, trivial user interface items like last broadcast date on shows that make finding new content other than the featured content REALLY painful. It's eye-candy heavy and usability light. The video player (the absolute core of the thing, really) has always crashed on my iPad, even though they've clearly changed their core player software (from one crashing system to another).
They should be making a much simpler, rock solid app. It's their fear of their eye-candy not looking the same which is driving this, or their fear of not being able to be sure that their ads will show.
NPR's iPhone app suffers from the same usability issues, though thanksfully isn't laden with eye-candy.
Science/math folks easily understand when non-science folk get things wrong. It's obvious. And so we know they need better science ed.
What's harder to see and not as clear cut is when science/engineering people (usually the low to mid-level people) are boring people who cannot think. Dull, spudly people you don't want to work with.
They don't need to take the humanities for the reasons from the article, they need to take the humaninties because they want to. When you find you don't want to, change colleges, change courses. You're getting a crap education when history isn't fun.
Yes, skip Plato. Skip the oldest deadest white guys. You can read the cliff notes there. But when you go to IIT you know to do your damnedest to avoid the required COBOL class they taught until something like 10 years ago. You know to skip the into to programming class they still try to make you take. Colleges make money on the stock crap. Skip that when you can. Skip the intros. You can get that from a book.
Whereas small group seminars in the humanities are chances to try to think. They teach you how to talk and integrate information from the news and from different countries/cultures. Take a class on Melville. Take a class on the history of detective fiction. And take linguistics, polysci and art. Otherwise why the hell are you wasteing your money going to a University? Go to a trade school. Be a drone. Reach the mid-level and stagnate. Because that's who you want to be.
Don't bitch about the humanities versions of the COBOL class without bitching about the CS department's COBOL class in the same breath. It's the same thing. Don't bitch about well-educated humanities people being morons without looking in the mirror and seeing the disfunctional troll you personally sculpted by avoiding investigating culture all your life.
Really, you need to skim more.
The essence of this is by far the best idea here. Build a sound booth. Whether it's egg-shaped or a tardis-shaped box, it's doable and can be very quiet. Make sure there's a window so you can see the fire alarm, though.
Until we sequence a good representitive sample of Neanderthals, this is premature. You could look for mitochondrial progession, and make some judgements about that (see the complete cock-up the Eve hypothesis people made of this in the late 80's) but right now we have the genome of ONE Neanderthal. ONE!
This is a group of people which ranged across Africa, Asia, Europe and Australia and were there for a long time. There's a lot of genetic variation possible. We don't know how much, because we have nothing to compare against.
This is shoddy work.
"Theories that modern humans simply outbred them and replaced them are viable"
Of course they're not. It impies that there wasn't enough food for Neanderthals, once the modern HS came on the scene. Humans (including Neanderthals) are omnivores with big enough brains to adapt to different food sources, and to move on when there's not enough food in one place. The Earth is BIG, and there were lots of prey animals and plants. There are plenty of places Neanderthals could have held out. Remember, the above hypothesis doesn't require them to starve on 99% of the planet. It requires them to starve EVERYWHERE.
They had to have been assimilated or killed. They may have been reduced in number by diminishing food sources, but that wouldn't have eliminated them.
No, if it does, then the data will reflect it. They might be right in their testable hypothesis, and wrong on their guess at causality.
You can't prove anything about the size f the visual cortex in the Neanderthals, so you'd be comparing apples to smoke anyhow. Their paper says "Big eyes means stupid." That's testable.
This is just another in a long string of pointless Neanderthal speculation articles. This one made the mistake of having a testable hypothesis. Finaly, one that can be shown to be a waste of paper!
Yes. And the blind are friggin' geniuses.
This study is being badly interpretted (notably on Nova).
Europeans show a small amount of Neanderthal DNA because we compared them to ONE Neanderthal sample.
When this is done on a respectable sample size including Neanderthals around the world, we'll find that everyone has Neanderthal DNA.
Does that mean we can use all our produced CO2 for FRACKING?
Scale up? Why?
According to the article the reactors currently "each produce about 25 thermal kilowatts" so already they produce .. let's see... assuming they get 100% efficiency in their steam engines... they made more than $1.75 an hour.
No need to scale up at all.
It only cleans up the burning side if we have something to do with all that CO2 that this process produces.
This does nothing. But it completely stops break-ins and it's cheap.
https://spygear4u.com/ds_proddetail.asp?prod=GS-LS-131
Watch the videos you can find of it around. It's very scary. Does nothing, of course, but it's VERY scary. And that will keep your family's store safe.
The obvious answer is DataHand. Nothing else seems so well designed. But you can't get one anymore, and if you could they'd be more than you could afford. They always were, even when they were making them.
A search for a photo of the inside of this car shows a shifter.
People who love their iPhones usually bought them. There are two things going on there. Firstly, it's a self-selecting group. They bought into the idea of the ads they saw for the phone. Secondly, they spent money on it. When you make a purchase, you tend to self-justify. You think what you bought was the best, because otherwise you got suckered. No one likes that, so we tell ourselves we won. What we have is the best.
I was handed an iPhone by my company. It's really nice to have a free phone and I appreciate it hugely. Yes, it's a ball and chain to the company, but if they hadn't given me the phone, they'd be calling me on my personal phone anyhow.
But I hate the iPhone. Hate it. My antipathy for it was nonexistent when I got it. It was way better (in some ways) than the crappy blackberry it replaced. But over time, I've grown more and more frustrated with the potential of the thing which is squandered. Every little thing about it annoys me.
My wife has an android phone. I am so envious. There's still much to hate there, but not nearly as much, and there seems to be progress on Android. Something which annoys you might actually get fixed. On the iPhone, you must learn to love it, for it will never change.
We're going to die.
Pick a lunch (or lunch places) which are a good hike from work. Walk there.
It should be a place (again, "places" is better) where you can get something healthy.
And cut soda-pop completely out of your diet.
Read the constitution. While it doesn't say "you can't tell them how to vote" it does say that the electors annouce their decision. So the implication is that you can't tell them how to vote. You can appoint them any way you like, though, so there's no constitutional demand to hold an election for president. The govenor of Ohio can simply appoint a bunch of Republicans as electors, if the Ohio constitution/legislature allows it. But the govenor of Ohio shouldn't be able to tell them how to vote. But he does. Which is probably unconstitutional.
You are right to keep your child away from computers and TV. Yes, you could get your child to be good at video games like your pal, but it turns out that's not really a skill you need to be a successful and happy person.
Buy more books and keep him away from computers for another 8 years or so.
"Hell its Coke VS Pepsi!"
This is so wrong it's offensive. You need to get your facts in order before you say such absurd things.
The manufacturers of Coke and Pepsi are in competition.
We're never goig to get anywhere with them through voting. I think we should apply anti-trust legislation to them. Did you know that they own the debates? Together (yes, they work together on it) they manage and own the "presidential debates" we see on TV. It used to be run by the league of women voters, but the two parties, who share power and whose only real enemy is a third party, leveraged it away from them. You cannot have another voice in the discussion. Hell, you cannot even have a discussion.
http://people.howstuffworks.com/debate3.htm
The reason you're wrong is this isn't Coke vs. Pepsi at all. It's Coke vs. Coke in a collectable can.
You think they don't leave kids behind in China or Japan or Korea? I think the dirty little secret of all those international achievment comparisons is that most of the countries doing better than us are only testing the kids who got on the college track, while we include everyone in our metrics. I wonder where we'd come out in a fair comparison.
I suspect they do, but the real dirty secrets in Japan and Korea (and perhaps China) are that
b. This means that they cram what's done in the States in ten years (from first grade to about sophmore in college) into roughly eight. They do this by cramming after school, on weekends, etc.
c. Children in Korea and Japan are horribly overstressed and generally very unhappy.
d. Some of the cliches you hear about creative work, thinking as opposed to cramming, etc. are true.
Confucianism has oriented these societies towards test taking and fact memorization as a culture for 1500 years. Societally, they're good at it. But it takes toll on their kids, and it delivers high quality goods on a multiple-choice test, but not fantasically well when you're trying to create something. (Note that many Koreans and Japanese then go on to do well in colloge, learn lots there, learn to write, learn to create, etc. But they do this is spite of the system, not because of it.)
Another dirty secret is that acheivement comparisons between Eastern (or some Eastern anyhow) systems and the US education system compare apples to oranges. US advanced ed. is not about making kids that test well, it's about making thinkers and writers. It's still doing a great job of that, if you ignore all the people going to college now who wouldn't have 50 years ago. Those peope now go to college to learn a trade and get rooked. That's not what US higher Ed. is about.
US public primary ed. (and virtually all Western primary Ed) is aimed at making workers and always has been. It's doing a great job of that, assuming all our jobs include the ability to say "want fries with that?" Truely it is. When something keeps "failing" so consistently, you need to take a step back and realize it's not failing in the eyes of everyone, or there'd be general concensus to fix the problem. Western public primary ed. is succeeding, as far as many people are concerned. They don't use it directly, and they like the current outcome, though they'd like the same outcome cheaper, thank you very much.
They can hire the top 5% from US colleges as the real thinkers and the top 30% of Asian schools (more H1B's, please) to be the semi-clever layer, but they'll always need people to offer to supersize their meal, and the more of those people competing with each other there are in the pool, the cheaper such workers will be.
It all works just fine, thank you.
Bizarre, because the now dominiant language of Turkey, Turkish, isn't Indo-European. So it spread everywhere, but was pushed out of it's own back yard.