Yup, and get Chris Morris while they're at it. Which would be particularly appropriate since he was satirising the very insanity of moral panics like this in the first place.
Some people are naive/stupid/misguided. Many people use social networking. As such, there is a significant overlap between the two groups, and people therefore do inadvisable things using social media. I don't see it as any causal, or even correlated, relationship - I'd be interested to see any studies to the contrary, but anecdotally I'd say the incidence of 'stupid' on Facebook is roughly the same as in the general population (i.e. depressingly high), meaning it's use as an indicator is negligible.
You still fail. If it is fully public, you could have written "Does anyone want to go to the pub tonight?" on your own web site, retaining full control of said data. If it is intended just for your friends, you can text or e-mail them.
It's not always the best choice, but Facebook provides a convenient set of tools (better suited to group discussion than text or email), and the vast majority of people are already checking it (unlike this hypothetical personal site). Sure, those wouldn't make for very convincing arguments if I were actually losing out in any way by using Facebook, but the information I place on it is of literally zero value to me - you're absolutely right when you say it's information that I don't care about at all. That does not, however, in any way imply that I don't care about any of my personal info - just that I am capable of separating that which has value to me from that which doesn't.
How could an employer trust you that you would care more about company data?
Data is not all of equal value - the fact that I don't care who knows that I'm going to the pub tonight doesn't mean that I'll show the same disregard for people's bank details. That's like saying "how could an employer trust you with a company car when they saw you throw out an empty drink can?" - it's a nonsensical statement, because the items are of such vastly different value.
That's odd. I live in a society where the right to privacy is protected. Meaning that, even with government protection from businesses and so forth, you're still somewhat responsible. In the end, if you're unwilling to look after your own privacy as a matter of course today, then I wouldn't want to hire you either.
I don't see how that relates to my post. I said that public information goes on Facebook and the rest doesn't - how does that lead to the conclusion that I'm unwilling to protect my privacy?
If you're going to take nothing more than the fact that I use a particular communication tool as a reason to write me off as irresponsible, I feel fully justified in declaring you as a pompous, superior, neo-luddite based on nothing more than that single Slashdot post.
Some of my data doesn't need to be private; I'd be as happy to write "Does anyone want to go to the pub tonight?" in giant red letters on the side of a building as I am to place it on Facebook, if that happened to be the most convenient way to get the message to a large group of my friends. Some of my data does need to be private; that data doesn't go on Facebook at all.
I thought the same, but there are a few important supplementary questions (to which I don't know the answers):
By consistently streaming encrypted information out of the country, will you just make yourself a target for more invasive surveillance measures (and perhaps some rubber hose cryptanalysis)?
When the ISP themselves are your adversary, you're at an immediate security disadvantage. How far can they go towards cracking your connection when they can monitor everything you transmit, and cross reference it with real-world info about you?
If your connection is compromised, how much extra risk are you at? Is the sense of security leading you to transmit things that you wouldn't otherwise have committed to writing, and might they cause you trouble?
Are these encryption measures legal where you're going? Even if so, are the state the type who might see it as a reason throw you in jail on vague espionage charges?
I understand wanting to maintain your privacy as a matter of principal, but ultimately you're the one choosing to go to their country. You don't have to like it, but you do have to live by their rules. From my own experience travelling in some of the more repressive parts of the world, I would say that there's generally a certain amount of leeway given to foreigners that isn't afforded to locals, but you're still safer not giving them an excuse to pay you any extra attention. What I can't tell you (especially without knowing which country you're going to) is what they will or will not consider to be an excuse; honestly I doubt that even a police chief in the country could give you a definitive answer in a lot of places - the strictness of the definition tends to be inversely proportional to the wealth and influence wielded by the person that it is being applied to.
Just bear in mind that while it may be discomforting to know they're reading your emails home, they probably don't care what you're saying. They might well start caring about the fact that they can't see what you're saying.
Consciousness is just the emergent behaviour of organic computing hardware and software
And you can prove that how exactly?
OK, I was wrong to imply that was fact. I should've written something along the lines of "At our current level of understanding and observation, consciousness appears to be the emergent behaviour of organic hardware and software.". As yet, we have no evidence of any external 'driving force' of consciousness, nor any theories to explain how the phenomenon may exist outside of the brain; our current understanding is, of course, vastly incomplete - I'm not saying that we should rule out the theory of an 'external consciousness' - but with plenty of observable evidence of the consciousness existing within the brain, and no evidence of it existing outside, it is a sensible working hypothesis that its existence is a direct result of the brain's structure.
there's no reason that a sufficiently complex artificial system couldn't eventually show similar emergent behaviour, intentional or otherwise.
When you say "intentional" are you referring to the designers of the artificial system, or the artificial system itself? Because if the system can't have its own intentions, you can not say it has consciousness any more than a rock rolling down a hill.
I absolutely meant the intentions of the designer - I fully agree that the concept of a non-conscious system showing 'intent' is no more sensible than saying that a hammer shows the same. My point was more focused on the 'unintentional' side anyway: the idea that we may end up creating a 'thinking' AI without ever intending to, and indeed may even do so before we understand what in the system the 'thought' actually arises from.
Watson couldn't actually see or hear anything and the clues had to be fed to him electronically. Still impressive NLP but no speech recognition.
I know, that's why I said "in combination with some decent speech recognition software" - as in the software parses sound into text, which is then passed to Watson to be 'understood' and acted upon. Obviously the speech part is not in any way trivial, but there are many people working on the problem, and passing the text output across to Watson once the accuracy is sufficient is trivial; if anything, the language parsing algorithms could actually help in being somewhat forgiving of audio parsing errors.
However, there is little real difference. Watson is still just following a fixed set of rules, no matter how complex that set of rules is. Just like Deep Blue, it is completely incapable of dealing with literally anything that falls outside that specific set of rules. Which means that Watson is fundamentally no "smarter" than Deep Blue was.
Maybe I just misunderstood what you meant by no more special than Deep Blue, but my point was that Watson solves useful real-world problems in a manner with a much wider reach than Deep Blue was ever going to have. I think you're trivialising the creation of the set of rules that Watson operates on, when in fact it's a significantly useful achievement - the more all-encompassing a static rule set becomes, the more we understand about how a self-modifying, 'learning' one should function.
Even most animal brains that are of complexity near to our own are not capable of the kind of cognition and "self-awareness" that humans attribute to real consciousness.
Therefore, "sufficient complexity" appears to be extremely complex indeed, as this article [arstechnica.com] clearly implies, with quite a bit of evidence to back it up.
I don't doubt that any kind of genuine 'thinking' AI is a long way off, but even a basic animal-level system would have a fundamental advantage over current computers, which you touched on yourself: the ability to adapt beyond its pre-defined capabilities.
It's good marketing for IBM in general, I suppose, but I'm not sure what Ken Jennings and Alex Trebek are getting out of it besides announcing their pending obsolescence.
As another poster said, Jennings and the Jeopardy crew are making good money from this. As for IBM, they benefit in a few ways - firstly, the techniques learned in making the software will be very, very marketable, even if you don't see a box marked "Watson" on the shelf any time soon, and I'm sure the public challenge was a good way to keep the dev team motivated and enthusiastic. Secondly, the publicity; I know you realise that was part of their goal, but I think perhaps you underestimate just how successful it was - the general public are enthusiastically talking about what is essentially an IBM tech demo. I doubt most of the people I see discussing this would look twice at a more traditional story about some piece of random computer science research, even if it did happen to get a column somewhere on page 15 of a mass-media publication. The IBM name is becoming synonymous with AI, and it endures; people still talk about Deep Blue, and that was over a decade ago. A shiny superbowl ad that people talk about for a week is 'good marketing', and I think this goes many levels beyond that.
Why? I don't see anything more special or "AI" in this than in Deep Blue's wins at chess so long ago.
Chess can be brute forced in a way that language can't. Not to say that Deep Blue was all brute force, and I don't think Watson is true AI, but I do think it's a moderately significant step, not to mention more practically applicable. If nothing else, it (in combination with some decent speech recognition software) brings us one step closer to a Star Trek style voice interface, and that's a damn worthwhile cause in my book!
These debates always remind me of something I read once, too. I forget the book, but the gist was that coders will be the last people to accept true AI if we ever do create it; we tend to believe that we have a full understanding of the way computers work, and what they are and are not capable of. While this is true to an extent, it becomes less so as systems become more and more complicated - I'm sure there's not a person on Earth who could fully understand a million-line program singlehandedly. Consciousness is just the emergent behaviour of organic computing hardware and software, and there's no reason that a sufficiently complex artificial system couldn't eventually show similar emergent behaviour, intentional or otherwise.
I was thinking about the absurd hypocrisy of this yesterday, and I came to a conclusion: politics is a lot like teaching. At the beginning, you get some intelligent, motivated people who think they can do good, and some incompetent, slimy asshats. After a short while, the stress, the petty arguments, the long hours and the excessive exposure to said asshats leaves the decent ones jaded and broken - they no longer have the wherewithal to keep fighting a losing battle and the asshats win. Those who somehow do manage to hold on to their motivation are such a small minority that they can only vary rarely effect worthwhile change.
This is a platform that didn't exist that long ago. Any sale is one more sale than they would have had otherwise.
That's just flat out wrong; there is a reasonably high likelihood that someone who subscribes using an iPad app does so in place of a paper subscription. I'm sure the platform drives some new sales, but to say that all iPad subscription sales are new customers is as bad as the RIAA saying that all illegal downloads are lost customers - I'm sure that some of them are, but I wouldn't even want to speculate on the numbers.
Yup. I though the same thing as soon as I saw "protect itself, and obey the user, in that order"; I'm assuming that rooting, tethering and other unauthorised usage are going to to feature on the list of things that the phone needs to 'protect itself' from. The fact that Motorola, the guys behind that whole 'eFuse' piece of crap, are involved pretty much seals the deal.
Re:It Doesn't Matter if it's Humiliating
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Why Nokia Is Toast
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I agree, but that's only likely to work out for Nokia if WP7 is, in fact, really damn good. So far I've heard that it's basically fine, but nothing earth shattering; when Android has a far bigger installed base (and thus greater app support and so forth) and better name recognition, I don't think MS's marketing team will be enough to swing things in Nokia's direction.
It's something of a shame, actually. Nokia make some very nice hardware - I still think the 8910 & 1100 are by far the nicest 'basic' phones out there, and my E71 has done a fine job for the last couple of years - and it's true that I probably wouldn't buy another Symbian phone (two years ago, when I got the previous one, the Android offerings were still sparse, expensive and somewhat clunky) but I've had enough bad experience with MS software that I'm very unlikely to go for one of their new models either; it'd take some bloody good reviews to change my mind.
On that note, does anyone know of any Android phones that are roughly comparable to the E71 in terms of build? Hardware keyboard isn't a deal-breaker, but the thin, robust metal construction and decent battery life seem hard to find amongst the rather cheap-feeling plastic that tends to dominate the market.
But words are how we communicate, they are how we express our thoughts and feelings. They are how we transmit facts and opinions, so the "Just words" argument really doesn't work.
A reasonable argument in itself, but the logical conclusion of that is not, IMO, that it's appropriate or sensible for people to get so riled up over someone else's opinion of them.
These words are letting a number of students know that someone they respected and whom they thought respected them did not respect them. They are telling them that someone, a trained and recognized authority, has judged them to be inferior. So it's more than just words, there's a lot more involved. Even for people that will just "shrug it off," there's still damage that hits in ways we don't always see for a long time.
Either the teacher was a decent person and the kids really were a bunch of lying, scheming little shits, or the kids were decent people and the teacher was a vindictive asshole. My experience of the education system suggests that either is entirely plausible. If it was the former, the kids either can't cope with the hard truth or (more likely) don't really care but are playing the "poor, innocent offended child" act as manipulative payback to the teacher for daring to insult them. If it was the latter, then the teacher does not in any way deserve their respect and, more importantly, almost certainly didn't have it - it's damn near impossible to get most school kids to respect you as a teacher at the best of times, so I would put a lot of money on the fact that a teacher who would say things like that unjustly would not have earned the kids' respect in the first place.
In either case, nobody has suffered some great emotional burden placed upon them by a shining figure in their life.
I often tell my friends in Europe that the US is a weird mix between a 1st and a 3rd world country. And don't even get me started on health insurance here!
Perhaps not 3rd world, but I very much know what you mean. My working theory on the matter is that it arises from the very stratified (and inconsistent) views on government interference - health care, for example, starts with a laissez-faire libertarian free-market approach, but then evolves with government interference through Medicare and Medicaid; the end result is an odd public/private hybrid in which tax money serves the public via the private sector. It's not quite one thing or the other, and I get the impression that a lot of America's economy works in a similar way. It certainly has its advantages, but I think it's also what leads to the odd dichotomy you mention. Not, by any means, to say that the US is the only country where this happens, but it seems most pronounced here. For better or worse, other countries seem more inclined to fully nationalise or fully privatise.
Much as I'd like to agree, the MPAA studios are not exactly small businesses. Based on a cursory look at their market caps, the 'big six' combined are on roughly equal footing with Google, with a significant part of that coming from Disney. I don't doubt that Google would win if the MPAA really tried to fight on this one, but it's not quite as clear-cut as one might think.
I'm curious if you've seen differences between the US and UK about the amount of "Extra Credit" work available in an average class?
My experience in the UK more or less matches the other reply - extra credit doesn't exist, and almost everything is on the exam (80 to 90% in most science subjects, but apparently significantly less for friends who were studying humanities). It's far less grade-centric, though, and while the exams cover more difficult material, they have more margin for error - I personally found it easier to get above 70% on a UK exam (the boundary for a 'first', the highest class of degree) than to get above 90% on a US exam (the boundary for an A), but the figures say that overall there were a lot more people getting As in the US uni than firsts in the UK one, so I'm apparently not representative of the average there.
I prefer the UK method - it's less stressful during the year, although there is a lot of pressure during those last few weeks, and I think that getting more than two thirds or so right on a tough exam tests genuine understanding of a subject with reasonable leeway for non-critical errors; getting 90%, even on a much simpler exam, requires not only understanding but also near-perfect recall and calculation - it is far more strongly skewed by knowledge of facts than true understanding.
All that said, though, it's a fairly subjective matter, and there were also parts of the US system that I did much prefer - particularly the flexibility, which really doesn't exist in the UK system.
In that context I absolutely agree, but I was talking more about the manuals of full worked solutions that exist for some books. Even then it's not entirely black and white - there's a major difference between double checking a derivation after you're finished, or blindly copying out the steps and handing them in - but I'd say that the latter is pretty clear cheating (although facilitated by the professor's choice to set book problems).
I've studied physics in UK and US universities, and while both had their share of good and bad professors, one thing I noticed in the US that never happened in the UK (admittedly extrapolating from two universities to two entire countries, but anyway...) was that questions from the textbook would be set as graded work, rather than the professor making up their own unique problems (as you experienced, and as they always did at the UK university). I'm guessing that swapping PDFs of textbook answers is what they're talking about in engineering.
In any event, most of the 'cheating' measures are only useful in the more vacuous subjects.
Although I find the article to be fairly poor, the one thing that did surprise me was the subjects arranged by cheating level. My assumption would have been the same as yours, but apparently no so:
Engineering and technology (72%)
Computer sciences and mathematical sciences (71%)
Social studies (64%)
Business and administrative studies (63%)
Law (62%)
Creative arts and design (61%)
Architecture, Building and Planning (60%)
Medicine (58%)
Natural sciences (57%)
Humanities (46%)
Although it does seem that 'traditional' subjects are firmly at the bottom of the list. More plagiarism from those doing a degree to get a job, and less from those doing a degree to learn, perhaps?
Bad form to reply to myself, but this seemed worth adding:
The study also examined “traditional” plagiarism and found similarly high levels – again, 61.9% of the sample reported some type of plagiarism, though this time from books and articles. I am not wholly convinced that the researchers adequately differentiated “online articles” and “offline articles” (students may consider these to be the same thing), but there is not enough detail reported on their method to be sure either way.
Fits pretty well with what I said, IMO. Firstly that the level of plagiarism is about the same either way - it's not some scary new phenomenon that's sucking in our students from those devil-boxes on their desks - and secondly that there's so little actual difference between an online article and a printed one that people (rightly, in my opinion) don't even consider them as different things. An utter non-story, but one of the type we'll keep getting for a while yet, by the look of things.
What makes the article particularly irritating is that their own definition for 'cybercheat' doesn't match the context in which they're using it:
Cybercheating can be defined as cheating enabled by the internet – so cybercheating can occur in any course.
61.9% (757 students) admitted to engaging in online plagiarism. 59% copied a few sentences, 30% copied a few paragraphs, 12% copies a few pages, 4% copied entire documents, and 3% purchased essays. 22.3% admitted to engaging in such behaviors regularly.
It's plain old plagiarism, hardly 'enabled' by the internet and certainly not worthy of it's own new word.
The actual figures, while not brilliant, are far less worrying than they seem to be trying to lead us to believe, and the word 'cybercheating' is just another one of those ploys to gain extra coverage by still implying that the internet is something new and scary, rather than a day-to-day avenue by which old behaviours, from simple conversation to bullying to cheating are carried out.
I understood the problem from the start. As I said, I basically agree with what you say, just not with your overall appraisal of Wikipedia based on those problems. It's very, very far from perfect, and we should certainly be working to fix it, but that doesn't change the fact that it is still a hugely important and useful resource that the world would be far worse off without.
At the end of the day, I can still type in "Genghis Khan", "General relativity" or "Tulip mania" - all referring to information from long before 1990 - and be presented with a reasonably accurate and well written primer on the subject, complete with a good array of supplementary links. The objective usefulness of Wikipedia is enormous, and that is not diminished by the idea that it could be significantly better without the quite valid issues that you refer to.
Slashdot Mirror
Yup, and get Chris Morris while they're at it. Which would be particularly appropriate since he was satirising the very insanity of moral panics like this in the first place.
Some people are naive/stupid/misguided. Many people use social networking. As such, there is a significant overlap between the two groups, and people therefore do inadvisable things using social media. I don't see it as any causal, or even correlated, relationship - I'd be interested to see any studies to the contrary, but anecdotally I'd say the incidence of 'stupid' on Facebook is roughly the same as in the general population (i.e. depressingly high), meaning it's use as an indicator is negligible.
You still fail. If it is fully public, you could have written "Does anyone want to go to the pub tonight?" on your own web site, retaining full control of said data. If it is intended just for your friends, you can text or e-mail them.
It's not always the best choice, but Facebook provides a convenient set of tools (better suited to group discussion than text or email), and the vast majority of people are already checking it (unlike this hypothetical personal site). Sure, those wouldn't make for very convincing arguments if I were actually losing out in any way by using Facebook, but the information I place on it is of literally zero value to me - you're absolutely right when you say it's information that I don't care about at all. That does not, however, in any way imply that I don't care about any of my personal info - just that I am capable of separating that which has value to me from that which doesn't.
How could an employer trust you that you would care more about company data?
Data is not all of equal value - the fact that I don't care who knows that I'm going to the pub tonight doesn't mean that I'll show the same disregard for people's bank details. That's like saying "how could an employer trust you with a company car when they saw you throw out an empty drink can?" - it's a nonsensical statement, because the items are of such vastly different value.
That's odd. I live in a society where the right to privacy is protected. Meaning that, even with government protection from businesses and so forth, you're still somewhat responsible. In the end, if you're unwilling to look after your own privacy as a matter of course today, then I wouldn't want to hire you either.
I don't see how that relates to my post. I said that public information goes on Facebook and the rest doesn't - how does that lead to the conclusion that I'm unwilling to protect my privacy?
If you're going to take nothing more than the fact that I use a particular communication tool as a reason to write me off as irresponsible, I feel fully justified in declaring you as a pompous, superior, neo-luddite based on nothing more than that single Slashdot post.
Some of my data doesn't need to be private; I'd be as happy to write "Does anyone want to go to the pub tonight?" in giant red letters on the side of a building as I am to place it on Facebook, if that happened to be the most convenient way to get the message to a large group of my friends. Some of my data does need to be private; that data doesn't go on Facebook at all.
I thought the same, but there are a few important supplementary questions (to which I don't know the answers):
I understand wanting to maintain your privacy as a matter of principal, but ultimately you're the one choosing to go to their country. You don't have to like it, but you do have to live by their rules. From my own experience travelling in some of the more repressive parts of the world, I would say that there's generally a certain amount of leeway given to foreigners that isn't afforded to locals, but you're still safer not giving them an excuse to pay you any extra attention. What I can't tell you (especially without knowing which country you're going to) is what they will or will not consider to be an excuse; honestly I doubt that even a police chief in the country could give you a definitive answer in a lot of places - the strictness of the definition tends to be inversely proportional to the wealth and influence wielded by the person that it is being applied to.
Just bear in mind that while it may be discomforting to know they're reading your emails home, they probably don't care what you're saying. They might well start caring about the fact that they can't see what you're saying.
Consciousness is just the emergent behaviour of organic computing hardware and software
And you can prove that how exactly?
OK, I was wrong to imply that was fact. I should've written something along the lines of "At our current level of understanding and observation, consciousness appears to be the emergent behaviour of organic hardware and software.". As yet, we have no evidence of any external 'driving force' of consciousness, nor any theories to explain how the phenomenon may exist outside of the brain; our current understanding is, of course, vastly incomplete - I'm not saying that we should rule out the theory of an 'external consciousness' - but with plenty of observable evidence of the consciousness existing within the brain, and no evidence of it existing outside, it is a sensible working hypothesis that its existence is a direct result of the brain's structure.
there's no reason that a sufficiently complex artificial system couldn't eventually show similar emergent behaviour, intentional or otherwise.
When you say "intentional" are you referring to the designers of the artificial system, or the artificial system itself? Because if the system can't have its own intentions, you can not say it has consciousness any more than a rock rolling down a hill.
I absolutely meant the intentions of the designer - I fully agree that the concept of a non-conscious system showing 'intent' is no more sensible than saying that a hammer shows the same. My point was more focused on the 'unintentional' side anyway: the idea that we may end up creating a 'thinking' AI without ever intending to, and indeed may even do so before we understand what in the system the 'thought' actually arises from.
Watson couldn't actually see or hear anything and the clues had to be fed to him electronically. Still impressive NLP but no speech recognition.
I know, that's why I said "in combination with some decent speech recognition software" - as in the software parses sound into text, which is then passed to Watson to be 'understood' and acted upon. Obviously the speech part is not in any way trivial, but there are many people working on the problem, and passing the text output across to Watson once the accuracy is sufficient is trivial; if anything, the language parsing algorithms could actually help in being somewhat forgiving of audio parsing errors.
However, there is little real difference. Watson is still just following a fixed set of rules, no matter how complex that set of rules is. Just like Deep Blue, it is completely incapable of dealing with literally anything that falls outside that specific set of rules. Which means that Watson is fundamentally no "smarter" than Deep Blue was.
Maybe I just misunderstood what you meant by no more special than Deep Blue, but my point was that Watson solves useful real-world problems in a manner with a much wider reach than Deep Blue was ever going to have. I think you're trivialising the creation of the set of rules that Watson operates on, when in fact it's a significantly useful achievement - the more all-encompassing a static rule set becomes, the more we understand about how a self-modifying, 'learning' one should function.
Even most animal brains that are of complexity near to our own are not capable of the kind of cognition and "self-awareness" that humans attribute to real consciousness.
Therefore, "sufficient complexity" appears to be extremely complex indeed, as this article [arstechnica.com] clearly implies, with quite a bit of evidence to back it up.
I don't doubt that any kind of genuine 'thinking' AI is a long way off, but even a basic animal-level system would have a fundamental advantage over current computers, which you touched on yourself: the ability to adapt beyond its pre-defined capabilities.
It's good marketing for IBM in general, I suppose, but I'm not sure what Ken Jennings and Alex Trebek are getting out of it besides announcing their pending obsolescence.
As another poster said, Jennings and the Jeopardy crew are making good money from this. As for IBM, they benefit in a few ways - firstly, the techniques learned in making the software will be very, very marketable, even if you don't see a box marked "Watson" on the shelf any time soon, and I'm sure the public challenge was a good way to keep the dev team motivated and enthusiastic. Secondly, the publicity; I know you realise that was part of their goal, but I think perhaps you underestimate just how successful it was - the general public are enthusiastically talking about what is essentially an IBM tech demo. I doubt most of the people I see discussing this would look twice at a more traditional story about some piece of random computer science research, even if it did happen to get a column somewhere on page 15 of a mass-media publication. The IBM name is becoming synonymous with AI, and it endures; people still talk about Deep Blue, and that was over a decade ago. A shiny superbowl ad that people talk about for a week is 'good marketing', and I think this goes many levels beyond that.
Why? I don't see anything more special or "AI" in this than in Deep Blue's wins at chess so long ago.
Chess can be brute forced in a way that language can't. Not to say that Deep Blue was all brute force, and I don't think Watson is true AI, but I do think it's a moderately significant step, not to mention more practically applicable. If nothing else, it (in combination with some decent speech recognition software) brings us one step closer to a Star Trek style voice interface, and that's a damn worthwhile cause in my book!
These debates always remind me of something I read once, too. I forget the book, but the gist was that coders will be the last people to accept true AI if we ever do create it; we tend to believe that we have a full understanding of the way computers work, and what they are and are not capable of. While this is true to an extent, it becomes less so as systems become more and more complicated - I'm sure there's not a person on Earth who could fully understand a million-line program singlehandedly. Consciousness is just the emergent behaviour of organic computing hardware and software, and there's no reason that a sufficiently complex artificial system couldn't eventually show similar emergent behaviour, intentional or otherwise.
I was thinking about the absurd hypocrisy of this yesterday, and I came to a conclusion: politics is a lot like teaching. At the beginning, you get some intelligent, motivated people who think they can do good, and some incompetent, slimy asshats. After a short while, the stress, the petty arguments, the long hours and the excessive exposure to said asshats leaves the decent ones jaded and broken - they no longer have the wherewithal to keep fighting a losing battle and the asshats win. Those who somehow do manage to hold on to their motivation are such a small minority that they can only vary rarely effect worthwhile change.
This is a platform that didn't exist that long ago. Any sale is one more sale than they would have had otherwise.
That's just flat out wrong; there is a reasonably high likelihood that someone who subscribes using an iPad app does so in place of a paper subscription. I'm sure the platform drives some new sales, but to say that all iPad subscription sales are new customers is as bad as the RIAA saying that all illegal downloads are lost customers - I'm sure that some of them are, but I wouldn't even want to speculate on the numbers.
The 'peoples' phone: RIP. 2011
Yup. I though the same thing as soon as I saw "protect itself, and obey the user, in that order"; I'm assuming that rooting, tethering and other unauthorised usage are going to to feature on the list of things that the phone needs to 'protect itself' from. The fact that Motorola, the guys behind that whole 'eFuse' piece of crap, are involved pretty much seals the deal.
I agree, but that's only likely to work out for Nokia if WP7 is, in fact, really damn good. So far I've heard that it's basically fine, but nothing earth shattering; when Android has a far bigger installed base (and thus greater app support and so forth) and better name recognition, I don't think MS's marketing team will be enough to swing things in Nokia's direction.
It's something of a shame, actually. Nokia make some very nice hardware - I still think the 8910 & 1100 are by far the nicest 'basic' phones out there, and my E71 has done a fine job for the last couple of years - and it's true that I probably wouldn't buy another Symbian phone (two years ago, when I got the previous one, the Android offerings were still sparse, expensive and somewhat clunky) but I've had enough bad experience with MS software that I'm very unlikely to go for one of their new models either; it'd take some bloody good reviews to change my mind.
On that note, does anyone know of any Android phones that are roughly comparable to the E71 in terms of build? Hardware keyboard isn't a deal-breaker, but the thin, robust metal construction and decent battery life seem hard to find amongst the rather cheap-feeling plastic that tends to dominate the market.
But words are how we communicate, they are how we express our thoughts and feelings. They are how we transmit facts and opinions, so the "Just words" argument really doesn't work.
A reasonable argument in itself, but the logical conclusion of that is not, IMO, that it's appropriate or sensible for people to get so riled up over someone else's opinion of them.
These words are letting a number of students know that someone they respected and whom they thought respected them did not respect them. They are telling them that someone, a trained and recognized authority, has judged them to be inferior. So it's more than just words, there's a lot more involved. Even for people that will just "shrug it off," there's still damage that hits in ways we don't always see for a long time.
Either the teacher was a decent person and the kids really were a bunch of lying, scheming little shits, or the kids were decent people and the teacher was a vindictive asshole. My experience of the education system suggests that either is entirely plausible. If it was the former, the kids either can't cope with the hard truth or (more likely) don't really care but are playing the "poor, innocent offended child" act as manipulative payback to the teacher for daring to insult them. If it was the latter, then the teacher does not in any way deserve their respect and, more importantly, almost certainly didn't have it - it's damn near impossible to get most school kids to respect you as a teacher at the best of times, so I would put a lot of money on the fact that a teacher who would say things like that unjustly would not have earned the kids' respect in the first place.
In either case, nobody has suffered some great emotional burden placed upon them by a shining figure in their life.
I often tell my friends in Europe that the US is a weird mix between a 1st and a 3rd world country. And don't even get me started on health insurance here!
Perhaps not 3rd world, but I very much know what you mean. My working theory on the matter is that it arises from the very stratified (and inconsistent) views on government interference - health care, for example, starts with a laissez-faire libertarian free-market approach, but then evolves with government interference through Medicare and Medicaid; the end result is an odd public/private hybrid in which tax money serves the public via the private sector. It's not quite one thing or the other, and I get the impression that a lot of America's economy works in a similar way. It certainly has its advantages, but I think it's also what leads to the odd dichotomy you mention. Not, by any means, to say that the US is the only country where this happens, but it seems most pronounced here. For better or worse, other countries seem more inclined to fully nationalise or fully privatise.
It's like a chihuahua barking at a tiger.
Much as I'd like to agree, the MPAA studios are not exactly small businesses. Based on a cursory look at their market caps, the 'big six' combined are on roughly equal footing with Google, with a significant part of that coming from Disney. I don't doubt that Google would win if the MPAA really tried to fight on this one, but it's not quite as clear-cut as one might think.
I'm curious if you've seen differences between the US and UK about the amount of "Extra Credit" work available in an average class?
My experience in the UK more or less matches the other reply - extra credit doesn't exist, and almost everything is on the exam (80 to 90% in most science subjects, but apparently significantly less for friends who were studying humanities). It's far less grade-centric, though, and while the exams cover more difficult material, they have more margin for error - I personally found it easier to get above 70% on a UK exam (the boundary for a 'first', the highest class of degree) than to get above 90% on a US exam (the boundary for an A), but the figures say that overall there were a lot more people getting As in the US uni than firsts in the UK one, so I'm apparently not representative of the average there.
I prefer the UK method - it's less stressful during the year, although there is a lot of pressure during those last few weeks, and I think that getting more than two thirds or so right on a tough exam tests genuine understanding of a subject with reasonable leeway for non-critical errors; getting 90%, even on a much simpler exam, requires not only understanding but also near-perfect recall and calculation - it is far more strongly skewed by knowledge of facts than true understanding.
All that said, though, it's a fairly subjective matter, and there were also parts of the US system that I did much prefer - particularly the flexibility, which really doesn't exist in the UK system.
In that context I absolutely agree, but I was talking more about the manuals of full worked solutions that exist for some books. Even then it's not entirely black and white - there's a major difference between double checking a derivation after you're finished, or blindly copying out the steps and handing them in - but I'd say that the latter is pretty clear cheating (although facilitated by the professor's choice to set book problems).
I've studied physics in UK and US universities, and while both had their share of good and bad professors, one thing I noticed in the US that never happened in the UK (admittedly extrapolating from two universities to two entire countries, but anyway...) was that questions from the textbook would be set as graded work, rather than the professor making up their own unique problems (as you experienced, and as they always did at the UK university). I'm guessing that swapping PDFs of textbook answers is what they're talking about in engineering.
In any event, most of the 'cheating' measures are only useful in the more vacuous subjects.
Although I find the article to be fairly poor, the one thing that did surprise me was the subjects arranged by cheating level. My assumption would have been the same as yours, but apparently no so:
Although it does seem that 'traditional' subjects are firmly at the bottom of the list. More plagiarism from those doing a degree to get a job, and less from those doing a degree to learn, perhaps?
Bad form to reply to myself, but this seemed worth adding:
The study also examined “traditional” plagiarism and found similarly high levels – again, 61.9% of the sample reported some type of plagiarism, though this time from books and articles. I am not wholly convinced that the researchers adequately differentiated “online articles” and “offline articles” (students may consider these to be the same thing), but there is not enough detail reported on their method to be sure either way.
Fits pretty well with what I said, IMO. Firstly that the level of plagiarism is about the same either way - it's not some scary new phenomenon that's sucking in our students from those devil-boxes on their desks - and secondly that there's so little actual difference between an online article and a printed one that people (rightly, in my opinion) don't even consider them as different things. An utter non-story, but one of the type we'll keep getting for a while yet, by the look of things.
What makes the article particularly irritating is that their own definition for 'cybercheat' doesn't match the context in which they're using it:
Cybercheating can be defined as cheating enabled by the internet – so cybercheating can occur in any course.
61.9% (757 students) admitted to engaging in online plagiarism. 59% copied a few sentences, 30% copied a few paragraphs, 12% copies a few pages, 4% copied entire documents, and 3% purchased essays. 22.3% admitted to engaging in such behaviors regularly.
It's plain old plagiarism, hardly 'enabled' by the internet and certainly not worthy of it's own new word.
The actual figures, while not brilliant, are far less worrying than they seem to be trying to lead us to believe, and the word 'cybercheating' is just another one of those ploys to gain extra coverage by still implying that the internet is something new and scary, rather than a day-to-day avenue by which old behaviours, from simple conversation to bullying to cheating are carried out.
I understood the problem from the start. As I said, I basically agree with what you say, just not with your overall appraisal of Wikipedia based on those problems. It's very, very far from perfect, and we should certainly be working to fix it, but that doesn't change the fact that it is still a hugely important and useful resource that the world would be far worse off without.
At the end of the day, I can still type in "Genghis Khan", "General relativity" or "Tulip mania" - all referring to information from long before 1990 - and be presented with a reasonably accurate and well written primer on the subject, complete with a good array of supplementary links. The objective usefulness of Wikipedia is enormous, and that is not diminished by the idea that it could be significantly better without the quite valid issues that you refer to.