Re:Math teachers don't set the curriculum. :(
on
The Golden Ratio
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· Score: 1
I've never taught, but my dad taught jr. high and highschool math. When he was teaching Algebra 1, his former students would come to him for help with Algebra 2 because my dad taught concepts in a way that highschoolers could understand. So yes, it is possible to teach abstract concepts to highschoolers, if you are able to explain it in terms that highschoolers can understand.
(btw, the reason my dad got out of teaching was because he was tired of parents pitching fits about things like their kids getting in trouble for talking in class)
After the IBM superbowl commercials? Id say several million.
Yeah, but millions of people also saw the OS2 commercials, and we all know how well that's done. The problem is that IBM's commercials are too artsy and esoteric, and joe sixpack isn't going to buy artsy and esoteric.
If mathematics is taught properly, someone shouldn't need more than HS Algebra to understand what you're describing. Heck, they shouldn't even need any more than basic elementary school math. The problem is that the vast majority of math teachers try to avoid troubling students' brains with the inherently abstract nature of mathematics.
It's gotten to the point that even Kasparov is only playing the best chess computers to draws. Of course, he did lose to Deep Blue, but despite all his insistance that IBM cheated, he got beat mentally, not necessarily because the computer was better.
Incidentally, there is a new documentary, Game Over: Kasparov and the Machine about the Deep Blue rematch, which I had the opportunity to see at the US premier a few weekends back. I'd link to the review I wrote on my blog, but I don't think the sysadmin would be very happy with me if I did.
like maybe having your parents ship you a burger in the mail once in a while
Or, you could just take a vacation to Bangladesh, where the large Muslim population means you can find beef. My brother's been living in India as a researcher for the past few years, and he gets his beef fix when he occassionally goes to Bangladesh, or goes on vacation to Thailand.
My dad's car was an automatic, which might have been a part of the problem. But, the other thing that was a pain was that it tended to overheat, which made it more sluggish--I don't think that the 90 degree plus heat of Florida helped things any.
Escorts are terrible. I had a friend who had one burn up in her driveway. Fortunately, my dad's Escort never caught fire, but you had to be careful because it didn't have enough horsepower to be able to pull out in heavy traffic--that is, if it hadn't overheated first.
We had a Grand Marquis that caught fire while my mom was driving.
At least not in the sense that he lives under a bridge or sleeps over a sidewalk grate. It sounds like he's really just in that class of slacker who lives with his parents part of the time, and hangs out for extended periods at friends houses. Rootless (no pun intended) yes, homeless no.
Major drug dealers are routinely set free in exchange for supplying the prison industry with hundreds of individual users who supply more bodies for the prison and ensure high profits and stock prices for the prison corporation.
This isn't true. I know a guy who got arrested for heroin possession, and the higher ups in the police department were pretty ticked off at the street cops because arresting him tipped off the big fish dealers who were the ones they were trying to catch. Oh yeah, and the only time in jail that he did was overnight before he got released on his own recognizance--he ended up in a pre-trial diversion program for first time offenders.
While being able to examine the source code is better than not being able to see it, I believe it was Ken Thompson at Bell Labs back in the late 1970s who proved that you couldn't trust anything you didn't write--not even the compilier.
Open source would allow us to find the most obvious nefarious schemes, but we still wouldn't be totally safe, unless we were the one to build the system from the ground up, including writing the original compilier in machine code to ensure that any compiler that we were to use didn't modify our code.
Basically, anytime any other human is involved, we can't trust it completely.
There have been other times since then when solar storms have made it possible to see aurora borealis pretty far south. Back in the late 1980s, there was a big solar disturbance which resulted, among other things, in aurora borealis being visible at least as far south as South Florida (I know, I saw it). In that instance, there were no big problem with electrical systems.
I spent every day this last summer driving through one of the most notorious speed traps in the state of Florida. The speed limits are deliberately set artificially low, and deceivingly so wherever possible. State laws were passed specifically to curb the behavior of this town, and to discourage others. AAA specifically refers to this place as a speed trap, and has even taken out billboards warning motorists that a speed trap is 6 miles ahead. This town actually turns a profit on speeding tickets - completely funds the police department, and money left over.
Sure, argue against speed limits based on the most notorious speed trap towns in existance. That's only slightly above the level of a straw-man argument. Yes, there are speed trap towns, but there are also places where speeding is dangerous to everyone. Try driving on the stretch of I-75 just south of Chattanooga, TN, where semis go flying past above the speed limit and you can see the drivers struggling to keep their vehicles from flying out of the turn and across the median into oncoming traffic. Without the speed limits, it would be even more dangerous than it already is, because the drivers would be going even faster.
Men not getting special treatment? Maybe not in CS or engineering, but my male elementary education major friends in college would brag about all the special treatment they got from the education department, which will go out of it's way to try to get and keep guys in the elementary ed. major. I, on the other hand, got no special treatment as a female CS major, even though we were just as scarce as guys in elementary ed. (and, I had to put up with rude comments from male CS majors from time to time, whereas the guys in elementary ed got to have tons of girls telling them how great it was that they were in the major).
And it's not an exclusivity of AT&T either. As a European, I can tell you volumes about the wonders of the State-owned telephone monopolies in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, etc.
Too true. I was in Spain for only a week back in 2001 and saw several large public demonstrations against the phone companies. That's got to be pretty bad service when you feel so strongly that you start demonstrating in the streets.
beh, gel ink is the worst of the worst. It's thick and it smudges easily. Just get a standard ballpoint Bic if that's all you can afford.
No, it is not gel ink in general that is the worst of the worst, the worst of the worst is purple or green gel ink. I have way to many negative connotations with those colors of gel ink because I had a professors who would grade tests with those colors.
keypad vs. graffiti--handspring's response
on
New Treo Reviewed
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Who needs a freaking keypad on a Palm? (Well, actually the Sony Clie's that fold out, with the keypads, are perfectly acceptable, since they have both keypad AND graffiti area).
I didn't spend 6 years using graffiti to just throw it all away now!
I actually e-mailed Handspring with the same sentiments (saying that I would be more inclined to buy it if it didn't have a keypad), and recieved the response that the consumer base that they were marketing the Treo to was the base that used Blackberry type devices and didn't want to learn graffiti. So, basically, the marketing hacks decided to ignore everybody who had been using and liking grafitti to go for a totally different customer. We aren't the people they expect to be buying the Treo.
...it's that the girl and her mother are already poor and disempowered individuals--they live in a public housing project, for crying out loud! For the RIAA to go after little girls living in poverty is just sick and heartless. I didn't realize that even an organization like the RIAA had so little conscience. They're probably taking food out of that family's mouth. Sick.
The problem (at least what Apple might see as a problem), is that eventually almost all of the songs that people want will be available through resale, meaning that Apple will get a smaller cut than if they were purchased "new." This means smaller and smaller profits for Apple, and I doubt they'd go for that.
what exactly does a "smart card" have to do with money technology?
You must be an American--in much of Europe, all of the credit cards are smart cards. When I was in Spain about 3 years ago, I couldn't use my credit card to make pay phone calls because the phones were all equipped with smart card readers and couldn't read my American credit card with only a mag strip.
The former director of the planetarium in my town reportedly once shot out a light in the middle of a field because it was blocking his view.
When we lived out in the middle of nowhere, my brother would sometimes use his telescope looking through our sliding glass door when the mosquitos were too bad to go outside (the perils of living on a swamp), and even through a smudged sliding glass door, he could see more than he could when we lived in town. Alas, all the yuppies moved out there and the night skies are no longer pristine.
Currently there are not very many college students in CS or CompE that use open-source development products.
I don't know what college students you know, but I graduated from college this spring, and used almost entirely open-source products. They used to use MS VisualC++ in some classes, but it was such a frustrating experience for all involved that they dropped that a year or two before I got to those classes and went to an entirely Linux development environment. We got a pretty good dose of system level programming in Linux, as well. One guy even wrote his senior thesis on open-source development models and the philosophy behind open-source.
Maybe my school was the exception rather than the rule though. None of my professors had a particularly high opinion of M$.
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I've never taught, but my dad taught jr. high and highschool math. When he was teaching Algebra 1, his former students would come to him for help with Algebra 2 because my dad taught concepts in a way that highschoolers could understand. So yes, it is possible to teach abstract concepts to highschoolers, if you are able to explain it in terms that highschoolers can understand.
(btw, the reason my dad got out of teaching was because he was tired of parents pitching fits about things like their kids getting in trouble for talking in class)
After the IBM superbowl commercials? Id say several million.
Yeah, but millions of people also saw the OS2 commercials, and we all know how well that's done. The problem is that IBM's commercials are too artsy and esoteric, and joe sixpack isn't going to buy artsy and esoteric.
If mathematics is taught properly, someone shouldn't need more than HS Algebra to understand what you're describing. Heck, they shouldn't even need any more than basic elementary school math. The problem is that the vast majority of math teachers try to avoid troubling students' brains with the inherently abstract nature of mathematics.
It's gotten to the point that even Kasparov is only playing the best chess computers to draws. Of course, he did lose to Deep Blue, but despite all his insistance that IBM cheated, he got beat mentally, not necessarily because the computer was better.
Incidentally, there is a new documentary, Game Over: Kasparov and the Machine about the Deep Blue rematch, which I had the opportunity to see at the US premier a few weekends back. I'd link to the review I wrote on my blog, but I don't think the sysadmin would be very happy with me if I did.
like maybe having your parents ship you a burger in the mail once in a while
Or, you could just take a vacation to Bangladesh, where the large Muslim population means you can find beef. My brother's been living in India as a researcher for the past few years, and he gets his beef fix when he occassionally goes to Bangladesh, or goes on vacation to Thailand.
My dad's car was an automatic, which might have been a part of the problem. But, the other thing that was a pain was that it tended to overheat, which made it more sluggish--I don't think that the 90 degree plus heat of Florida helped things any.
No, the car was turned off. She had just returned from getting groceries when she looked out the window and her car was on fire.
Escorts are terrible. I had a friend who had one burn up in her driveway. Fortunately, my dad's Escort never caught fire, but you had to be careful because it didn't have enough horsepower to be able to pull out in heavy traffic--that is, if it hadn't overheated first. We had a Grand Marquis that caught fire while my mom was driving.
I dunno, I kind of think that the Edsel reaches the so-ugly-it's-cool level. There is a small segment of the population that are Edsel fans.
At least not in the sense that he lives under a bridge or sleeps over a sidewalk grate. It sounds like he's really just in that class of slacker who lives with his parents part of the time, and hangs out for extended periods at friends houses. Rootless (no pun intended) yes, homeless no.
Major drug dealers are routinely set free in exchange for supplying the prison industry with hundreds of individual users who supply more bodies for the prison and ensure high profits and stock prices for the prison corporation.
This isn't true. I know a guy who got arrested for heroin possession, and the higher ups in the police department were pretty ticked off at the street cops because arresting him tipped off the big fish dealers who were the ones they were trying to catch. Oh yeah, and the only time in jail that he did was overnight before he got released on his own recognizance--he ended up in a pre-trial diversion program for first time offenders.
And it's not fun. My brother got it in India, and the medicine he had to take was measured in grams, not milligrams.
While being able to examine the source code is better than not being able to see it, I believe it was Ken Thompson at Bell Labs back in the late 1970s who proved that you couldn't trust anything you didn't write--not even the compilier.
Open source would allow us to find the most obvious nefarious schemes, but we still wouldn't be totally safe, unless we were the one to build the system from the ground up, including writing the original compilier in machine code to ensure that any compiler that we were to use didn't modify our code.
Basically, anytime any other human is involved, we can't trust it completely.
There have been other times since then when solar storms have made it possible to see aurora borealis pretty far south. Back in the late 1980s, there was a big solar disturbance which resulted, among other things, in aurora borealis being visible at least as far south as South Florida (I know, I saw it). In that instance, there were no big problem with electrical systems.
I spent every day this last summer driving through one of the most notorious speed traps in the state of Florida. The speed limits are deliberately set artificially low, and deceivingly so wherever possible. State laws were passed specifically to curb the behavior of this town, and to discourage others. AAA specifically refers to this place as a speed trap, and has even taken out billboards warning motorists that a speed trap is 6 miles ahead. This town actually turns a profit on speeding tickets - completely funds the police department, and money left over.
Sure, argue against speed limits based on the most notorious speed trap towns in existance. That's only slightly above the level of a straw-man argument. Yes, there are speed trap towns, but there are also places where speeding is dangerous to everyone. Try driving on the stretch of I-75 just south of Chattanooga, TN, where semis go flying past above the speed limit and you can see the drivers struggling to keep their vehicles from flying out of the turn and across the median into oncoming traffic. Without the speed limits, it would be even more dangerous than it already is, because the drivers would be going even faster.
Men not getting special treatment? Maybe not in CS or engineering, but my male elementary education major friends in college would brag about all the special treatment they got from the education department, which will go out of it's way to try to get and keep guys in the elementary ed. major. I, on the other hand, got no special treatment as a female CS major, even though we were just as scarce as guys in elementary ed. (and, I had to put up with rude comments from male CS majors from time to time, whereas the guys in elementary ed got to have tons of girls telling them how great it was that they were in the major).
And it's not an exclusivity of AT&T either. As a European, I can tell you volumes about the wonders of the State-owned telephone monopolies in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, etc.
Too true. I was in Spain for only a week back in 2001 and saw several large public demonstrations against the phone companies. That's got to be pretty bad service when you feel so strongly that you start demonstrating in the streets.
beh, gel ink is the worst of the worst. It's thick and it smudges easily. Just get a standard ballpoint Bic if that's all you can afford.
No, it is not gel ink in general that is the worst of the worst, the worst of the worst is purple or green gel ink. I have way to many negative connotations with those colors of gel ink because I had a professors who would grade tests with those colors.
Who needs a freaking keypad on a Palm? (Well, actually the Sony Clie's that fold out, with the keypads, are perfectly acceptable, since they have both keypad AND graffiti area).
I didn't spend 6 years using graffiti to just throw it all away now!
I actually e-mailed Handspring with the same sentiments (saying that I would be more inclined to buy it if it didn't have a keypad), and recieved the response that the consumer base that they were marketing the Treo to was the base that used Blackberry type devices and didn't want to learn graffiti. So, basically, the marketing hacks decided to ignore everybody who had been using and liking grafitti to go for a totally different customer. We aren't the people they expect to be buying the Treo.
That kid obviously has waaaay too much time on his hands. I can't imagine doing that my freshman year.
...it's that the girl and her mother are already poor and disempowered individuals--they live in a public housing project, for crying out loud! For the RIAA to go after little girls living in poverty is just sick and heartless. I didn't realize that even an organization like the RIAA had so little conscience. They're probably taking food out of that family's mouth. Sick.
The problem (at least what Apple might see as a problem), is that eventually almost all of the songs that people want will be available through resale, meaning that Apple will get a smaller cut than if they were purchased "new." This means smaller and smaller profits for Apple, and I doubt they'd go for that.
what exactly does a "smart card" have to do with money technology?
You must be an American--in much of Europe, all of the credit cards are smart cards. When I was in Spain about 3 years ago, I couldn't use my credit card to make pay phone calls because the phones were all equipped with smart card readers and couldn't read my American credit card with only a mag strip.
The former director of the planetarium in my town reportedly once shot out a light in the middle of a field because it was blocking his view.
When we lived out in the middle of nowhere, my brother would sometimes use his telescope looking through our sliding glass door when the mosquitos were too bad to go outside (the perils of living on a swamp), and even through a smudged sliding glass door, he could see more than he could when we lived in town. Alas, all the yuppies moved out there and the night skies are no longer pristine.
Currently there are not very many college students in CS or CompE that use open-source development products.
I don't know what college students you know, but I graduated from college this spring, and used almost entirely open-source products. They used to use MS VisualC++ in some classes, but it was such a frustrating experience for all involved that they dropped that a year or two before I got to those classes and went to an entirely Linux development environment. We got a pretty good dose of system level programming in Linux, as well. One guy even wrote his senior thesis on open-source development models and the philosophy behind open-source.
Maybe my school was the exception rather than the rule though. None of my professors had a particularly high opinion of M$.
Ryn