A bad pun (to begin with)
on
SCOoby Snacks
·
· Score: 1
All this needs to go into Webster's next to the word "SCOfflaw"...
Semi-seriously -- who can take SCO seriously anymore? -- let's look at the slander of title claim as delineated in Groklaw:
"[t]o prove slander of title, a claimant must prove that (1) there was a publication of a slanderous statement disparaging claimant's title, (2) the statement was false, (3) the statement was made with malice, and (4) the statement caused actual or special damages."
"publication of a slanderous statement disparaging claimant's title" -- So Novell published as statement contesting SCO's claim to the copyright. Is that "slanderous"? To what extent are company letters really "published"?
"the statement was false" -- My first reaction is that this is redundant, given that "slanderous" is in point #1. SCO has yet to disclose any "proof" that their claim is valid. They contend it's valid, but that's not proof. SCO will have to show its hand to prevail on this & I don't think they're holding any face cards.
"the statement was made with malice" -- I think SCO has a tough row to hoe with this one, too, given that McBride worked for Novell & that Novell willing sold the product (and not the copyright) to SCO to market.
"the statement caused special damages" -- SCO will have it easy on this one. Any counterclaim obviously means that the day-trading SCO execs lose money;-)
Gould was a popular writer. He made a good living doing it. That alone is enough to make a lot of his peers very jealous. The fact that he was a socialist in an American society that was swinging to the right must be considered as well. Gould's "enemies" are as guilty of attacking a straw man as he is. (And he is very guilty of doing that -- it sells books.)
As far as it being "Marxist," I challenge you to find any theory that isn't colored to some extent by politics, right-left, right-wrong. In fact, one of the beautiful things about Mismeasure is the irony. The tough thing is that it is Gould's second most tedious book (Ontogeny & Phylogeny gets first place) & most readers never make it to the end, where Gould exposes his real rationale for writing -- his learning-disabled son.
Actually, I believe Gould wrote Mismeasure to denigrate intelligence testing. It was largely stimulated by the discovery that one of his sons had a learning disability.
Gould's best shots at E.O. Wilson are in other works.
Trust me, there are plenty of biologists who think that Wilson shoulda stuck with fire ants.
Marketing is something Linux needs. Of course, that's the weak point for a lot of open source.
Tux toys & t-shirts sound trivial, but they loosen people up about something that a lot of non-tech types think is "hard". Setting up the "sexist" argument ("Even the women can use this OS") is even appropriate if that's what it takes to make decision-makers come around.
Brain size is usually taken in relation to something else, and not as an absolute value
Of course.
I will reiterate my recommendation of Gould's The Mismeasure of Man. In it, he traces the history of many of our most cherished statistical methods (Spearman, Pearson, etc), which were developed to relate brain size to "something else." In those cases, the purpose was to adjust the brain size of white males so it consistently came out on top.
Another main theme of Gould's book is "reification" of intelligence. Reification involves (among other things) assigning a numeric value to something that isn't exactly quantifiable.
My original point, though, was to object to the article's use of "intelligence/brain size" as if the two were unarguably interchangeable.
But I wish the "blurb" had left brain size out of the mix. If brain size has anything to do with intelligence (within a group), then humans would be in the zoo & elephants would be running the show.
Once I read "brain size," all I could do was think of the efforts -- well discussed in Stephen Jay Gould's The Mismeasure of Man -- of 19th and 20th century physical anthropologists to use "brain size is correlated with intelligence" to justify racism & sexism.
The only thing that brain size is really correlated with is body size. Cattle have larger brains than most monkeys. Men have larger brains than women. Blacks have larger brains than whites.
Sounds to me like the anthropologists are out looking for grant money...
"We are not just interested in what is being said, but how it is being conveyed," said program creator Shrikanth Narayanan, professor in the Speech Analysis and Interpretation Laboratory at the University of Southern California.
Jeez! Have they outsourced the Speech & Interpretation Lab to India?
Semi-seriously, I had an episode with an outsourced customer service line where the "tech" on the other end of the line simply didn't recognize English cusswords when he heard 'em. So maybe "machine intelligence" would be an improvement.
"I'm velly solly, suh, but da louter don't have a fscking light. It have a ambah light."
"Idiot makes mistake, exposes private data to Net. Sound thrashing in progress."
Of course, the thrashing could be inflicted faster & with less preliminary legal wrangling if the culprit had been a regular employee & not an outsourced "consultant."
Regular employees take employers to court after the thrashing. Outsourced consultants have to be taken to court before the thrashing.
Plenty of open source stuff for Micro$oft Windows. Just as there is some closed source stuff for Linux.
And there are plenty of open source programs for Palm OS. Look into PocketC, for example. While the compiler code isn't OSS, the vast majority of stuff written for the compiler is open source, as are the native libraries & code libraries.
There are plenty of other examples...
But I have to figure that the average PDA user isn't into compiling their own applications. The average user wants to cut the danged thing on & keep their calendar, contacts & to do list.
Given my own professional biases, I'd throw Ernst Mayr's Growth of Biological Thought into the mix, simply because Mayr was an opponent of reductionism in the life sciences. His concept of emergent properties makes sense to most biologists & is a good mind-stretch for physical scientists.
According to Educational Testing Service, the GRE was not cancelled in India or China in 2002-2003. However, the GRE Computer Science subject testwas cancelled in India and China in 2002 due to "improper sharing of questions from the GRE Computer Science Subject Test by students..."
A small correction, maybe, but the GRE Computer Science subject test is not the entire GRE.
I imagine a true scientist would be thrilled if new discoveries replaced old theories. Isn't that the point of research, discussion, and exploration?
Scientists are human beings, after all, and they can get attached to "their" theories, just like we may get attached to some old piece of furniture that is past its prime but "comfortable."
Part of what makes science work is that there is a bit of a battle between the old school and the "young Turks" every now and then.
According to T.S. Kuhn, most research takes place during periods of "normal science," as new evidence is plugged in to an existing theory. Eventually, the new evidence begins to undermine the old theory, and a revolutionary period occurs when new theories compete for dominance. Then the "paradigm" of the discipline "shifts"...
I was discussing Kuhn with a couple of colleagues who'd never (!) heard of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. One of the truly great arguments Kuhn advanced is that old paradigms don't change because people decide to change, they change when the practitioners of the older paradigm die.
Stephen Covey shoulda read the whole book before he expropriated "paradigm" for that horrific morass called The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. (Most of Covey's "effective people" don't have the intellectual wherewithal to fathom Kuhn.)
If you've not read Kuhn, consider it your Slashdot homework assignment for this week. You'll not regret it!
I think Mozilla is very good and use it always, why should I change to Firefox?
I can only speak for myself, of course. But I install Mozilla when I need a browser-email-news suite & Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox when I need just a browser. A specific example: I put Firebird on an old laptop that my household offspring unit uses, because there was limited HDD space and because she uses a webmail site to read her email...
... this hasn't been done before. More specifically, I wonder why a woman hasn't already devised a class action sexual harassment suit built around penis enlargement or viagra spam.
Re:A function of the human brain?
on
The Golden Ratio
·
· Score: 1
Clearly, 10-digit dialling found in many areas trounces on this "limit"
Actually 10-digit dialling may be the apparent exception that in fact proves the rule. Those same "psychologists from several decades ago" recognized a phenomenon commonly known as chunking. Chunking is not syllable-based & could use a very large grouping concept.
Dissecting the 10-digit number, I find it falls well within a five (or seven, as sometimes citied) plus-or-minus two limit:
Consider:
1+123+456+7890
First, we count the 1 (dial prefix). This borders on something that is more motor than cognitive, but we'll count it as a chunk anyway, in case we need operator assistance.
Next, we count the ENTIRE area code, which is a single chunk if we use it enough. The area codes we don't use often are special cases & we pay attention to that, quickly reducing it to a single chunk using a phrase like "one twenty-eight". One chunk, at most two.
Then we have what used to be called a city code. Again, we all probably know several city codes by heart & the ones we don't make us more attentive to the problem at hand. Again, one chunk or two, depending on who's counting.
Finally, a large number of people (I don't know if the majority) would read the example given as "seventy-eight" and "ninety".
So I count five chunks in the ten digit number, or allowing for 2 chunks for the three digit components, seven (also within the "limit"). Notice also that none of the basic components of the ten digit number X-XXX-XXX-XXXX exceeds four, much less five digits.
The "limit" imposed by the "five plus-or-minus" limit is a lot higher than a measly 10 digits.
You are assuming that everyone has a concept of cardinality. Realistically, people don't have much of one beyond the number six (yes, there are outlyers for whom eight objects in a group is eight objects not one-two-three-four-five-six-seven-eight objects).
I had never thought about this before. But generally, a half dozen is about the point where people do lose the concept of "one unit". Interestingly, the limit of human short-term memory is five plus-or-minus two discrete objects. So maybe six is a good average "memory chunk".
So fundamental mathematical concepts might be contingent on how the human brain is wired, just as our decimal system is based on the number of digits some amphibian happened to evolve.
I could see some alien creature with a short-term memory capacity of a hundred, or a million, or a gorf or whatever they call it out there. And that in turn might affect how their "mathematics" or "philosophy" works.
We might also conceive of an alien race that, due to its "wiring", thought entirely in binary with a totally boolean philosophy. In fact, I suspect several members of that race now work in my computer center...
...which I didn't pay any attention to when I was younger, is "do something you absolutely love to do."
I worried too much about money (and to a secondary extent, the "prestige" of the job) with predictable results. Now, I make a good salary, I have a fancy title & I have days that are merely a tick on the calendar en route to my pension.
Of course, if you happen to absolutely love doing something lucrative (and legal), more power to you!
Anyone else think we're nearing the end of the analog phone system?
Nope.
I know probably most/. readers are in urban or suburban settings where they can take broadband access or cellular phone service for granted.
I live in a small town. Both cable and DSL access are available in the city limits. But a person living outside the city limits is stuck with 56K dial-up access (or an expensive satellite rig that's probably still 56K on the uptake). And if the person lives 10-12 miles out of town, it is highly probable that his cellphone won't "show a tower."
OTOH, POTS provides those rural residents with solid, reliable voice communications.
Why? Because POTS has about a 100 year jump on VOIP or cellular in terms of infrastructure. Those lines may only provide 56K dial-up access, but they are perfectly fine for analog voice...
Several times. The problem is several blocks away from my house at an amp.
For background, I have operated a local access cable channel for a church for over 10 years. It is unique in our region in that it has a reverse feed set-up. For two years, we had frequent outages on the feed from the remote site to the cable company's head end. Turned out to be a line amp midway between the two locations; it had been set to amplify the regular channels but not the reverse feed.
In this case, the cable company lines & head end hardware have changed ownership several times. The new company employs nobody who was involved with the original set-up. When they "went digital" a year ago, it was a Chinese fire drill...
I think you're probably correct. It's been a while, but when I first signed on with Bellsouth's DSL, they had a Windows requirement. It turned out it was their PPPOE "dialer" client, which summarily clobbered Windows requiring a reinstall. Then I discovered that, by using a router/switch on the modem, I had no need for the PPPOE client anyway. <SIGH>
Nextel may just have the Windows client for logging onto the network ready now, hence the limitation.
Slashdot Mirror
Semi-seriously -- who can take SCO seriously anymore? -- let's look at the slander of title claim as delineated in Groklaw:
Caveat: IANAL (thank goodness!)
As far as it being "Marxist," I challenge you to find any theory that isn't colored to some extent by politics, right-left, right-wrong. In fact, one of the beautiful things about Mismeasure is the irony. The tough thing is that it is Gould's second most tedious book (Ontogeny & Phylogeny gets first place) & most readers never make it to the end, where Gould exposes his real rationale for writing -- his learning-disabled son.
Gould's best shots at E.O. Wilson are in other works.
Trust me, there are plenty of biologists who think that Wilson shoulda stuck with fire ants.
Tux toys & t-shirts sound trivial, but they loosen people up about something that a lot of non-tech types think is "hard". Setting up the "sexist" argument ("Even the women can use this OS") is even appropriate if that's what it takes to make decision-makers come around.
<OFFTOPIC>
How about it, Slashdot? It may be time to revisit the templates...
PROFIT!
Of course.
I will reiterate my recommendation of Gould's The Mismeasure of Man. In it, he traces the history of many of our most cherished statistical methods (Spearman, Pearson, etc), which were developed to relate brain size to "something else." In those cases, the purpose was to adjust the brain size of white males so it consistently came out on top.
Another main theme of Gould's book is "reification" of intelligence. Reification involves (among other things) assigning a numeric value to something that isn't exactly quantifiable.
My original point, though, was to object to the article's use of "intelligence/brain size" as if the two were unarguably interchangeable.
Once I read "brain size," all I could do was think of the efforts -- well discussed in Stephen Jay Gould's The Mismeasure of Man -- of 19th and 20th century physical anthropologists to use "brain size is correlated with intelligence" to justify racism & sexism.
The only thing that brain size is really correlated with is body size. Cattle have larger brains than most monkeys. Men have larger brains than women. Blacks have larger brains than whites.
Sounds to me like the anthropologists are out looking for grant money...
Jeez! Have they outsourced the Speech & Interpretation Lab to India?
Semi-seriously, I had an episode with an outsourced customer service line where the "tech" on the other end of the line simply didn't recognize English cusswords when he heard 'em. So maybe "machine intelligence" would be an improvement.
"I'm velly solly, suh, but da louter don't have a fscking light. It have a ambah light."
Isn't that the rule, rather than the exception?
Of course, the thrashing could be inflicted faster & with less preliminary legal wrangling if the culprit had been a regular employee & not an outsourced "consultant."
Regular employees take employers to court after the thrashing. Outsourced consultants have to be taken to court before the thrashing.
And there are plenty of open source programs for Palm OS. Look into PocketC, for example. While the compiler code isn't OSS, the vast majority of stuff written for the compiler is open source, as are the native libraries & code libraries.
There are plenty of other examples...
But I have to figure that the average PDA user isn't into compiling their own applications. The average user wants to cut the danged thing on & keep their calendar, contacts & to do list.
Given my own professional biases, I'd throw Ernst Mayr's Growth of Biological Thought into the mix, simply because Mayr was an opponent of reductionism in the life sciences. His concept of emergent properties makes sense to most biologists & is a good mind-stretch for physical scientists.
A small correction, maybe, but the GRE Computer Science subject test is not the entire GRE.
Scientists are human beings, after all, and they can get attached to "their" theories, just like we may get attached to some old piece of furniture that is past its prime but "comfortable."
Part of what makes science work is that there is a bit of a battle between the old school and the "young Turks" every now and then.
According to T.S. Kuhn, most research takes place during periods of "normal science," as new evidence is plugged in to an existing theory. Eventually, the new evidence begins to undermine the old theory, and a revolutionary period occurs when new theories compete for dominance. Then the "paradigm" of the discipline "shifts"...
Stephen Covey shoulda read the whole book before he expropriated "paradigm" for that horrific morass called The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. (Most of Covey's "effective people" don't have the intellectual wherewithal to fathom Kuhn.)
If you've not read Kuhn, consider it your Slashdot homework assignment for this week. You'll not regret it!
I can only speak for myself, of course. But I install Mozilla when I need a browser-email-news suite & Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox when I need just a browser. A specific example: I put Firebird on an old laptop that my household offspring unit uses, because there was limited HDD space and because she uses a webmail site to read her email...
... this hasn't been done before. More specifically, I wonder why a woman hasn't already devised a class action sexual harassment suit built around penis enlargement or viagra spam.
Actually 10-digit dialling may be the apparent exception that in fact proves the rule. Those same "psychologists from several decades ago" recognized a phenomenon commonly known as chunking. Chunking is not syllable-based & could use a very large grouping concept.
Dissecting the 10-digit number, I find it falls well within a five (or seven, as sometimes citied) plus-or-minus two limit:
Consider:
1+123+456+7890
- First, we count the 1 (dial prefix). This borders on something that is more motor than cognitive, but we'll count it as a chunk anyway, in case we need operator assistance.
- Next, we count the ENTIRE area code, which is a single chunk if we use it enough. The area codes we don't use often are special cases & we pay attention to that, quickly reducing it to a single chunk using a phrase like "one twenty-eight". One chunk, at most two.
- Then we have what used to be called a city code. Again, we all probably know several city codes by heart & the ones we don't make us more attentive to the problem at hand. Again, one chunk or two, depending on who's counting.
- Finally, a large number of people (I don't know if the majority) would read the example given as "seventy-eight" and "ninety".
So I count five chunks in the ten digit number, or allowing for 2 chunks for the three digit components, seven (also within the "limit"). Notice also that none of the basic components of the ten digit number X-XXX-XXX-XXXX exceeds four, much less five digits.The "limit" imposed by the "five plus-or-minus" limit is a lot higher than a measly 10 digits.
I had never thought about this before. But generally, a half dozen is about the point where people do lose the concept of "one unit". Interestingly, the limit of human short-term memory is five plus-or-minus two discrete objects. So maybe six is a good average "memory chunk".
So fundamental mathematical concepts might be contingent on how the human brain is wired, just as our decimal system is based on the number of digits some amphibian happened to evolve.
I could see some alien creature with a short-term memory capacity of a hundred, or a million, or a gorf or whatever they call it out there. And that in turn might affect how their "mathematics" or "philosophy" works.
We might also conceive of an alien race that, due to its "wiring", thought entirely in binary with a totally boolean philosophy. In fact, I suspect several members of that race now work in my computer center...
I worried too much about money (and to a secondary extent, the "prestige" of the job) with predictable results. Now, I make a good salary, I have a fancy title & I have days that are merely a tick on the calendar en route to my pension.
Of course, if you happen to absolutely love doing something lucrative (and legal), more power to you!
Nope.
I know probably most /. readers are in urban or suburban settings where they can take broadband access or cellular phone service for granted.
I live in a small town. Both cable and DSL access are available in the city limits. But a person living outside the city limits is stuck with 56K dial-up access (or an expensive satellite rig that's probably still 56K on the uptake). And if the person lives 10-12 miles out of town, it is highly probable that his cellphone won't "show a tower."
OTOH, POTS provides those rural residents with solid, reliable voice communications.
Why? Because POTS has about a 100 year jump on VOIP or cellular in terms of infrastructure. Those lines may only provide 56K dial-up access, but they are perfectly fine for analog voice...
THANK YOU! I knew it wasn't Sir Edmund but I couldn't find the correct reference. I am now changing my little list of quotes with your correction. :-)
Several times. The problem is several blocks away from my house at an amp.
For background, I have operated a local access cable channel for a church for over 10 years. It is unique in our region in that it has a reverse feed set-up. For two years, we had frequent outages on the feed from the remote site to the cable company's head end. Turned out to be a line amp midway between the two locations; it had been set to amplify the regular channels but not the reverse feed.
In this case, the cable company lines & head end hardware have changed ownership several times. The new company employs nobody who was involved with the original set-up. When they "went digital" a year ago, it was a Chinese fire drill...
Nextel may just have the Windows client for logging onto the network ready now, hence the limitation.