Yes, calculus changes a lot. What are the important applications?
More obviously, recent calculus books have attempted to incorporate graphing calculators and software packages (e.g. mathematica) as teaching tools. Think you could have done this 20 years ago? Much less 100?
Then there are the issues of teaching methodologies, which change frequently. And finding a book one teaches well from is non-trivial - if a better book comes out, shouldn't it be used?
Oddly enough, the one time Russia was conquered by outsiders (the Mongols), it was during the winter. The marshes stopped being obstacles, and all those rivers which are normally a pain to cross became 13th (or was it 14th) century superhighways.
And, regarding Napolean, he lost more troops in Spain:)
For a good discussion on the "fake" letters see:
this page from instapundit. The polls come from Gallup. If you look at US casualty figures, I wouldn't say the open arms are RPGs - also note almost all of the casualties come from the Sunni triangle. Most of the reports from the troops, congressional observers, odd musicians traveling in the area, etc. are quite positive. Electrical power generation is up over pre-war levels, numerous hospitals and schools are being opened, non-expired medicine is available (and no, it wasn't the sanctions before), etc.
Also of note is that the Iraqi governing council is (occasionally) standing up to the US, e.g. with the issue of Turkish troops coming.
Well, I'd argue against US actions in Iraq based largely on the cost.....but to take this argument, the money (and lives) spent in Iraq freed a country from a murderous dictator. Polls from Iraq are showing a majority of Iraqis think that the US invasion is a net benefit (I'll admit right now I don't trust the polls - I don't think all Iraqis are that easy to get ahold of to do a good poll).
Keeping out the caveats I've been placing to be balanced and objective - the expenditures in Iraq liberated a people (assuming the US turns over governance, which it looks like it will) who were being totally screwed (by Hussein, and to an arguable extent the US and the UN). That is accomplishing something. Sending somebody into orbit isn't.
And find me some good science done in orbit. I'll point out the payload of Columbia (seeing how roses bloom in 0g....5th graders science project!) and Feynman's observation that he hadn't seen a paper from the shuttle program to point out manned spaceflight is more about prestige and ego than it is about science. Given the poverty of rural China, I'm quite sure the money can be better spent.
And no, if a person's math is horrible, there is no reason they shouldn't be playing soccer. They aren't playing with other people's time (money). And if they don't enjoy the math, or at least see a reason for doing it, they'll be spending their time better playing soccer, since the math will be useless to them.
Just to ponder - how else could China have spent that money for the benefits of its citizenry - how many kids could have been sent to college, how much could healthcare of been extended to rural areas without, etc., for the money invested in sending somebody to space? And what has this accomplished other than stroke some egos?
This was part of my point. Sure, its cool to recognize fingerspelling, and its a pretty good project for a high school student, but that isn't the interface that will help deaf people. My point about needing more sophisticated hardware was to highlight the big step there is from recognizing finger-spelling to recognizing ASL.
A previous reply had a link to a page with a glove form Mattel - from reading the page, it looks like the glove has some technical difficulties, and that it recognizes a limited set of commands, nothing as wide as what you would need for ASL.
For the record, my sister-in-law and her brother are deaf - I'd like to think I know a bit about how signing works from the experiences I've had with them:)
Recognizing letters from ASL also isn't that useful - it would be the equivelent of taking dictation one letter at a time, albeit a bit faster for proficient signers. It is the first step, however, of recognizing any ASL sign, which would allow dictation by deaf people. However, to do that you'd need to know where the glove is in space, not just its configuration with respect to itself, which would require more sophisticated hardware.
Also, imagine the possiblities if you could teach in your own signs, as a method of interacting with the program of your choice.....
Another bit to consider - how much data do we have to train a classifier to recognize a school shooter? Negligible amounts, becuase there haven't been that many school shooters. OTOH, there have been plenty of HS drop-outs, so we can get a pretty good idea of what the data on one of them should look like. Will there be mistakes? Yes, but if done right, sufficiently few so that the number of dropouts you prevent are worth it for the odd good student you pull in for a superflous lecture.
As a non-computer geek (math is my poison), I am one of the/.'ers who has never assembled a computer from scratch. I could, but I could either spend a week researching what I need to know to do it right, or offer to have a friend over for dinner and get him to do it. And conidering that I like cooking far more than I like fiddling with computer hardware.....
>What's "radical" about letter Andrea lay around >anyway? Nothing. Evidently her body did all the >work.
Some people would argue keeping a comatose individual with a negligible chance of ever waking up on life support for three years is a waste of resources. My point is that here is an example where it wasn't. I don't feel it is that far of a stretch to the issue of organ donation.
If your doctors are just trying to push drugs, find better doctors. They exist.
My mom is an occupational therapist, mostly retired. The one client she's kept she's been working with for about a decade. Andrea was in an auto accident when she was 16 which left her in a coma, which the doctors thought she'd never recover from. She did, with no memories, and with difficulties forming new ones.
After a decade of work and therapy, she is now ready to move into her own place. She is pursuing an interest in writing, and has started taking classes at a local community college.
Compare this with being dead or a vegetable. Pretty impressive.
And before somebody points out that a great amount of money has been invested in her, and her lifetime productivity will probably never pay it back, she had a settlement from the accident which has been paying for her recovery.
And then there is the value of her life.
The moral of this is that by prolonging somebody's life, it might not be just a few sick years. It can be a nearly complete life that you are giving somebody.
Think about that before you condemn radical medical procedures.
Why do you need technology to call people at random? On the first day of class ask everybody to fill out a 3x5 card with their name, and answers to some basic questions (i.e. why are you taking this class, what are good times for office hours, etc.). Then during class choose cards at random.
As an academic, I've got to say I love Google's indexing of.pdf files. The article complains about how it makes articles a better way to share information than books. I love breaking it to the author, but they are. Articles are where you find new research. Books are where you find synthesis of ideas that are a little older.
Oddly enough, most of the people I know that have talked about MSRI seem to enjoy it (still kicking myself for not going to Dyson's talk there last year). Maybe it has something to do with their field, insofar as they are all statisticians.....
1,000 respondents give a +/-3 percent 95% confidence interval.
Rule of thumb - worst case is if the population is split 50-50. This gives a base 95% confidence interval of 1. Divide by the square root of n. That is your worst-case confidence interval.
If you can make a random sample of all major websites (define major websites), then no need for stratified sampling - only if you wish to talk about specific subgroups or if sampling the general population is difficult is stratified sampling necessary.
They did a survey of 70 leading websites over a nine week period - one needs to wonder who picked those 70 leading websites, and in what sense they are considered leading or typical.
And if slashdotting causes more downtime than developer mistakes, couldn't one argue that interesting content is more harmful than bad code for website uptime?
Actually, Shalit just showed that in general we should disregard his research. How hard would it be to identify a "typical" sized transaction (I'd be inclined to ask a Wal-mart or some other mega-retailer for help on this, by getting their records of the sizes of all cash purchases in their store(s) for a period of time), and get an empirical distribution of the sizes of cash transactions. Not perfect, but a big improvement on assuming a uniform distribution. Then model based on this distribution?
I have two levels of security - stuff I don't really care about (i.e. NYTimes or Yahoo registration), and stuff I do (i.e. work computer). In the former, I use one of half-a-dozen passwords, primarily so that if I forget it, I can guess it in short time.
Yes, you could probably hack most of my EnlightenedDuck accounts - including this one:) But why should I care if somebody impersonates me on/.?
The secure account(s) get unique passwords - I usually keep this to 2-3 accounts at a time. Makes things pretty easy, and relatively secure.
Note that this was written by as astrophysicist - he's commenting on areas outside of his field of expertise.
Also, note his comment about the allocation of money. If risky (trendy) fields have their research budgets reduced (i.e. biotech, nanotech, particle physics), there is more for everybody else (i.e. him).
Not that he doesn't have valid concerns, just some warnings that should go with his advice.
Worse than that - I tried looking for the methods section and couldn't find it. The paper discusses a few case studies (i.e. are Carbon Nanotubes dangerous), and finds inconclusive evidence. I especially enjoyed where when explaining why researchers used a less effective but cheaper method it was because the more expensive method was like "feeding pearls to swines." Aimed at generating a public outcry, not at convincing the people knowledgeable about the science.
Also, it wasn't pubilshed in a peer-reviewed forum - generally a good indication of poor science.
Slashdot Mirror
I fly through RDU a lot, and I've found the TSA folk there to be nice and helpful. I've generally found them that way at other airports too.
Thank you. Thinking manual/hatch-back, and I appreciate the options reccomendation. Mike
I'm actually thinking about buying a Mazda 3. Any advice, suggestions, or reccomendations?
1) His girlfriend was present
2) There were three past and future Miss America's in the class. The girl offering was far from the most attractive:)
MIT's undergraduates are about evenly split between males and females, so I doubt the gender ratio is that big of a problem there....
More obviously, recent calculus books have attempted to incorporate graphing calculators and software packages (e.g. mathematica) as teaching tools. Think you could have done this 20 years ago? Much less 100?
Then there are the issues of teaching methodologies, which change frequently. And finding a book one teaches well from is non-trivial - if a better book comes out, shouldn't it be used?
Oddly enough, the one time Russia was conquered by outsiders (the Mongols), it was during the winter. The marshes stopped being obstacles, and all those rivers which are normally a pain to cross became 13th (or was it 14th) century superhighways.
And, regarding Napolean, he lost more troops in Spain:)
Quack!
Also of note is that the Iraqi governing council is (occasionally) standing up to the US, e.g. with the issue of Turkish troops coming.
Keeping out the caveats I've been placing to be balanced and objective - the expenditures in Iraq liberated a people (assuming the US turns over governance, which it looks like it will) who were being totally screwed (by Hussein, and to an arguable extent the US and the UN). That is accomplishing something. Sending somebody into orbit isn't.
And find me some good science done in orbit. I'll point out the payload of Columbia (seeing how roses bloom in 0g....5th graders science project!) and Feynman's observation that he hadn't seen a paper from the shuttle program to point out manned spaceflight is more about prestige and ego than it is about science. Given the poverty of rural China, I'm quite sure the money can be better spent.
And no, if a person's math is horrible, there is no reason they shouldn't be playing soccer. They aren't playing with other people's time (money). And if they don't enjoy the math, or at least see a reason for doing it, they'll be spending their time better playing soccer, since the math will be useless to them.
Just to ponder - how else could China have spent that money for the benefits of its citizenry - how many kids could have been sent to college, how much could healthcare of been extended to rural areas without, etc., for the money invested in sending somebody to space? And what has this accomplished other than stroke some egos?
A previous reply had a link to a page with a glove form Mattel - from reading the page, it looks like the glove has some technical difficulties, and that it recognizes a limited set of commands, nothing as wide as what you would need for ASL.
For the record, my sister-in-law and her brother are deaf - I'd like to think I know a bit about how signing works from the experiences I've had with them:)
Also, imagine the possiblities if you could teach in your own signs, as a method of interacting with the program of your choice.....
Another bit to consider - how much data do we have to train a classifier to recognize a school shooter? Negligible amounts, becuase there haven't been that many school shooters. OTOH, there have been plenty of HS drop-outs, so we can get a pretty good idea of what the data on one of them should look like. Will there be mistakes? Yes, but if done right, sufficiently few so that the number of dropouts you prevent are worth it for the odd good student you pull in for a superflous lecture.
As a non-computer geek (math is my poison), I am one of the /.'ers who has never assembled a computer from scratch. I could, but I could either spend a week researching what I need to know to do it right, or offer to have a friend over for dinner and get him to do it. And conidering that I like cooking far more than I like fiddling with computer hardware.....
Some people would argue keeping a comatose individual with a negligible chance of ever waking up on life support for three years is a waste of resources. My point is that here is an example where it wasn't. I don't feel it is that far of a stretch to the issue of organ donation.
If your doctors are just trying to push drugs, find better doctors. They exist.
After a decade of work and therapy, she is now ready to move into her own place. She is pursuing an interest in writing, and has started taking classes at a local community college.
Compare this with being dead or a vegetable. Pretty impressive.
And before somebody points out that a great amount of money has been invested in her, and her lifetime productivity will probably never pay it back, she had a settlement from the accident which has been paying for her recovery.
And then there is the value of her life.
The moral of this is that by prolonging somebody's life, it might not be just a few sick years. It can be a nearly complete life that you are giving somebody.
Think about that before you condemn radical medical procedures.
Why do you need technology to call people at random? On the first day of class ask everybody to fill out a 3x5 card with their name, and answers to some basic questions (i.e. why are you taking this class, what are good times for office hours, etc.). Then during class choose cards at random.
As an academic, I've got to say I love Google's indexing of .pdf files. The article complains about how it makes articles a better way to share information than books. I love breaking it to the author, but they are. Articles are where you find new research. Books are where you find synthesis of ideas that are a little older.
Oddly enough, most of the people I know that have talked about MSRI seem to enjoy it (still kicking myself for not going to Dyson's talk there last year). Maybe it has something to do with their field, insofar as they are all statisticians.....
1,000 respondents give a +/-3 percent 95% confidence interval.
Rule of thumb - worst case is if the population is split 50-50. This gives a base 95% confidence interval of 1. Divide by the square root of n. That is your worst-case confidence interval.
If you can make a random sample of all major websites (define major websites), then no need for stratified sampling - only if you wish to talk about specific subgroups or if sampling the general population is difficult is stratified sampling necessary.
And if slashdotting causes more downtime than developer mistakes, couldn't one argue that interesting content is more harmful than bad code for website uptime?
Actually, Shalit just showed that in general we should disregard his research. How hard would it be to identify a "typical" sized transaction (I'd be inclined to ask a Wal-mart or some other mega-retailer for help on this, by getting their records of the sizes of all cash purchases in their store(s) for a period of time), and get an empirical distribution of the sizes of cash transactions. Not perfect, but a big improvement on assuming a uniform distribution. Then model based on this distribution?
Yes, you could probably hack most of my EnlightenedDuck accounts - including this one:) But why should I care if somebody impersonates me on /.?
The secure account(s) get unique passwords - I usually keep this to 2-3 accounts at a time. Makes things pretty easy, and relatively secure.
Also, note his comment about the allocation of money. If risky (trendy) fields have their research budgets reduced (i.e. biotech, nanotech, particle physics), there is more for everybody else (i.e. him).
Not that he doesn't have valid concerns, just some warnings that should go with his advice.
Also, it wasn't pubilshed in a peer-reviewed forum - generally a good indication of poor science.