I apologize in advance for lack of references. This is all from memory here.
The important thing about learning anything isn't rote memorization, but internalization of concepts and then being able to reason from those concepts. Much of science is "common sense", and can be checked out using your intuition - cause preceeds effect, faster things cover set distances in shorter times, etc. But many physical and mathematical concepts are not intuitively obvious.
In the 80s I heard of an educational program that used physical intuition to help teach "poor students" math and science. The educators knew that people learn using different modalities that develop at different ages. The kinesthetic modality develops first - that's what lets a baby put its hand in its mouth, or find its feet. Next comes the visiual modality. This is extremely powerful - you can recognize one face out of thousands in just a blink of an eye. The most abstract modality is symbolic. You can reason about anything symbolically, but it is the slowest mode, and unlike the others has little "hardware acceleration".
(There seems to be cool hardware/software in the brain for doing lots of visual processing. For instance, the time it takes to match a shape with the same shape rotated is proportional to the angle of rotation. And Deaf people who grow up using sign language score much better at visual perception tests, as the visual parts of their brains are more developed from using them for language.)
The program I heard about used an approach of starting with the lowest level modalities and progressing upwards until students had a symbolic grasp of the material.
For instance, the students were taken out into a field with portable sonar range-finders and computers. They were then asked to run in various manners: constant velocity, accelerating, decelerating, running in a circle, etc. Using the gadgetry, they could see a visual plot of their movement, in terms of velocity and acceleration. This let them tie their kinesthetic understanding of simple physics to a visual one. Building on that, they were able to grasp the mathematical concepts of position, velocity, and acceleration.
It seems a lot of education tries to deliver information at the symbolic level. If you give students a way to connect that abstract stuff to things they already understand, they do a lot better at internalizing it.
Piaget showed that people learn at the frontiers of their knowledge. If you tell someone something they've already learned, there isn't any opportunity to learn it again. And if you tell someone something too far removed from what they already know, they can't make a connection to it and won't understand it (try explaining quantum mechanics to someone who doesn't know about atomic theory). But if you tell someone something that they have enough background for, they will be able to make that connection, and voila, learning occurs!
Hakim's approach of telling stories about scientific progress might make the information easier for students to memorize. However it doesn't seem like it will make the concepts easier to internalize. That takes a more radical approach.
Re:BUNK: Smalltalk not OO, didn't invent GUI
on
Opencroquet
·
· Score: 1
Calm down. I worked with Alan Kay for a few years, and he freely acknowledges your claims about "prior art".
If Smalltalk is the mother of all OO languages, Simula is the grandmother. Alan Kay would never pretend that Smalltalk didn't owe a lot to Simula. However, I believe Smalltalk was the first completely object-oriented system. And Alan was the first to coin the term "object-oriented".
Likewise, Alan credits Englebart and Sutherland. But you have to give him some credit for combining a few interesting ideas into a system that was so cool that 30 years later it still looks pretty good. In fact, Smalltalk (as Squeak) still has some extremely useful characteristics that set it apart from other programming or operating systems.
I don't understand why you say "Smalltalk isn't even OO as we know it". Maybe it's because most people think of OO as the bizarre half-assed ways that C++ and Perl approach it. The classic definition of object orientation requires three things: encapsulation at the object boundary, late binding of methods, and class inheritance. The OOP community has spent years debating the proper terminology for variations on that theme, including "object-based", "class-based", and "prototype-based" programming.
Smalltalk has the same kind of appeal as the Macintosh. It's not for everyone, but those who grow to appreciate it tend to get fanatical about how great it is compared to anything else. And it got to be that kind of compelling technology because its creators purposefully set their sights on creating a system that wouldn't be practical for years to come. Now, 30 years later, it's time to up the bar.
Black holes, like quantum mechanics, are not something you can reason about using your newtonian-evolved intuition. So don't feel too bad.
The manifold within an event horizon has significantly different properties than without. Outside the event horizion, the manifold is "timelike", meaning you are free to move in space but limited in time. Inside, the manifold is "spacelike", meaning you are free to move in time, but your direction in space is limited. At this point, analogies become difficult.
You can generate multiple event horizons around a black hole. You can get one from mass, and another one from angular momentum. If you pass through both of them, I think you go back into a timelike region. But don't ask me what things are like in there, I gave up on physics and switched majors to comp sci.
Here's a nice potential benefit. Methane is a greenhouse gas. I've read that the cattle industry generates a significant fraction of the US greenhouse gas output. Of course burning methane produces CO2, which is also a greenhouse gas, but I think the net reduction in greenhouse effect of capturing the methane still outweighs the CO2 produced. So you could view this style of energy generation as producing negative pollution. Cool!
Another potential optimization: use the methane to run a fuel cell generator. Get rid of the combustion generator and do it with greater efficiency and less waste heat.
Speaking of heat, I don't understand why they have to heat the tank. When my family composted manure (rural upbringing), the bacteria produced a LOT of heat. You actually have to be careful with compost heaps, as they can set themselves on fire if they get too hot.
It's not just the storage space for the message. It's also the bandwidth costs. That's the nice thing about this approach. It doesn't bother ordinary users, but is death for spammers. Instead of making a send raid on a few SMTP servers, they have to keep their servers running while a million readers all come calling. It's like they have set up a DDoS attack on themselves. It would be fine for non-spam businesses like amazon.com to do that, as they maintain some whompin big servers. But it would kill the small spammer, as the capital outlay for spamming would go up a lot.
Au contraire. While there aren't quite as many axes for connection as for movies/tv, works of literature can still be connected.
Author/title is the obvious connection. But there are also Editors of compilations, co-authors, books series, and of course the topic. (How many books on the assasination of JFK do you think there are?) If I liked one short story by my favorite author in a collection, I might like another by a different author, or even other anthologies by the same editor. Or if I liked the Complete Idiot's Guide to Publishing Science Fiction, maybe I'll like the Complete Idiot's Guide to Project Management.
There is a whole field of Library Science, and systems for organizing knowledge like the Dewey Decimal System. I would think anyone taking a serious stab at a project like this would enlist the aid of some top-notch librarians.
Severian the Torturer calls the color of his cloak that is darker than black "fugilin".
My physics professor called the mythical substance with the same electromagnetic absorbtion properties as open space "spacecloth". Physics nerds, is this a common term, or was my prof just using non-standard jargon?
One useful thing about XML is that there are lots of tools for working with it. At my workplace, we find it's very simple to use XML as a meta-format for many of our file formats. These files then get processed by one web application or another. (Please don't harp on performance issues here, that's another topic!)
When authoring one of these XML documents, we need to have a DTD or schema to be able to validate the contents of the file. I lobbied to get DTDs for all our doc formats, and we found that lots of our existing files had significant problems - that's what happens when you let a human edit an XML file by hand.
Back to the main topic... DTD kinda sucks for two reasons. One is it's very limited. The other is documentation for it is nearly impossible to find, unless you go buy an expensive book. What is the point of free, open standards if you have to go spend $45 on a book to be able to use them? I haven't much experience with XMLSchema, but it's got to be better than crappy old DTDs!
Folders as a way of describing file hierarchies were part of the "desktop metaphor" that was developed in the late-70s/early-80s at Xerox PARC as part of the Xerox Star system. (I might have some of these details wrong, I worked at Xerox in the 80s.) The whole point of the desktop metaphor was to transform geeky computer internals into concepts the average office worker or exec could understand. Star even used "file cabinets" to organize folders.
Anyway, we did a lot of other cool stuff at Xerox in the 80s. There were two other information management systems that used non-hierarchical organizations. The Analyst (implemented in Smalltalk-80) and NoteCards (in Lisp) both had lattice file systems. You could create arbitrary links from one item to another, with lots of different kinds of links each with its own semantic meaning. It was an amazingly powerful way to navigate your files.
Why go to all that trouble? Because we found that it didn't matter how carefully people filed stuff away, they always were losing things. So the important thing was to make it as easy as possible for people to find their files, either by browsing or searching. In The Analyst, a document could be linked to by multiple folders, keywords, or other documents. The browser and search tools took advantage of the richness of linkages to make finding things easy. You just had to remember a few things about the item to locate it, rather than having to recall/a/maze/of/twisty/little/folder/names/all/differen t.
Re:Command Line Interface?
on
PHP 4.3.0 Released
·
· Score: 3, Informative
While MS continues to innovate visual solutions to problems, the open-source community keeps returning to outdated ways of doing things... The idea that you should have to learn the command line interface to a language will end up coming back to bite PHP it the ass.
Not sure if this is a troll or just a misfire. The optional CLI is an addition to PHP, not something that changes how you use it from web pages. The CLI is a valuable feature. It lets you use PHP as a shell scripting language, rather than being restricted to CGI processing.
Using the CLI, you can write a wrapper that dumps a PHP-created web page to a static HTML file. Now you can use PHP as an authoring tool for statically served web pages. Nifty!
How's this for a kick in the pants? Statistically, Deaf people are safer drivers than hearing people. Insurance companies used to not give car insurance to Deaf folks, but now they give them lower rates!
I have a bunch of Deaf friends, since I started learning ASL a few years ago. Driving with them is crazy. Scares the hell out of me when they try to converse with me while driving, but never seems to be a problem.
I read somewhere that one of the major causes of car accidents is drivers being distracted by tuning the radio. I guess that's not a problem for Deaf people =)
There have been rumblings in the news for over a decade that profligate use of anitbiotics in both medical care and factory farming would lead to just this sort of problem. After years of warnings, no one should be surprised by this development. DNA swapping among bacteria species is a well-known phenomenon, and I read years ago that biologists were concerned this very thing would happen.
What's the alternative? Virtually every species of bacteria has one or more virus species that have evolved to prey on it. These bacteriophage (or phage for short) can sometimes be used as treatment for bacterial infection. They were supposedly the Next Big Thing about a century ago, before antibiotics stole the show. Now there is renewed interest in this approach. There was also a recent development of a technique using only a phage-produced enzyme to fight bacterial infections.
Google "phage therapy" or "phage enzyme" for some good reading on the subject.
can't run out of electronic ballots
on
Indecision 2002
·
· Score: 1
While there are certainly risks to be managed with electronic voting, there are definitely advantages too. Some polling places in San Francisco ran out of ballot forms in today's election, and people who couldn't wait around for more ballots to be delivered did not get to vote. At least with electronic voting you can't run out of ballots!
By the way, San Francisco recently switched from the old punch-card hanging-chad ballots to the optical scanner technology. It's so much easier to use, and apparently faster to count the ballots as well. Maybe someday we'll get the touch-screen voting they used in Alameda today.
Slashdot Mirror
I apologize in advance for lack of references. This is all from memory here.
The important thing about learning anything isn't rote memorization, but internalization of concepts and then being able to reason from those concepts. Much of science is "common sense", and can be checked out using your intuition - cause preceeds effect, faster things cover set distances in shorter times, etc. But many physical and mathematical concepts are not intuitively obvious.
In the 80s I heard of an educational program that used physical intuition to help teach "poor students" math and science. The educators knew that people learn using different modalities that develop at different ages. The kinesthetic modality develops first - that's what lets a baby put its hand in its mouth, or find its feet. Next comes the visiual modality. This is extremely powerful - you can recognize one face out of thousands in just a blink of an eye. The most abstract modality is symbolic. You can reason about anything symbolically, but it is the slowest mode, and unlike the others has little "hardware acceleration".
(There seems to be cool hardware/software in the brain for doing lots of visual processing. For instance, the time it takes to match a shape with the same shape rotated is proportional to the angle of rotation. And Deaf people who grow up using sign language score much better at visual perception tests, as the visual parts of their brains are more developed from using them for language.)
The program I heard about used an approach of starting with the lowest level modalities and progressing upwards until students had a symbolic grasp of the material.
For instance, the students were taken out into a field with portable sonar range-finders and computers. They were then asked to run in various manners: constant velocity, accelerating, decelerating, running in a circle, etc. Using the gadgetry, they could see a visual plot of their movement, in terms of velocity and acceleration. This let them tie their kinesthetic understanding of simple physics to a visual one. Building on that, they were able to grasp the mathematical concepts of position, velocity, and acceleration.
It seems a lot of education tries to deliver information at the symbolic level. If you give students a way to connect that abstract stuff to things they already understand, they do a lot better at internalizing it.
Piaget showed that people learn at the frontiers of their knowledge. If you tell someone something they've already learned, there isn't any opportunity to learn it again. And if you tell someone something too far removed from what they already know, they can't make a connection to it and won't understand it (try explaining quantum mechanics to someone who doesn't know about atomic theory). But if you tell someone something that they have enough background for, they will be able to make that connection, and voila, learning occurs!
Hakim's approach of telling stories about scientific progress might make the information easier for students to memorize. However it doesn't seem like it will make the concepts easier to internalize. That takes a more radical approach.
Calm down. I worked with Alan Kay for a few years, and he freely acknowledges your claims about "prior art".
If Smalltalk is the mother of all OO languages, Simula is the grandmother. Alan Kay would never pretend that Smalltalk didn't owe a lot to Simula. However, I believe Smalltalk was the first completely object-oriented system. And Alan was the first to coin the term "object-oriented".
Likewise, Alan credits Englebart and Sutherland. But you have to give him some credit for combining a few interesting ideas into a system that was so cool that 30 years later it still looks pretty good. In fact, Smalltalk (as Squeak) still has some extremely useful characteristics that set it apart from other programming or operating systems.
I don't understand why you say "Smalltalk isn't even OO as we know it". Maybe it's because most people think of OO as the bizarre half-assed ways that C++ and Perl approach it. The classic definition of object orientation requires three things: encapsulation at the object boundary, late binding of methods, and class inheritance. The OOP community has spent years debating the proper terminology for variations on that theme, including "object-based", "class-based", and "prototype-based" programming.
Smalltalk has the same kind of appeal as the Macintosh. It's not for everyone, but those who grow to appreciate it tend to get fanatical about how great it is compared to anything else. And it got to be that kind of compelling technology because its creators purposefully set their sights on creating a system that wouldn't be practical for years to come. Now, 30 years later, it's time to up the bar.
Black holes, like quantum mechanics, are not something you can reason about using your newtonian-evolved intuition. So don't feel too bad.
The manifold within an event horizon has significantly different properties than without. Outside the event horizion, the manifold is "timelike", meaning you are free to move in space but limited in time. Inside, the manifold is "spacelike", meaning you are free to move in time, but your direction in space is limited. At this point, analogies become difficult.
You can generate multiple event horizons around a black hole. You can get one from mass, and another one from angular momentum. If you pass through both of them, I think you go back into a timelike region. But don't ask me what things are like in there, I gave up on physics and switched majors to comp sci.
Someone in the Pleiades needs help moving 50 billion quatloos out of a forgotten government bank account, and they want Earth to help.
Here's a nice potential benefit. Methane is a greenhouse gas. I've read that the cattle industry generates a significant fraction of the US greenhouse gas output. Of course burning methane produces CO2, which is also a greenhouse gas, but I think the net reduction in greenhouse effect of capturing the methane still outweighs the CO2 produced. So you could view this style of energy generation as producing negative pollution. Cool!
Another potential optimization: use the methane to run a fuel cell generator. Get rid of the combustion generator and do it with greater efficiency and less waste heat.
Speaking of heat, I don't understand why they have to heat the tank. When my family composted manure (rural upbringing), the bacteria produced a LOT of heat. You actually have to be careful with compost heaps, as they can set themselves on fire if they get too hot.
It's not just the storage space for the message. It's also the bandwidth costs. That's the nice thing about this approach. It doesn't bother ordinary users, but is death for spammers. Instead of making a send raid on a few SMTP servers, they have to keep their servers running while a million readers all come calling. It's like they have set up a DDoS attack on themselves. It would be fine for non-spam businesses like amazon.com to do that, as they maintain some whompin big servers. But it would kill the small spammer, as the capital outlay for spamming would go up a lot.
Au contraire. While there aren't quite as many axes for connection as for movies/tv, works of literature can still be connected.
Author/title is the obvious connection. But there are also Editors of compilations, co-authors, books series, and of course the topic. (How many books on the assasination of JFK do you think there are?) If I liked one short story by my favorite author in a collection, I might like another by a different author, or even other anthologies by the same editor. Or if I liked the Complete Idiot's Guide to Publishing Science Fiction, maybe I'll like the Complete Idiot's Guide to Project Management.
There is a whole field of Library Science, and systems for organizing knowledge like the Dewey Decimal System. I would think anyone taking a serious stab at a project like this would enlist the aid of some top-notch librarians.
So now I won't have to worry about losing my underwear in the dark, and it will always smell like flowers?
Severian the Torturer calls the color of his cloak that is darker than black "fugilin".
My physics professor called the mythical substance with the same electromagnetic absorbtion properties as open space "spacecloth". Physics nerds, is this a common term, or was my prof just using non-standard jargon?
One useful thing about XML is that there are lots of tools for working with it. At my workplace, we find it's very simple to use XML as a meta-format for many of our file formats. These files then get processed by one web application or another. (Please don't harp on performance issues here, that's another topic!)
When authoring one of these XML documents, we need to have a DTD or schema to be able to validate the contents of the file. I lobbied to get DTDs for all our doc formats, and we found that lots of our existing files had significant problems - that's what happens when you let a human edit an XML file by hand.
Back to the main topic... DTD kinda sucks for two reasons. One is it's very limited. The other is documentation for it is nearly impossible to find, unless you go buy an expensive book. What is the point of free, open standards if you have to go spend $45 on a book to be able to use them? I haven't much experience with XMLSchema, but it's got to be better than crappy old DTDs!
Folders as a way of describing file hierarchies were part of the "desktop metaphor" that was developed in the late-70s/early-80s at Xerox PARC as part of the Xerox Star system. (I might have some of these details wrong, I worked at Xerox in the 80s.) The whole point of the desktop metaphor was to transform geeky computer internals into concepts the average office worker or exec could understand. Star even used "file cabinets" to organize folders.
/a/maze/of/twisty/little/folder/names/all/differen t.
Anyway, we did a lot of other cool stuff at Xerox in the 80s. There were two other information management systems that used non-hierarchical organizations. The Analyst (implemented in Smalltalk-80) and NoteCards (in Lisp) both had lattice file systems. You could create arbitrary links from one item to another, with lots of different kinds of links each with its own semantic meaning. It was an amazingly powerful way to navigate your files.
Why go to all that trouble? Because we found that it didn't matter how carefully people filed stuff away, they always were losing things. So the important thing was to make it as easy as possible for people to find their files, either by browsing or searching. In The Analyst, a document could be linked to by multiple folders, keywords, or other documents. The browser and search tools took advantage of the richness of linkages to make finding things easy. You just had to remember a few things about the item to locate it, rather than having to recall
While MS continues to innovate visual solutions to problems, the open-source community keeps returning to outdated ways of doing things... The idea that you should have to learn the command line interface to a language will end up coming back to bite PHP it the ass.
Not sure if this is a troll or just a misfire. The optional CLI is an addition to PHP, not something that changes how you use it from web pages. The CLI is a valuable feature. It lets you use PHP as a shell scripting language, rather than being restricted to CGI processing.
Using the CLI, you can write a wrapper that dumps a PHP-created web page to a static HTML file. Now you can use PHP as an authoring tool for statically served web pages. Nifty!
How's this for a kick in the pants? Statistically, Deaf people are safer drivers than hearing people. Insurance companies used to not give car insurance to Deaf folks, but now they give them lower rates!
I have a bunch of Deaf friends, since I started learning ASL a few years ago. Driving with them is crazy. Scares the hell out of me when they try to converse with me while driving, but never seems to be a problem.
I read somewhere that one of the major causes of car accidents is drivers being distracted by tuning the radio. I guess that's not a problem for Deaf people =)
There have been rumblings in the news for over a decade that profligate use of anitbiotics in both medical care and factory farming would lead to just this sort of problem. After years of warnings, no one should be surprised by this development. DNA swapping among bacteria species is a well-known phenomenon, and I read years ago that biologists were concerned this very thing would happen.
What's the alternative? Virtually every species of bacteria has one or more virus species that have evolved to prey on it. These bacteriophage (or phage for short) can sometimes be used as treatment for bacterial infection. They were supposedly the Next Big Thing about a century ago, before antibiotics stole the show. Now there is renewed interest in this approach. There was also a recent development of a technique using only a phage-produced enzyme to fight bacterial infections.
Google "phage therapy" or "phage enzyme" for some good reading on the subject.
While there are certainly risks to be managed with electronic voting, there are definitely advantages too. Some polling places in San Francisco ran out of ballot forms in today's election, and people who couldn't wait around for more ballots to be delivered did not get to vote. At least with electronic voting you can't run out of ballots!
By the way, San Francisco recently switched from the old punch-card hanging-chad ballots to the optical scanner technology. It's so much easier to use, and apparently faster to count the ballots as well. Maybe someday we'll get the touch-screen voting they used in Alameda today.