You really shouldn't generalize about what psychology majors are going to be like. In the department I did my Ph.D in, psychology was closely allied to biology and ecology, and there was another department across campus that did social psychology. Some of the psychologists were pretty darn quantitative. But they were being quantitative about the mind, which is (my bias) maybe more interesting than the examples you used last time you taught calculus.
Also, while the majority of students may be psych majors, some will be from other majors. What do you want future lawyers, school principals and politicians to know about statistics? This is your chance to teach them.
Sooo, they might have good math skills, or not. But you can't assume that they know calculus, obviously, so you probably want to use a textbook that treats stats as a tool for understanding patterns in data, and goes easy on the theory behind maximum likelihood estimates and so on. I like Perry Hinton's Statistics Explained, but it really depends what you are trying to teach the students to do.
http://www.amazon.com/Statistics-Explained-Science-Students-Edition/dp/0415332850/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1340578689&sr=1-1&keywords=statistics+explained
If the psychology majors are any good, they may be more used to thinking clearly about surveys and tricky experiments than you are. Perhaps you can structure the course so that learning goes both ways.
High school math and science are not as much fun as the things that a good college education can show you. Math and science skills can serve you really well in linguistics, psychology, marketing, political science, cognitive science, neuroscience, biology, finance, business, medicine and other fields. I teach linguistics and computer science, and recommend both, but the key thing is to encourage her to take a look at several possibilities early in college, or even sooner. Two other thoughts: firstly, peer group is important, any subject is nicer if you are doing it in group of people you like and get on with. Secondly, as people have said, the standard high school subjects do get much more interesting with further study.
Your contract probably says that your employment can be terminated at will by either side, and that nobody (not you, not
them) has to give a reason. If so, this isn't really a question
about legal rights but rather one about what is likely to
happen if you take a stand.
You could try to educate your manager about why you
feel that applying for the patent is not in the company's
best interest. Maybe, especially if you take care to be
very positive and constructive in the way you show that
you are really looking out for the company's interests, the
policy will change.
Or not. It could be that if you really
think about what the company needs, you will agree that
it might after all be sensible to get a patent. You could
think of it as the same kind of decision as paying your
taxes. Just as you might wish for a better world in which
the government spends money only on things you agree
with, you might wish for a better intellectual property system that truly rewards genuine innovation and nothing else. But, for the moment, you might choose to go along with what is expected or required by your situation. Or not. Maybe it
would be more satisfying to not go along with it. If so
you have to live with whatever consequences arise.
Many of the comments in this thread
look as if they come from the US perspective, so might be
hard to apply to the UK situation. There are major
differences in what people understand by Masters-level
in the two places.
Being neither an astronomer nor a mathematician
I have no way to fully assess the advice, but
Jodrell Bank has a sane looking reading list for people
doing a UK M.Sc similar to the one you are taking.
( reading list at: http://www.jb.man.ac.uk/postgrad_course/readls.html)
Roughly speaking, US undergraduate degrees are less specialized than British ones, so Masters degrees usually have at least two years of course work, and must cover a lot of ground. That's why several of the
commenters can't imagine how a Masters degree could be squeezed into just one year. At the same time, the final year
of a UK undergraduate degree is often just as intense and
focused as a US graduate program, so the jump up in level
may be less than some commenters are assumng.
Bruce Schneier has pointed out that the
underlying problem with click fraud is
the way that the incentives are set up. If it is in the fraudster's interest to
try to spoof the system, this is going to happen, and both fraudsters and
would-be fraud-busters are going to spend time and effort on an "arms
race" that has no winners. He recommends that Google and co.
Change the rules of the game so that click fraud doesn't matter.
That's how to solve a security problem.
and suggests that Google's experiments with cost-per-action are
indicators of how things might go forward.
Expect high standards of literacy from teachers and
pupils
Re-do the grading system so as to make visible to students and teachers the difference between good work and truly exceptional achievement. Give A only for the latter.
But the most important changes are things to do with how
society values education and educators.
Make teaching qualifications hard to achieve
Reward those who succeed as teachers with high status, good pay, and maybe (as in Germany) lifetime job security.
Make it hard for politicians to interfere with the running of schools and even harder for them to impose meaningless extra duties on teachers and students, even in the name of "accountability".
In other words, ensure that teachers are valued as true
professionals, trusted to take the hard decisions, and not messed with
This is very hard to do, because education is such a hot-button issue that it is hard for politicians and parents to accept that they should be ceding control to a teaching profession that is
not yet of the uniformly high quality that we need to create.
A context-free language is one that can be
produced by a context-free grammar. What that
means is answered by
Wikipedia's definition.
The definition of a context-free language relies on a concept of language that will be strange
for some people. Under this view a language is
defined as a set of strings. For English, these
strings are just sequences of words. The idea
is that you describe a mathematical function
from strings to booleans that will return true
if the string is legal according to the grammar of the language and false otherwise. One of the ways
of describing such a function is to use a context-free grammar.
Gold's theorem is about whether
it is possible to unambiguously identify the context-free grammar that produced
a finite sequence of positive
examples. Gold says this is not possible, since
he can always construct more than one context-free grammar that is consistent with what we have seen so far. In order to prove this he has to make
everything mathematical and precise. It isn't
obvious that Gold's rather abstract version of the
learning problem has much to do with real-life learning.
The claim that human language is at least context-free is fairly widely accepted even among those linguists who disagree with Chomsky, but the claim that context-free languages are not
learnable is much more controversial.
Specifically, Gold's theorem is about 'learnability in the limit', in other words, precise learning of the exact set of strings that make up the language that the learner is exposed to. If the learner is prepared to accept the risk of making the occasional
mistake, then Gold's theorem is not so relevant.
From the perspective of a language learner trying to get by in a complex social world, it might be
sufficient to learn the language well enough to communicate, without worrying whether the string set that you have is exactly the same as what other speakers have.
You can still argue (and people do) about whether the Gold's theorem setup is a good way to think about learning of language by humans. Or indeed birds...
Re:The word is 'burgle', you illiterate moron!
on
Robbers Scared by GTA
·
· Score: 1
The burglars were Bulgarian, of course. "Burglarize" is a useful compromise between "burgle" and "Bulgarianize".
You can't actually ask these questions, because they are questions
about the uncertain future, but you
can choose questions that might shed light
on them.
If you can find out what they do when
things get difficult, that would also be good to know. Good bosses take responsibility, bad
ones blame others (usually those weaker
than themselves).
How about Jorge Luis Borges? His short stories each have more ideas in than most novels.
Or (probably the better idea) find someone who
is maximally unlike you, and ask them for a
recommendation.
The best text-to-speech that I know about is
from Rhetorical Systems at at www.rhetorical.com.
The system still doesn't really understand what
it is trying to say, but the quality of the speech itself seems good to me.
Their technology is proprietary, so one can't be quite sure how they are doing this, but it looks to be large database
unit selection (like some of the Festival voices)
done very well. (Disclaimer: before the company existed, I used to work with some of the people at Rhetorical, so I might be biased, but listen for yourselves).
Slashdot Mirror
You really shouldn't generalize about what psychology majors are going to be like. In the department I did my Ph.D in, psychology was closely allied to biology and ecology, and there was another department across campus that did social psychology. Some of the psychologists were pretty darn quantitative. But they were being quantitative about the mind, which is (my bias) maybe more interesting than the examples you used last time you taught calculus. Also, while the majority of students may be psych majors, some will be from other majors. What do you want future lawyers, school principals and politicians to know about statistics? This is your chance to teach them. Sooo, they might have good math skills, or not. But you can't assume that they know calculus, obviously, so you probably want to use a textbook that treats stats as a tool for understanding patterns in data, and goes easy on the theory behind maximum likelihood estimates and so on. I like Perry Hinton's Statistics Explained, but it really depends what you are trying to teach the students to do. http://www.amazon.com/Statistics-Explained-Science-Students-Edition/dp/0415332850/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1340578689&sr=1-1&keywords=statistics+explained If the psychology majors are any good, they may be more used to thinking clearly about surveys and tricky experiments than you are. Perhaps you can structure the course so that learning goes both ways.
High school math and science are not as much fun as the things that a good college education can show you. Math and science skills can serve you really well in linguistics, psychology, marketing, political science, cognitive science, neuroscience, biology, finance, business, medicine and other fields. I teach linguistics and computer science, and recommend both, but the key thing is to encourage her to take a look at several possibilities early in college, or even sooner. Two other thoughts: firstly, peer group is important, any subject is nicer if you are doing it in group of people you like and get on with. Secondly, as people have said, the standard high school subjects do get much more interesting with further study.
Your contract probably says that your employment can be terminated at will by either side, and that nobody (not you, not them) has to give a reason. If so, this isn't really a question about legal rights but rather one about what is likely to happen if you take a stand.
You could try to educate your manager about why you feel that applying for the patent is not in the company's best interest. Maybe, especially if you take care to be very positive and constructive in the way you show that you are really looking out for the company's interests, the policy will change.
Or not. It could be that if you really think about what the company needs, you will agree that it might after all be sensible to get a patent. You could think of it as the same kind of decision as paying your taxes. Just as you might wish for a better world in which the government spends money only on things you agree with, you might wish for a better intellectual property system that truly rewards genuine innovation and nothing else. But, for the moment, you might choose to go along with what is expected or required by your situation. Or not. Maybe it would be more satisfying to not go along with it. If so you have to live with whatever consequences arise.
Many of the comments in this thread look as if they come from the US perspective, so might be hard to apply to the UK situation. There are major differences in what people understand by Masters-level in the two places. Being neither an astronomer nor a mathematician I have no way to fully assess the advice, but Jodrell Bank has a sane looking reading list for people doing a UK M.Sc similar to the one you are taking. ( reading list at: http://www.jb.man.ac.uk/postgrad_course/readls.html) Roughly speaking, US undergraduate degrees are less specialized than British ones, so Masters degrees usually have at least two years of course work, and must cover a lot of ground. That's why several of the commenters can't imagine how a Masters degree could be squeezed into just one year. At the same time, the final year of a UK undergraduate degree is often just as intense and focused as a US graduate program, so the jump up in level may be less than some commenters are assumng.
Bruce Schneier has pointed out that the underlying problem with click fraud is the way that the incentives are set up. If it is in the fraudster's interest to try to spoof the system, this is going to happen, and both fraudsters and would-be fraud-busters are going to spend time and effort on an "arms race" that has no winners. He recommends that Google and co.
and suggests that Google's experiments with cost-per-action are indicators of how things might go forward.cf. http://www.schneier.com/essay-119.html for Schneier's own words
- Strive to teach properly challenging math
- Expect high standards of literacy from teachers and
pupils
- Re-do the grading system so as to make visible to students and teachers the difference between good work and truly exceptional achievement. Give A only for the latter.
But the most important changes are things to do with how society values education and educators.- Make teaching qualifications hard to achieve
- Reward those who succeed as teachers with high status, good pay, and maybe (as in Germany) lifetime job security.
- Make it hard for politicians to interfere with the running of schools and even harder for them to impose meaningless extra duties on teachers and students, even in the name of "accountability".
- In other words, ensure that teachers are valued as true
professionals, trusted to take the hard decisions, and not messed with
This is very hard to do, because education is such a hot-button issue that it is hard for politicians and parents to accept that they should be ceding control to a teaching profession that is not yet of the uniformly high quality that we need to create.A context-free language is one that can be produced by a context-free grammar. What that means is answered by Wikipedia's definition.
The definition of a context-free language relies on a concept of language that will be strange for some people. Under this view a language is defined as a set of strings. For English, these strings are just sequences of words. The idea is that you describe a mathematical function from strings to booleans that will return true if the string is legal according to the grammar of the language and false otherwise. One of the ways of describing such a function is to use a context-free grammar.
Gold's theorem is about whether it is possible to unambiguously identify the context-free grammar that produced a finite sequence of positive examples. Gold says this is not possible, since he can always construct more than one context-free grammar that is consistent with what we have seen so far. In order to prove this he has to make everything mathematical and precise. It isn't obvious that Gold's rather abstract version of the learning problem has much to do with real-life learning.
The claim that human language is at least context-free is fairly widely accepted even among those linguists who disagree with Chomsky, but the claim that context-free languages are not learnable is much more controversial.
Specifically, Gold's theorem is about 'learnability in the limit', in other words, precise learning of the exact set of strings that make up the language that the learner is exposed to. If the learner is prepared to accept the risk of making the occasional mistake, then Gold's theorem is not so relevant.
From the perspective of a language learner trying to get by in a complex social world, it might be sufficient to learn the language well enough to communicate, without worrying whether the string set that you have is exactly the same as what other speakers have.
You can still argue (and people do) about whether the Gold's theorem setup is a good way to think about learning of language by humans. Or indeed birds...
The burglars were Bulgarian, of course. "Burglarize" is a
useful compromise between "burgle" and "Bulgarianize".
- Do they understand what the job is?
- Do they have the ability to do it well?
- Will they be happy and successful doing it?
You can't actually ask these questions, because they are questions about the uncertain future, but you can choose questions that might shed light on them. If you can find out what they do when things get difficult, that would also be good to know. Good bosses take responsibility, bad ones blame others (usually those weaker than themselves).How about Jorge Luis Borges? His short stories each have more ideas in than most novels. Or (probably the better idea) find someone who is maximally unlike you, and ask them for a recommendation.
The best text-to-speech that I know about is from Rhetorical Systems at at www.rhetorical.com. The system still doesn't really understand what it is trying to say, but the quality of the speech itself seems good to me. Their technology is proprietary, so one can't be quite sure how they are doing this, but it looks to be large database unit selection (like some of the Festival voices) done very well. (Disclaimer: before the company existed, I used to work with some of the people at Rhetorical, so I might be biased, but listen for yourselves).