I bought a Scott e-Vest jacket. I can keep my laptop, mp3 player, PDA, a water bottle, digital camera, as well as assorted cables and other items in my pockets without any noticable bulges in the jacket. As a benefit, the jacket does a great job of distributing the weight evenly so my neck and shoulders do not get sore.
There have also been a number of studies that challenge some of the claims of the Mozart effect. For example:
"Listening to Mozart does not improve children's spatial ability: Final curtains for the Mozart effect" McKelvie, Pippa; Low, Jason; British Journal of Developmental Psychology, Vol 20(2), Jun 2002. pp. 241-258.
"The mystery of the Mozart effect: Failure to replicate." Steele, Kenneth M.; Bass, Karen E.; Crook, Melissa D.; Psychological Science, Vol 10(4), Jul 1999. pp. 366-369.
"Failure to confirm the Rauscher and Shaw description of recovery of the Mozart effect." Steele, Kenneth M.; Brown, Joshua D.; Stoecker, Jaimily A.; Perceptual & Motor Skills, Vol 88(3, Pt 1), Jun 1999. pp. 843-848.
"The Mozart effect: An artifact of preference." Nantais, Kristin M.; Schellenberg, E. Glenn; Psychological Science, Vol 10(4), Jul 1999. pp. 370-373.
Abstract: Replicated and extended the findings that were reported by F. H. Rauscher, G. L. Shaw, and K. N. Ky (1993, 1995) about the Mozart effect, which indicates that spatial-temporal abilities are enhanced after listening to music composed by Mozart. In Exp 1, performance on a spatial-temporal task was better after 56 college students listened to a piece composed by Mozart or by Schubert than after they sat in silence. 28 college students participated in Exp 2, which found that the advantage for the music condition disappeared when the control condition consisted of a narrated story instead of silence. Results suggest that performance was a function of listeners' preference (music or story), with better performance following the preferred condition. (emphasis added)
"The Mozart effect: Not learning from history". Jones, Stephanie M.; Zigler, Edward; Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, Vol 23(3), May-Jun 2002. pp. 355-372.
Abstract: This paper critiques the links between recent reports on the impact of early experience on the developing brain and proposed policies and interventions for young children. Using the "Mozart effect" as a contemporary example, as well as several examples from history, the case is made that brain research is being misappropriated to the service of misguided, "quick fix" solutions to more complicated, systemic issues. The paper concludes with a brief summary of research that, by contrast, illustrates the substantive contribution of high quality, intensive, multidomain interventions to early cognitive and social development. (emphasis added)
Of course, this doesn't really say anything about the current study. It may very well be that some features of Mozart's work (or classical music, or music, or certain types of sounds) do have distinct effects on gene expression at the hippocampus. It may also be that lots of other stimuli have similar effects. Take this, and the whole "Mozart Effect" thing with a very large grain of salt.
Re:Too expensive...
on
TiVo Will Die
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
That's why the poster above is able to keep replacing the hard drive. He was saying that the part that has the ID is less likely to fail than the HD, so keep replacing the HD and you should be ok for a long time.
The cloning part is just necessary to get the Tivo software on the new drive (although you could download one of the forbidden drive images). If you wanted to keep your saved shows, you could do a full drive cloning, if not, you can just copy the software (and your settings).
It's amazing how helpful the "~" can be when doing searches. Prefixing a word with a tilde will search for that word and many of its synonyms. Very helpful when doing things like:
Social network analysis has indeed been around for a long time. What makes Newman's work new is that he is applying new algorithms to make sense of large networks. In this particular case, he has devised a new way to divide up a network into subcommunities (see this paper for details [or many of these for lots more network analysis).
Newman, Watts, Barabasi and others are trying to understand the nature of these types of networks (and other types), rather than just the content of the networks (orkut, slashdot, disease networks, etc).
Mount one to the top and one to the bottom of the cable box with double-sided tape
I've actually found that using both blasters to control one cable/satellite receiver is worse than using just one blaster. I used to have both blasters taped to the box, but I was getting a large number of channel change errors (e.g., a digit gets missed or misrecognized). After trying lots of different changes (e.g., switching to 'slow' IR signals), I found the most effective solution was to move one of the blasters away from the box. Since then, I've gone from an appoximately 5% failure rate to less than 1%.
I've wanted to build a modified version of the game Simon. When the alarm goes off, you'd have to demonstrate that you are awake by repeating a random pattern of button presses on the clock. As the number of snoozes increased, the pattern length would get longer. I figure that would wake you up...
Of course, I can't solder so I'll have to wait for someone else to build it.
I learned to touch type in high school many years ago. I can still remember the frustration of having to do things the "hard way" while my touch typing speed hovered around 5-10 wpm.
A few years ago I switched to Dvorak by simply printing out the layout and transcribing text from a book. I had that same feeling, but kept with it (about an hour a day for 3 weeks, while continuing to type QWERTY the rest of the day) and eventually switched to Dvorak exclusively. It took me a month or so to get my Dvorak typing up to my previous QWERTY speed. It was actually much easier to learn Dvorak having already learned QWERTY.
None of the other cases of "lil' sizzlers" (I love that term) have involved placing blame on the the bar/retail store where the neglecting parent was...
If mom decides to go get drunk at the bar and leave Junior in the car, nobody starts blaming the liquor companies...
First, you are on the right track in pushing for a double-blind, methodologically sound study. However, the value of analyzing "a number of older experiments performed by a variety of organizations" should not be underestimated. In many ways a meta-analysis (evaluation of existing analyses) is actually more reliable than a single well designed study. No matter how well it is designed, any single study will have weaknesses -- they have a small number of subjects, the truths/lies are limited to a single domain, the time and location of the study has some unexpected influence on the results, etc.
By combining these studies, organizing them by potentially meaningful variables (question type, subject pool, etc.), and weighting their influence by the number of subjects (bigger studies are more important than small ones), you essentially cancel out a lot of the noise (e.g., experimenter bias, weird questions or instructions, etc.)
Second point: The polygraph is reasonably valid as a lie detector. I'd characterize their accuracy as "better than most people, but not good enough to execute someone." Unaided humans in studies similar to the one you outline above perform in the 55-65% range. Significantly better than chance, but not particularly awe inspiring. Moreover, police officers, judges, customs agents, FBI agents, and college students all tend to perform about the same. Some Prisoners, Secret Service Agents, Psychologists interested in deception, and some people who have grown up in abusive environments have been shown to perform even better. But accuracy tends to be pretty domain specific.
The polygraph can arguably be characterized as having an accuracy as a lie detector in the 60-80% range. There are people (and organizations) that will claim accuracies in the 95-100% ranges, as well as those who would argue that the accuracy of the polygraph is 55% or lower. In both cases, you're probably dealing with people who have hidden (or not so hidden) agendas.
Again, the polygraph is a decent tool to determine if someone reacts unusually to some stimulus. Any assumptions beyond that may be unfounded.
All "lie detector" tests are bogus because the results are always "subjective" to the machine's operator.
Not quite. Polygraphs can be valid under the right circumstances. They are reasonably accurate when used to ask questions about specific instances. Less so when they are used in hiring decision contexts. See this recent report from the National Academy of Science. There are many effective countermeasures to "fool" a polygraph. I wouldn't want my future (guilt or innocence) to depend on one, but they are pretty good at recognizing when people have unusual reactions to stimuli. How they are interpreted (e.g., is that a 'lie' or just nervousness?) is another matter.
Anyone know when this concept was first used?
The use of the polygraph as lie detector was pioneered by psychologist Dr. William Moulton Marston. He may be more familiar to Slashdotters under his pseudonym Charles Moulton. That's the name he used when he created the comic book "Wonder Woman."
Look around for "customer owned coin operated telephones" (COCOTs). You can buy your own payphone -- no need to rent, but they are a favorite target of phreakers...
I type Dvorak on my PC and qwerty on my Treo. Because the interaction styles for the two keyboards are so different (whole hands vs. thumbs) there's no real problem converting back and forth.
Also, the efficiency of Dvorak (about 5-10% faster than qwerty) comes in part from the switching from hand to hand between characters. This isn't particularly helpful in a small keyboard. Perhaps one of the one-handed Dvorak layouts would be efficient for one-thumb typing...
I'm not sure about the DirecTivo, but I know that the standalone Tivo will let you do manual recording without a subscription (Tivo Button + 7 gets you there)
Re:A good idea
on
TiVo Basic
·
· Score: 3, Informative
They do allow timed "VCR style" recordings.
Is that without any subscription, and without ever hooking up to a phoneline?
Yep. If you buy the box and never hook it up to a phone line and never sign up for any service, you can still use it to record channel X from time 1 to time 2, and fill your hard drive that way. It also still lets you do cool stuff to live TV (you can fast forward, or with the backdoor code you can turn on 30 second commercial skip).
I don't think there's too much to worry about re: rooting your system. You could always create a CD image of the hard drive, and if the system is ever compromised, you can format the drive and recreate the virgin Tivo conditions.
Actually, that's not quite right. It looks like most of the arguments you're presenting were based on The Fable of the Keys by Liebowitz and Margolis.
As I pointed out when the topic came up last year, Leibowitz and Margolis are economists, and while their discussion of market externalities was correct, they don't quite represent the cognitive research on the Dvorak vs. Sholes (QWERTY) issue very accurately, or fairly.
A) Actual research does not support the efficiency gains of the Dvorak layout. The most-commonly-cited study in favor of the Dvorak layout was published by... guess who... Mr. Dvorak himself, and the science behind that study is deeply questionable.
The data entry industry did their own studies, which do not support the claimed efficiency boost of the Dvorak keyboard. Since they make more money if their data entry personnel type faster, they had every reason to conduct a fair and honest study of the two formats. They stuck with QWERTY.
Actually, the half-dozen or so well constructed lab tests comparing Dvorak to Sholes consistently show a 5-10% advantage for Dvorak (even Leibowitz and Margolis admit that Dvorak is somewhat faster). For a good overview of the research conducted on text entry, check out Jim Lewis's chapter "Keys and Keyboards" in the Handbook of Human-Computer Interaction.
The "data entry industry" study you're referring to is probably the Navy study mentioned in The Fable (and Lewis's chapter). Leibowitz and Margolis don't really describe the study correctly. This is in part due to the strange way it was conducted -- I'm away from my copy of it so I can't give a good description.
(On an unrelated note, it is pretty irritating to read Leibowitz and Margolis's character assassination of Dvorak. I once asked a well known economist about Stan Leibowitz and was told that his research seems to be too motivated by his political beliefs. I have no idea if that's true, and I would never use that as an argument to refute him in a peer reviewed article. Likewise, I think that the aspersions cast on Dvorak's reputation are a bit disingenuous and out of line for a scientific article.)
B) QWERTY is actually pretty damned good. The common urban legend about QWERTY being designed to slow typists down is just that, an urban legend. It is true that QWERTY was designed to reduce jamming on mechanical typewriters, but it did not do this by intentionally slowing typists down, as the legend claims.
Instead, it does this by ensuring that commonly-pressed pairs of keys are not next to one another (and in the days of mechanical hammers, this would also mean that the hammers were not next to one another). Conveniently, this means that successive keystrokes are likely to be pressed by alternate hands, which actually makes typing faster instead of slower.
Sort of right. Analyses of cross-hand keying do indicate that QWERTY is pretty good, but Dvorak is still better.
C) Your own anecdotal stories are, I'm sorry to say, worthless.
Actually, this is sort of true, sort of false, but these days probably irrelevant.
True: Only well designed scientific studies (or simulations) of human performance using various layouts can tell us which layouts are most efficient in which contexts.
False: Your anecdotal evidence is actually worth a lot -- to you. If you typed at 40 WPM using one layout and now type at 60 WPM using another layout, good for you. It doesn't mean anything for anyone else, but something about the switch (the new layout, the practice you had to engage in, your desire to prove that your layout is superior) helped you.
Irrelevant: Unless you are a transcriptionist (in which case, you probably should be using a specialized tra
Actually, Foster cites himself so much because he's The Big Guy in grid computing. He's been in it since the early days, gets a huge chunk of the research funding, and is involved with lots of projects (both in terms of developing grid technology and implementing it in scientific communities).
When you're ahead of the crowd, you don't have many peers to cite.
Oh, and his reputation is actually pretty sound, he doesn't really need to rely on inflated citation counts, he has plenty of research dollars coming in -- that should keep his institutions (Argonne and U of Chicago) happy.
yeah. It looks like the skylink sends a resynchronize signal to the garage door, then uses the default code to open it. (page 7 of the motion to dismiss pdf file)
The claim is that by 'rebooting' the garage system and then using guest:guest instead of dealing with the standard password system, skylink is circumventing their protection to a copyrighted work.
So, it's like having a building with a super-duper unpickable lock on the front door, but with an unlocked door on the side.
My questions: 1. could using this 'side door' be considered circumvention under the orginal (misguided) spirit of the law?
2. Where's the copyrighted work? They seem to claim it is the rolling code algorithm, but the rolling code program is never accessed. Maybe they'll claim that they've copyrighted the inside of my garage... Maybe lexmart can get in on the deal if I start keeping my printer cartridges inside my garage.
I don't think the DMCA was mentioned in any of the earlier filings. It looks to be a patent infringement case that some overzealous lawyer figured he'd add this cool DMCA thing to.
I think that gentle introductions to Linux for Win users are a Good Thing. Someone who decides to buy this book probably already has some level of interest in Linux, and is looking to see if the switch can be done with little-to-no pain.
The real challenge, is getting people to that point. One approach is to have lots of stories published in the mass media that talk about how easy/efficient Linux is. The challenge there is not to raise expectations too high. If someone expects to be able to sit down in front of their computer, put a Linux CD in, click "ok" a few times, and be up and running, doing everything they had been able to do in Win, they'll be disappointed, and are likely to give up. Non-geeks aren't motivated to hack around for a while. They want to use their new tool.
People need appropriate motivation. As an example, speech recognition software is more likely to be successful when the user has a strong motivation to work through the early hassles. People with RSIs or other physical constraints are more likely to become successful speech reco users than are ablebodied people.
So, the challenge is to motivate people to try it without raising expectations too high. I'm not sure what the answers are, but although this type of book is a good step, more needs to be done.
Slashdot Mirror
I bought a Scott e-Vest jacket. I can keep my laptop, mp3 player, PDA, a water bottle, digital camera, as well as assorted cables and other items in my pockets without any noticable bulges in the jacket. As a benefit, the jacket does a great job of distributing the weight evenly so my neck and shoulders do not get sore.
There have also been a number of studies that challenge some of the claims of the Mozart effect. For example:
"Listening to Mozart does not improve children's spatial ability: Final curtains for the Mozart effect" McKelvie, Pippa; Low, Jason; British Journal of Developmental Psychology, Vol 20(2), Jun 2002. pp. 241-258.
"The mystery of the Mozart effect: Failure to replicate." Steele, Kenneth M.; Bass, Karen E.; Crook, Melissa D.; Psychological Science, Vol 10(4), Jul 1999. pp. 366-369.
"Failure to confirm the Rauscher and Shaw description of recovery of the Mozart effect." Steele, Kenneth M.; Brown, Joshua D.; Stoecker, Jaimily A.; Perceptual & Motor Skills, Vol 88(3, Pt 1), Jun 1999. pp. 843-848.
"The Mozart effect: An artifact of preference." Nantais, Kristin M.; Schellenberg, E. Glenn; Psychological Science, Vol 10(4), Jul 1999. pp. 370-373.
Abstract: Replicated and extended the findings that were reported by F. H. Rauscher, G. L. Shaw, and K. N. Ky (1993, 1995) about the Mozart effect, which indicates that spatial-temporal abilities are enhanced after listening to music composed by Mozart. In Exp 1, performance on a spatial-temporal task was better after 56 college students listened to a piece composed by Mozart or by Schubert than after they sat in silence. 28 college students participated in Exp 2, which found that the advantage for the music condition disappeared when the control condition consisted of a narrated story instead of silence. Results suggest that performance was a function of listeners' preference (music or story), with better performance following the preferred condition. (emphasis added)
"The Mozart effect: Not learning from history". Jones, Stephanie M.; Zigler, Edward; Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, Vol 23(3), May-Jun 2002. pp. 355-372.
Abstract: This paper critiques the links between recent reports on the impact of early experience on the developing brain and proposed policies and interventions for young children. Using the "Mozart effect" as a contemporary example, as well as several examples from history, the case is made that brain research is being misappropriated to the service of misguided, "quick fix" solutions to more complicated, systemic issues. The paper concludes with a brief summary of research that, by contrast, illustrates the substantive contribution of high quality, intensive, multidomain interventions to early cognitive and social development. (emphasis added)
Of course, this doesn't really say anything about the current study. It may very well be that some features of Mozart's work (or classical music, or music, or certain types of sounds) do have distinct effects on gene expression at the hippocampus. It may also be that lots of other stimuli have similar effects. Take this, and the whole "Mozart Effect" thing with a very large grain of salt.
That's why the poster above is able to keep replacing the hard drive. He was saying that the part that has the ID is less likely to fail than the HD, so keep replacing the HD and you should be ok for a long time.
The cloning part is just necessary to get the Tivo software on the new drive (although you could download one of the forbidden drive images). If you wanted to keep your saved shows, you could do a full drive cloning, if not, you can just copy the software (and your settings).
It's amazing how helpful the "~" can be when doing searches. Prefixing a word with a tilde will search for that word and many of its synonyms. Very helpful when doing things like:
/. a while ago.
linux ~tutorial
Also, I think this list of google tricks was listed on
Social network analysis has indeed been around for a long time. What makes Newman's work new is that he is applying new algorithms to make sense of large networks. In this particular case, he has devised a new way to divide up a network into subcommunities (see this paper for details [or many of these for lots more network analysis).
Newman, Watts, Barabasi and others are trying to understand the nature of these types of networks (and other types), rather than just the content of the networks (orkut, slashdot, disease networks, etc).
Mount one to the top and one to the bottom of the cable box with double-sided tape
I've actually found that using both blasters to control one cable/satellite receiver is worse than using just one blaster. I used to have both blasters taped to the box, but I was getting a large number of channel change errors (e.g., a digit gets missed or misrecognized). After trying lots of different changes (e.g., switching to 'slow' IR signals), I found the most effective solution was to move one of the blasters away from the box. Since then, I've gone from an appoximately 5% failure rate to less than 1%.
I've wanted to build a modified version of the game Simon. When the alarm goes off, you'd have to demonstrate that you are awake by repeating a random pattern of button presses on the clock. As the number of snoozes increased, the pattern length would get longer. I figure that would wake you up...
Of course, I can't solder so I'll have to wait for someone else to build it.
almost
I learned to touch type in high school many years ago. I can still remember the frustration of having to do things the "hard way" while my touch typing speed hovered around 5-10 wpm.
A few years ago I switched to Dvorak by simply printing out the layout and transcribing text from a book. I had that same feeling, but kept with it (about an hour a day for 3 weeks, while continuing to type QWERTY the rest of the day) and eventually switched to Dvorak exclusively. It took me a month or so to get my Dvorak typing up to my previous QWERTY speed. It was actually much easier to learn Dvorak having already learned QWERTY.
None of the other cases of "lil' sizzlers" (I love that term) have involved placing blame on the the bar/retail store where the neglecting parent was...
If mom decides to go get drunk at the bar and leave Junior in the car, nobody starts blaming the liquor companies...
Two points:
First, you are on the right track in pushing for a double-blind, methodologically sound study. However, the value of analyzing "a number of older experiments performed by a variety of organizations" should not be underestimated. In many ways a meta-analysis (evaluation of existing analyses) is actually more reliable than a single well designed study. No matter how well it is designed, any single study will have weaknesses -- they have a small number of subjects, the truths/lies are limited to a single domain, the time and location of the study has some unexpected influence on the results, etc.
By combining these studies, organizing them by potentially meaningful variables (question type, subject pool, etc.), and weighting their influence by the number of subjects (bigger studies are more important than small ones), you essentially cancel out a lot of the noise (e.g., experimenter bias, weird questions or instructions, etc.)
Second point: The polygraph is reasonably valid as a lie detector. I'd characterize their accuracy as "better than most people, but not good enough to execute someone." Unaided humans in studies similar to the one you outline above perform in the 55-65% range. Significantly better than chance, but not particularly awe inspiring. Moreover, police officers, judges, customs agents, FBI agents, and college students all tend to perform about the same. Some Prisoners, Secret Service Agents, Psychologists interested in deception, and some people who have grown up in abusive environments have been shown to perform even better. But accuracy tends to be pretty domain specific.
The polygraph can arguably be characterized as having an accuracy as a lie detector in the 60-80% range. There are people (and organizations) that will claim accuracies in the 95-100% ranges, as well as those who would argue that the accuracy of the polygraph is 55% or lower. In both cases, you're probably dealing with people who have hidden (or not so hidden) agendas.
Again, the polygraph is a decent tool to determine if someone reacts unusually to some stimulus. Any assumptions beyond that may be unfounded.
All "lie detector" tests are bogus because the results are always "subjective" to the machine's operator.
Not quite. Polygraphs can be valid under the right circumstances. They are reasonably accurate when used to ask questions about specific instances. Less so when they are used in hiring decision contexts. See this recent report from the National Academy of Science. There are many effective countermeasures to "fool" a polygraph. I wouldn't want my future (guilt or innocence) to depend on one, but they are pretty good at recognizing when people have unusual reactions to stimuli. How they are interpreted (e.g., is that a 'lie' or just nervousness?) is another matter.
Anyone know when this concept was first used?
The use of the polygraph as lie detector was pioneered by psychologist Dr. William Moulton Marston. He may be more familiar to Slashdotters under his pseudonym Charles Moulton. That's the name he used when he created the comic book "Wonder Woman."
Seriously!
Look around for "customer owned coin operated telephones" (COCOTs). You can buy your own payphone -- no need to rent, but they are a favorite target of phreakers...
A quick google search came up with this
Try CGIProxy.
I type Dvorak on my PC and qwerty on my Treo. Because the interaction styles for the two keyboards are so different (whole hands vs. thumbs) there's no real problem converting back and forth.
Also, the efficiency of Dvorak (about 5-10% faster than qwerty) comes in part from the switching from hand to hand between characters. This isn't particularly helpful in a small keyboard. Perhaps one of the one-handed Dvorak layouts would be efficient for one-thumb typing...
A 737 is a cute little plane... Remember when Slashdot covered this guy's 747 Simulator?
Which law blog can advise me about SDRAM?
I'm not sure about the DirecTivo, but I know that the standalone Tivo will let you do manual recording without a subscription (Tivo Button + 7 gets you there)
Is that without any subscription, and without ever hooking up to a phoneline?
Yep. If you buy the box and never hook it up to a phone line and never sign up for any service, you can still use it to record channel X from time 1 to time 2, and fill your hard drive that way. It also still lets you do cool stuff to live TV (you can fast forward, or with the backdoor code you can turn on 30 second commercial skip).
I don't think there's too much to worry about re: rooting your system. You could always create a CD image of the hard drive, and if the system is ever compromised, you can format the drive and recreate the virgin Tivo conditions.
Actually, that's not quite right. It looks like most of the arguments you're presenting were based on The Fable of the Keys by Liebowitz and Margolis.
... guess who ... Mr. Dvorak himself, and the science behind that study is deeply questionable.
As I pointed out when the topic came up last year, Leibowitz and Margolis are economists, and while their discussion of market externalities was correct, they don't quite represent the cognitive research on the Dvorak vs. Sholes (QWERTY) issue very accurately, or fairly.
A) Actual research does not support the efficiency gains of the Dvorak layout. The most-commonly-cited study in favor of the Dvorak layout was published by
The data entry industry did their own studies, which do not support the claimed efficiency boost of the Dvorak keyboard. Since they make more money if their data entry personnel type faster, they had every reason to conduct a fair and honest study of the two formats. They stuck with QWERTY.
Actually, the half-dozen or so well constructed lab tests comparing Dvorak to Sholes consistently show a 5-10% advantage for Dvorak (even Leibowitz and Margolis admit that Dvorak is somewhat faster). For a good overview of the research conducted on text entry, check out Jim Lewis's chapter "Keys and Keyboards" in the Handbook of Human-Computer Interaction.
The "data entry industry" study you're referring to is probably the Navy study mentioned in The Fable (and Lewis's chapter). Leibowitz and Margolis don't really describe the study correctly. This is in part due to the strange way it was conducted -- I'm away from my copy of it so I can't give a good description.
(On an unrelated note, it is pretty irritating to read Leibowitz and Margolis's character assassination of Dvorak. I once asked a well known economist about Stan Leibowitz and was told that his research seems to be too motivated by his political beliefs. I have no idea if that's true, and I would never use that as an argument to refute him in a peer reviewed article. Likewise, I think that the aspersions cast on Dvorak's reputation are a bit disingenuous and out of line for a scientific article.)
B) QWERTY is actually pretty damned good. The common urban legend about QWERTY being designed to slow typists down is just that, an urban legend. It is true that QWERTY was designed to reduce jamming on mechanical typewriters, but it did not do this by intentionally slowing typists down, as the legend claims.
Instead, it does this by ensuring that commonly-pressed pairs of keys are not next to one another (and in the days of mechanical hammers, this would also mean that the hammers were not next to one another). Conveniently, this means that successive keystrokes are likely to be pressed by alternate hands, which actually makes typing faster instead of slower.
Sort of right. Analyses of cross-hand keying do indicate that QWERTY is pretty good, but Dvorak is still better.
C) Your own anecdotal stories are, I'm sorry to say, worthless.
Actually, this is sort of true, sort of false, but these days probably irrelevant.
True: Only well designed scientific studies (or simulations) of human performance using various layouts can tell us which layouts are most efficient in which contexts.
False: Your anecdotal evidence is actually worth a lot -- to you. If you typed at 40 WPM using one layout and now type at 60 WPM using another layout, good for you. It doesn't mean anything for anyone else, but something about the switch (the new layout, the practice you had to engage in, your desire to prove that your layout is superior) helped you.
Irrelevant: Unless you are a transcriptionist (in which case, you probably should be using a specialized tra
seriously though would i be able to type with one hand at the same speed i type now with two hands? because that would be enough reason to switch
You could try learning one of the One-handed Dvorak layouts. Motivated users can reach very high speeds with sufficient practice.
Actually, Foster cites himself so much because he's The Big Guy in grid computing. He's been in it since the early days, gets a huge chunk of the research funding, and is involved with lots of projects (both in terms of developing grid technology and implementing it in scientific communities).
When you're ahead of the crowd, you don't have many peers to cite.
Oh, and his reputation is actually pretty sound, he doesn't really need to rely on inflated citation counts, he has plenty of research dollars coming in -- that should keep his institutions (Argonne and U of Chicago) happy.
yeah. It looks like the skylink sends a resynchronize signal to the garage door, then uses the default code to open it. (page 7 of the motion to dismiss pdf file)
The claim is that by 'rebooting' the garage system and then using guest:guest instead of dealing with the standard password system, skylink is circumventing their protection to a copyrighted work.
So, it's like having a building with a super-duper unpickable lock on the front door, but with an unlocked door on the side.
My questions:
1. could using this 'side door' be considered circumvention under the orginal (misguided) spirit of the law?
2. Where's the copyrighted work? They seem to claim it is the rolling code algorithm, but the rolling code program is never accessed. Maybe they'll claim that they've copyrighted the inside of my garage... Maybe lexmart can get in on the deal if I start keeping my printer cartridges inside my garage.
I don't think the DMCA was mentioned in any of the earlier filings. It looks to be a patent infringement case that some overzealous lawyer figured he'd add this cool DMCA thing to.
and, anyone with a free barcode font can create a new key to break into his house!
Sweet!
I think that gentle introductions to Linux for Win users are a Good Thing. Someone who decides to buy this book probably already has some level of interest in Linux, and is looking to see if the switch can be done with little-to-no pain.
The real challenge, is getting people to that point. One approach is to have lots of stories published in the mass media that talk about how easy/efficient Linux is. The challenge there is not to raise expectations too high. If someone expects to be able to sit down in front of their computer, put a Linux CD in, click "ok" a few times, and be up and running, doing everything they had been able to do in Win, they'll be disappointed, and are likely to give up. Non-geeks aren't motivated to hack around for a while. They want to use their new tool.
People need appropriate motivation. As an example, speech recognition software is more likely to be successful when the user has a strong motivation to work through the early hassles. People with RSIs or other physical constraints are more likely to become successful speech reco users than are ablebodied people.
So, the challenge is to motivate people to try it without raising expectations too high. I'm not sure what the answers are, but although this type of book is a good step, more needs to be done.