This research likely will dead-end, but not because "no one thought of it before." The reason it's developing now is because it's being studied by a handful of psychology Ph.D.s (I have connections to a couple of them), who are studying this from a different perspective than most linguists have in the past.
The actual research, which this article ignores (as most articles do) shows that the Live Ink software actually hurts text processing ability in individuals who are already moderately skilled at English. Who it does help are people trying to pick up English as a second (or third, or fourth...) language, or those who have trouble with parsing (individuals below the first or second standard deviation in verbal ability). Marked verb positions make it substantially easier for people parsing the sentence with another linguistic background to figure out where the subject, verb and object are located.
The major hurdle, of course, is that once they have learned English with the help of this software, it's substantially harder to move back to blocked text.
The effect of using the software is also much larger for very complicated sentences, while the gain for simple sentences (such as the ones used in the examples on the page) are minute.
I am confident that this area of research will die out, but not until it dies with the academics that introduced it.
This is just a guarantee to cover their collective asses if Nintendo doesn't ship as many systems as they say they will. My guess is that EB/GameStop Corporate received word of how many total systems that they'd receive, which they allotted down to stores (and online distribution) as they saw fit. I was assured that as long as Nintendo delivered the number of systems that they said they would, everyone that pre-ordered (including me) would get a system.
And as for the story, I got to my local GameStop (in Minneapolis) at 9AM, which put me in the #10 spot for the 10AM opening. After there were 14 of us (about 10 minutes later), the manager came out and told us that there were only 14 pre-orders available. Lucky us. We turned away at least 10-15 more people that came by before 10AM, and a few more after 10AM.
In English, discimination refers to differing individuals by some attribute or quality. This is how all hiring decisions are made. You discriminate among candidates to see who is best for the job and hire them.
In American law, discirimination refers to hiring or not hiring people because of a protected status, which includes race, gender, age, and disability status. The school that you attended is not protected under this legislation. In fact, you can hire people based on their favorite color, if you wanted to (as long as favorite color didn't correlate with a protected class).
There is nothing wrong with choosing who you believe is the best candidate. If they believe your school is subpar, then that's their right. That should also tell you, however, that the environment of that company is very judgmental in terms of education and is probably not a place you'd want to work anyway.
Experimental participants were just exposed to a game in which beating/killing people and watching them soak in a pool of their own blood. By comparison, drinking and smoking marijuana doesn't really seem quite so bad, does it?
The effect is just from priming the individuals to "extremely bad things." When presented with "somewhat bad things," they don't seem that bad to the students, at least in a relative sense.
Also keep in mind that these are attitudes as measured IMMEDIATELY after playing such a game. This is not a longitudinal study, so it's impossible to say whether these effects are long-term. I would bet quite a bit that they aren't.
Actually, politically incorrect though it may be, the psychological evidence these days points to a general factor of intelligence that is likely around 30-40% genetic. That's not to say that nurture isn't important of course (60% is obviously substantial), but genetics do give a person a sizable and substantial advantage over their not-so-gifted brethren. And having said THAT, there are a lot of risk factors that during pregnany that will lower that intelligence further (exposure to lead, other toxins, undue stress, etc.)
There has been a long running debate instigated by a psychologist named Robert J. Sternberg that stated there were three intelligences: academic, practical, and creative. Academic intelligence is the type measured by IQ, practical is the ability to use information in a useful way, and creative is creativity. Well guess what - the empirical evidence reveals that this is a totally arbitrary distinction, and that the general factor of intelligence proves much more useful and descriptive than any combination of specific intelligences (even splits like math/verbal).
Even Sternberg himself, who based his entire career on this idea, has finally admitted defeat: the data just isn't there to support much value of intelligences beyond the general factor.
What DOES show promise is the measure of things beyond intelligence/ability - things like personality, integrity, and so on. While you may be "doomed to be dumb" to _some_ extent, there are plenty of ways to overcome those limitations.
I'm not really sure why this competition happened in the first place. If you were a Mac OS X enthusiast wanting to show the "amazing" security of your OS, why would you leave the first major door wide open?
And who gains from this publicity? It would seem like sponsoring a hacking competition that took MORE than 30 minutes (seemingly the goal of such an event) would be good for Apple, but then why leave the system more vulnerable at the start of the contest? And if it was really sponsored by an anti-Apple group posing as an pro-Apple group, why have the hacker claim that Macs are essentially "small pickin's"?
Actually, it was Episode 2, Level 8, and the sign was for "aardwolf". This is the original sign. In the 1997 re-release of the game, they replaced the sign with a pile of crap on the floor. Here's what Apogee's Joe Siegler originally said about it (stolen from here):
"Call Apogee and say Aardwolf." It's a sign that to this day is something that I get asked about a lot. This is a sign that appears on a wall in a particularly nasty maze in Episode 2 Level 8 of Wolfenstein 3D. The sign was to be the goal in a contest Apogee was going to have, but almost immediately after the game's release, a large amount of cheat and mapping programs were released. With these programs running around, we felt that it would have been unfair to have the contest and award a prize. The sign was still left in the game, but in hindsight, probably should have been taken out. To this day, Apogee gets letters and phone calls and asking what Aardwolf is, frequently with the question, "Has anyone seen this yet?"
Also, in a somewhat related issue, letters were shown after the highest score in the score table in some revisions of the game. These letters were to be part of another contest that got scrapped before it got started, where we were going to have people call in with their scores and tell us the code; we'd then be able to verify their score. However, with the cheat programs out there this got scrapped too.
Basically, "Aardwolf" and the letters mean nothing now. Also note that if you found the Aardwolf sign in the game (without cheating), there's a VERY strong chance that you're stuck in there. The only way out may be to restart, or load a saved game from before you went into that maze.
The problem is that this is still assumed in colleges, and by necessesity. In the writing-intensive classes in psychology (at a US public university) that I help teach, we don't have time to teach students how to read. We assume that somewhere along the line, be it elementary or high school, these kids should have already learned it.
If we're teaching a class in psychology, why should we take the time of the entire class to teach 50% of it how to write all over again? We just tell them "your writing is a bit poor - why not go to the writing center for some advice?" and send them on their merry way. The thing is - these students never go to the writing center. Most of them aren't concerned that they don't know how to read or write. If they don't want to learn, they won't.
I was once one of the officers for a college organization called the "Knoxville Gaming Bureau," which focused on, believe it or not, playing all sorts of games, video games included. We put up flyers all over campus to advertise when we first started up. Important part of this puzzle: we're talking about Knoxville, Tennessee.
Fast forward to meeting one: some good-ole-boy politely comes in and sits down, listens politely to the first five minutes of our introduction, stands up and says "Y'all don't hunt?"
"No sir. No sir, we do not. And politely take your rifle elsewhere."
I'm sorry, but he's right - you're an idiot.
This is very simple, and I'll only say it once.
Digital cameras encode pictures by recording color information as pixels and organizing those pixels in a grid to display later (yes, it's more complicated than that, but this is the general idea).
35mm cameras record the impact of light onto film. That's all. No encoding, no translation, no pixels. No resolution, either, as light isn't made of pixels - it's LIGHT.
Talking about 35mm cameras having "resolution" only reveals that you have no idea how a 35mm camera functions. If you get fuzzy photos when you use one, that's only because you don't know how to set aperature, focus, and exposure time to get a decent shot.
We wouldn't want it watching the paper and learning "rock, scissor, human" instead.
I can't believe that this was moderated Insightful. What kind of culture are we living in where we believe machines can spontaneously flow with free will and kill us all?
Someone had to program this thing. They had to tell the program to recognize a human form as the object to pay attention to. It's not like they got a camera, gave it AI, pointed it at a rock-paper-scissors game and commanded it to "learn." That would be real AI, which we are nowhere close to creating.
It's this kind of ignorance of modern technology and programming that creates sensational journalism that in turn spawns legislation that limits technology and technological progress.
Anyone else going to feel nervous when you snap the SD card in half in order to get the USB connector loose?
I mean, I appreciate the innovation here, but wouldn't a USB plug that slid out from the card simply have a better asthetic?
Not to mention that some USB ports (on the back of computers and even some hubs) are in recessed locations where this card wouldn't even fit in its snapped-in-half state.
According to the text of the act, this includes any recipient of spam, defining recipient as:
(a) A receiving address furnished by an electronic mail service provider that bills for furnishing and maintaining that receiving address to a mailing address within this state;
(b) A receiving address ordinarily accessed from a computer located within this state or by a person domiciled within this state;
(c) Any other receiving address with respect to which this section can be imposed consistent with the United States Constitution.
So, that means that this act is designed to apply to anyone that sends spam to anyone that lives in Ohio, checks their e-mail in Ohio, or has an e-mail service provider/ISP located in Ohio.
How enforceable that is, is really anyone's guess. But I do see it as wise to define spam by who receives it rather than who sends it ("spammers").
Where the hell do you eat? Unless you're already paying $50 a plate, ever restaurant that most of the people here are going to eat in is going to supply a ready stream of tap water, free of charge. At worst, a fast-food chain will charge you up to $0.15 for the cup and ice.
Just where do you go that "I'd like some ice water" is met with "Sorry, we don't have that."?
I seriously doubt the validity of a test that outright asks you "Would you torture people in a concentration camp?"
Right now, integrity tests are used to predict future job performance in HR firms because the degree to which you are a decent human being seems to indicate the degree to which you will succeed in a work environment. But within integrity testing exists two camps - overt testing and personality-based testing.
Overt testing is much less valid because the test asks you, outright, if you're a decent human being. Most people with low integrity, when something important is on the line, will lie their asses off to get a good score (called "faking good"). By camouflaging the questions (a personality-based test), you can get much more accurate responses.
The same problem looks like it would exist with the Harman Value Profile, except instead of asking you "are you a decent human being?", it asks "are you a raging psychotic killer?" Who would possibly test highly on this except the most psychotic individuals? And if you're only going to point out only the top 0.5% of the crazies, what real use is it anyway?
Consumerism and the pursuit of the most pretty product has been a thorn in the side of every industry for years. Remember, people spend years of their lives dedicated to mastering to the science of marketing, to make the average (stupid) consumer buy what he doesn't need. That is the fuel for capitalist economy. When people are too scared to waste money on things they don't need due to flashy lights and pretty pictures, recession enters here. "God Bless America."
Slashdot Mirror
This research likely will dead-end, but not because "no one thought of it before." The reason it's developing now is because it's being studied by a handful of psychology Ph.D.s (I have connections to a couple of them), who are studying this from a different perspective than most linguists have in the past.
The actual research, which this article ignores (as most articles do) shows that the Live Ink software actually hurts text processing ability in individuals who are already moderately skilled at English. Who it does help are people trying to pick up English as a second (or third, or fourth...) language, or those who have trouble with parsing (individuals below the first or second standard deviation in verbal ability). Marked verb positions make it substantially easier for people parsing the sentence with another linguistic background to figure out where the subject, verb and object are located.
The major hurdle, of course, is that once they have learned English with the help of this software, it's substantially harder to move back to blocked text.
The effect of using the software is also much larger for very complicated sentences, while the gain for simple sentences (such as the ones used in the examples on the page) are minute.
I am confident that this area of research will die out, but not until it dies with the academics that introduced it.
This is just a guarantee to cover their collective asses if Nintendo doesn't ship as many systems as they say they will. My guess is that EB/GameStop Corporate received word of how many total systems that they'd receive, which they allotted down to stores (and online distribution) as they saw fit. I was assured that as long as Nintendo delivered the number of systems that they said they would, everyone that pre-ordered (including me) would get a system.
And as for the story, I got to my local GameStop (in Minneapolis) at 9AM, which put me in the #10 spot for the 10AM opening. After there were 14 of us (about 10 minutes later), the manager came out and told us that there were only 14 pre-orders available. Lucky us. We turned away at least 10-15 more people that came by before 10AM, and a few more after 10AM.
In English, discimination refers to differing individuals by some attribute or quality. This is how all hiring decisions are made. You discriminate among candidates to see who is best for the job and hire them.
In American law, discirimination refers to hiring or not hiring people because of a protected status, which includes race, gender, age, and disability status. The school that you attended is not protected under this legislation. In fact, you can hire people based on their favorite color, if you wanted to (as long as favorite color didn't correlate with a protected class).
There is nothing wrong with choosing who you believe is the best candidate. If they believe your school is subpar, then that's their right. That should also tell you, however, that the environment of that company is very judgmental in terms of education and is probably not a place you'd want to work anyway.
Pick your battles wisely, my friend.
It won't be sharp enough until I can swing the knife in midair, splitting atoms along the way, with a ripple of nuclear fusion in my wake.
Mad scientists of the world (and Canada), unite to make my dreams come true!!!
Rather important to keep in mind here:
Experimental participants were just exposed to a game in which beating/killing people and watching them soak in a pool of their own blood. By comparison, drinking and smoking marijuana doesn't really seem quite so bad, does it?
The effect is just from priming the individuals to "extremely bad things." When presented with "somewhat bad things," they don't seem that bad to the students, at least in a relative sense.
Also keep in mind that these are attitudes as measured IMMEDIATELY after playing such a game. This is not a longitudinal study, so it's impossible to say whether these effects are long-term. I would bet quite a bit that they aren't.
Actually, politically incorrect though it may be, the psychological evidence these days points to a general factor of intelligence that is likely around 30-40% genetic. That's not to say that nurture isn't important of course (60% is obviously substantial), but genetics do give a person a sizable and substantial advantage over their not-so-gifted brethren. And having said THAT, there are a lot of risk factors that during pregnany that will lower that intelligence further (exposure to lead, other toxins, undue stress, etc.)
There has been a long running debate instigated by a psychologist named Robert J. Sternberg that stated there were three intelligences: academic, practical, and creative. Academic intelligence is the type measured by IQ, practical is the ability to use information in a useful way, and creative is creativity. Well guess what - the empirical evidence reveals that this is a totally arbitrary distinction, and that the general factor of intelligence proves much more useful and descriptive than any combination of specific intelligences (even splits like math/verbal).
Even Sternberg himself, who based his entire career on this idea, has finally admitted defeat: the data just isn't there to support much value of intelligences beyond the general factor.
What DOES show promise is the measure of things beyond intelligence/ability - things like personality, integrity, and so on. While you may be "doomed to be dumb" to _some_ extent, there are plenty of ways to overcome those limitations.
I'm not really sure why this competition happened in the first place. If you were a Mac OS X enthusiast wanting to show the "amazing" security of your OS, why would you leave the first major door wide open?
And who gains from this publicity? It would seem like sponsoring a hacking competition that took MORE than 30 minutes (seemingly the goal of such an event) would be good for Apple, but then why leave the system more vulnerable at the start of the contest? And if it was really sponsored by an anti-Apple group posing as an pro-Apple group, why have the hacker claim that Macs are essentially "small pickin's"?
It just doesn't make sense...
Actually, it was Episode 2, Level 8, and the sign was for "aardwolf". This is the original sign. In the 1997 re-release of the game, they replaced the sign with a pile of crap on the floor. Here's what Apogee's Joe Siegler originally said about it (stolen from here):
"Call Apogee and say Aardwolf." It's a sign that to this day is something that I get asked about a lot. This is a sign that appears on a wall in a particularly nasty maze in Episode 2 Level 8 of Wolfenstein 3D. The sign was to be the goal in a contest Apogee was going to have, but almost immediately after the game's release, a large amount of cheat and mapping programs were released. With these programs running around, we felt that it would have been unfair to have the contest and award a prize. The sign was still left in the game, but in hindsight, probably should have been taken out. To this day, Apogee gets letters and phone calls and asking what Aardwolf is, frequently with the question, "Has anyone seen this yet?"
Also, in a somewhat related issue, letters were shown after the highest score in the score table in some revisions of the game. These letters were to be part of another contest that got scrapped before it got started, where we were going to have people call in with their scores and tell us the code; we'd then be able to verify their score. However, with the cheat programs out there this got scrapped too.
Basically, "Aardwolf" and the letters mean nothing now. Also note that if you found the Aardwolf sign in the game (without cheating), there's a VERY strong chance that you're stuck in there. The only way out may be to restart, or load a saved game from before you went into that maze.
The problem is that this is still assumed in colleges, and by necessesity. In the writing-intensive classes in psychology (at a US public university) that I help teach, we don't have time to teach students how to read. We assume that somewhere along the line, be it elementary or high school, these kids should have already learned it.
If we're teaching a class in psychology, why should we take the time of the entire class to teach 50% of it how to write all over again? We just tell them "your writing is a bit poor - why not go to the writing center for some advice?" and send them on their merry way. The thing is - these students never go to the writing center. Most of them aren't concerned that they don't know how to read or write. If they don't want to learn, they won't.
What about "Gaming (shooting deer)"?
I was once one of the officers for a college organization called the "Knoxville Gaming Bureau," which focused on, believe it or not, playing all sorts of games, video games included. We put up flyers all over campus to advertise when we first started up. Important part of this puzzle: we're talking about Knoxville, Tennessee.
Fast forward to meeting one: some good-ole-boy politely comes in and sits down, listens politely to the first five minutes of our introduction, stands up and says "Y'all don't hunt?"
"No sir. No sir, we do not. And politely take your rifle elsewhere."
I'm sorry, but he's right - you're an idiot. This is very simple, and I'll only say it once. Digital cameras encode pictures by recording color information as pixels and organizing those pixels in a grid to display later (yes, it's more complicated than that, but this is the general idea). 35mm cameras record the impact of light onto film. That's all. No encoding, no translation, no pixels. No resolution, either, as light isn't made of pixels - it's LIGHT. Talking about 35mm cameras having "resolution" only reveals that you have no idea how a 35mm camera functions. If you get fuzzy photos when you use one, that's only because you don't know how to set aperature, focus, and exposure time to get a decent shot.
I can't believe that this was moderated Insightful. What kind of culture are we living in where we believe machines can spontaneously flow with free will and kill us all?
Someone had to program this thing. They had to tell the program to recognize a human form as the object to pay attention to. It's not like they got a camera, gave it AI, pointed it at a rock-paper-scissors game and commanded it to "learn." That would be real AI, which we are nowhere close to creating.
It's this kind of ignorance of modern technology and programming that creates sensational journalism that in turn spawns legislation that limits technology and technological progress.
20-year Usenet Archive and 20-year Usenet Timeline are different things.
Anyone else going to feel nervous when you snap the SD card in half in order to get the USB connector loose?
I mean, I appreciate the innovation here, but wouldn't a USB plug that slid out from the card simply have a better asthetic?
Not to mention that some USB ports (on the back of computers and even some hubs) are in recessed locations where this card wouldn't even fit in its snapped-in-half state.
According to the text of the act, this includes any recipient of spam, defining recipient as:
So, that means that this act is designed to apply to anyone that sends spam to anyone that lives in Ohio, checks their e-mail in Ohio, or has an e-mail service provider/ISP located in Ohio.
How enforceable that is, is really anyone's guess. But I do see it as wise to define spam by who receives it rather than who sends it ("spammers").
I've been on /. too long... I originally read the title as "HP Hacks Blu-Ray Disc Technology", and my first response was "I wonder how they did it."
I think we can all agree that you have other far more important problems if you stare at an LED all day.
Where the hell do you eat? Unless you're already paying $50 a plate, ever restaurant that most of the people here are going to eat in is going to supply a ready stream of tap water, free of charge. At worst, a fast-food chain will charge you up to $0.15 for the cup and ice.
Just where do you go that "I'd like some ice water" is met with "Sorry, we don't have that."?
I seriously doubt the validity of a test that outright asks you "Would you torture people in a concentration camp?" Right now, integrity tests are used to predict future job performance in HR firms because the degree to which you are a decent human being seems to indicate the degree to which you will succeed in a work environment. But within integrity testing exists two camps - overt testing and personality-based testing. Overt testing is much less valid because the test asks you, outright, if you're a decent human being. Most people with low integrity, when something important is on the line, will lie their asses off to get a good score (called "faking good"). By camouflaging the questions (a personality-based test), you can get much more accurate responses. The same problem looks like it would exist with the Harman Value Profile, except instead of asking you "are you a decent human being?", it asks "are you a raging psychotic killer?" Who would possibly test highly on this except the most psychotic individuals? And if you're only going to point out only the top 0.5% of the crazies, what real use is it anyway?
Consumerism and the pursuit of the most pretty product has been a thorn in the side of every industry for years. Remember, people spend years of their lives dedicated to mastering to the science of marketing, to make the average (stupid) consumer buy what he doesn't need. That is the fuel for capitalist economy. When people are too scared to waste money on things they don't need due to flashy lights and pretty pictures, recession enters here. "God Bless America."