That thing looks almost exactly like the ear thermometer we use on our kid. Or an otoscope. So maybe if you stick the pen in your ear, it'll tell you your body temperature? (Not that this would be a good habit to get kids into...)
My wife and I were in China last month to adopt our daughter. We were in Beijing for three days and Guangzhou (the fifth largest city in China) for seven - so both are big cities. I was amazed at two aspects of technology in each place:
* Cell phone coverage is AMAZING. We had a cell phone and no matter where we went, even if it was the bowels of the hotel we were in, we never had less than full tower coverage. There was a telecom engineer traveling with us and he commented on the sheer number of cell phone transmitters, seemingly everywhere in Guangzhou, even the desperately poverty-stricken areas.
* Computer access in general, and internet connections in particular, were at best average and were usually terrible. We hunted all over Guangzhou for a decently-fast broadband connection for sending digital photos back home and the fastest we found (at Blenz Coffeehouse on Shamian Island) was about the speed of the old Earthlink dialup we had 3 years ago. And despite the number of westerners in Guangzhou who are there to process their adoption of Chinese children, internet connections are few and far between - most are in the back rooms of shady-looking tourist shops and consist of circa-1995 pentiums with lots of duct tape.
Our theory was that the cell phone was the only way that the Chinese could acquire personal space; which would explain why the cell phone is really a way of life in China from what we could tell.
They said on the Indianapolis tv news this morning that the service was going to be provided free of charge for the first two years, and then if the state government keeps it, it would be paid for by taxpayer dollars.
Here's a link to the story in the Indianapolis Star. Nice quote at the end by a Purdue prof:
The $6 million cost -- about $1 per Hoosier -- is being footed by SimDesk Technologies, which also has brought the technology to users in Houston and Chicago. The Houston-based firm has several Indiana investors, Davis said, and is partnering with Hewlett-Packard NonStop servers to provide the service.
The program will be offered free for two years, Davis said. After that, the state will decide whether to continue it.
Kyle Lutes, associate professor of computer science at Purdue University, said he hadn't heard of SimDesk but expressed skepticism at the program.
It seems like a good deal, he said, but the company may be using the "crack dealer method of marketing -- give it to 'em free until they're addicted."
Plus, he said, many of its features already are available for free online.
A similar thing to SimIndiana is currently in use by the city of Houston. They have quotes from city officials on the SimDesk web site. Probably explains the Texas thing; they just forgot to edit that out of the TOS more than likely.
"Such blather" as dieties, Heaven, and Hell were the staples of the monastic system of training from the middle ages that gave rise to all the great universities of Europe and consequently the very fact that we even have a system of higher education today. So I wouldn't be too quick to equate religious ideas with "blather".
I'm a college math professor, and I deal with this same problem with 18-22 year olds. I am convinced that the problem here goes a lot deeper than altering the content or presentation of math and science:
1. Many students today have profound problems with basic information processing: reading, writing, listening, paying attention, taking notes, etc. Students in my college classes have flat-out not learned how to read a book or article for comprehension of details or write a summary of a section of a text they've read. Even short math questions present problems; the problem will say that the interest rate is 3% and a student will come up to me in a panic saying that they weren't given the interest rate, until I point it out to them. And let's not even begin to talk about the quality of their writing. Now, this is not all students; and this isn't to say that these students can't learn how to do this sort of thing. But the fact is, they haven't. Perhaps in other classes this lack of ability can be mitigated. But in math and science, things are VERY detail-oriented and every jot and tittle has some kind of special meaning. So if students have a hard time processing information in general, then they're going to have REAL problems with math and science. And there's really no way to disconnect math and science from the basic fact that students have to read and understand things that written about it.
2. A lot of college math programs that train teachers are guilty of teaching math in a pat, uninteresting way that doesn't capture the beauty and power of the discipline. Same probably with science. So future teachers go away thinking that they can just teach a curriculum out of a box and that's OK. They often don't get the sense that the curriculum won't teach itself -- that THEIR personality and grasp of the discipline is crucial.
3. Standardized testing has sucked the life out of public education. Here in Indiana, students have to take a qualifying exam called the ISTEP in order to graduate from high school. In some cases students are taking the ISTEP 4-5 times throughout their education -- that's once every 2 or 3 grade levels! So students are being taught that education = testing, and that what they learn in class is very important for passing the test (including SAT's, etc.) but they can just purge it all after the exam is over. There's little sense of the value of education and the idea that it can (and should) last a lifetime. Math and science build on themselves like no other disciplines, which leads to trouble when you're teaching a Calculus class and you need students to remember stuff from Algebra II, which was two years ago. They figured that stuff was no longer necessary.
4. Someone's already mentioned the social stigma associated with math and science.
So I think the problem here isn't with math and science but the way young kids are getting basic thinking skills in general.
Interesting that you should portray problem solving as something people never have to face. I think most people have to solve problems every day. Even when you suggest that the math topics taught in schools be decided by a survey, this is itself a math problem, one that has to be carefully formulated and solved and the solution analyzed from multiple perspectives in order to properly interpret the results. So I wouldn't write off the problem-solving approach just yet.
There are three basic problems with the idea of using "only types of math people use":
1. Who gets to decide who "people" are, and who gets to decide what I "need" to know? Who is it that has the right to decide this, for me or for my kid? If the majority of people don't use Calculus, and therefore we stop teaching it or the concepts that lead up to it, how do we know we aren't short-changing kids who could do great things with it? We should think very carefully before vesting someone with the power to decide for us what is useful and what isn't, and therefore what will be taught in school or not. (Yes, I'm aware that this is actually the current situation in public schools. That's why I'm not too keen on public schools.)
2. This line of thinking becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy -- we stop teaching trigonometry, for instance, and so there are no longer any people who know how to use trig, and therefore nobody around to think that it's useful. But this doesn't imply that trig isn't useful. It just means that we've made ourselves too ignorant to notice.
3. Don't forget that education doesn't exist merely for pragmatic reasons. We don't restrict our learning only to what "people need to know". Education also allows us to apprehend beauty in all its forms, enlarge our ways of thinking, and make connections between different areas of study. Education is literally "leading out" -- in this case leading out of ignorance -- not just 12-16 years of job training.
...for me isn't how pretty I can get an OS to look, but how well it works. If I can put all kinds of skins on Longhorn, but it runs as slow as molasses and crashes at the drop of a hat, then MS will have wasted their time developing this thing.
On the other hand if Longhorn turns out to be a nice, stable, functional OS that happens to be skinnable then Linux will have some real competition (which is good for both OS's).
I'm an evangelical Christian and a Monty Python fan, including this particular movie. I think it is dead-on in its portrayal of mob psychology, particularly as it applies to religious people. It's irreverent, but if you're looking for reverent go watch Charles Stanely or something. So if Rainbow wants to re-release it, more power to them.
But check out this quote from the BBC article:
Rainbow president Henry Jaglom said: "We decided this is an important time to re-release this film, to provide some counter-programming to The Passion."
Why does this person feel like The Passion needs some kind of antidote? Why should this movie need "counter-programming"? What's wrong with having a millions of people very interested in a film which, like it or not, has serious artistic merit? Even if it didn't have artistic merit, why should a popular movie need an alternative?
I guess NSA didn't get the memo -- or the lobbyists -- from SCO telling them that open source software was a security risk and that terrorists could use it to make their own supercomputer.
I used to believe that football was just for dumb jocks. But say what you will -- the more I follow football the more I realize that to play football well at the college or pro level you have to be very smart and quick-thinking. Some of the offensive playbooks for pro teams (like the Indianapolis Colts, for instance) are as dense and complex as a circa-1975 calculus book. Just ask people who know pro football how smart Peyton Manning has to be, to be able to walk up to the line, look over the defense, change the play 1-2 times on the spot and then deliver the ball in a rapidly-changing defense, all in under 30 seconds. You can't be slow-witted and do stuff like that.
I also remember one of my best Calculus students was a guy named Todd Yoder, who is now a tight end for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and was an all-SEC wide receiver when I had him in college. Changed my mind about the whole "student-athlete is an oxymoron" joke.
Re:Don't forget the ad CBS is refusing to air.
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How is CBS' decision not to air the MoveOn ad "censorship" and not just a simple business decision? Doesn't CBS retain the right to choose which advertisements it uses to bring in revenue? If MoveOn offered me $100 if I put their movie on my website, don't I have the right to say "no thanks" for whatever reason I want? And if that's censorship, is that really wrong?
It sounds more like MoveOn is just playing the censorship card because somebody disagrees with them and they don't like it. I'd like to see the increase in the number of hits on their website since CBS refused to air the ad.
- Professors don't care. In fact in some cases they are paid to select the more expensive of two options by bookstores who offer them a kickback based on a percentage of the sales. (Just face it, what's standing in the way of a professor including an Amazon.com affiliate URL on the course's website, knowing that at least a few students will by the required book that way?) And, often the professor is the author of the book, so every student in their course equals a textbook royalty coming their way.
I'd be very interested in some evidence for this claim. I'm a college professor, and I care very much about the prices that my students (often first-generation college students from low-income rural families) are paying for books. To suggest that we receive kickbacks for adopting certain textbooks is ridiculous. A large percentage of textbook sales are made for big intro-level classes where the book decision is not even MADE by the individual professor but by a department chair or course coordinator. And if you think textbook writers get rich off royalties -- talk to one some time. It ain't a booming business except in a very few cases.
The majority of professors out there actually do have ethical standards and care about students, and are as concerned over textbook prices as any student. If you can't find any such profs at your school, transfer.
Here's a quote from Beyond Fear by Bruce Schneier about the financing of the 9/11 attacks:
The terrorists turned four commercial airplanes into flying bombs, killed some 3,000 people, destroyed $40 billion in property, and did untold economic damage. They altered the New York skyline as well as the political landscape of the U.S. and the whole world. And all this was done with no more than a thirty-person, two-year, half-million-dollar operation. [my emphasis]
Those figures aren't straight from the investigators but I don't believe they would be far off.
2) We still won't see a big example of cyber-terrorism simply because nobody has figured out how to actually kill people that way. When it comes to terrorism, all that matters are body counts. We will, however, see dramatic growth in cyber-extortion and plain old theft.
I certainly hope Cringley is right that there will be no big examples of cyber-terrorism. But there are at least two issues that he is getting wrong in this prediction.
1. Terrorism is NOT just about body counts, it is about the ability to get a group to accede to your wishes by force or threat of force. Killing people is an effective way to do this but it is not the only way. In a highly wired country like the USA, a single cyberterrorist act that cripples the nation's infrastructure and/or economy is just as effective in producing terror as threatening to crash a plane into a building.
2. Cyberterrorism need not be separate from other acts of terrorism. A cyber attack could well be a component of a large, complex attack. So even if a large cyberterror attack were improbable, it doesn't rule out small ones that are done as one piece of a much larger attack. (For example, using electronic means to extort or steal money, as Cringley admits is likely, could finance another 9/11 attack.)
...I have a feeling I'll be reading about this in "The Doghouse" section of Crypto-Gram sometime soon.
I think Schneier makes a special point in Beyond Fear that extreme terms like "absolute security" and "any force known to man" don't even make sense in a security situation. They are only used by people who don't understand security in the first place!
A cattle rancher owns an enormous number of cattle and is having a hard time building a fence big enough to keep them all penned in. After trying out engineer after engineer to design a fence that will enclose all his cattle, he finds that nobody can build one large enough. He is finally approached by a topologist who claims to be able to build the fence the rancher needs. The rancher is skeptical but lets him go to work. The topologist promptly builds a small circular fence around himself. The rancher says, "How is that little bitty pen supposed to hold all my cattle?"
The topologist replies, "Simple -- I just declare myself to be on the outside."
And now, opening for Cannibal Corpse...
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....it's the Barnyard Masturbators!
Don't you think that has a certaing ring to it as a band name?
I ordered Bruce's new book a few days ago, and after the interview I am definitely looking forward to reading it. I've been using his Crypto book religiously as a reference and I have enjoyed all that I've read. He does have that rare ability to bring technical, complex material down to the layperson's level without "dumbing down" anything.
What I appreciate most about his interview was his balanced approach -- that security measures since 9/11 are flawed, but we should try to FIX them rather than throw the baby out with the bathwater. It seems you hear one extreme or the other -- folks are either on the Ashcroftian end of the spectrum and want to tread on all privacy rights in the name of "keeping us safe", or they are radical libertarians (small "L") who want to have absolute freedom and do things like declassify all government documents and remove all immigration barriers, which don't seem very prudent either. Bruce's approach to finding the best balance of liberty and security -- even having a concept of a "balance" of the two -- is refreshing, and I hope policy-makers take notice.
If the book is as good as the interview, in fact, I might get an extra few copies and send to my senators and congressman. Who knows, $50 spent on gift books could save millions wasted on ineffective security measures like face recognition in airports.
My point isn't that TI products are superior to HP's, but that HP effectively stopped innovating their calculators when the TI-92 came out. Your friends may have gotten better calculators when they ditched their TI's for HP-48's, but they did NOT get anything newer than a TI-92 because HP manufactured no such item. Of course, newer != better but a company that updates its product line often does at least present the appearance of a lower risk for non-tech people considering adopting the technology en masse, such as high school math departments, many of whom are indeed non-tech people. (Of course this can go too far as well, e.g. Sony's habit of discontinuing a Clie PDA and introducing a new one every month...)
Whether HP's decision not to keep up with TI was a smart tech or business move is not something I'm qualified to judge, but I can say as an educator that HP's failure to keep itself current in the market -- even had it been through minor tweaks in the HP-48 series -- cost them plenty in the education world by letting TI make inroads and build brand loyalty among high school teachers. High school and college teachers who are investing big (taxpayer) bucks in student technology aren't necessarily interested in getting the best technology at any price, but rather a "good enough" technology which gives a lot of bang for the buck and which is well-supported on the curriculum end. (I don't necessarily agree with this approach, but it is the predominant philosophy nonetheless.) With HP, Sharp, Casio, et al. basically standing still while TI pushed the TI-89/92 line and building a huge base of lab manuals, textbooks, web resources, etc. around those products, TI basically won the hearts of the educational community and it's questionable whether schools that are so heavily invested in one brand of calculator are willing to ever jump ship at this point, no matter how much better the technology is. (Come to think of it, there are a lot of interesting parallels between TI and the calculator market and Microsoft and the OS market.)
And while the TI-92 eventually met its demise thanks to the QWERTY keyboard, as you point out, I wouldn't say that this was the end of the line for the TI-92 concept. All TI did was rotate the hardware 90 degrees and voila, we have the TI-89, which is now probably the dominant high-end calculator at least in education.
The calculator looks nice, but I think HP may have a hard time finding a market for it. In fact I wonder if any effective market niche still exists for non-Texas Instruments high-end calculators. The education market -- high school and college math/science students -- is pretty well ruled by TI and has been for years since TI came out with the TI-92. Nearly all of the calculator-oriented curricula out there is designed specifically for TI calculators. And part of this is HP's fault -- when the TI-92 came out, a colleague of mine was at a math teachers' conference and asked HP if they had anything coming out that could compare with it, and their answer was a resigned "Nope". And for years, the textbooks and lab supplements went specifically toward TI machines because nobody else bothered to keep up with them. Although this machine does compete with TI's, it seems, I think there is just too much brand loyalty and curricular momentum in the education market towards TI for HP to make a dent.
The only thing that's successfully competed with TI calculators has been computer algebra systems (you can get a good, cheap CAS program like Derive -- another TI product, by the way -- for $99 for the student version and $199 for the professional version) and PDA scientific calculator programs. Existing hardware and software is more flexible and less expensive than this new HP. So if this isn't intended for the student market, I wonder who it is intended for, and if it'll actually sell once it's out.
You can print to PDF in OO Writer 1.0.2 already. Just go File > Print... and select PDF converter under the printer name popup menu.
That said, I'm looking foward to OO 1.1 as well. Good product.
I'm a professor and I wholeheartedly agree with harvardian's assessment here. If you find meaning and enjoyment in something, you will WANT to work on it.
An important corollary is that the first thing you ought to do with a new class you're taking or chunk of material in a class is think about (and ask the prof about) how the new stuff connects to the stuff that you find yourself enjoying. For instance, all CS majors at my college have to take Calculus. It's not immediately how on earth Calculus will help someone be a better computing person. If students don't ask about why it's required, the whole semester of Calc is going to be a burden. But if they do, I can tell them all about things like computational complexity and how computing time for an algorithm changes linearly/nonlinearly with input size and all sort of interesting connections. Go into every subject with an open mind and constantly ask questions about how this will be of use to you, or where the beauty of the subject lies, or how you might become a better person for having studied it.
Aside: In fact the biggest problem I find with incoming freshmen is that in today's performance-oriented, standardized-test-centric secondary school environment, the very idea of enjoyment of an academic subject has been nearly wiped out. What makes my job fun, and difficult, is getting students to start rediscovering how liberating it is to find something meaningful in life. It's like C. S. Lewis said, "The true goal of the modern educator isn't to cut down jungles but to irrigate deserts." (that's from The Abolition of Man)
I share your peeve about graphing calculators. One reason high schools use them so much is the AP Calculus test, which actually requires a graphing calculator -- to be chosen from a specific list of models, none of which (as of the 2002 exam) includes gc software on a handheld. And then you see a lot of college using them because even more high schools use them.
The college I work at uses computer algebra software (Derive on the lower levels and Mathematica for sophomore-and-above courses) along with a smattering of cheap or free stuff (Java applets, open-source software, Geometers Sketchpad, etc.) I like the fact that technology can be used to get across the mathematical methodology (experiment-conjecture-proof) and I think gc's -- even the TI-89/92 -- are just too limited.
Slashdot Mirror
Q: What's purple, commutes, and is worshipped by a small cult of followers?
A: A finitely venerated abelian grape.
That thing looks almost exactly like the ear thermometer we use on our kid. Or an otoscope. So maybe if you stick the pen in your ear, it'll tell you your body temperature? (Not that this would be a good habit to get kids into...)
My wife and I were in China last month to adopt our daughter. We were in Beijing for three days and Guangzhou (the fifth largest city in China) for seven - so both are big cities. I was amazed at two aspects of technology in each place: * Cell phone coverage is AMAZING. We had a cell phone and no matter where we went, even if it was the bowels of the hotel we were in, we never had less than full tower coverage. There was a telecom engineer traveling with us and he commented on the sheer number of cell phone transmitters, seemingly everywhere in Guangzhou, even the desperately poverty-stricken areas. * Computer access in general, and internet connections in particular, were at best average and were usually terrible. We hunted all over Guangzhou for a decently-fast broadband connection for sending digital photos back home and the fastest we found (at Blenz Coffeehouse on Shamian Island) was about the speed of the old Earthlink dialup we had 3 years ago. And despite the number of westerners in Guangzhou who are there to process their adoption of Chinese children, internet connections are few and far between - most are in the back rooms of shady-looking tourist shops and consist of circa-1995 pentiums with lots of duct tape. Our theory was that the cell phone was the only way that the Chinese could acquire personal space; which would explain why the cell phone is really a way of life in China from what we could tell.
A similar thing to SimIndiana is currently in use by the city of Houston. They have quotes from city officials on the SimDesk web site. Probably explains the Texas thing; they just forgot to edit that out of the TOS more than likely.
"Such blather" as dieties, Heaven, and Hell were the staples of the monastic system of training from the middle ages that gave rise to all the great universities of Europe and consequently the very fact that we even have a system of higher education today. So I wouldn't be too quick to equate religious ideas with "blather".
I'm a college math professor, and I deal with this same problem with 18-22 year olds. I am convinced that the problem here goes a lot deeper than altering the content or presentation of math and science:
1. Many students today have profound problems with basic information processing: reading, writing, listening, paying attention, taking notes, etc. Students in my college classes have flat-out not learned how to read a book or article for comprehension of details or write a summary of a section of a text they've read. Even short math questions present problems; the problem will say that the interest rate is 3% and a student will come up to me in a panic saying that they weren't given the interest rate, until I point it out to them. And let's not even begin to talk about the quality of their writing. Now, this is not all students; and this isn't to say that these students can't learn how to do this sort of thing. But the fact is, they haven't. Perhaps in other classes this lack of ability can be mitigated. But in math and science, things are VERY detail-oriented and every jot and tittle has some kind of special meaning. So if students have a hard time processing information in general, then they're going to have REAL problems with math and science. And there's really no way to disconnect math and science from the basic fact that students have to read and understand things that written about it.
2. A lot of college math programs that train teachers are guilty of teaching math in a pat, uninteresting way that doesn't capture the beauty and power of the discipline. Same probably with science. So future teachers go away thinking that they can just teach a curriculum out of a box and that's OK. They often don't get the sense that the curriculum won't teach itself -- that THEIR personality and grasp of the discipline is crucial.
3. Standardized testing has sucked the life out of public education. Here in Indiana, students have to take a qualifying exam called the ISTEP in order to graduate from high school. In some cases students are taking the ISTEP 4-5 times throughout their education -- that's once every 2 or 3 grade levels! So students are being taught that education = testing, and that what they learn in class is very important for passing the test (including SAT's, etc.) but they can just purge it all after the exam is over. There's little sense of the value of education and the idea that it can (and should) last a lifetime. Math and science build on themselves like no other disciplines, which leads to trouble when you're teaching a Calculus class and you need students to remember stuff from Algebra II, which was two years ago. They figured that stuff was no longer necessary.
4. Someone's already mentioned the social stigma associated with math and science.
So I think the problem here isn't with math and science but the way young kids are getting basic thinking skills in general.
Interesting that you should portray problem solving as something people never have to face. I think most people have to solve problems every day. Even when you suggest that the math topics taught in schools be decided by a survey, this is itself a math problem, one that has to be carefully formulated and solved and the solution analyzed from multiple perspectives in order to properly interpret the results. So I wouldn't write off the problem-solving approach just yet.
There are three basic problems with the idea of using "only types of math people use":
1. Who gets to decide who "people" are, and who gets to decide what I "need" to know? Who is it that has the right to decide this, for me or for my kid? If the majority of people don't use Calculus, and therefore we stop teaching it or the concepts that lead up to it, how do we know we aren't short-changing kids who could do great things with it? We should think very carefully before vesting someone with the power to decide for us what is useful and what isn't, and therefore what will be taught in school or not. (Yes, I'm aware that this is actually the current situation in public schools. That's why I'm not too keen on public schools.)
2. This line of thinking becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy -- we stop teaching trigonometry, for instance, and so there are no longer any people who know how to use trig, and therefore nobody around to think that it's useful. But this doesn't imply that trig isn't useful. It just means that we've made ourselves too ignorant to notice.
3. Don't forget that education doesn't exist merely for pragmatic reasons. We don't restrict our learning only to what "people need to know". Education also allows us to apprehend beauty in all its forms, enlarge our ways of thinking, and make connections between different areas of study. Education is literally "leading out" -- in this case leading out of ignorance -- not just 12-16 years of job training.
...for me isn't how pretty I can get an OS to look, but how well it works. If I can put all kinds of skins on Longhorn, but it runs as slow as molasses and crashes at the drop of a hat, then MS will have wasted their time developing this thing. On the other hand if Longhorn turns out to be a nice, stable, functional OS that happens to be skinnable then Linux will have some real competition (which is good for both OS's).
I guess NSA didn't get the memo -- or the lobbyists -- from SCO telling them that open source software was a security risk and that terrorists could use it to make their own supercomputer.
I used to believe that football was just for dumb jocks. But say what you will -- the more I follow football the more I realize that to play football well at the college or pro level you have to be very smart and quick-thinking. Some of the offensive playbooks for pro teams (like the Indianapolis Colts, for instance) are as dense and complex as a circa-1975 calculus book. Just ask people who know pro football how smart Peyton Manning has to be, to be able to walk up to the line, look over the defense, change the play 1-2 times on the spot and then deliver the ball in a rapidly-changing defense, all in under 30 seconds. You can't be slow-witted and do stuff like that.
I also remember one of my best Calculus students was a guy named Todd Yoder, who is now a tight end for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and was an all-SEC wide receiver when I had him in college. Changed my mind about the whole "student-athlete is an oxymoron" joke.
How is CBS' decision not to air the MoveOn ad "censorship" and not just a simple business decision? Doesn't CBS retain the right to choose which advertisements it uses to bring in revenue? If MoveOn offered me $100 if I put their movie on my website, don't I have the right to say "no thanks" for whatever reason I want? And if that's censorship, is that really wrong? It sounds more like MoveOn is just playing the censorship card because somebody disagrees with them and they don't like it. I'd like to see the increase in the number of hits on their website since CBS refused to air the ad.
- Professors don't care. In fact in some cases they are paid to select the more expensive of two options by bookstores who offer them a kickback based on a percentage of the sales. (Just face it, what's standing in the way of a professor including an Amazon.com affiliate URL on the course's website, knowing that at least a few students will by the required book that way?) And, often the professor is the author of the book, so every student in their course equals a textbook royalty coming their way.
I'd be very interested in some evidence for this claim. I'm a college professor, and I care very much about the prices that my students (often first-generation college students from low-income rural families) are paying for books. To suggest that we receive kickbacks for adopting certain textbooks is ridiculous. A large percentage of textbook sales are made for big intro-level classes where the book decision is not even MADE by the individual professor but by a department chair or course coordinator. And if you think textbook writers get rich off royalties -- talk to one some time. It ain't a booming business except in a very few cases.
The majority of professors out there actually do have ethical standards and care about students, and are as concerned over textbook prices as any student. If you can't find any such profs at your school, transfer.
Here's a quote from Beyond Fear by Bruce Schneier about the financing of the 9/11 attacks:
The terrorists turned four commercial airplanes into flying bombs, killed some 3,000 people, destroyed $40 billion in property, and did untold economic damage. They altered the New York skyline as well as the political landscape of the U.S. and the whole world. And all this was done with no more than a thirty-person, two-year, half-million-dollar operation. [my emphasis]
Those figures aren't straight from the investigators but I don't believe they would be far off.
1. Terrorism is NOT just about body counts, it is about the ability to get a group to accede to your wishes by force or threat of force. Killing people is an effective way to do this but it is not the only way. In a highly wired country like the USA, a single cyberterrorist act that cripples the nation's infrastructure and/or economy is just as effective in producing terror as threatening to crash a plane into a building.
2. Cyberterrorism need not be separate from other acts of terrorism. A cyber attack could well be a component of a large, complex attack. So even if a large cyberterror attack were improbable, it doesn't rule out small ones that are done as one piece of a much larger attack. (For example, using electronic means to extort or steal money, as Cringley admits is likely, could finance another 9/11 attack.)
...I have a feeling I'll be reading about this in "The Doghouse" section of Crypto-Gram sometime soon.
I think Schneier makes a special point in Beyond Fear that extreme terms like "absolute security" and "any force known to man" don't even make sense in a security situation. They are only used by people who don't understand security in the first place!
A cattle rancher owns an enormous number of cattle and is having a hard time building a fence big enough to keep them all penned in. After trying out engineer after engineer to design a fence that will enclose all his cattle, he finds that nobody can build one large enough. He is finally approached by a topologist who claims to be able to build the fence the rancher needs. The rancher is skeptical but lets him go to work. The topologist promptly builds a small circular fence around himself. The rancher says, "How is that little bitty pen supposed to hold all my cattle?" The topologist replies, "Simple -- I just declare myself to be on the outside."
Don't you think that has a certaing ring to it as a band name?
What I appreciate most about his interview was his balanced approach -- that security measures since 9/11 are flawed, but we should try to FIX them rather than throw the baby out with the bathwater. It seems you hear one extreme or the other -- folks are either on the Ashcroftian end of the spectrum and want to tread on all privacy rights in the name of "keeping us safe", or they are radical libertarians (small "L") who want to have absolute freedom and do things like declassify all government documents and remove all immigration barriers, which don't seem very prudent either. Bruce's approach to finding the best balance of liberty and security -- even having a concept of a "balance" of the two -- is refreshing, and I hope policy-makers take notice.
If the book is as good as the interview, in fact, I might get an extra few copies and send to my senators and congressman. Who knows, $50 spent on gift books could save millions wasted on ineffective security measures like face recognition in airports.
Whether HP's decision not to keep up with TI was a smart tech or business move is not something I'm qualified to judge, but I can say as an educator that HP's failure to keep itself current in the market -- even had it been through minor tweaks in the HP-48 series -- cost them plenty in the education world by letting TI make inroads and build brand loyalty among high school teachers. High school and college teachers who are investing big (taxpayer) bucks in student technology aren't necessarily interested in getting the best technology at any price, but rather a "good enough" technology which gives a lot of bang for the buck and which is well-supported on the curriculum end. (I don't necessarily agree with this approach, but it is the predominant philosophy nonetheless.) With HP, Sharp, Casio, et al. basically standing still while TI pushed the TI-89/92 line and building a huge base of lab manuals, textbooks, web resources, etc. around those products, TI basically won the hearts of the educational community and it's questionable whether schools that are so heavily invested in one brand of calculator are willing to ever jump ship at this point, no matter how much better the technology is. (Come to think of it, there are a lot of interesting parallels between TI and the calculator market and Microsoft and the OS market.)
And while the TI-92 eventually met its demise thanks to the QWERTY keyboard, as you point out, I wouldn't say that this was the end of the line for the TI-92 concept. All TI did was rotate the hardware 90 degrees and voila, we have the TI-89, which is now probably the dominant high-end calculator at least in education.
The only thing that's successfully competed with TI calculators has been computer algebra systems (you can get a good, cheap CAS program like Derive -- another TI product, by the way -- for $99 for the student version and $199 for the professional version) and PDA scientific calculator programs. Existing hardware and software is more flexible and less expensive than this new HP. So if this isn't intended for the student market, I wonder who it is intended for, and if it'll actually sell once it's out.
You can print to PDF in OO Writer 1.0.2 already. Just go File > Print... and select PDF converter under the printer name popup menu. That said, I'm looking foward to OO 1.1 as well. Good product.
An important corollary is that the first thing you ought to do with a new class you're taking or chunk of material in a class is think about (and ask the prof about) how the new stuff connects to the stuff that you find yourself enjoying. For instance, all CS majors at my college have to take Calculus. It's not immediately how on earth Calculus will help someone be a better computing person. If students don't ask about why it's required, the whole semester of Calc is going to be a burden. But if they do, I can tell them all about things like computational complexity and how computing time for an algorithm changes linearly/nonlinearly with input size and all sort of interesting connections. Go into every subject with an open mind and constantly ask questions about how this will be of use to you, or where the beauty of the subject lies, or how you might become a better person for having studied it.
Aside: In fact the biggest problem I find with incoming freshmen is that in today's performance-oriented, standardized-test-centric secondary school environment, the very idea of enjoyment of an academic subject has been nearly wiped out. What makes my job fun, and difficult, is getting students to start rediscovering how liberating it is to find something meaningful in life. It's like C. S. Lewis said, "The true goal of the modern educator isn't to cut down jungles but to irrigate deserts." (that's from The Abolition of Man)
I share your peeve about graphing calculators. One reason high schools use them so much is the AP Calculus test, which actually requires a graphing calculator -- to be chosen from a specific list of models, none of which (as of the 2002 exam) includes gc software on a handheld. And then you see a lot of college using them because even more high schools use them.
The college I work at uses computer algebra software (Derive on the lower levels and Mathematica for sophomore-and-above courses) along with a smattering of cheap or free stuff (Java applets, open-source software, Geometers Sketchpad, etc.) I like the fact that technology can be used to get across the mathematical methodology (experiment-conjecture-proof) and I think gc's -- even the TI-89/92 -- are just too limited.