The way I see it both sides have equal burden of proof. The point of both the 'discovery' method and the 'rote' method is to train the neural net that is the brain. The discovery method presents several different signals.
The difference is that in the rote method there is a teacher controlling the input, while the discovery method assumes that the important point is to learn to select the important features from the input. Of course it is important to learn what features to look for, but this is not really a skill that can be acquired by training. You know what to look for because of your background knowledge, and the point of education should be to pump as much background knowledge into you as possible.
As far as the burden of proof is concerned: when you are messing with an existing education system that works well, the burden of proof is on you. A government shouldn't experiment with the lives and minds of its subjects.
Care to cite your sources? When I went to college to get my 2-year Associate's degree, I was suprised to find that they were teaching classes in basic arithmetic, much less algebra.
I teach on a Dutch university. I have seen it happen. First we introduced summer courses on mathematics and writing for weak students, and this year we made those courses part of the official program because almost everybody needs them now in our experience. You have to take into account that we have a highly stratified high school system: only good students go to preparatory school, and only those children have the option of going to university.
In the US and some other countries there is less stratification in the high school system, universities expect less of new students, and there is a greater variance in the quality of 'universities', ranging from bad quality vocational schools that don't deserve the name university to internationally recognized research institutions. In these countries assessment of incoming students is obvious. These countries btw generally do badly in standardized international assessments like PISA 2003 (where we score 3rd, even though we spend less per student than the OECD average).
A key here is "computer simulated". It is very hard to analyze anything "computer simulated" very thoroughly.
The situations we created for the experiments are on the other hand very similar to the kind of 'discovery' situations schools will set up. School is not real life either.
What is the difference in your mind between "instruction" and "procedure"?
An instruction is a directive. A procedure is a specification for a family of discrete processes. Since processes comply with or deviate from instructions it is natural to design procedures that don't violate instructions, but these notions originally belong to different vocabularies.
Only in the context of computers this distinction becomes confusing, since people insist on giving computers metaphorical 'instructions', even though the computer cannot deviate from the instruction. Thjat is how language developes: when you only have a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail.
When I look at legislation, I see it has to go through committees before going to the general floor before becoming law, there is an order of priority of what gets considered first, etc.
You are talking about legal procedure. Interestingly, existing legal procedures are not directly based in law: they are possible realizations of the constraints imposed by the directives in constitutional and administrative law.
Legislation directs people. It tells them what (not) to do, not how to do something. Usually it doesn't make a difference whether you read provisions from back to front or the other way around: it says the same thing in both cases, even though it is usually easier to understand if you read it in the intended order. This is true on the provision level: on the sentence level you do find anaphora.
Demonstrating that someone does badly in a given environment at discovering things, doesn't show anything conclusively, Maybe the environment was bad for that sort of thing, or maybe the instructions were bad.
The burden of proof is on the other side. There is no body of research showing people capable of discovery on demand, and cognitive psychology suggests humans are generally speaking not capable of doing so within the time frame set by an educational system. Time spent discovering stuff is wasted for learning. It is doubtful whether the children learned some valuable 'discovery' skill: they just know less in the end, and more children eventually drop out of school because there is less immediate pressure to perform. When they get to university they now start with a course on basic algebra. Just a few years ago this wasn't necessary.
We also did a small experiment involving graduate physics students on the university: they weren't capable of discovering within 10 minutes that a slightly modified version of the inverse square law of optics applied to a computer simulated instrument we had them examine, even though they did know the necessary mathematics very well.
Maybe the environment they had been in up til then left them poorly prepared for this scenario, and thus would take a lot of work to overcome.
I don't know to what extent preference for knowledge acquisition by rote learning is innate or an 'invention' of our ancestors taught to very young children, but the simple fact is that this is the way we have passed on knowledge for millenia. Learning as theory invention is a Romantic notion we flatter ourselves with. Most of us are not that intelligent. We just know a lot, and live in an environment tailored to mankind and its shortcomings.
There was a paper handed out in school that said "Read all the instrictions first", and the last instruction said something like "Don't follow any of the instructions and turn the paper in". I noted that there wasn't an instruction to follow the instructions out of order, so an argument could be made that the correct procedure to follow was to do all the instructions anyways.
The most obvious check would be to *ask* the students afterwards why they did what they did. Introspective and retrospective interviewing is quite common in cognitive psychology. Besides that you don't need an instruction to follow instructions out of order. Instructions are not generally dependent on order. Look at legislation: few, if any, constraints on order and no anaphora. Procedures are dependent on order.
I do agree that testing in schools usually follows a certain script, and deviations from that script will yield confusing results.
In the nineties we changed from traditional rote learning to a revolutionary discovery-based teaching method in secondary schools in the Netherlands. My professor in Cognitive Psychology was extremely skeptical about this and had his students organize learning experiments with children and students to demonstrate how badly they performed at 'discovering' anything other than a simple correlation or inverse correlation. He was right: the method turned out to be a disaster for the generation of children exposed to it and we are now returning to rote learning.
What differentiates mankind from animals is not the kind of skills someone like Newton possessed, but our capacity to transfer acquired knowledge to others, and in particular future generations, in an efficient way. Language plays an important role, as well as the capacity of young humans to imitate seemingly pointless customs without a direct reward.
An important difference between the children and the chimps is that the children live in a magical universe with remote controls and mobile phones: they are used to learning how to operate devices they don't understand.
Propensity to experiment is highly overrated. Cats are for instance typical opportunists that 'experiment' all the time when solving mazes. They simply don't expect the rewards in a maze to be in the same place each time: they will keep checking random dead ends in the maze to make sure there isn't a reward there this time. This doesn't make them 'intelligent' from our point of view, since they fail miserably on the kind of experiments rats and mice excel in, but apparently it does work very well for catching small rodents. To appreciate the superior spatial intelligence of cats you have to see a hungry cat close in on a prey, positioning themselves to to intercept it on the only escape route left open.
We all have choices. Is your choice to blame all Christians for the actions of a few vocal ones?
I would imagine you have made choices to be a member of many groups and classes of people. Some of whom probably bug the hell out of others. Are their actions YOUR fault?
We need to take responsbility for ourselves and expect it from others. Blaming all Christians is the easy way out and cheapens the issue because suddenly it's not about the clear truth of science and the insanity of "intelligent design" but about attacks and blame.
We can win with logic, but if we fall into their blame game we are no better. Save the venom from the SPECIFIC people and groups who are doing the idiot work.
I know lots of Christians who are perfectly decent people, and interpret Christian teachings in a way that is not in any way offensive to me. No argument with that.
But equating Christianity with a group membership that cannot be evaded, like race, or gender, is insincere. Blaming someone for voluntary association with some political or ideological organization that is perceived to be evil is very different from racism. On the other hand it is also not a very productive way for dealing with a majority group like Christians. If the organization is a small minority group (like neonazis or Scientology) they can even be prohibited.
You choose to be Christian. Blacks can't help being black. There's an important difference there. Having an issue with christianity is not the same as having an issue with a race. It is more similar to being an anti-communist. The disappearance of christianity, or communism, does not necessarily involve genocide.
Ummm...if you are "in public"...doesn't that over rule your "privacy" rights a little?
The fact that you walk around on some street is a public information. The data your phone company keeps about you is private, and can only be exchanged with others if you give permission or with a legal ground. Having said that, it is apparently not that hard to fabricate a legal ground, given the Netherlands government reputationforeavesdropping.
Does the phone company know if you depart to other countries automatically, or does this only occur when you actually make a call, SMS, or do internet activity from your phone?
Can they, with multiple phone towers, identify all phones in a given area?
Or do they have to know your phone number and know to look?
The wiretapping order they need for this type of thing is given for an individual phone. I don't know about the technical possibilities, and the available data from foreign operators probably depends on bilateral treaties. The government does require phone operators on the Dutch market to install equipment to facilitate investigation. The former state operator KPN even had a special department for eavesdropping before it was privatized. The phone operators supposedly proactively provide the government with information about public health risks.
Maybe the poster should consider the content and not the medium itself. There is a reason why FOX News now has a higher rating than CNN. There are obviously millions of Americans who don't agree with the left-wing slant in many of today's papers (especially the editorials). Just a thought...
You are obviously speaking of the millions who want a "news source" with a marked right-wing slant that adjusts the facts to their hate campaigns. I am not an American, but I do know that FOX has been in the television news here in the Netherlands a number of times in the last two years because of factual inaccuracies about, and misrepresentation of, events in our country.
CNN has in the last decade also misrepresented events several times and regularly makes stupid mistakes like showing incorrect maps of other countries, but FOX intentionally blurs the distinction between "news" and "opinion".
This is a viable business model: forget about "facts" (and checking them), get some outspoken editorialists, and target a politically homogenous, but uninformed, readership. It doesn't work for the local newspaper, though.
Most politically oriented and/or opinion blogs are self affirming wank sessions with very little general dissent. People do not stick around day after day to read someone's opinion that they disagree with.
How is that different from newspapers? On the Internet there is more choice of self affirming wanking sessions. Newspapers traditionally cater to readerships with a greater variation of views and interests. This is not a feature of newspaper journalism, but merely a historical effect of scarcity of outlets for your opinion.
Only a minority of the population likes to disagree with the majority. The rest will find a news source that only tells them what they want to know.
I bet that the inaccuracy rates of "real" newspapers are about the same as Slashdot. Have you really read a newspaper and checked it for fact and objectivity recently.
Certainly in the "news for nerds" category. I also noted that many newspapers are increasingly copying from blogs, apparently without any additional fact checking.
I wish newspapers had such things, I would love to have gotten the opportunity to moderate the "missing white girl" stories as flaimbait... and most things political as trolls.
I would love to have the opportunity to moderate stories "fud", "propaganda", and "good day to bury bad news".
I attended a presentation Taco gave last year in which he said that only about 25% of/.'s visitors read or post comments.
This is an extremely high percentage. Certainly at least half of the pageviews on the average website that ranks high in Google are 'accidental': people click on a link, find something they weren't looking for, and back out. Counting visitors instead of pageviews only increases the percentage of 'accidents'.
It is naive to say that there will always be newspapers. It is like saying there will always be record players. Digital technology will eventually destroy newspapers. Even if someday they get replaced by high res flexible digital "paper", the traditional model of a printed paper that has to be distributed is doomed. It is simply too expensive.
There will always be written news, but the market for news is likely to shrink. Increased communication of information will destroy the market for printing Reuters press releases on paper and selling thos press releases at a ridiculous price. The customers have more choice, at lower costs. The future of newspapers is not what is at stake - they can profit from the name recognition they still have if they don't wait too long - but the jobs of many newspaper employees are.
Maybe they can delay the inevitable by hunting down the people who read their newspapers without a license and suing them?
unfortunately, that particular system is illegal in the uk, and possibly the rest of europe. the provisions of the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations [our anti-spam laws] prevent any non-private entity from opening electronic communications with someone who has not explicitely reqiested it.
In the Netherlands we have a provision in the criminal code that requires people that know about a public health risk to inform the government. This rule overrules doctor-patient privilege and other forms of privacy. The phone company knows that your phone went to country X and then came back. Even if it is a prepaid phone, they can triangulate your position (with a large margin of error) and inform the government. I assume the UK government has similar provisions for emergency situations.
You brought out the important determining factors. The thing that people often misunderstand is that people who are "good" at "being social" are not necessarily extroverts. Often those people who are the life of the party really prefer alone time and are incredibly drained after the party.
One of the most effective salespeople I know, has almost no social life. The most brilliant public speaker I know usually spends the two hours before a lecture taking a long walk to avoid being confused by contact with anyone. A colleague of mine who spends a large part of the working day chatting to people, even while working on the computer, is a nuisance at meetings and a hopelessly nervous public speaker. Etc.
The common misunderstanding of introversion-extraversion seems to be caused by the tendency of people to impose a preference relation good-bad on any pair of complementary concepts. Extraversion is not the same as narcissism, does not necessarily mean that you have social skills or are more interesting, does not make you a good public speaker or leader, etc. Introversion does not mean you are shy, cannot get laid, have no social skills, and it also does not mean you are more intelligent, think better about your decisions, etc.
Maybe introverts are less common in politics, but that is most likely a choice since a "public life" will be stressful and therefore be less appealing to them.
The direction the preference relation points to is of course mostly decided by what kind of person you are. Part of it also seems to be culture-specific. Experiments in cognitive psychology and management science show for instance that Americans tend to like the open and interactive style of extravert decision makers (and also consider people who make decisions immediately good leaders), while East-Asians, and parts of Europe, tend to prefer introvert decision makers that do not immediately jump to conclusions in their presence. This accounts for a notable difference in how business meetings are conducted: Americans want an immediate resolution to the issues on the agenda, instead of patiently waiting a few days for the decision maker to make up his mind in private.
... I don't know if this is a very good point. After all, that ranking only expresses the amount of freedom the press has in saying what it wants. However, Dutch journalists (much like, as I've been told, American journalists after 9/11) have a notoriously uncritical attitude toward the government -and politicians in general. It's easy to be left in freedom if you never push the boundaries of what's generally accepted.
That's true everywhere. It's easy for governments to be 'liberal' if your authority is not threatened. That's why Western countries always rank highest in these lists. People are free if they only want to do what you allow them to do. These freedom rankings mostly measure how stable countries are internally, or -- in other words -- to what extent a people has the legislation it deserves. The 'War on Terrorism' is a good illustration of how this mechanism works: it makes governments feel impotent and they react by reducing freedom.
The United States' slander/ libel laws are the only one's in the World where the victim must prove the statements made were in fact FALSE in order to receive judgement.
Everywhere else in the World, the accused must be able to prove his/ her statements were TRUE in order to avoid judgement.
AFAIK, in criminal law we actually have two variants in the Netherlands: criminal slander and criminal defamation. To be acquitted of criminal defamation you have to argue that you speak in the public interest. This is the case if your accusations are likely to be true, and it is in the public interest to know that they are true. To be acquitted of criminal slander you have to argue that you know of credible evidence backing up your statements. The distinction is relevant in cases where you for instance accuse someone in public of a private vice like adultery: it is not in the public interest to know, and not in the accuser's interest to have the court determine whether the accusation is true as this leads to additional damage.
The civil law reparational action also requires the accuser to prove that his income was affected by the accusations.
A defamatory statement must belong to a recognized category of harms to dignity or honour. Stating that someone is stupid or thinks like a Nazi is for instance generally legal (except for calling police officers Nazis!), while accusing someone of a concrete crime, vice, or tort is generally not. Whether it is true is not in itself relevant for determining the defamatory character of a statement, although it may be a valid defense.
In addition we distinguish criminal defamation of elected representatives, public officials, the monarch, and heads of state of a friendly power. It works quite well in keeping the media out of the private lives of public figures. There are some international NGO's that think that this legislation is problematic, in particular because most new Eastern European democracies copied this model instead of the Anglosaxon one and use it with enthusiasm on much broader categories of insults of government officials than is intended.
Lycos's defense was invalid IMO, since civil slander presupposes the existence of a criminal slander even if it went unpunished. I have to agree with the court on that.
I am not misinformed. I am realistic. I live in Britain, but I have also lived elsewhere in Europe. And if the British Police has not noticed, armoured BMWs on the streets with registrations belonging to the new member states. I have noticed. So have many other people who have seen these same ones in action elsewhere.
It is only a matter of time until these push out the local criminals the way the Albanian pushed out all pimps in London. And once they are done with this the turf wars are inevitable. I have seen these turf wars first hand. I have seen the same people cleaning up with machine guns and RPG launchers. It is only a matter of time until British streets see the same.
And while I agree that Bobbies on the beat are best unarmed, it is time to start thinking about arming responce teams adequately to deal with imported crime which has brought its own guns with it.
Firearm incidents are also rising here in Amsterdam by about 20% a year due to a combination of illegal immigration, Schengen, and easy access to weapons from the war in Yugoslavia. In Amsterdam we have a violent war between native and foreign gangs over control of the drugs market.
Since the early nineties criminals are increasingly shot in the street instead of being discreetly stabbed to death in a private place. Nationwide the vast majority of people are still killed in the tradional way with knives. Most of the gang-related shootings in the last decade happened in wealthy suburban areas and expensive shopping streets (or holiday locations like Thailand), which make them more visible.
In the rare cases where a gun is actually fired by a police officer to catch an armed criminal in flagrante delicto, like the case where an Amsterdam police officer caught the Muslim fanatic that killed Van Gogh alive by shooting him in the legs, the involved police officer is more or less accidentally in the right place on the right time and just happens to be cold-blooded enough. Professional hitmen nearly always get away before a special armed team arrives.
I don't think the Eastern European license plates on expensive cars are very significant. That's more likely a taxes thing. It is not that difficult administratively to drive around with a local license plate: you just need a local Patsy to register it for you. There are lots of Eastern European burglars prowling around, but I don't think they drive armoured BMWs.
The total economic impact isn't relevant. What matters is the cost/benefit of investing in rebuilding or improvement vs. resettling people.
There is also a more general cost to society as a whole for letting parts of the countryside die, while other areas of the country get too crowded. These mountain areas are attractive for tourists as long as there are people there to keep the place habitable. No permanent inhabitants = no services, no shops, and low real estate value because of burglars, bears, and wolves.
I cannot (well - I do believe) the EU is paying up for a scheme to redirect sunlight into a town that:
a) was badly positioned in the first place;
b) has existed as such for hundreds of years without blowing up, dying or otherwise falling off the edge of the planet without this winter sun;
What about EU funds for my city - it's a bit chilly in winter. Has been for the last 5000 years. Everyone there knew it was chilly in winter and it hasn't blown up or fallen off the edge of the world because of this winter chill. I think the EU should pay for some weird underground heating to recompense us for this winter horror. Oh and a massive umbrella - it tends to rain a bit here.
Other than that - 'tis a cool piece of tech.
I also live in one of those places that was 'badly positioned in the first place': below sea level in the Netherlands. Is the EU also going to pay the energy bills for the pump installations we use to pump out excess water? Even better: we would be really grateful if the EU lowered the sea level in the North Sea by about 7 meters.
We also know for a fact that the sea level on the Dutch and Belgian coast has been some 6-8m higher than it is now in the Middle Ages (see graph and map in Dutch), which suggests that major ice masses in Greenland would have been melted. We have sea clay sediments, archeological finds, and old great flood stories to prove it. When Greenland was inhabitable, the Netherlands was largely uninhabitable. During the Roman regression the sea level was 5m lower than it is now (as is proven by Roman forts and Germanic setttlements in sea). A 6-8m rise does not have a dramatic effect on most of the European coast line, and apparently isn't noticed much in other countries.
As a Moroccan, I would say that maybe from 40% to 60% of the people who emigrated from Morocco to Europe are Berber
I would have guessed 60-80%, based on my occasional contacts with members of the immigrant community here in greater Amsterdam. Maybe this is an effect of the tendency of people from the same town to emigrate to the same area in Europe? Or my subjective estimate is just wrong.
Note that this still a politically sensible subject in Morocco, although its slowly changing.
This is clear. In (some parts of) Europe the Berber had a chance to emancipate themselves politically, and you can hardly avoid knowing that Berber do not want to be confused with Arabs if you have ever speak with one.
Yes this is mostly correct, although you have also many blacks Arabs and blacks Berber in Morocco and lots of metis.
I did know that Arab/Berber is more a "class" and culture thing than a real ethnicity, but I didn't know it even applied to blacks. Having said that, I wouldn't be able to distinguish clear ethnicities here in northwest Europe either.
It is interesting to see (again) that when shit happens somewhere commentators abroad will always point to differences between us and them to explain why it happens to them and not to us. From a European perspective France is the closest to the US when it comes to how the state approaches integration.
The American notion that France is a European "multiculturalist" country and that that is an explanation of what happens, flatly contradicts the analysis given recently by the leader of the radical Arab-European League (AEL), Abou Jahjah, on Dutch television.
His take on it is that the Dutch/German/Scandinavian segregation model, which basically denies that non-Western immigrants really become equal to the natives by acquiring citizenship, actually works better for emancipating minorities and preventing riots because it at least gives second and third generation descendents of immigrants a clear identity: that of their parents and/or grandparents. It also creates discontent among ethnic minorities, but it will usually be voiced in more acceptable ways by the older and wiser leaders of the hierarchically organized ethnic community.
Comparing the American situation to Europe is also misguided. Most European countries are relatively monocultural and monoreligious, like France, with the exception of the Netherlands and Germany that have a protestant/catholic dividing line through the country.
Europe is adjacent to North Africa and the Middle East, and traditionally considers those areas as hostile. The vast majority of immigrants are uneducated, African, Muslim, and unemployable. Many immigrants never really chose to live in Europe for the rest of their lives, and initially left their family in the home country while they went to Europe to make money. Another category of early immigrants are former colonials, that sometimes takes historical griefs with them. Decolonization era immigrants are for instance often former native colonial soldiers that had to flee, and they strongly feel that they have a right to be treated as equals by the people they fought for.
The US has less immigration in absolute terms than continental Western Europe, a large part of the immigrants are from Western (Mexico) or Asian cultures, and South Americans are obviously Catholic. Muslim immigrants are better educated, and really decided to emigrate to the US. They were also able to afford a plane ticket.
Yeah, but it's like describing Canadians or Mexicans as Americans - entirely correct, but misleading nonetheless. Except that it's an even more misleading description to use "African" as a label for those from north Africa, as we're talking about people descended from Arab ethnicity - rather than the ethnicies further south in Africa.
The whole division of ethnicies comes into the North-South conflict in places like Sudan (that is not merely a religious division, but ethnic - non-Arab and Arab/Arabicized).
The notion that Africa was once black and that the "Arabs" immigrated into North Africa at some point is also a misconception, and the practice of calling blacks "African" is American misguided political correctness. Calling North Africans "Arab", as the French do, is equally misguided.
The majority of Africans that immigrate into Europe are white Muslims from the North, and of those a minority speaks/is Arabic.
In Morocco you for instance find two different culturals groups: the Arabs and the Berber. Both are white. You distinguish the "Arabs" from the cities from the Berber by the mere fact that they speak a form of Arabic and are better educated. The Arabic conquest had only a superficial genetic impact on an already predominantly white population. The occurence of blue eyes in North Africa apparently even predates the Vandal invasion in the 5th century.
Egypt and Sudan are different: the dividing line between white and black does seem to have moved southward along the Nile over the millenia.
Yes, the salt and urea concentration can make grass turn yellow. And in really massive concentrations (like if you directly pipe a public outhouse into a river), the phosphate can cause algal bloom - just like most fertilizers.
It also seriously damages centuries-old brick walls for some reason. You can literally piss a hole in a wall. Here in Amsterdam you get fined EUR 160 for urinating in public, because it causes millions a year in damage to old churches and houses. In addition to that home owners obviously hate it when their multimillion-dollar 17th century canal house entrance smells of piss. No connection is made to sex offenses.
The stupid thing is that foreign tourists often just get warned if they are caught doing it, even though they are the idiots pissing against brick walls. A civilized local will piss into a canal, which is of course more 'indecent' but doesn't really inconvenience anyone.
Still, it would take a pretty bad urge before I would let go in a residential area.
Obviously, assuming that it is possible to move out of that residential area or to a waiting queue for a public toilet or toilet in a bar or restaurant in a reasonable time, which is not always the case during festivals. I once made hundreds of euros in two hours charging people EUR 5 for using my toilet.
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The way I see it both sides have equal burden of proof. The point of both the 'discovery' method and the 'rote' method is to train the neural net that is the brain. The discovery method presents several different signals.
The difference is that in the rote method there is a teacher controlling the input, while the discovery method assumes that the important point is to learn to select the important features from the input. Of course it is important to learn what features to look for, but this is not really a skill that can be acquired by training. You know what to look for because of your background knowledge, and the point of education should be to pump as much background knowledge into you as possible.
As far as the burden of proof is concerned: when you are messing with an existing education system that works well, the burden of proof is on you. A government shouldn't experiment with the lives and minds of its subjects.
Care to cite your sources? When I went to college to get my 2-year Associate's degree, I was suprised to find that they were teaching classes in basic arithmetic, much less algebra.
I teach on a Dutch university. I have seen it happen. First we introduced summer courses on mathematics and writing for weak students, and this year we made those courses part of the official program because almost everybody needs them now in our experience. You have to take into account that we have a highly stratified high school system: only good students go to preparatory school, and only those children have the option of going to university.
In the US and some other countries there is less stratification in the high school system, universities expect less of new students, and there is a greater variance in the quality of 'universities', ranging from bad quality vocational schools that don't deserve the name university to internationally recognized research institutions. In these countries assessment of incoming students is obvious. These countries btw generally do badly in standardized international assessments like PISA 2003 (where we score 3rd, even though we spend less per student than the OECD average).
A key here is "computer simulated". It is very hard to analyze anything "computer simulated" very thoroughly.
The situations we created for the experiments are on the other hand very similar to the kind of 'discovery' situations schools will set up. School is not real life either.
What is the difference in your mind between "instruction" and "procedure"?
An instruction is a directive. A procedure is a specification for a family of discrete processes. Since processes comply with or deviate from instructions it is natural to design procedures that don't violate instructions, but these notions originally belong to different vocabularies.
Only in the context of computers this distinction becomes confusing, since people insist on giving computers metaphorical 'instructions', even though the computer cannot deviate from the instruction. Thjat is how language developes: when you only have a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail.
When I look at legislation, I see it has to go through committees before going to the general floor before becoming law, there is an order of priority of what gets considered first, etc.
You are talking about legal procedure. Interestingly, existing legal procedures are not directly based in law: they are possible realizations of the constraints imposed by the directives in constitutional and administrative law.
Legislation directs people. It tells them what (not) to do, not how to do something. Usually it doesn't make a difference whether you read provisions from back to front or the other way around: it says the same thing in both cases, even though it is usually easier to understand if you read it in the intended order. This is true on the provision level: on the sentence level you do find anaphora.
Demonstrating that someone does badly in a given environment at discovering things, doesn't show anything conclusively, Maybe the environment was bad for that sort of thing, or maybe the instructions were bad.
The burden of proof is on the other side. There is no body of research showing people capable of discovery on demand, and cognitive psychology suggests humans are generally speaking not capable of doing so within the time frame set by an educational system. Time spent discovering stuff is wasted for learning. It is doubtful whether the children learned some valuable 'discovery' skill: they just know less in the end, and more children eventually drop out of school because there is less immediate pressure to perform. When they get to university they now start with a course on basic algebra. Just a few years ago this wasn't necessary.
We also did a small experiment involving graduate physics students on the university: they weren't capable of discovering within 10 minutes that a slightly modified version of the inverse square law of optics applied to a computer simulated instrument we had them examine, even though they did know the necessary mathematics very well.
Maybe the environment they had been in up til then left them poorly prepared for this scenario, and thus would take a lot of work to overcome.
I don't know to what extent preference for knowledge acquisition by rote learning is innate or an 'invention' of our ancestors taught to very young children, but the simple fact is that this is the way we have passed on knowledge for millenia. Learning as theory invention is a Romantic notion we flatter ourselves with. Most of us are not that intelligent. We just know a lot, and live in an environment tailored to mankind and its shortcomings.
There was a paper handed out in school that said "Read all the instrictions first", and the last instruction said something like "Don't follow any of the instructions and turn the paper in". I noted that there wasn't an instruction to follow the instructions out of order, so an argument could be made that the correct procedure to follow was to do all the instructions anyways.
The most obvious check would be to *ask* the students afterwards why they did what they did. Introspective and retrospective interviewing is quite common in cognitive psychology. Besides that you don't need an instruction to follow instructions out of order. Instructions are not generally dependent on order. Look at legislation: few, if any, constraints on order and no anaphora. Procedures are dependent on order.
I do agree that testing in schools usually follows a certain script, and deviations from that script will yield confusing results.
In the nineties we changed from traditional rote learning to a revolutionary discovery-based teaching method in secondary schools in the Netherlands. My professor in Cognitive Psychology was extremely skeptical about this and had his students organize learning experiments with children and students to demonstrate how badly they performed at 'discovering' anything other than a simple correlation or inverse correlation. He was right: the method turned out to be a disaster for the generation of children exposed to it and we are now returning to rote learning.
What differentiates mankind from animals is not the kind of skills someone like Newton possessed, but our capacity to transfer acquired knowledge to others, and in particular future generations, in an efficient way. Language plays an important role, as well as the capacity of young humans to imitate seemingly pointless customs without a direct reward.
An important difference between the children and the chimps is that the children live in a magical universe with remote controls and mobile phones: they are used to learning how to operate devices they don't understand.
Propensity to experiment is highly overrated. Cats are for instance typical opportunists that 'experiment' all the time when solving mazes. They simply don't expect the rewards in a maze to be in the same place each time: they will keep checking random dead ends in the maze to make sure there isn't a reward there this time. This doesn't make them 'intelligent' from our point of view, since they fail miserably on the kind of experiments rats and mice excel in, but apparently it does work very well for catching small rodents. To appreciate the superior spatial intelligence of cats you have to see a hungry cat close in on a prey, positioning themselves to to intercept it on the only escape route left open.
We all have choices. Is your choice to blame all Christians for the actions of a few vocal ones?
I would imagine you have made choices to be a member of many groups and classes of people. Some of whom probably bug the hell out of others. Are their actions YOUR fault?
We need to take responsbility for ourselves and expect it from others. Blaming all Christians is the easy way out and cheapens the issue because suddenly it's not about the clear truth of science and the insanity of "intelligent design" but about attacks and blame.
We can win with logic, but if we fall into their blame game we are no better. Save the venom from the SPECIFIC people and groups who are doing the idiot work.
I know lots of Christians who are perfectly decent people, and interpret Christian teachings in a way that is not in any way offensive to me. No argument with that.
But equating Christianity with a group membership that cannot be evaded, like race, or gender, is insincere. Blaming someone for voluntary association with some political or ideological organization that is perceived to be evil is very different from racism. On the other hand it is also not a very productive way for dealing with a majority group like Christians. If the organization is a small minority group (like neonazis or Scientology) they can even be prohibited.
Using a power and communication cable from the command unit to the eyeball instead of wireless makes sense.
You choose to be Christian. Blacks can't help being black. There's an important difference there. Having an issue with christianity is not the same as having an issue with a race. It is more similar to being an anti-communist. The disappearance of christianity, or communism, does not necessarily involve genocide.
I'm calling the "Metaphor and Analogy" police, if there is such a thing.
Why is it that EVERYTHING involving computers and the internets ends up becoming some cutesy-cutesy thing?
What's next?
Spear-spamming?
Ummm...if you are "in public"...doesn't that over rule your "privacy" rights a little?
The fact that you walk around on some street is a public information. The data your phone company keeps about you is private, and can only be exchanged with others if you give permission or with a legal ground. Having said that, it is apparently not that hard to fabricate a legal ground, given the Netherlands government reputation for eavesdropping.
Does the phone company know if you depart to other countries automatically, or does this only occur when you actually make a call, SMS, or do internet activity from your phone?
Can they, with multiple phone towers, identify all phones in a given area?
Or do they have to know your phone number and know to look?
The wiretapping order they need for this type of thing is given for an individual phone. I don't know about the technical possibilities, and the available data from foreign operators probably depends on bilateral treaties. The government does require phone operators on the Dutch market to install equipment to facilitate investigation. The former state operator KPN even had a special department for eavesdropping before it was privatized. The phone operators supposedly proactively provide the government with information about public health risks.
Maybe the poster should consider the content and not the medium itself. There is a reason why FOX News now has a higher rating than CNN. There are obviously millions of Americans who don't agree with the left-wing slant in many of today's papers (especially the editorials). Just a thought...
You are obviously speaking of the millions who want a "news source" with a marked right-wing slant that adjusts the facts to their hate campaigns. I am not an American, but I do know that FOX has been in the television news here in the Netherlands a number of times in the last two years because of factual inaccuracies about, and misrepresentation of, events in our country.
CNN has in the last decade also misrepresented events several times and regularly makes stupid mistakes like showing incorrect maps of other countries, but FOX intentionally blurs the distinction between "news" and "opinion".
This is a viable business model: forget about "facts" (and checking them), get some outspoken editorialists, and target a politically homogenous, but uninformed, readership. It doesn't work for the local newspaper, though.
Most politically oriented and/or opinion blogs are self affirming wank sessions with very little general dissent. People do not stick around day after day to read someone's opinion that they disagree with.
How is that different from newspapers? On the Internet there is more choice of self affirming wanking sessions. Newspapers traditionally cater to readerships with a greater variation of views and interests. This is not a feature of newspaper journalism, but merely a historical effect of scarcity of outlets for your opinion.
Only a minority of the population likes to disagree with the majority. The rest will find a news source that only tells them what they want to know.
I bet that the inaccuracy rates of "real" newspapers are about the same as Slashdot. Have you really read a newspaper and checked it for fact and objectivity recently.
Certainly in the "news for nerds" category. I also noted that many newspapers are increasingly copying from blogs, apparently without any additional fact checking.
I wish newspapers had such things, I would love to have gotten the opportunity to moderate the "missing white girl" stories as flaimbait... and most things political as trolls.
I would love to have the opportunity to moderate stories "fud", "propaganda", and "good day to bury bad news".
I attended a presentation Taco gave last year in which he said that only about 25% of /.'s visitors read or post comments.
This is an extremely high percentage. Certainly at least half of the pageviews on the average website that ranks high in Google are 'accidental': people click on a link, find something they weren't looking for, and back out. Counting visitors instead of pageviews only increases the percentage of 'accidents'.
It is naive to say that there will always be newspapers. It is like saying there will always be record players. Digital technology will eventually destroy newspapers. Even if someday they get replaced by high res flexible digital "paper", the traditional model of a printed paper that has to be distributed is doomed. It is simply too expensive.
There will always be written news, but the market for news is likely to shrink. Increased communication of information will destroy the market for printing Reuters press releases on paper and selling thos press releases at a ridiculous price. The customers have more choice, at lower costs. The future of newspapers is not what is at stake - they can profit from the name recognition they still have if they don't wait too long - but the jobs of many newspaper employees are.
Maybe they can delay the inevitable by hunting down the people who read their newspapers without a license and suing them?
unfortunately, that particular system is illegal in the uk, and possibly the rest of europe. the provisions of the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations [our anti-spam laws] prevent any non-private entity from opening electronic communications with someone who has not explicitely reqiested it.
In the Netherlands we have a provision in the criminal code that requires people that know about a public health risk to inform the government. This rule overrules doctor-patient privilege and other forms of privacy. The phone company knows that your phone went to country X and then came back. Even if it is a prepaid phone, they can triangulate your position (with a large margin of error) and inform the government. I assume the UK government has similar provisions for emergency situations.
You brought out the important determining factors. The thing that people often misunderstand is that people who are "good" at "being social" are not necessarily extroverts. Often those people who are the life of the party really prefer alone time and are incredibly drained after the party.
One of the most effective salespeople I know, has almost no social life. The most brilliant public speaker I know usually spends the two hours before a lecture taking a long walk to avoid being confused by contact with anyone. A colleague of mine who spends a large part of the working day chatting to people, even while working on the computer, is a nuisance at meetings and a hopelessly nervous public speaker. Etc.
The common misunderstanding of introversion-extraversion seems to be caused by the tendency of people to impose a preference relation good-bad on any pair of complementary concepts. Extraversion is not the same as narcissism, does not necessarily mean that you have social skills or are more interesting, does not make you a good public speaker or leader, etc. Introversion does not mean you are shy, cannot get laid, have no social skills, and it also does not mean you are more intelligent, think better about your decisions, etc.
Maybe introverts are less common in politics, but that is most likely a choice since a "public life" will be stressful and therefore be less appealing to them.
The direction the preference relation points to is of course mostly decided by what kind of person you are. Part of it also seems to be culture-specific. Experiments in cognitive psychology and management science show for instance that Americans tend to like the open and interactive style of extravert decision makers (and also consider people who make decisions immediately good leaders), while East-Asians, and parts of Europe, tend to prefer introvert decision makers that do not immediately jump to conclusions in their presence. This accounts for a notable difference in how business meetings are conducted: Americans want an immediate resolution to the issues on the agenda, instead of patiently waiting a few days for the decision maker to make up his mind in private.
... I don't know if this is a very good point. After all, that ranking only expresses the amount of freedom the press has in saying what it wants. However, Dutch journalists (much like, as I've been told, American journalists after 9/11) have a notoriously uncritical attitude toward the government -and politicians in general. It's easy to be left in freedom if you never push the boundaries of what's generally accepted.
That's true everywhere. It's easy for governments to be 'liberal' if your authority is not threatened. That's why Western countries always rank highest in these lists. People are free if they only want to do what you allow them to do. These freedom rankings mostly measure how stable countries are internally, or -- in other words -- to what extent a people has the legislation it deserves. The 'War on Terrorism' is a good illustration of how this mechanism works: it makes governments feel impotent and they react by reducing freedom.
The United States' slander/ libel laws are the only one's in the World where the victim must prove the statements made were in fact FALSE in order to receive judgement.
Everywhere else in the World, the accused must be able to prove his/ her statements were TRUE in order to avoid judgement.
AFAIK, in criminal law we actually have two variants in the Netherlands: criminal slander and criminal defamation. To be acquitted of criminal defamation you have to argue that you speak in the public interest. This is the case if your accusations are likely to be true, and it is in the public interest to know that they are true. To be acquitted of criminal slander you have to argue that you know of credible evidence backing up your statements. The distinction is relevant in cases where you for instance accuse someone in public of a private vice like adultery: it is not in the public interest to know, and not in the accuser's interest to have the court determine whether the accusation is true as this leads to additional damage.
The civil law reparational action also requires the accuser to prove that his income was affected by the accusations.
A defamatory statement must belong to a recognized category of harms to dignity or honour. Stating that someone is stupid or thinks like a Nazi is for instance generally legal (except for calling police officers Nazis!), while accusing someone of a concrete crime, vice, or tort is generally not. Whether it is true is not in itself relevant for determining the defamatory character of a statement, although it may be a valid defense.
In addition we distinguish criminal defamation of elected representatives, public officials, the monarch, and heads of state of a friendly power. It works quite well in keeping the media out of the private lives of public figures. There are some international NGO's that think that this legislation is problematic, in particular because most new Eastern European democracies copied this model instead of the Anglosaxon one and use it with enthusiasm on much broader categories of insults of government officials than is intended.
Lycos's defense was invalid IMO, since civil slander presupposes the existence of a criminal slander even if it went unpunished. I have to agree with the court on that.
I am not misinformed. I am realistic. I live in Britain, but I have also lived elsewhere in Europe. And if the British Police has not noticed, armoured BMWs on the streets with registrations belonging to the new member states. I have noticed. So have many other people who have seen these same ones in action elsewhere.
It is only a matter of time until these push out the local criminals the way the Albanian pushed out all pimps in London. And once they are done with this the turf wars are inevitable. I have seen these turf wars first hand. I have seen the same people cleaning up with machine guns and RPG launchers. It is only a matter of time until British streets see the same.
And while I agree that Bobbies on the beat are best unarmed, it is time to start thinking about arming responce teams adequately to deal with imported crime which has brought its own guns with it.
Firearm incidents are also rising here in Amsterdam by about 20% a year due to a combination of illegal immigration, Schengen, and easy access to weapons from the war in Yugoslavia. In Amsterdam we have a violent war between native and foreign gangs over control of the drugs market.
Since the early nineties criminals are increasingly shot in the street instead of being discreetly stabbed to death in a private place. Nationwide the vast majority of people are still killed in the tradional way with knives. Most of the gang-related shootings in the last decade happened in wealthy suburban areas and expensive shopping streets (or holiday locations like Thailand), which make them more visible.
In the rare cases where a gun is actually fired by a police officer to catch an armed criminal in flagrante delicto, like the case where an Amsterdam police officer caught the Muslim fanatic that killed Van Gogh alive by shooting him in the legs, the involved police officer is more or less accidentally in the right place on the right time and just happens to be cold-blooded enough. Professional hitmen nearly always get away before a special armed team arrives.
I don't think the Eastern European license plates on expensive cars are very significant. That's more likely a taxes thing. It is not that difficult administratively to drive around with a local license plate: you just need a local Patsy to register it for you. There are lots of Eastern European burglars prowling around, but I don't think they drive armoured BMWs.
The total economic impact isn't relevant. What matters is the cost/benefit of investing in rebuilding or improvement vs. resettling people.
There is also a more general cost to society as a whole for letting parts of the countryside die, while other areas of the country get too crowded. These mountain areas are attractive for tourists as long as there are people there to keep the place habitable. No permanent inhabitants = no services, no shops, and low real estate value because of burglars, bears, and wolves.
I cannot (well - I do believe) the EU is paying up for a scheme to redirect sunlight into a town that:
a) was badly positioned in the first place;
b) has existed as such for hundreds of years without blowing up, dying or otherwise falling off the edge of the planet without this winter sun;
What about EU funds for my city - it's a bit chilly in winter. Has been for the last 5000 years. Everyone there knew it was chilly in winter and it hasn't blown up or fallen off the edge of the world because of this winter chill. I think the EU should pay for some weird underground heating to recompense us for this winter horror. Oh and a massive umbrella - it tends to rain a bit here.
Other than that - 'tis a cool piece of tech.
I also live in one of those places that was 'badly positioned in the first place': below sea level in the Netherlands. Is the EU also going to pay the energy bills for the pump installations we use to pump out excess water? Even better: we would be really grateful if the EU lowered the sea level in the North Sea by about 7 meters.
We also know for a fact that the sea level on the Dutch and Belgian coast has been some 6-8m higher than it is now in the Middle Ages (see graph and map in Dutch), which suggests that major ice masses in Greenland would have been melted. We have sea clay sediments, archeological finds, and old great flood stories to prove it. When Greenland was inhabitable, the Netherlands was largely uninhabitable. During the Roman regression the sea level was 5m lower than it is now (as is proven by Roman forts and Germanic setttlements in sea). A 6-8m rise does not have a dramatic effect on most of the European coast line, and apparently isn't noticed much in other countries.
As a Moroccan, I would say that maybe from 40% to 60% of the people who emigrated from Morocco to Europe are Berber
I would have guessed 60-80%, based on my occasional contacts with members of the immigrant community here in greater Amsterdam. Maybe this is an effect of the tendency of people from the same town to emigrate to the same area in Europe? Or my subjective estimate is just wrong.
Note that this still a politically sensible subject in Morocco, although its slowly changing.
This is clear. In (some parts of) Europe the Berber had a chance to emancipate themselves politically, and you can hardly avoid knowing that Berber do not want to be confused with Arabs if you have ever speak with one.
Yes this is mostly correct, although you have also many blacks Arabs and blacks Berber in Morocco and lots of metis.
I did know that Arab/Berber is more a "class" and culture thing than a real ethnicity, but I didn't know it even applied to blacks. Having said that, I wouldn't be able to distinguish clear ethnicities here in northwest Europe either.
You, sir, might find this article interesting:
c hness-readers-have.html
http://www.juancole.com/2005/11/problem-with-fren
It is interesting to see (again) that when shit happens somewhere commentators abroad will always point to differences between us and them to explain why it happens to them and not to us. From a European perspective France is the closest to the US when it comes to how the state approaches integration.
The American notion that France is a European "multiculturalist" country and that that is an explanation of what happens, flatly contradicts the analysis given recently by the leader of the radical Arab-European League (AEL), Abou Jahjah, on Dutch television.
His take on it is that the Dutch/German/Scandinavian segregation model, which basically denies that non-Western immigrants really become equal to the natives by acquiring citizenship, actually works better for emancipating minorities and preventing riots because it at least gives second and third generation descendents of immigrants a clear identity: that of their parents and/or grandparents. It also creates discontent among ethnic minorities, but it will usually be voiced in more acceptable ways by the older and wiser leaders of the hierarchically organized ethnic community.
Comparing the American situation to Europe is also misguided. Most European countries are relatively monocultural and monoreligious, like France, with the exception of the Netherlands and Germany that have a protestant/catholic dividing line through the country.
Europe is adjacent to North Africa and the Middle East, and traditionally considers those areas as hostile. The vast majority of immigrants are uneducated, African, Muslim, and unemployable. Many immigrants never really chose to live in Europe for the rest of their lives, and initially left their family in the home country while they went to Europe to make money. Another category of early immigrants are former colonials, that sometimes takes historical griefs with them. Decolonization era immigrants are for instance often former native colonial soldiers that had to flee, and they strongly feel that they have a right to be treated as equals by the people they fought for.
The US has less immigration in absolute terms than continental Western Europe, a large part of the immigrants are from Western (Mexico) or Asian cultures, and South Americans are obviously Catholic. Muslim immigrants are better educated, and really decided to emigrate to the US. They were also able to afford a plane ticket.
Yeah, but it's like describing Canadians or Mexicans as Americans - entirely correct, but misleading nonetheless. Except that it's an even more misleading description to use "African" as a label for those from north Africa, as we're talking about people descended from Arab ethnicity - rather than the ethnicies further south in Africa.
The whole division of ethnicies comes into the North-South conflict in places like Sudan (that is not merely a religious division, but ethnic - non-Arab and Arab/Arabicized).
The notion that Africa was once black and that the "Arabs" immigrated into North Africa at some point is also a misconception, and the practice of calling blacks "African" is American misguided political correctness. Calling North Africans "Arab", as the French do, is equally misguided.
The majority of Africans that immigrate into Europe are white Muslims from the North, and of those a minority speaks/is Arabic.
In Morocco you for instance find two different culturals groups: the Arabs and the Berber. Both are white. You distinguish the "Arabs" from the cities from the Berber by the mere fact that they speak a form of Arabic and are better educated. The Arabic conquest had only a superficial genetic impact on an already predominantly white population. The occurence of blue eyes in North Africa apparently even predates the Vandal invasion in the 5th century.
Egypt and Sudan are different: the dividing line between white and black does seem to have moved southward along the Nile over the millenia.
Yes, the salt and urea concentration can make grass turn yellow. And in really massive concentrations (like if you directly pipe a public outhouse into a river), the phosphate can cause algal bloom - just like most fertilizers.
It also seriously damages centuries-old brick walls for some reason. You can literally piss a hole in a wall. Here in Amsterdam you get fined EUR 160 for urinating in public, because it causes millions a year in damage to old churches and houses. In addition to that home owners obviously hate it when their multimillion-dollar 17th century canal house entrance smells of piss. No connection is made to sex offenses.
The stupid thing is that foreign tourists often just get warned if they are caught doing it, even though they are the idiots pissing against brick walls. A civilized local will piss into a canal, which is of course more 'indecent' but doesn't really inconvenience anyone.
Still, it would take a pretty bad urge before I would let go in a residential area.
Obviously, assuming that it is possible to move out of that residential area or to a waiting queue for a public toilet or toilet in a bar or restaurant in a reasonable time, which is not always the case during festivals. I once made hundreds of euros in two hours charging people EUR 5 for using my toilet.