My brother and I both went (different years) to the Ohio Supercomputer Summer Institute. While I can't say it was a life-altering experience (we both were already interested in computers and programming; you needed to be to get into the program since applicants have to solve a simple programming problem), it was a great experience both socially and practically—we got to make friends with other geeky kids and do work (and play) on "real" computers (everything at the time was done on SGI workstations running IRIX and we even got accounts on Cray and SGI supercomputers) and do generally cool stuff.
I think that in terms of actual usefulness to the local/regional/educational/technical community though, a longer and perhaps more introductory program would have been better. 2 weeks isn't long enough to accomplish a lot when you're trying to get things done with excited teenagers (it would be hard for anyone), and the fact that the program is limited to somewhat-experienced kids means that while you can accomplish more in that short time you also are not really doing a lot to get new people interested and engaged with technology.
Actually, unlimited ANYTHING in Japan is extremely expensive... but Japanese phones all have their own email addresses and support full email (no crappy 160-character limit), and at least with the carrier I had (AU), both you and the recipient are charged for how many packets are required to upload/download the message (a "packet" is actually about the size of a text message, I think 128 bytes). This rate, however, is on the order of 0.15 yen per packet, or just over 1/10th of a cent or less than 1/10th of a pence.
There are also more SMS-like services (very limited-length, free-to-receive) that are limited to messages whose senders and recipients are both on the same network. These are a little more expensive, but still less than a penny a pop.
Lack of competition and cost awareness. Really.
For example, take the data rates while abroad. Do you really think the extra cost of transferring data across the world (you know, like you're doing right now) justified a price that's often tens of dollars per megabyte? Or that in-flight calls really cost that much? They charge what people will pay, simple as that. SMS prices are absolutely ridiculous (and 5p is nothing, my carrier charged me 0.20USD per when I didn't have an SMS plan, and I believe their prices have INcreased to $0.25 or $0.30 since then), but in-flight data/voice services are mostly satellite-based and a completely different animal (unless they are air-to-ground, which is a different matter).
Do you have any idea how much satellite bandwidth costs? Not to mention latency issues. Just because you can get some form of internet does NOT mean that the cost to offer the service is similar to what you might get from your terrestrial ISP. In this case, the lack of price awareness works the other way, I think.
I seem to remember that back when the Blaster worm was a big deal, someone did just this. Thing is, everyone complained and said it was terrible and irresponsible to patch peoples' computers without their permission, potentially causing instability, especially in the enterprise where patches have to be thoroughly vetted before being applied, even if they are for critical vulnerabilities.
Someone else pointed this out, too, with an appropriate link to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welchia
It should be noted that the 10% of the web number is somewhat misleading--some comments seem to think it implies that 1 in every 10 pages one visits are likely to contain malware, or the like. Chances are, most of these pages are not worth visiting. This isn't in in every ten pages on yahoo.com or cnn.com, it's probably more like 8 in 10 pages on freekiddiepornplz.com and piratewarezserialzhackz.tv.
The US gets a lot of flack for not using the metric system, but honestly, we're not the only ones (and I don't mean Liberia and Myanmar).
Just recently a friend from Canada (Montreal) astounded me when she stepped on my scale and complained that she had no idea what it meant, since it used kilograms. She told me that she thinks of her weight only in pounds, and that, furthermore, clothing measurements (like the waist and inseam on jeans) are measured not in centimeters, but in inches. I don't recall if I asked whether she measures her height in feet+inches or centimeters.
But honestly, what difference does it make, anyway? Sure the metric system is great, I rather like it. A cubic centimeter = 1 millileter, and if you fill it with (pure) water (under 1 bar of pressure at 4 degrees centigrade) it weighs exactly 1 gram. How cool is that? But really, it doesn't make measurements any more or less accurate to use one system or the other. All Americans learn metric in school, anyway, last I checked. So who cares what we use?
For a study of this nature, it seems like this kind of testing could help remove the possibility of unintentional cues from the tester that could result in statistically significant false positive results. Of course, I think it's more likely to disprove the existence of telepathy than to reveal evidence of psychic phenomena.
Since we're offering anecdotal evidence, I'll give my two cents:
I'm a reasonably in-shape guy, programmer finishing up my degree in CS in June, going on to who knows what after that (I have a lot of options). I bike every day to get from once place to another, can run a mile easily, sure, love to ski, play DDR, and I'm up for a game of tennis or soccer (I'm terrible, though!)... but I almost never work out or go for extended jogs.
The reason is precisely as the summary (no, I didn't RTFA) says: I can't stand to concentrate on one thing at once. When I'm at the gym (yes, I do go when I can), I at LEAST have to listen to music, and even then I am constantly annoyed by the fact that it is taking a long time to "accomplish" my task (getting exercise)--time that is wasted because I can't get anything else done during it.
I spend most of my day, even in class, on my computer, doing at least several things at once--listening to a lecture, programming, reading, chatting, working, planning, etc. When that is all pared down to one single task, I find it VERY difficult to concentrate; I keep getting distracted by the fact that I'm ONLY doing one thing, when I feel I could be doing 4 or 5.
Now, what both of us have proven is that being a geek doesn't mean you HAVE to be terribly out of shape... but as an explanation for the (stereo)typical geeky aversion to dedicated physical activity, well, I say it's spot-on.
If network and gaming trends continue as they are, video games will still be too large to download "on-demand". Notice that the only successful model of online video delivery, Apple's iTMS, only downloads reduced-resolution, iPod-sized videos. This isn't because they don't want you buying an episode of Scrubs or whatever for $2 and burning it to a DVD (and hence not buying the DVD set when it comes out), it's because we don't have the infrastructure to deliver full-resolution TV shows, much less feature films. Video games (many of them, anyway) are just as large, and keeping pace. Just because people don't mind starting up bittorrent and waiting a few hours/days for a movie doesn't mean that it's a valid distribution model. People do that because it's free--if a company tried to distribute their multi-gig program/movie/data over the internet, it would be paying far more in bandwidth costs, with nothing other than DEcreased customer satisfaction to show for it, than if it just paid a printing company and DVD fab to stamp their discs and stick in a shiny insert.
Good luck getting them to reauthorize you to download a new copy in the case of a hard-drive failure. Why do it, when they can just force you to buy a new one? Same story, different method of distribution.
Also, say good-bye to the days of lending your friend a game, or selling/giving one away second hand.
Does anyone really believe that the government could make it illegal to record anything in analog? Come on, think about it--when I want to record my home movies, they're going to require that I only have a DRMed, digital copy? Or if I want to make an audio tape, I'll have to use an expensive, DRM-encumbered digital recorder, instead of a cheap cassette player? Or more pertinent, when a linguistics researcher or reporter wants to record a conversation, or a filmmaker wants to make a movie--there can't be any realistic expectation to force them to go not only digital, but DRM-encumbered digital.
Even if such a bill were to be passed, it would be laughed at as the public went on its merry way using older analog and unencumbered digital devices.
I think that many phones in the US have already phased out the ability to run off the camera sound because of privacy issues. You can no longer buy phones in Japan that will take pictures silently. This is, of course, not to let you know that you took the photo, but rather to let others know that you took the photo.
Actually, I'm gay. And not a girl.
But hey, you're right about that webcam idea! I'll be sure to hook you up with a direct feed, and let you know when I have company. *wink wink*
This is perfect for me and my roommate--we are college students with our own apartment, and can't afford to get even basic cable service ($52.95/mo?!). We have netflix instead, which is fine for me since I don't watch TV anyway, but she misses her Adult Swim. Internet is a necessity, though, so we have 5Mbps downstream cable internet (more than enough for streaming video). Now we can get the one thing we were missing out on--free and legal!
Good point--I don't know about most languages in the world, but Latinate and Germanic languages certainly aren't the way to go for logical grammar. I've studied Japanese for a number of years, and it not only does away with gendered nouns, it does away with articles entirely, which are mostly superfluous (especially in Latinate languages where they are often required for no apparent reason other than to make you look stupid when you don't know a noun's gender). And as far as plurality goes, it turns out you don't really need that, either. You can explicitly pluralize or number nouns in Japanese, but 99% of the time you don't, and don't need to. Et voilà, all your agreement problems are solved!
Also, the Japanese syllabary allows you to correctly write any word no matter what--if you can say it, you know how to write it (assuming you are not analphabetic). Forget about capitalization and spacing, too--it doesn't exist!
Of course, there are those pesky several thousand Chinese characters with at least 2 and often more ways to pronounce that you have to learn to write and read above the level of a 3-year-old, which essentially makes Japanese give up all the ground it's gained in sensible grammar. Well, nobody's perfect, eh? But then again, English is/particularly/ nasty in many respects...
What's your point? Chinese has an even more complex character system with tens of thousands of characters when you start getting into older and classical texts. At least Japanese has syllabaries.
Oh, and I happen to speak, read and write Japanese.
I was referring to the popularity of the "schoolkid discovers magical powers" genre in Japanese manga and anime, so, same thing. If I could revise my original post, I'd probably have said "I believe the Island of Japan has prior art."
If you're talking about the Japanese supposedly having the world's finest education system (producing magic kids that score highest in the world on standardized tests), you are very uninformed--I would never send one of my kids to school in Japan. In fact, I would rate their system significantly lower than that of many other countries like the US and much of Europe.
Test scores are an incredibly misleading way of rating education (though, unfortunately, the only currently feasible way), and the US government is doing its populace a major disservice by attempting to "catch up" to and imitate the Japanese in this regard.
So what does that say about students who sat in the front chatting on IRC?
But seriously, I find this to be completely wrong. I've never seen a strong correlation to seating and skill level--the people on their laptops doing whatever seem pretty well-scattered to me.
You might have something if you said that the students in the front/wanted/ the most help, and the students in the back didn't care... but I think it's probably still not a strong correlation.
Actually, it's a robotics exposition held at/during EXPO/Aichi Expo/ Aichi Exposition of Global Harmony. It's a World's Fair.
I was living in Aichi prefecture for 6 months prior to it--you can't live anywhere near the region and not know it, the merchandising was incessant. Unfortunately, I left Japan just a few weeks before it began.:( I'm hoping to head back within the next month so I can go (it lasts until September).
I especially want to find out about the Linear Express, the latest Japanese bullet train--it's a maglev train that will travel 570KPH from OsakaKyotoNagoyaTokyo (or something like that). Even the newest "Nozomi" class shinkansen bullet trains only travel something like 170KPH... less than impressive.
I'd love Google Maps to have satellite photos of, say, Japan, and other countries too, but realistically, there is still a very large part of America that doesn't have satellite photos beyond an incredibly low resolution. Outside of major cities, you can often barely make out even major highways.
This is a big deal for me, too--I frequently use X11 under OSX, but if I want anything other than iso-8859-1, support just isn't there. I use Colloquy and iChat for all of my chatting, even if I use Japanese only a small percentage of the time. Doing any sort of chatting, word processing, etc. in X11 is just impossible for international users.
I doubt it is a big enough segment of the mac population to affect Apple's decisions (international users of OSX who run X11 apps and want non-roman input), but really, would it have been so hard to integrate the OSX input methods into X11?
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My brother and I both went (different years) to the Ohio Supercomputer Summer Institute. While I can't say it was a life-altering experience (we both were already interested in computers and programming; you needed to be to get into the program since applicants have to solve a simple programming problem), it was a great experience both socially and practically—we got to make friends with other geeky kids and do work (and play) on "real" computers (everything at the time was done on SGI workstations running IRIX and we even got accounts on Cray and SGI supercomputers) and do generally cool stuff. I think that in terms of actual usefulness to the local/regional/educational/technical community though, a longer and perhaps more introductory program would have been better. 2 weeks isn't long enough to accomplish a lot when you're trying to get things done with excited teenagers (it would be hard for anyone), and the fact that the program is limited to somewhat-experienced kids means that while you can accomplish more in that short time you also are not really doing a lot to get new people interested and engaged with technology.
Actually, unlimited ANYTHING in Japan is extremely expensive... but Japanese phones all have their own email addresses and support full email (no crappy 160-character limit), and at least with the carrier I had (AU), both you and the recipient are charged for how many packets are required to upload/download the message (a "packet" is actually about the size of a text message, I think 128 bytes). This rate, however, is on the order of 0.15 yen per packet, or just over 1/10th of a cent or less than 1/10th of a pence.
There are also more SMS-like services (very limited-length, free-to-receive) that are limited to messages whose senders and recipients are both on the same network. These are a little more expensive, but still less than a penny a pop.
I seem to remember that back when the Blaster worm was a big deal, someone did just this. Thing is, everyone complained and said it was terrible and irresponsible to patch peoples' computers without their permission, potentially causing instability, especially in the enterprise where patches have to be thoroughly vetted before being applied, even if they are for critical vulnerabilities. Someone else pointed this out, too, with an appropriate link to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welchia
It should be noted that the 10% of the web number is somewhat misleading--some comments seem to think it implies that 1 in every 10 pages one visits are likely to contain malware, or the like. Chances are, most of these pages are not worth visiting. This isn't in in every ten pages on yahoo.com or cnn.com, it's probably more like 8 in 10 pages on freekiddiepornplz.com and piratewarezserialzhackz.tv.
...where does "first post" rank?
The US gets a lot of flack for not using the metric system, but honestly, we're not the only ones (and I don't mean Liberia and Myanmar).
Just recently a friend from Canada (Montreal) astounded me when she stepped on my scale and complained that she had no idea what it meant, since it used kilograms. She told me that she thinks of her weight only in pounds, and that, furthermore, clothing measurements (like the waist and inseam on jeans) are measured not in centimeters, but in inches. I don't recall if I asked whether she measures her height in feet+inches or centimeters.
But honestly, what difference does it make, anyway? Sure the metric system is great, I rather like it. A cubic centimeter = 1 millileter, and if you fill it with (pure) water (under 1 bar of pressure at 4 degrees centigrade) it weighs exactly 1 gram. How cool is that? But really, it doesn't make measurements any more or less accurate to use one system or the other. All Americans learn metric in school, anyway, last I checked. So who cares what we use?
For a study of this nature, it seems like this kind of testing could help remove the possibility of unintentional cues from the tester that could result in statistically significant false positive results. Of course, I think it's more likely to disprove the existence of telepathy than to reveal evidence of psychic phenomena.
Since we're offering anecdotal evidence, I'll give my two cents:
I'm a reasonably in-shape guy, programmer finishing up my degree in CS in June, going on to who knows what after that (I have a lot of options). I bike every day to get from once place to another, can run a mile easily, sure, love to ski, play DDR, and I'm up for a game of tennis or soccer (I'm terrible, though!)... but I almost never work out or go for extended jogs.
The reason is precisely as the summary (no, I didn't RTFA) says: I can't stand to concentrate on one thing at once. When I'm at the gym (yes, I do go when I can), I at LEAST have to listen to music, and even then I am constantly annoyed by the fact that it is taking a long time to "accomplish" my task (getting exercise)--time that is wasted because I can't get anything else done during it.
I spend most of my day, even in class, on my computer, doing at least several things at once--listening to a lecture, programming, reading, chatting, working, planning, etc. When that is all pared down to one single task, I find it VERY difficult to concentrate; I keep getting distracted by the fact that I'm ONLY doing one thing, when I feel I could be doing 4 or 5.
Now, what both of us have proven is that being a geek doesn't mean you HAVE to be terribly out of shape... but as an explanation for the (stereo)typical geeky aversion to dedicated physical activity, well, I say it's spot-on.
Great, then we can send a thousand Chinese citizens to political prisons, every day!
If network and gaming trends continue as they are, video games will still be too large to download "on-demand". Notice that the only successful model of online video delivery, Apple's iTMS, only downloads reduced-resolution, iPod-sized videos. This isn't because they don't want you buying an episode of Scrubs or whatever for $2 and burning it to a DVD (and hence not buying the DVD set when it comes out), it's because we don't have the infrastructure to deliver full-resolution TV shows, much less feature films. Video games (many of them, anyway) are just as large, and keeping pace. Just because people don't mind starting up bittorrent and waiting a few hours/days for a movie doesn't mean that it's a valid distribution model. People do that because it's free--if a company tried to distribute their multi-gig program/movie/data over the internet, it would be paying far more in bandwidth costs, with nothing other than DEcreased customer satisfaction to show for it, than if it just paid a printing company and DVD fab to stamp their discs and stick in a shiny insert.
Good luck getting them to reauthorize you to download a new copy in the case of a hard-drive failure. Why do it, when they can just force you to buy a new one? Same story, different method of distribution.
Also, say good-bye to the days of lending your friend a game, or selling/giving one away second hand.
Does anyone really believe that the government could make it illegal to record anything in analog? Come on, think about it--when I want to record my home movies, they're going to require that I only have a DRMed, digital copy? Or if I want to make an audio tape, I'll have to use an expensive, DRM-encumbered digital recorder, instead of a cheap cassette player? Or more pertinent, when a linguistics researcher or reporter wants to record a conversation, or a filmmaker wants to make a movie--there can't be any realistic expectation to force them to go not only digital, but DRM-encumbered digital.
Even if such a bill were to be passed, it would be laughed at as the public went on its merry way using older analog and unencumbered digital devices.
I think that many phones in the US have already phased out the ability to run off the camera sound because of privacy issues. You can no longer buy phones in Japan that will take pictures silently. This is, of course, not to let you know that you took the photo, but rather to let others know that you took the photo.
Actually, I'm gay. And not a girl. But hey, you're right about that webcam idea! I'll be sure to hook you up with a direct feed, and let you know when I have company. *wink wink*
This is perfect for me and my roommate--we are college students with our own apartment, and can't afford to get even basic cable service ($52.95/mo?!). We have netflix instead, which is fine for me since I don't watch TV anyway, but she misses her Adult Swim. Internet is a necessity, though, so we have 5Mbps downstream cable internet (more than enough for streaming video). Now we can get the one thing we were missing out on--free and legal!
Thank you, Cartoon Network!
Good point--I don't know about most languages in the world, but Latinate and Germanic languages certainly aren't the way to go for logical grammar. I've studied Japanese for a number of years, and it not only does away with gendered nouns, it does away with articles entirely, which are mostly superfluous (especially in Latinate languages where they are often required for no apparent reason other than to make you look stupid when you don't know a noun's gender). And as far as plurality goes, it turns out you don't really need that, either. You can explicitly pluralize or number nouns in Japanese, but 99% of the time you don't, and don't need to. Et voilà, all your agreement problems are solved!
/particularly/ nasty in many respects...
Also, the Japanese syllabary allows you to correctly write any word no matter what--if you can say it, you know how to write it (assuming you are not analphabetic). Forget about capitalization and spacing, too--it doesn't exist!
Of course, there are those pesky several thousand Chinese characters with at least 2 and often more ways to pronounce that you have to learn to write and read above the level of a 3-year-old, which essentially makes Japanese give up all the ground it's gained in sensible grammar. Well, nobody's perfect, eh? But then again, English is
What's your point? Chinese has an even more complex character system with tens of thousands of characters when you start getting into older and classical texts. At least Japanese has syllabaries.
Oh, and I happen to speak, read and write Japanese.
I'm not sure what you're getting at...
I was referring to the popularity of the "schoolkid discovers magical powers" genre in Japanese manga and anime, so, same thing. If I could revise my original post, I'd probably have said "I believe the Island of Japan has prior art."
If you're talking about the Japanese supposedly having the world's finest education system (producing magic kids that score highest in the world on standardized tests), you are very uninformed--I would never send one of my kids to school in Japan. In fact, I would rate their system significantly lower than that of many other countries like the US and much of Europe.
Test scores are an incredibly misleading way of rating education (though, unfortunately, the only currently feasible way), and the US government is doing its populace a major disservice by attempting to "catch up" to and imitate the Japanese in this regard.
the woman who writes the Harry Potter books ought to be able to patent stories about magical school kids
I believe that the Island of Japan already holds this patent.
So what does that say about students who sat in the front chatting on IRC?
/wanted/ the most help, and the students in the back didn't care... but I think it's probably still not a strong correlation.
But seriously, I find this to be completely wrong. I've never seen a strong correlation to seating and skill level--the people on their laptops doing whatever seem pretty well-scattered to me.
You might have something if you said that the students in the front
Actually, it's a robotics exposition held at/during EXPO/Aichi Expo/ Aichi Exposition of Global Harmony. It's a World's Fair.
:( I'm hoping to head back within the next month so I can go (it lasts until September).
I was living in Aichi prefecture for 6 months prior to it--you can't live anywhere near the region and not know it, the merchandising was incessant. Unfortunately, I left Japan just a few weeks before it began.
I especially want to find out about the Linear Express, the latest Japanese bullet train--it's a maglev train that will travel 570KPH from OsakaKyotoNagoyaTokyo (or something like that). Even the newest "Nozomi" class shinkansen bullet trains only travel something like 170KPH... less than impressive.
I'd love Google Maps to have satellite photos of, say, Japan, and other countries too, but realistically, there is still a very large part of America that doesn't have satellite photos beyond an incredibly low resolution. Outside of major cities, you can often barely make out even major highways.
Hear, hear!
This is a big deal for me, too--I frequently use X11 under OSX, but if I want anything other than iso-8859-1, support just isn't there. I use Colloquy and iChat for all of my chatting, even if I use Japanese only a small percentage of the time. Doing any sort of chatting, word processing, etc. in X11 is just impossible for international users.
I doubt it is a big enough segment of the mac population to affect Apple's decisions (international users of OSX who run X11 apps and want non-roman input), but really, would it have been so hard to integrate the OSX input methods into X11?