The other board all seemed to think the same thing, so why's this groupthink and not that?:P
This is a complicated issue, and anyone coming down fully on one side or the other probably hasn't thought about it long enough. The cops were facing a noncompliant student of decent size. He may or may not have been actively resisting to leave. Some people say there was a disconnect between what he was yelling and what he was doing. He was certainly trying to rile up a crowd of students, most of whom are probably looking for some kind of cause to get behind. Tasing the guy might've seemed like the best way to disable him.
On the other hand, the cops threatened onlookers. Bringing out a taser in front of a mob is a bad idea if you don't absolutely have to. It's hard to imagine what five taser stuns will do that one or two will not. After the second, and even the first, did not have the intended effect, they should've probably switched to another tact.
Personally, I think the officer threatening the student asking for the badge number and the repeated tasings are misconduct, and should be dealt with appropriately. It seems this kid might've been looking to start trouble, but it still doesn't justify the response. I don't think this is a widespread issue of civil liberties, it's cops in a very tense situation that made a couple poor decisions.
It's to keep out people that don't belong, plain and simple. Students want expensive equipment available without having to pay for thefts, students want to use the library at 3AM and be safe. IDs are the easiest way for that to happen. On my old rural campus it would've been overkill, and mostly they let IDs slide, but at my new school in the middle of a city I do appreciate the added layer of security.
Information was gathered from 6300+ test takers at 63 four-year colleges and universities, community colleges and high schols, who took the ICT Literacy Assessment in 2006. Institutions selected the students that would take the assessment. Some chose to test students enrolled in a particular course, some used a random sampling process, and still others issued an open invitation and ofered gift certificates as incentives. Because the data is not a random sample and is not representative of all US institutions or all higher education instutions, ETS urges caution in using these results to generalize to the greater population of college-age students.
But hey, what the hell, let's do it anyway! I just know that Dr. Dronebot's 8 AM Technology for Freshman Athletes section was happy to participate in the study and filled out all the answers to the absolute best of their ability.
Number theory is certainly math and, to be honest with you, I haven't seen a university where number theory is the domain of philosophy. I know a couple number theorists that would be very surprised to learn they were doing philosophy and not mathematics:P
I'm not sure what you mean by non-mathematical properties, but please reply, I am genuinely interested in what your school considered to be number theory. You might be confusing it with mathematical philosophy, which is essentially digging down deeper to find more and more fundamental axiomatic sets. For example, we intuitively know what the natural numbers are, so we essentially used them as undefineds for a long time (still today, even). About 100 years ago, when people were trying to prove the consistancy of some of the more popular axiomatic systems and maybe find an ultimate one from which everything could be derived, a couple mathematicians started working to construct the natural numbers in terms of sets. This is still mathematics, but it doesn't really give us any new information about the natural numbers, so it was sort of motivated by a philosophical purpose.
Calculus is an interesting learning tool I think. Not for the standard reasons that it demonstrates your critical thinking and all that crap, but because, if taught correctly, it can be the first really rigorous exposure to approximations, when they converge, when they don't converge, etc. If you can understand calculus on a rigorous level, I think you've learned something pretty valuable. If you just know the formulae and the rules, you've learned something that's conditionally useful, but only if you can directly apply it.
As to mathematicians using calculus, certainly not all of them do, but I don't think there are any out there that don't appreciate its power, and it's pretty fundamental to a fairly wide swathe of mathematics. Even if you do work purely with the discrete, most times there is some overlap. Embedding your discrete object into some other continuous space can provide interesting results. And there are things like generating functions, whose series expansions can give you the terms in a discrete sequence. There are also formulations of discrete derivitive...ish things.
Yeah, in the U.S., even getting a PhD, in undergrad and grad school combined I think most non-analysts wouldn't even take six analysis courses. Of course I'm talking in the strict sense in terms of what we usually title our courses, if you count dynamics, ODE, differential geometry, etc, you'd probably raise that count a little bit. If I successfully complete my PhD (or even if I don't, I guess, hehe), the only courses I'll have taken that I'd call analysis even in a broad sense are one semester each of undergrad analysis (advanced calc, definition of derivative, etc), undergrad dynamics, graduate analysis (measure theory mostly), graduate functional analysis, graduate ODE, undergrad differential geometry, and two courses of graduate riemannian geometry.
I don't know if our universities synch up exactly with yours in terms of meaning, but in the U.S. at the bachelor's level, it'd be very rare for anyone to have six semesters of analysis. Maybe if you count the calculus sequence and basic ODEs, but there's very little serious analysis generally occuring in those classes.
I have an undergraduate degree in math and I know for sure it didn't cover everything described there. However, with independent studies, summer research programs, and semesters abroad at schools with a stronger math program, I was able to shore up those weaknesses. If I had been at a school that had a decent graduate program in mathematics I could've moved onto that during my senior year.
More advanced topics in algebra are certainly not out of reach though, my school only had one semester of algebra, but I had a lot of friends at schools with two semesters, and in two semesters there's no reason you can't get to Galois theory.
Depends totally on what direction you're planning on taking.
If you want to go onto grad school, double major in math and take everything you can. Electives and even core requirements probably have heavy overlap. It tends to be one of the easiest combinations in terms of course load. Also consider testing out a fall semester grad class or two in your senior year. These will probably look a lot like math classes. If you can't hack an undergrad math degree, odds are very good that the graduate CS program will kill you.
I have to confess that I have limited experience in computer science myself, but I've seen a couple uses for various areas of mathematics.
I was doing an optimization problem where I was trying to find the maximal distance apart of two points on a given surface along the surface itself. To begin with, in these kinds of optimization problems you want to know when you've found the answer and what kind of accuracy you have. To answer those questions you're going to need estimates and approximations, things that you learn in analysis. If your calculation is of critical importance, you don't want to just eyeball something, you want to know that you've got an answer with the appropriate accuracy.
The surface was basically defined in two different pieces glued together along their boundaries. I needed to calculate lengths along these boundaries where they were joined together. To calculate these lengths explicitly was literally impossible given the types of curves, and I ended up with an integral equation I couldn't resolve. So I used a combination of approximations for the values of the integrals and something like Newton's method from calculus to get a quickly converging answer to a problem that ground Maple to a halt when I tried the naive solution of just plugging it in.
If you're sampling data and using it to estimate the behavior of something, say a flow (like the movement of the wind or a river), you're going to want to know how accurate your data needs to be for your model to produce good results. This is a question in dynamical systems. Granted, this analysis may not be performed by the CS guy, but being able to do this sort of thing combined with having a good knowledge of computers opens a lot of exciting possibilities in science.
Similarly, in robotics, the configuration space of things like different joints on robot arms is a multi-dimensional surface, an object that is studied in differential geometry and topology. Using methods from calculus you can find the critical points in the configuration space, which it is generally a Good Idea to avoid (like a robot with its arm extended straight out) because of the fragility of the tolerance there (again, back to dynamics).
If you have a recursion, there are some fairly standard tricks you can try to apply to obtain a generating function, which can often lead to an easier computation or even a closed-form solution. There is a free text available on the internet, generatingfunctionology, which could be used as the basis for an independent study.
Things like encryption algorithms have found good uses for number theory. Graph theory can model relations between data or routes over a network. Statistics and probability are very useful for all sorts of things. Straight-up algebra and logic courses are great tools to get your mind working, though admittedly a lot of topics in your standard undergrad algebra course might be of limited use unless you're planning on pursuing a graduate degree. DEs and their solutions are great for most scientific applications. Discrete Math is usually the name they give to the mathematics course that is tailored towards computer science applications, so that's almost a no-brainer.
We need more math and science teachers, but who is going to do it? I have a BSEE and an MSEE, I'm not going to take a 50% pay cut to go teach high school math, especially since the state thinks that my education isn't qualified to teach (I need to get a teaching degree). I graduated from a top 50 school that's known for engineering. A math major roommate started teaching high school math in Syracuse, NY. The kids were hell, and the state was requiring him to take teaching courses in order to be certified. He said screw it, passed his actuarial tests, is earning twice as much, works fewer hours, and doesn't have to put up with the kids.
They actually do have an interesting math fellowship program where they recruit people to NYC on a six year commitment to get your certs and teach. They pay for the degree and an additional $90k stipend over the six years on top of what you're making as a teacher. That is just a drop in the bucket, though, as far as recruiting math teachers. I was fortunate enough to have some very good ones in high school, but I'm gathering that my school was above average as far as high schools go.
Does this honestly happen in MMOs? I've played quite a few MMOs with female friends playing female characters, and I've also rolled a couple female toons myself, and I've never ever seen or heard of anyone getting hit on in tells. Of course you'll run into idiots and thirteen-year-olds that harrass people for shits and giggles, but that happens with everyone. The only game I've never gotten around to is WoW, so maybe if it's there...
FPS there is somewhat of a bigger problem, just because there is a metric shitload of women playing MMOs compared to FPS. I could see wanting to hide your gender there. I play an FPS with a relatively mature audience as that goes, and we had three women that regged on my main server. There wasn't really anything negative, but it was actually sort of painful to watch in the opposite direction -- instant reg status, conversation constantly centering around them, sex-related topics being introduced on IRC just for the "teehee I'm talking dirty with a RL girl" kick. Some people do thrive on that, but I wouldn't, and I'd wager some of the more introverted women that might enjoy those types of games wouldn't either.
Language is context sensitive. Words receive their meaning through collective usage and are defined self-referentially. Your forest is not precisely Wordsworth's forest, which, in turn, is different from my forest. Why don't you just describe Wordsworth's forest to me? Why do I have to read his poetry? Meaning cannot always be distilled down into a line's worth of dictionary definition: else, poetry would be a simple masturbatory exercise. "Orly" is the sum total of all the owl pictures, chat conversations, text messages, memes, and comedic references across the internet. Similarly with a h4x0r, not to be confused with a hacker. Just as omg is not zomg is not oh em gee, none of which are oh my god.
Additionally, if the unwashed masses employ language outside of Ye Olde Queen's Proper English, it works its way into the rhetoric of the educated simply by way of ironic usage and expressive dialogue. Thus these words do extend the language for everyone in a sort of metausage even assuming that they do not directly. You can start waving your IAAEM banner around and profess that swearing is the last refuge of the creatively challenged, but frankly, r00fl3z.
As much as it grates on me, this kind of change could actually increase the expressivity of language. For example, right now the vocabulary of netspeak, 1337speak, all that kinda shit gives way to a certain kind of self-aware ironic communication on the web. "Pwnt," "orly," "kthx," and all their derivatives have grown to express a unique meaning that's not really filled by any other words in the english lexicon.
If at some point it does become adopted widely as a legitimate means of communication, perhaps it will just add a new way of expressing a lower level of formality. It won't devalue preexisting language, but it might actually add new nuance.
I always thought government sanctioning of marriage really didn't have as much to do with direct encouragement of childbearing, as much as it does with creating stability. You're less likely to go out and shoot people when you have a family.
I'm... not entirely sure about that. I don't really have data to dispute you, but it seems like a lot of crime is born out of tumultuous relationships that people feel "stuck" in because it's the norm.
I don't care if the primary source is biased or not, if there's a primary source I want to see it. I would prefer to see the original evidence from someone whose ideology conflicts with mine rather than the sanitized version. If you can't ignore irrelevant partisanship to discuss the actual issue, you're going to miss a lot of discussion, which plays into the hands of all politicians.
In this case, though, the two paragraphs expended on Bush versus Clinton serve an interesting point in asking, "Why censorship now and not censorship then?" It's apropos because it responds to a Washington Post opinion piece comparing the two, and Clinton is the most recent example of a lying president's treatment by the press.
As to news for nerds and the overlap with politics and censorship, there's quite a bit of it in reality. Especially with IP moving to the forefront of first amendment debate.
I've got the same question, and actually, an additional one: the PA site mentioned that he went out of the city to grind monsters for a quest. I've put in my time on the MMOs, I've ground levels in previous RPGs, and frankly I'm done with grinding. I'm wondering exactly how much "grinding" there is in the game, whether it be for questing or levelling.
Just because you haven't availed yourself of traditional encyclopaedias doesn't mean that they aren't available to you.
Just because they're available doesn't mean they have as many people looking at the entries.
As to your second point, that's a false dichotomy. No one is claiming that the Encyclopaedia Britannica (or any other traditional encyclopaedia) is 100% accurate, but I think it's fair to say that you won't find entries in the E.B. along the lines of "KLINGON: Klingons are toal fagz omg!"
Why do we have five posts a day telling us that Wikipedia has flaws with +5 insightful people saying "olo u can't use in research reports omg"? Where do I flip to in Encyclopedia Britannica to see the editors' discussion of what they included on the page? On which page do I find a write-up of some arcane piece of mathematics? Where can I look back at previous editions that got left on the cutting room floor to compare if I think I found an error?
The point is that the two are not the same kind of tool at all, yet continually I find myself immersed in discussions of Wikipedia versus print encyclopedia because people insist on comparing one of the most useful, albeit imperfect, resources available today to one of the currently most useless and find the former lacking. I just wonder what kind of virtues they're attributing to the print encyclopedia.
Being an accomplished kernel hacker does not make you (for instance) a climatologist or economist, yet there is no shortage of coders who think that nothing more than their specific occupational intelligence qualifies them to speak authoritatively on those subjects. How seriously would anyone take an English major's critique of LISP syntax? Hell, look at all the flak Noam Chomsky catches around here: "He's just a linguist, what does he know about politics?"
Meh, degrees are something but they're not the entire picture, and I say that as someone firmly entrenched in academia. Especially undergrad major, which means approximately jack. I'd take an english major's critique of LISP syntax as seriously as the english major knows LISP. There are enough people with an overinflated opinion of their modest amount of knowledge at all levels to make me treat any new piece of information with skepticism, regardless of the source.
They had a system with some limitations that worked back in the 70's and was developed for lots and lots of money. They have a tried-and-true technology. The article says that their fleet is due to retire in 2010 and they were looking for a way to change this back in 2003, so my guess is probably that they're just waiting for the next generation of shuttle instead of retrofitting a system that already works within some bounds, which would cost both money and time. If they have to delay launches by a couple of months in the interim... well, that's not too steep of a price.
We're not playing tiddlywinks on the schoolyard here. We have a problem if the future of America, and by proxy most of the world, boils down to the ethics of a single private corporation.
Elections are really one place we should be neurotic about cheating.
I don't know about the rest of everyone, but I haven't cracked an encyclopedia in something more than fifteen years since I wrote my third grade report on Alaska. I can't recall the last time I've seen a print set, and the information available in online encyclopedias is minimal compared to the information available elsewhere on the web.
I don't include Wikipedia in the list of encyclopedias since, for some reason, it calls out the entire bandwagon of people waiting to tell me that it's not 100% factual and you shouldn't use it in a paper. The scary thought is that, perhaps, these people think that traditional encyclopedias have that virtue.
OK, Frankfurt isn't exactly a luxurious destination- but why are Wikipedia people going on "retreats", and who is footing the bill? And I don't mean just airfare or accomodations...I mean meeting facilities, dinners, etc...
Donations and partnerships I'd imagine. If you go to their budget page there's a more detailed analysis, but I'm a little too tired and apathetic to look through all of it. It's not very uncommon though, especially in a situation like this where you have an academic project that's massive in scope, plus this one's also got a pretty big financial interest.
I wouldn't say TV is better than MMOs inherently, but it is less likely to be as much of a timesink. Most shows only have up to 2.5 hours of new material every week (if they're a daily, half-hour show). There's no group of friends (virtual or not) waiting on you so that they can watch their TV show. If you decide to quit the Daily Show early and watch the rebroadcast later, you're not going to piss off your group/raid. You can half pay attention to the TV while you're doing your homework, talking to friends, etc, whereas an MMO requires active participation on some level, making it much harder to multitask.
On the last part, success can mean different things to different people. If you can manage to treat having fun as success, then you can enjoy MMOs in limited quantity. In DDO, probably the most friendly game to this sorta playstyle, some people run weekly role playing groups or permadeath guilds (they delete their character if they die without a rez). Success is overcoming obstacles or enjoying the sights along the way, not picking up uberphatz.
But then there are people that will spend hours farming the same dungeon for its loot table. If success means that you need to have the best equipment, or you need to be the guy that knows everything about the game, or you need to complete every single quest or get the most money or be the best crafter, then yes, you're in danger of falling into the sixteen-hours-a-day uber farming trap. That's not even anything new though, back when I used to play consoles more I knew some friends who'd put in 200+ hours on one game trying to get every single bit of gear and poking around into every last corner so when they finally got to the last boss they could poke him with their collective pinky finger and he'd fall over dead. Meanwhile, I'd usually spend maybe 40 hours and enjoyed the challenge of beating the bosses while I was severely underlevelled. Ironically enough, I'm the only one that managed to get hooked on MMOs, though not as much for uberphatz.
Slashdot Mirror
The other board all seemed to think the same thing, so why's this groupthink and not that? :P
This is a complicated issue, and anyone coming down fully on one side or the other probably hasn't thought about it long enough. The cops were facing a noncompliant student of decent size. He may or may not have been actively resisting to leave. Some people say there was a disconnect between what he was yelling and what he was doing. He was certainly trying to rile up a crowd of students, most of whom are probably looking for some kind of cause to get behind. Tasing the guy might've seemed like the best way to disable him.
On the other hand, the cops threatened onlookers. Bringing out a taser in front of a mob is a bad idea if you don't absolutely have to. It's hard to imagine what five taser stuns will do that one or two will not. After the second, and even the first, did not have the intended effect, they should've probably switched to another tact.
Personally, I think the officer threatening the student asking for the badge number and the repeated tasings are misconduct, and should be dealt with appropriately. It seems this kid might've been looking to start trouble, but it still doesn't justify the response. I don't think this is a widespread issue of civil liberties, it's cops in a very tense situation that made a couple poor decisions.
It's to keep out people that don't belong, plain and simple. Students want expensive equipment available without having to pay for thefts, students want to use the library at 3AM and be safe. IDs are the easiest way for that to happen. On my old rural campus it would've been overkill, and mostly they let IDs slide, but at my new school in the middle of a city I do appreciate the added layer of security.
Unless someone's using it to bot in our favorite MMO, in which case they deserve it up the ass any way Blizzard can hand it out.
Wait, does that mean we can hold you accountable for Horizons? :P
Information was gathered from 6300+ test takers at 63 four-year colleges and universities, community colleges and high schols, who took the ICT Literacy Assessment in 2006. Institutions selected the students that would take the assessment. Some chose to test students enrolled in a particular course, some used a random sampling process, and still others issued an open invitation and ofered gift certificates as incentives. Because the data is not a random sample and is not representative of all US institutions or all higher education instutions, ETS urges caution in using these results to generalize to the greater population of college-age students.
But hey, what the hell, let's do it anyway! I just know that Dr. Dronebot's 8 AM Technology for Freshman Athletes section was happy to participate in the study and filled out all the answers to the absolute best of their ability.
Number theory is certainly math and, to be honest with you, I haven't seen a university where number theory is the domain of philosophy. I know a couple number theorists that would be very surprised to learn they were doing philosophy and not mathematics :P
I'm not sure what you mean by non-mathematical properties, but please reply, I am genuinely interested in what your school considered to be number theory. You might be confusing it with mathematical philosophy, which is essentially digging down deeper to find more and more fundamental axiomatic sets. For example, we intuitively know what the natural numbers are, so we essentially used them as undefineds for a long time (still today, even). About 100 years ago, when people were trying to prove the consistancy of some of the more popular axiomatic systems and maybe find an ultimate one from which everything could be derived, a couple mathematicians started working to construct the natural numbers in terms of sets. This is still mathematics, but it doesn't really give us any new information about the natural numbers, so it was sort of motivated by a philosophical purpose.
Calculus is an interesting learning tool I think. Not for the standard reasons that it demonstrates your critical thinking and all that crap, but because, if taught correctly, it can be the first really rigorous exposure to approximations, when they converge, when they don't converge, etc. If you can understand calculus on a rigorous level, I think you've learned something pretty valuable. If you just know the formulae and the rules, you've learned something that's conditionally useful, but only if you can directly apply it.
As to mathematicians using calculus, certainly not all of them do, but I don't think there are any out there that don't appreciate its power, and it's pretty fundamental to a fairly wide swathe of mathematics. Even if you do work purely with the discrete, most times there is some overlap. Embedding your discrete object into some other continuous space can provide interesting results. And there are things like generating functions, whose series expansions can give you the terms in a discrete sequence. There are also formulations of discrete derivitive...ish things.
Yeah, in the U.S., even getting a PhD, in undergrad and grad school combined I think most non-analysts wouldn't even take six analysis courses. Of course I'm talking in the strict sense in terms of what we usually title our courses, if you count dynamics, ODE, differential geometry, etc, you'd probably raise that count a little bit. If I successfully complete my PhD (or even if I don't, I guess, hehe), the only courses I'll have taken that I'd call analysis even in a broad sense are one semester each of undergrad analysis (advanced calc, definition of derivative, etc), undergrad dynamics, graduate analysis (measure theory mostly), graduate functional analysis, graduate ODE, undergrad differential geometry, and two courses of graduate riemannian geometry.
I don't know if our universities synch up exactly with yours in terms of meaning, but in the U.S. at the bachelor's level, it'd be very rare for anyone to have six semesters of analysis. Maybe if you count the calculus sequence and basic ODEs, but there's very little serious analysis generally occuring in those classes.
I have an undergraduate degree in math and I know for sure it didn't cover everything described there. However, with independent studies, summer research programs, and semesters abroad at schools with a stronger math program, I was able to shore up those weaknesses. If I had been at a school that had a decent graduate program in mathematics I could've moved onto that during my senior year.
More advanced topics in algebra are certainly not out of reach though, my school only had one semester of algebra, but I had a lot of friends at schools with two semesters, and in two semesters there's no reason you can't get to Galois theory.
Depends totally on what direction you're planning on taking.
If you want to go onto grad school, double major in math and take everything you can. Electives and even core requirements probably have heavy overlap. It tends to be one of the easiest combinations in terms of course load. Also consider testing out a fall semester grad class or two in your senior year. These will probably look a lot like math classes. If you can't hack an undergrad math degree, odds are very good that the graduate CS program will kill you.
I have to confess that I have limited experience in computer science myself, but I've seen a couple uses for various areas of mathematics.
I was doing an optimization problem where I was trying to find the maximal distance apart of two points on a given surface along the surface itself. To begin with, in these kinds of optimization problems you want to know when you've found the answer and what kind of accuracy you have. To answer those questions you're going to need estimates and approximations, things that you learn in analysis. If your calculation is of critical importance, you don't want to just eyeball something, you want to know that you've got an answer with the appropriate accuracy.
The surface was basically defined in two different pieces glued together along their boundaries. I needed to calculate lengths along these boundaries where they were joined together. To calculate these lengths explicitly was literally impossible given the types of curves, and I ended up with an integral equation I couldn't resolve. So I used a combination of approximations for the values of the integrals and something like Newton's method from calculus to get a quickly converging answer to a problem that ground Maple to a halt when I tried the naive solution of just plugging it in.
If you're sampling data and using it to estimate the behavior of something, say a flow (like the movement of the wind or a river), you're going to want to know how accurate your data needs to be for your model to produce good results. This is a question in dynamical systems. Granted, this analysis may not be performed by the CS guy, but being able to do this sort of thing combined with having a good knowledge of computers opens a lot of exciting possibilities in science.
Similarly, in robotics, the configuration space of things like different joints on robot arms is a multi-dimensional surface, an object that is studied in differential geometry and topology. Using methods from calculus you can find the critical points in the configuration space, which it is generally a Good Idea to avoid (like a robot with its arm extended straight out) because of the fragility of the tolerance there (again, back to dynamics).
If you have a recursion, there are some fairly standard tricks you can try to apply to obtain a generating function, which can often lead to an easier computation or even a closed-form solution. There is a free text available on the internet, generatingfunctionology, which could be used as the basis for an independent study.
Things like encryption algorithms have found good uses for number theory. Graph theory can model relations between data or routes over a network. Statistics and probability are very useful for all sorts of things. Straight-up algebra and logic courses are great tools to get your mind working, though admittedly a lot of topics in your standard undergrad algebra course might be of limited use unless you're planning on pursuing a graduate degree. DEs and their solutions are great for most scientific applications. Discrete Math is usually the name they give to the mathematics course that is tailored towards computer science applications, so that's almost a no-brainer.
No no, they were *cabalists*. Totally different.
Oh, so like Madonna.
We need more math and science teachers, but who is going to do it? I have a BSEE and an MSEE, I'm not going to take a 50% pay cut to go teach high school math, especially since the state thinks that my education isn't qualified to teach (I need to get a teaching degree). I graduated from a top 50 school that's known for engineering. A math major roommate started teaching high school math in Syracuse, NY. The kids were hell, and the state was requiring him to take teaching courses in order to be certified. He said screw it, passed his actuarial tests, is earning twice as much, works fewer hours, and doesn't have to put up with the kids.
They actually do have an interesting math fellowship program where they recruit people to NYC on a six year commitment to get your certs and teach. They pay for the degree and an additional $90k stipend over the six years on top of what you're making as a teacher. That is just a drop in the bucket, though, as far as recruiting math teachers. I was fortunate enough to have some very good ones in high school, but I'm gathering that my school was above average as far as high schools go.
Does this honestly happen in MMOs? I've played quite a few MMOs with female friends playing female characters, and I've also rolled a couple female toons myself, and I've never ever seen or heard of anyone getting hit on in tells. Of course you'll run into idiots and thirteen-year-olds that harrass people for shits and giggles, but that happens with everyone. The only game I've never gotten around to is WoW, so maybe if it's there...
FPS there is somewhat of a bigger problem, just because there is a metric shitload of women playing MMOs compared to FPS. I could see wanting to hide your gender there. I play an FPS with a relatively mature audience as that goes, and we had three women that regged on my main server. There wasn't really anything negative, but it was actually sort of painful to watch in the opposite direction -- instant reg status, conversation constantly centering around them, sex-related topics being introduced on IRC just for the "teehee I'm talking dirty with a RL girl" kick. Some people do thrive on that, but I wouldn't, and I'd wager some of the more introverted women that might enjoy those types of games wouldn't either.
Language is context sensitive. Words receive their meaning through collective usage and are defined self-referentially. Your forest is not precisely Wordsworth's forest, which, in turn, is different from my forest. Why don't you just describe Wordsworth's forest to me? Why do I have to read his poetry? Meaning cannot always be distilled down into a line's worth of dictionary definition: else, poetry would be a simple masturbatory exercise. "Orly" is the sum total of all the owl pictures, chat conversations, text messages, memes, and comedic references across the internet. Similarly with a h4x0r, not to be confused with a hacker. Just as omg is not zomg is not oh em gee, none of which are oh my god.
Additionally, if the unwashed masses employ language outside of Ye Olde Queen's Proper English, it works its way into the rhetoric of the educated simply by way of ironic usage and expressive dialogue. Thus these words do extend the language for everyone in a sort of metausage even assuming that they do not directly. You can start waving your IAAEM banner around and profess that swearing is the last refuge of the creatively challenged, but frankly, r00fl3z.
As much as it grates on me, this kind of change could actually increase the expressivity of language. For example, right now the vocabulary of netspeak, 1337speak, all that kinda shit gives way to a certain kind of self-aware ironic communication on the web. "Pwnt," "orly," "kthx," and all their derivatives have grown to express a unique meaning that's not really filled by any other words in the english lexicon.
If at some point it does become adopted widely as a legitimate means of communication, perhaps it will just add a new way of expressing a lower level of formality. It won't devalue preexisting language, but it might actually add new nuance.
I always thought government sanctioning of marriage really didn't have as much to do with direct encouragement of childbearing, as much as it does with creating stability. You're less likely to go out and shoot people when you have a family.
I'm... not entirely sure about that. I don't really have data to dispute you, but it seems like a lot of crime is born out of tumultuous relationships that people feel "stuck" in because it's the norm.
I don't care if the primary source is biased or not, if there's a primary source I want to see it. I would prefer to see the original evidence from someone whose ideology conflicts with mine rather than the sanitized version. If you can't ignore irrelevant partisanship to discuss the actual issue, you're going to miss a lot of discussion, which plays into the hands of all politicians.
In this case, though, the two paragraphs expended on Bush versus Clinton serve an interesting point in asking, "Why censorship now and not censorship then?" It's apropos because it responds to a Washington Post opinion piece comparing the two, and Clinton is the most recent example of a lying president's treatment by the press.
As to news for nerds and the overlap with politics and censorship, there's quite a bit of it in reality. Especially with IP moving to the forefront of first amendment debate.
I've got the same question, and actually, an additional one: the PA site mentioned that he went out of the city to grind monsters for a quest. I've put in my time on the MMOs, I've ground levels in previous RPGs, and frankly I'm done with grinding. I'm wondering exactly how much "grinding" there is in the game, whether it be for questing or levelling.
Just because you haven't availed yourself of traditional encyclopaedias doesn't mean that they aren't available to you.
Just because they're available doesn't mean they have as many people looking at the entries.
As to your second point, that's a false dichotomy. No one is claiming that the Encyclopaedia Britannica (or any other traditional encyclopaedia) is 100% accurate, but I think it's fair to say that you won't find entries in the E.B. along the lines of "KLINGON: Klingons are toal fagz omg!"
Why do we have five posts a day telling us that Wikipedia has flaws with +5 insightful people saying "olo u can't use in research reports omg"? Where do I flip to in Encyclopedia Britannica to see the editors' discussion of what they included on the page? On which page do I find a write-up of some arcane piece of mathematics? Where can I look back at previous editions that got left on the cutting room floor to compare if I think I found an error?
The point is that the two are not the same kind of tool at all, yet continually I find myself immersed in discussions of Wikipedia versus print encyclopedia because people insist on comparing one of the most useful, albeit imperfect, resources available today to one of the currently most useless and find the former lacking. I just wonder what kind of virtues they're attributing to the print encyclopedia.
Being an accomplished kernel hacker does not make you (for instance) a climatologist or economist, yet there is no shortage of coders who think that nothing more than their specific occupational intelligence qualifies them to speak authoritatively on those subjects. How seriously would anyone take an English major's critique of LISP syntax? Hell, look at all the flak Noam Chomsky catches around here: "He's just a linguist, what does he know about politics?"
Meh, degrees are something but they're not the entire picture, and I say that as someone firmly entrenched in academia. Especially undergrad major, which means approximately jack. I'd take an english major's critique of LISP syntax as seriously as the english major knows LISP. There are enough people with an overinflated opinion of their modest amount of knowledge at all levels to make me treat any new piece of information with skepticism, regardless of the source.
They had a system with some limitations that worked back in the 70's and was developed for lots and lots of money. They have a tried-and-true technology. The article says that their fleet is due to retire in 2010 and they were looking for a way to change this back in 2003, so my guess is probably that they're just waiting for the next generation of shuttle instead of retrofitting a system that already works within some bounds, which would cost both money and time. If they have to delay launches by a couple of months in the interim... well, that's not too steep of a price.
We're not playing tiddlywinks on the schoolyard here. We have a problem if the future of America, and by proxy most of the world, boils down to the ethics of a single private corporation.
Elections are really one place we should be neurotic about cheating.
I don't know about the rest of everyone, but I haven't cracked an encyclopedia in something more than fifteen years since I wrote my third grade report on Alaska. I can't recall the last time I've seen a print set, and the information available in online encyclopedias is minimal compared to the information available elsewhere on the web.
I don't include Wikipedia in the list of encyclopedias since, for some reason, it calls out the entire bandwagon of people waiting to tell me that it's not 100% factual and you shouldn't use it in a paper. The scary thought is that, perhaps, these people think that traditional encyclopedias have that virtue.
OK, Frankfurt isn't exactly a luxurious destination- but why are Wikipedia people going on "retreats", and who is footing the bill? And I don't mean just airfare or accomodations...I mean meeting facilities, dinners, etc...
Donations and partnerships I'd imagine. If you go to their budget page there's a more detailed analysis, but I'm a little too tired and apathetic to look through all of it. It's not very uncommon though, especially in a situation like this where you have an academic project that's massive in scope, plus this one's also got a pretty big financial interest.
I wouldn't say TV is better than MMOs inherently, but it is less likely to be as much of a timesink. Most shows only have up to 2.5 hours of new material every week (if they're a daily, half-hour show). There's no group of friends (virtual or not) waiting on you so that they can watch their TV show. If you decide to quit the Daily Show early and watch the rebroadcast later, you're not going to piss off your group/raid. You can half pay attention to the TV while you're doing your homework, talking to friends, etc, whereas an MMO requires active participation on some level, making it much harder to multitask.
On the last part, success can mean different things to different people. If you can manage to treat having fun as success, then you can enjoy MMOs in limited quantity. In DDO, probably the most friendly game to this sorta playstyle, some people run weekly role playing groups or permadeath guilds (they delete their character if they die without a rez). Success is overcoming obstacles or enjoying the sights along the way, not picking up uberphatz.
But then there are people that will spend hours farming the same dungeon for its loot table. If success means that you need to have the best equipment, or you need to be the guy that knows everything about the game, or you need to complete every single quest or get the most money or be the best crafter, then yes, you're in danger of falling into the sixteen-hours-a-day uber farming trap. That's not even anything new though, back when I used to play consoles more I knew some friends who'd put in 200+ hours on one game trying to get every single bit of gear and poking around into every last corner so when they finally got to the last boss they could poke him with their collective pinky finger and he'd fall over dead. Meanwhile, I'd usually spend maybe 40 hours and enjoyed the challenge of beating the bosses while I was severely underlevelled. Ironically enough, I'm the only one that managed to get hooked on MMOs, though not as much for uberphatz.