If you look at popular magazine articles about global warming, they're 50-50 for supporting it or dissenting from it.
If you look at peer reviewed scientific articles, it's a slightly different balance. There's almost one article saying that global warming isn't happening. We'll call it zero. There are hundreds supporting global warming, with the major differences being in cause and extent and severity of future trends.
But most people don't read the peer reviewed articles. They read Time and Cosmopolitan and watch Fox News [sic]. Most people aren't qualified to have an educated opinion about global warming, because they aren't reading research, they're reading the words of people that don't know anything. I don't care how many times you tell me that, in your opinion, d(x^2)/dx = 3x. You're still wrong. I don't care how many people agree with you either. You're all wrong.
Climate Science isn't a popularity contest. It's science.
I get consistently better reception (full 1080p) on most major channels with an antenna on my roof than friends get with cable. I'm watching a football game or something at home, leave to go to their house, and the picture is worse for what they're paying for. Seems silly to me.
I happily pay for Netflix because their customer service is awesome. The couple of times I've had problems with a DVD, it's been fixed instantly (or close enough as is reasonable) with no questions asked. I pay for a 7Mb internet connection, and complain when it's not performing. I'd pay for faster if I thought it'd be more reliable and truly faster.
I took a CS course some time ago in C. The instructor told us that it was perfectly okay to get help from another student on the assignment, because of how he constructed the exams: He would give you one additional feature to add to the program in class, and you had until the end of class to complete it. That way he would know if you really knew what you were doing, or whether you really copied someone else's work.
I helped another student with some of the assignments, including the last one. I knew what I was doing, they didn't. I went to check my grades a couple of weeks after the end of the semester, and there was a notification to come into the departmental office. It seems that the final assignment I turned in was very similar to another student's. My implementation of the final project was clean and quick, and adding the final feature took all of about 5 minutes. I said that the other student had cheated off of me, and I knew what I was doing: they didn't. Unfortunately, the other student had left town, already having a BS from another university (not in CS). This was a community college. The teacher himself never confronted me or made any comments that what was going on wasn't okay. In fact, he had specifically stated in class that it was okay, but the department chair said that he was 'on vacation, so unavailable'. I was furious, and fought it, but lost. I got an F on the final project, and my grade in the class was lowered an additional letter. It's been more than 10 years, and it still makes my blood boil.
I was talking to a friend who still lives in the same town recently and he told me that he has now heard this story 7 times from 7 different people who all had the same thing happen: no comments were made during the semester, and so while the teacher was on summer break, they had cheating charges leveled against them. It was the same teacher. His name is Scott Badman. He taught at Parkland Community College in Champaign, IL, and I think he's now finally retired.
This wasn't a meteor. It must have been a satellite. Meteors/meteorites move VERY fast and explode quickly. There are no extra-terrestrial objects that would match the velocity of the earth to within a few hundred mph (and not get accelerated to beyond that by gravity). That thing had to have been man-made.
Why is this news? Microsoft doesn't follow any standards, and never has. It's part of their strategy. Since they're bigger than everyone else, everyone has to adhere to their (non) standards, which means everyone else is always playing catchup, and can never get ahead. This way implementation is never judged on speed or size, but instead judged on "how Microsoft-like" it is. Microsoft always wins that comparison.
I was given a piece of advice when I started using email: "Don't put anything in email that you wouldn't want shouted by the town crier in the town square at high noon on announcement day."
There is no expectation of privacy in email.
However, ANY encryption method can be used to protect yourself legally. You can use rot13 if you like, or if you're paranoid, triple rot13. IANAL, but my understanding is that the DMCA prevents anyone from decrypting your email legally (if not practically). Decryption of digital transmissions is illegal.
If you want real privacy on email you send, use pgp.
Exponential decay uses e most of the time, because the derivatives and integrals are a lot less messy. e is irrational. What makes you think you're using 2? And what makes you think that the decay only has values for integer time? What's 1/3 of the way between (1/2)^3 and (1/2)^4? An irrational number.
Go to your nice local Unitarian/Universalist Church. There's lots of friendly people there. They like to do things that help the community. Chicks dig guys that help the community, and since you're a fellow Unitarian, you might be worth talking to (even if you're introverted).
There were many editors on the book, but unfortunately, they weren't actually allowed to do anything. I mean nothing. They couldn't change commas or periods or point out factual errors. It's bad because he paid to have it published. He really didn't do anything new in the book. People have been trying to come up with reasons for complex-looking patterns for a while. Occam's razor says there should be a simple reason.
100:1 odds says this thing is underwhelming at best. Most of the great stuff attributed to Wolfram is only because he was the one who had the money.
I recommend to my students when faced with this situation that they not react. If it's genuinely an emergency, then do what must be done.
When the teacher takes further action, simply state something to the effect of, "I understand the rules. This was a genuine emergency. I understand if you feel the need to take further action."
If you get assigned detention, then serve it and try to get some homework done during it. I've found that most teachers and admins won't push it too far if the student/parent isn't being overly self-righteous.
Most CFOs are old guys. Like 60+. When they were entering the work force in their 20's, it was 1970 or so, a time when there was massive sexism in America. So is it any surprise that there are more men than women at that level of corporations?
It's not like they're given these jobs. They have to fight and sacrifice a lot to get there. They don't get to spend a lot of time with family. Many of them didn't take a lot of vacation time and worked 60+ hours a week to get where they are now.
Which would you rather do, work nonstop climbing the corporate ladder or stay at home and raise your children. There are a lot of women who would take the latter choice. There is virtually no opportunity for a man to make that choice.
It's not so much that they have a "1,2,many" counting system as that they have NO ABSTRACT concepts in their language. If someone in the tribe currently living hasn't seen it, then it doesn't exist. They have no history!
They spend less than one tenth of 1% of their budget celebrating their continued technological successes. That's probably less than ANY private company anywhere. It's not like they're not getting stuff done.
Sosetta
It should bug you. Specifically because it is a method that obfuscates the underlying mathematics. The underlying mathematics (area of a rectangle) is VASTLY easier to understand.
As a math teacher, I'd say you're better off getting help from someone competent than going it alone.
That being said, and the understanding that you don't want to pour in the money required to get a good teacher (craigslist looking for a math tutor is a place to start. If you start off with one and it doesn't feel like a good emotional fit, then get a different one. A good tutor will try to get a solid grasp of where you are now, and then start taking steps to get you moving forward from where you are. A great tutor will help you when you're stuck, but also give you specific resources that you can use to work on exactly what you need to be working on right now in your time away from the tutor), here's my advice.
First off, understand what exactly it is you are trying to do. You are trying to build abstract thought paths in your brain. This is hard to do. Many of the math problems you were presented with in high school were an attempt to get you to make the leap from specific application of concepts in lots of different ways to the abstract concept itself. In algebra, you do tons of factoring and other ways of solving the quadratic equation. The point of all those problems was that you would, through many problems approaching the concepts from different angles, fundamentally understand what parabolas are all about. Accurate quadratic thinking is much much harder than linear thinking. When you see a line, you know it's a line, but when you see a curve, it might be quadratic, cubic, exponential, logarithmic, or any of a host of variations.
So, do a bunch of problems to build your skills and gain fluency with the concepts. Then try to figure out exactly what it is that's really going on. There's often some really obvious reason that something works the way it does, if you can find it. For instance, the whole FOIL method for multiplying binomials like this: (x+3)(x+2). If you draw a rectangle, and put the x+2 on top and the x+3 going down the side, and break the rectangle into an x part and a 2 part vertically, and an x part and a 3 part going horizontally, then you'll get 4 rectangles that all add up to make the original rectangle. Their areas are x^2, 2x for the first row and 3x, 6 for the second row. Those are, respectively, the First, Outer, Inner, and Last products of the FOIL method. If you draw the picture, it's really obvious, and you'll wonder why you struggled with it for so long (if you did). A good tutor can help make it all easy for you by showing you the really obvious reasons why things work the way they do.
Photobucket already 'censors' content. Anything not okay for prime time TV gets deleted.
This isn't a bad thing. It's what keeps photobucket from being a free porn hosting site. It also helps to catch people who do things that ought not be done (think of the children). The bar for what's okay and what's not okay might move with News Corp, but make no mistake, there's been a bar for a while.
My significant other does content moderation for them.
She wants to be a teacher. You cannot do this without a teaching certificate. They're withholding that which she needs to get the job that she wants (and the reason for her attending the university in the first place)
$75k is a little light. She could find justification for $750k if she tried just a little bit harder.
There are a lot of cowards in management. Even more in education management.
Parents get cranky. They send their best children to a school and they want to believe that that school is the absolute best for their children, even when they are not themselves the best for their children. When parents get together to talk about teachers, any rumor isn't off limits, and if enough of them get together, they will talk to the board of education. If the teacher isn't fired, the administrator will be.
You can't make everyone happy all the time, but some administrators try. They're the bad ones, and will lose their job regardless.
In this case, you have a school administrator who is afraid that they will get canned because a teacher that they graduated cast their school in a less-than-perfect light.
Is there a personal vendetta here, and this is merely an excuse to do what they wanted to do? I see the pirate hat, but no evidence to show that what she's drinking out of the cup is beer or any other alcoholic beverage. She could be drinking water, for all we can tell.
She's got a case, to be sure, and I wouldn't be suing for $75,000. I'd be suing for $750,000.00 at least.
"But it can also apply when someone's writings can disturb an individual, Delelio said"
It will be interesting when Lee sues Delelio for violating his constitutional right to free speech. Delelio doesn't match my quick check of Supreme Court Justices.
In order for inciting a riot to stick as a charge, you must actually incite a riot, not merely try to. This is a student completing an assignment honestly.
There are very few restrictions on free speech. This is absolutely not one of them. I would say that Lee's lawyer should earn his money on this one.
The studies show that the fact that the person you're talking with isn't there causes you to spend about 4 times as much of your feeble brainpower on the conversation. There's no freebies of expression, gesture, shared-experience, etc. so you have to concentrate that much harder to follow the conversation.
When you are talking with someone in the car with you, and something happens that you need to be aware of, you both stop talking, then resume when it's okay. When you're on your cell phone, the other person merrily continues, causing the cranial overload.
Yelling "Fire" in a crowded theatre is one of those not-free areas of speech. Inciting a riot is VERY hard to prove. You can arrest someone for it, but they will immediately be released unless they were successful. So you have to have had intent to incite the riot, and everyone would have to follow your direct impetus. The cops can arrest you for trying, but you'll be immediately released (which is fine, since their primary concern was to get you away from the action).
So, no, it's not unlimited free speech, but it's darn close to it.
As a public school, you have virtually no control over who gets to go to your school and who doesn't. The Assistant Principal cannot do anything at all to the students when they are not in school or on school grounds. "On school grounds" extends from the front door of the students' houses to the school itself if the student is coming to or from school, by the way. Once the student is at home, there is little that the school administrator can do directly.
Something must be done. You say that the people who read MySpace aren't the people who know the AP, but that's not true at all. The school administrator absolutely MUST maintain the respect of the community and the students at the school. This is critical. Have you been to a school where an administrator wasn't respected by the students? It's UGLY, and stuff like Columbine happens when it gets really bad.
I'm not saying that the AP in question deserves respect from the entire student body, but these students posted false and defamatory information about her in a location where the entire student body can (and will, once they know about it) read it. This undermines her effectiveness and makes her job intolerable. If you cannot hold the students accountable directly, and you can't simply kick them out of school (you can't), then what can you do? You ultimately MUST hold the parents responsible. They are the ones who can do something about it. It would not surprise me if the AP did contact the parents directly in some way, and there might have been a barrier or a refusal because of an incident. Rather than deal with the incident directly, the students (and parents who are legally responsible for their actions) chose to defame and slander.
Put yourself in the shoes of the administrator. How could you deal with this situation?
-sosetta
Slashdot Mirror
If you look at popular magazine articles about global warming, they're 50-50 for supporting it or dissenting from it.
If you look at peer reviewed scientific articles, it's a slightly different balance. There's almost one article saying that global warming isn't happening. We'll call it zero. There are hundreds supporting global warming, with the major differences being in cause and extent and severity of future trends.
But most people don't read the peer reviewed articles. They read Time and Cosmopolitan and watch Fox News [sic]. Most people aren't qualified to have an educated opinion about global warming, because they aren't reading research, they're reading the words of people that don't know anything. I don't care how many times you tell me that, in your opinion, d(x^2)/dx = 3x. You're still wrong. I don't care how many people agree with you either. You're all wrong.
Climate Science isn't a popularity contest. It's science.
I get consistently better reception (full 1080p) on most major channels with an antenna on my roof than friends get with cable. I'm watching a football game or something at home, leave to go to their house, and the picture is worse for what they're paying for. Seems silly to me.
I happily pay for Netflix because their customer service is awesome. The couple of times I've had problems with a DVD, it's been fixed instantly (or close enough as is reasonable) with no questions asked. I pay for a 7Mb internet connection, and complain when it's not performing. I'd pay for faster if I thought it'd be more reliable and truly faster.
I took a CS course some time ago in C. The instructor told us that it was perfectly okay to get help from another student on the assignment, because of how he constructed the exams: He would give you one additional feature to add to the program in class, and you had until the end of class to complete it. That way he would know if you really knew what you were doing, or whether you really copied someone else's work.
I helped another student with some of the assignments, including the last one. I knew what I was doing, they didn't. I went to check my grades a couple of weeks after the end of the semester, and there was a notification to come into the departmental office. It seems that the final assignment I turned in was very similar to another student's. My implementation of the final project was clean and quick, and adding the final feature took all of about 5 minutes. I said that the other student had cheated off of me, and I knew what I was doing: they didn't. Unfortunately, the other student had left town, already having a BS from another university (not in CS). This was a community college. The teacher himself never confronted me or made any comments that what was going on wasn't okay. In fact, he had specifically stated in class that it was okay, but the department chair said that he was 'on vacation, so unavailable'. I was furious, and fought it, but lost. I got an F on the final project, and my grade in the class was lowered an additional letter. It's been more than 10 years, and it still makes my blood boil.
I was talking to a friend who still lives in the same town recently and he told me that he has now heard this story 7 times from 7 different people who all had the same thing happen: no comments were made during the semester, and so while the teacher was on summer break, they had cheating charges leveled against them. It was the same teacher. His name is Scott Badman. He taught at Parkland Community College in Champaign, IL, and I think he's now finally retired.
So, did I cheat?
This wasn't a meteor. It must have been a satellite. Meteors/meteorites move VERY fast and explode quickly. There are no extra-terrestrial objects that would match the velocity of the earth to within a few hundred mph (and not get accelerated to beyond that by gravity). That thing had to have been man-made.
Why is this news? Microsoft doesn't follow any standards, and never has. It's part of their strategy. Since they're bigger than everyone else, everyone has to adhere to their (non) standards, which means everyone else is always playing catchup, and can never get ahead. This way implementation is never judged on speed or size, but instead judged on "how Microsoft-like" it is. Microsoft always wins that comparison.
I was given a piece of advice when I started using email: "Don't put anything in email that you wouldn't want shouted by the town crier in the town square at high noon on announcement day."
There is no expectation of privacy in email.
However, ANY encryption method can be used to protect yourself legally. You can use rot13 if you like, or if you're paranoid, triple rot13. IANAL, but my understanding is that the DMCA prevents anyone from decrypting your email legally (if not practically). Decryption of digital transmissions is illegal.
If you want real privacy on email you send, use pgp.
Exponential decay uses e most of the time, because the derivatives and integrals are a lot less messy. e is irrational. What makes you think you're using 2? And what makes you think that the decay only has values for integer time? What's 1/3 of the way between (1/2)^3 and (1/2)^4? An irrational number.
That's just the notation. Math is abstract concepts. Abstract concepts existed before the wind. They're abstract.
Go to your nice local Unitarian/Universalist Church. There's lots of friendly people there. They like to do things that help the community. Chicks dig guys that help the community, and since you're a fellow Unitarian, you might be worth talking to (even if you're introverted).
100:1 odds says this thing is underwhelming at best. Most of the great stuff attributed to Wolfram is only because he was the one who had the money.
How do you think the situation should have been handled, then? Let the girl do whatever she wants? At what point do you not accept her bad behavior?
I recommend to my students when faced with this situation that they not react. If it's genuinely an emergency, then do what must be done.
When the teacher takes further action, simply state something to the effect of, "I understand the rules. This was a genuine emergency. I understand if you feel the need to take further action."
If you get assigned detention, then serve it and try to get some homework done during it. I've found that most teachers and admins won't push it too far if the student/parent isn't being overly self-righteous.
It's not like they're given these jobs. They have to fight and sacrifice a lot to get there. They don't get to spend a lot of time with family. Many of them didn't take a lot of vacation time and worked 60+ hours a week to get where they are now.
Which would you rather do, work nonstop climbing the corporate ladder or stay at home and raise your children. There are a lot of women who would take the latter choice. There is virtually no opportunity for a man to make that choice.
It's not so much that they have a "1,2,many" counting system as that they have NO ABSTRACT concepts in their language. If someone in the tribe currently living hasn't seen it, then it doesn't exist. They have no history!
Sosetta
They spend less than one tenth of 1% of their budget celebrating their continued technological successes. That's probably less than ANY private company anywhere. It's not like they're not getting stuff done. Sosetta
It should bug you. Specifically because it is a method that obfuscates the underlying mathematics. The underlying mathematics (area of a rectangle) is VASTLY easier to understand.
As a math teacher, I'd say you're better off getting help from someone competent than going it alone.
That being said, and the understanding that you don't want to pour in the money required to get a good teacher (craigslist looking for a math tutor is a place to start. If you start off with one and it doesn't feel like a good emotional fit, then get a different one. A good tutor will try to get a solid grasp of where you are now, and then start taking steps to get you moving forward from where you are. A great tutor will help you when you're stuck, but also give you specific resources that you can use to work on exactly what you need to be working on right now in your time away from the tutor), here's my advice.
First off, understand what exactly it is you are trying to do. You are trying to build abstract thought paths in your brain. This is hard to do. Many of the math problems you were presented with in high school were an attempt to get you to make the leap from specific application of concepts in lots of different ways to the abstract concept itself. In algebra, you do tons of factoring and other ways of solving the quadratic equation. The point of all those problems was that you would, through many problems approaching the concepts from different angles, fundamentally understand what parabolas are all about. Accurate quadratic thinking is much much harder than linear thinking. When you see a line, you know it's a line, but when you see a curve, it might be quadratic, cubic, exponential, logarithmic, or any of a host of variations.
So, do a bunch of problems to build your skills and gain fluency with the concepts. Then try to figure out exactly what it is that's really going on. There's often some really obvious reason that something works the way it does, if you can find it. For instance, the whole FOIL method for multiplying binomials like this: (x+3)(x+2). If you draw a rectangle, and put the x+2 on top and the x+3 going down the side, and break the rectangle into an x part and a 2 part vertically, and an x part and a 3 part going horizontally, then you'll get 4 rectangles that all add up to make the original rectangle. Their areas are x^2, 2x for the first row and 3x, 6 for the second row. Those are, respectively, the First, Outer, Inner, and Last products of the FOIL method. If you draw the picture, it's really obvious, and you'll wonder why you struggled with it for so long (if you did). A good tutor can help make it all easy for you by showing you the really obvious reasons why things work the way they do.
Good luck
Fermat's Last Theorem was the hard one to solve. Fermat's Little Theorem isn't hard to prove.
-Sosetta
Photobucket already 'censors' content. Anything not okay for prime time TV gets deleted.
This isn't a bad thing. It's what keeps photobucket from being a free porn hosting site. It also helps to catch people who do things that ought not be done (think of the children). The bar for what's okay and what's not okay might move with News Corp, but make no mistake, there's been a bar for a while.
My significant other does content moderation for them.
She wants to be a teacher. You cannot do this without a teaching certificate. They're withholding that which she needs to get the job that she wants (and the reason for her attending the university in the first place)
$75k is a little light. She could find justification for $750k if she tried just a little bit harder.
There are a lot of cowards in management. Even more in education management.
Parents get cranky. They send their best children to a school and they want to believe that that school is the absolute best for their children, even when they are not themselves the best for their children. When parents get together to talk about teachers, any rumor isn't off limits, and if enough of them get together, they will talk to the board of education. If the teacher isn't fired, the administrator will be.
You can't make everyone happy all the time, but some administrators try. They're the bad ones, and will lose their job regardless.
In this case, you have a school administrator who is afraid that they will get canned because a teacher that they graduated cast their school in a less-than-perfect light.
Is there a personal vendetta here, and this is merely an excuse to do what they wanted to do? I see the pirate hat, but no evidence to show that what she's drinking out of the cup is beer or any other alcoholic beverage. She could be drinking water, for all we can tell.
She's got a case, to be sure, and I wouldn't be suing for $75,000. I'd be suing for $750,000.00 at least.
Sosetta
"But it can also apply when someone's writings can disturb an individual, Delelio said"
It will be interesting when Lee sues Delelio for violating his constitutional right to free speech. Delelio doesn't match my quick check of Supreme Court Justices.
In order for inciting a riot to stick as a charge, you must actually incite a riot, not merely try to. This is a student completing an assignment honestly.
There are very few restrictions on free speech. This is absolutely not one of them. I would say that Lee's lawyer should earn his money on this one.
Sosetta
The studies show that the fact that the person you're talking with isn't there causes you to spend about 4 times as much of your feeble brainpower on the conversation. There's no freebies of expression, gesture, shared-experience, etc. so you have to concentrate that much harder to follow the conversation.
When you are talking with someone in the car with you, and something happens that you need to be aware of, you both stop talking, then resume when it's okay. When you're on your cell phone, the other person merrily continues, causing the cranial overload.
The cases where free speech isn't are very few.
Yelling "Fire" in a crowded theatre is one of those not-free areas of speech. Inciting a riot is VERY hard to prove. You can arrest someone for it, but they will immediately be released unless they were successful. So you have to have had intent to incite the riot, and everyone would have to follow your direct impetus. The cops can arrest you for trying, but you'll be immediately released (which is fine, since their primary concern was to get you away from the action).
So, no, it's not unlimited free speech, but it's darn close to it.
Something must be done. You say that the people who read MySpace aren't the people who know the AP, but that's not true at all. The school administrator absolutely MUST maintain the respect of the community and the students at the school. This is critical. Have you been to a school where an administrator wasn't respected by the students? It's UGLY, and stuff like Columbine happens when it gets really bad.
I'm not saying that the AP in question deserves respect from the entire student body, but these students posted false and defamatory information about her in a location where the entire student body can (and will, once they know about it) read it. This undermines her effectiveness and makes her job intolerable. If you cannot hold the students accountable directly, and you can't simply kick them out of school (you can't), then what can you do? You ultimately MUST hold the parents responsible. They are the ones who can do something about it. It would not surprise me if the AP did contact the parents directly in some way, and there might have been a barrier or a refusal because of an incident. Rather than deal with the incident directly, the students (and parents who are legally responsible for their actions) chose to defame and slander.
Put yourself in the shoes of the administrator. How could you deal with this situation? -sosetta