Dennis Fernandez, that is. He gave a seminar at a conference on artificial intelligence in Honolulu last year. His presentation was very focussed on the use of patents as an offensive business weapon. Basically, he was telling us to look very carefully at what the competition is doing, then file patents on anything they could develop from what they currently have. He called it ring-fencing the competition.
Although I don't agree with his sense of ethics in this matter, he is actually a pretty nice guy.
Look carefully, people, he's in New Zealand, the USian feds don't have any power here. And I think it would be a bit hard for the US to justify sending troops here to grab him and sling him in Guantanamo prison.
Not that I wouldn't put it past those wankers Bush and Ashcroft to try.
I think that's a shameful answer to an important issue
Not to be too flip, but this issue is a minor one. The important issue is how to deal with student feedback
Reading your post, I think you missed my second point, which was: universities are not vocational training institutes
it's also important to expose students to the most modern practices and tools in their field.
No, it is not. It is important to teach students how to learn these things.
This can mean the difference between them getting jobs, or being left in the dark
I can't speak for employers, because I am not one. But, the employers who come to graduate recruitment emphasise that they want thinking individuals who can learn new things, not people who already have all the knowledge. It seems that most employers who pick up graduates straight from university will train them in the areas they need to know.
I understand that basic theory must be taught, and using tried-and-tested material is the easiest approach
For a university, teaching the theory is more important than teaching the practice. Using tried and tested material isn't just the easiest approach, it is the best approach. Students don't like it when you use them to debug courses. I know this from experience.
It is so much work and so time consuming to rework a course, that by the time the course is reworked the technology the instructor is trying to incorporate is no longer cutting edge. Other problems include a lack of familiarity with the material on the part of other people in the teaching team. Also, as I stated before, the instructor will have to give up most or all of their research work to do so, which will impact the reputation of the instructor and school, and thence of the students who graduate.
Finally, a point that I should have included in my original post - there are only a certain number of weeks in the teaching semester. If you want to cover the basics as well as the bleeding edge stuff, then the depth and quality of the material taught is going to suffer. Students (in my experience, based on the feedback I have gotten from students) prefer depth of material over breadth of material.
suggest that you ponder whether you are doing what's best for your students, or what's easiest for you.
What is best for students is to give them the learning skills they need to pick up cutting-edge technology, for them to have an instructor and institution with good reputations, and for them to be taught a course that is stable and problem-free. Frequent upgrading of courses will jepordise all of these things.
Finally, I do spend a lot of time and effort eliciting feedback from the students, and in considering what they have to say. However, not everyone's suggestions are going to be acted on. One student in one presentation of a course isn't going to affect a change in that course, it's as simple as that.
I teach two undergraduate courses. I know what it's like to have students complaining about the content of a course, and I have two comments about this topic.
Firstly, changing what is taught in a course is very very very very hard work, and a course that has been restructured or had its content changed is very very very likely to have problems with said new content. It is simply not practical to keep updating a course to deal with new technology. Once a course is stable, it is far better to leave it that way. Also, the staff teaching that course must spend time doing research and likely supervising postgrad students. They must do this to keep their job and to maintain the reputation of the university.
Secondly, universities are not vocational training institutes. University teaches the basic theory and concepts behind the technology, and teaches students how to learn these concepts. The student should then be able to apply these theories and concepts in an employment situation.
If you want to learn how to use new technology solely to apply those skills to a job, go to polytech or do a training course. Don't sit around whining to the course instructor, because frankly he probably knows a hell of a lot more about how to run a course than you do.
One wonders when the time will come when you'll just be able to press a button and your movie will be generated for you. Surely it will be simpler to simulate hollywood producers first?
If it stops Hayden Christiansen getting in front of a camera again, I'm all for it.
As I recall, that was to detonate radar fused shells. Plain old mechanical impact fused shells weren't effected. A laser will kill the ones the radio system won't.
but though awareness was present in the program, failure was not allowed by the system. There were no provisions for aborting the mission and ejecting the passenger capsule.
Probably because there was no way to eject the passenger compartment. In fact, there was no way the crew could have escaped that situation. Detachment of either the orbiter or the boosters while the boosters are firing is not possible.
Before the events of September 12 (as it was here, we're 16 hours ahead of the USA), there was absolutely no security on domestic flights. No x-ray, metal detectors, nothing. There's never been a highjacking here, so we didn't think we needed any. Now, all of the major centres have security checking. The airport security is administered by the government, as well, not private companies.
In May, I travelled to Honolulu for a conference. I flew directly from Auckland to Honolulu. At Auckland, on the way out, I had to go through two sets of metal detectors and x-rays, as well as a search of my carry-on luggage (although that may have been because I was carrying a plastic poster roll). When I flew from Honolulu back to Auckland, there was just a single metal detector and a single x-ray, and no-one searched my poster roll, which I was still carrying. In short, the security for international flights in New Zealand was much better than in Hawaii.
(begin irony)
As a New Zealander, I now officially love the DMCA! For years we New Zealanders have tried to compete with the USA's technical dominance. Now, we don't have to worry! The USA is destroying it's own technical dominance, and we don't have to do a thing to make it happen! Woohoo!
(end irony)
This law courtesy of the US Congress®, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Disney® Corporation.
About 10 years ago, Dale Brown wrote a book called 'Sky Masters' that described exactly this kind of launch technique, right down to a reusable booster with scissor wings. The only difference is that the Sky Masters launch system used a dedicated aircraft, instead of a generic transport.
And the buggers had the gall to patent this? Dale Brown should sue.
To be honest, I'm in a different situation: I'm a researcher (PhD candidate) and a teacher (second and third year university courses, mostly) but I know the feeling of things going wrong. Some of things I deal with are:
a class lab that I wrote a month before and tested three times has an error in it that stops it from working.
one of my experiments just will not give me useable results, no matter how much I fiddle with it.
the people I am writing a paper with are nowhere to be found, and the deadline is one week away(!!!)
Things I do to cope with these, include the following:
Drink a lot of beer. It is important to remember the following about this strategy, though:
I do it only with people I trust, and who will take care of me and not wind me up further
I don't do it too much. Alcohol does not make my problems go away, it just relaxes me for a little while and makes me better able to deal with them when the hangover's gone
Spend a quiet evening at home with my other half. This is especially helpful to both of us, since she's a researcher as well
Leave the thing that is winding me up, and work on something else. For this reason I always like to have several projects going at once, so I can easily switch to another when I get bored with one of them.
Read a book. A good, low brain power novel will do wonders for clearing your head.
Ask for help. I learned the hard way that letting my pride get in the way makes things worse in the long run. Knowing when to ask for help is one of the most important skills I've learned in the last few years.
Punch the wall. Really, really hard. It hurts like hell, but it's a great way to release stress and tension, It is important not to hit a thin bit of the wall, though, and not to do it more than once as this may lead to cracks (in the wall, or in your hand, depending on which is stronger / harder)
Things I will not do, are the following:
Continue working on the thing that is getting me down. That will just depess me further, and make me completely unproductive
Drink on my own. One of my rules about alcohol is that I do not drink alone, and I don't drink to feel better about myself. Drink to relax, not improve your self-esteem.
Forget that no matter the problem I am dealing with now, I am still a good person, who has done a lot of good work and touched a lot of people. That might sound like touch-feely new age crap, but a positive self image is important.
Take out my stress and frustrations on other people. I often get tempted to snap at my friends, but I know that they are the ones who will help me through the rough patches.
Like I said, I'm in a different situation, but I think a lot of these strategies are fairly universal.
The blast wave would travel quite a long way, but worse than that would be the fallout. A two mile crater would mean the excavation of a vast quantity of soil and rock, probably billions of tonnes of it. And that all has to come down somewhere, and would probably still be quite hot when it did descend. So, we've got the combined blast / tsunami / red-hot fallout hitting large distances from the impact site, all of which is incredibly destructive. Follow that up with disease and famine from the flooding, and you could easily lose a few primitive civilisations.
Once upon a midnight dreary, while I coded weak and weary
Over many a quaint and curious file of forgotten code --
While I type'ed nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of someone gently typing, typing at my office door,
"Tis some visitor" I muttered, "typing by my office door--
only this, and nothing more"
Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak November;
And each seperate dying monitor wrought it's ghost upon the floor.
Eagerly I wished the morrow, vainly I had sought to borrow
From my code surcease of sorrow, sorrow for the local coffee store --
For that rare and radiant haven known as the local coffee store--,
Close'd now, for evermore.
And the sudden sad uncertain terror of each single compiler error
Thrilled me--filled me with fantastic pleasures I had never felt before;
So that now, to still the beating of my hard drive I stood repeating,
"Tis some late visitor coding by my office door--
Some late visitor typing outside my office door--
That is it, and nothing more"
Presently my code grew stronger; bugging me then no longer,
"Sir", said I "or Madam, truly your caffeine I do implore;
But the fact is I was coding, and so gently came you typing,
And so faintly came you coding, coding by my office door,
That I was scarce was sure I heard you"--here I opened wide the door--
My bosses there, and nothing more.
Deep unto the bosses peering, long I stood there wondering, peering,
Doubting, dreaming dreams no coder ever dared to dream before;
But the silence was unbroken, and the bosses gave no token,
And the only sound there heard was the whispered query "Work more?"
This they whispered, and I echoed back, the whispered words "Work more"
Merely this, and nothing more.
Slashdot Mirror
... is of a lifting body accident. ..Which the pilot walked away from.
If "walking away from" means having your eye torn out...
No. It crashed in Sweden, not New Zealand ;-)
in a country that elected Buckeroo Bush as president.
My irony metre just exploded.
Dennis Fernandez, that is. He gave a seminar at a conference on artificial intelligence in Honolulu last year. His presentation was very focussed on the use of patents as an offensive business weapon. Basically, he was telling us to look very carefully at what the competition is doing, then file patents on anything they could develop from what they currently have. He called it ring-fencing the competition.
Although I don't agree with his sense of ethics in this matter, he is actually a pretty nice guy.
The difference is that the cruise missile without warhead is just a remote controlled aircraft, while a phalanx system is an automatic weapon.
Not that I wouldn't put it past those wankers Bush and Ashcroft to try.
Will declare New Zealand to be part of the Axis of Evil.
Not to be too flip, but this issue is a minor one. The important issue is how to deal with student feedback
Reading your post, I think you missed my second point, which was:
universities are not vocational training institutes
it's also important to expose students to the most modern practices and tools in their field.
No, it is not. It is important to teach students how to learn these things.
This can mean the difference between them getting jobs, or being left in the dark
I can't speak for employers, because I am not one. But, the employers who come to graduate recruitment emphasise that they want thinking individuals who can learn new things, not people who already have all the knowledge. It seems that most employers who pick up graduates straight from university will train them in the areas they need to know.
I understand that basic theory must be taught, and using tried-and-tested material is the easiest approach
For a university, teaching the theory is more important than teaching the practice. Using tried and tested material isn't just the easiest approach, it is the best approach. Students don't like it when you use them to debug courses. I know this from experience.
It is so much work and so time consuming to rework a course, that by the time the course is reworked the technology the instructor is trying to incorporate is no longer cutting edge. Other problems include a lack of familiarity with the material on the part of other people in the teaching team. Also, as I stated before, the instructor will have to give up most or all of their research work to do so, which will impact the reputation of the instructor and school, and thence of the students who graduate.
Finally, a point that I should have included in my original post - there are only a certain number of weeks in the teaching semester. If you want to cover the basics as well as the bleeding edge stuff, then the depth and quality of the material taught is going to suffer. Students (in my experience, based on the feedback I have gotten from students) prefer depth of material over breadth of material.
suggest that you ponder whether you are doing what's best for your students, or what's easiest for you.
What is best for students is to give them the learning skills they need to pick up cutting-edge technology, for them to have an instructor and institution with good reputations, and for them to be taught a course that is stable and problem-free. Frequent upgrading of courses will jepordise all of these things.
Finally, I do spend a lot of time and effort eliciting feedback from the students, and in considering what they have to say. However, not everyone's suggestions are going to be acted on. One student in one presentation of a course isn't going to affect a change in that course, it's as simple as that.
if it wasn't for the students.
I teach two undergraduate courses. I know what it's like to have students complaining about the content of a course, and I have two comments about this topic.
Firstly, changing what is taught in a course is very very very very hard work, and a course that has been restructured or had its content changed is very very very likely to have problems with said new content. It is simply not practical to keep updating a course to deal with new technology. Once a course is stable, it is far better to leave it that way. Also, the staff teaching that course must spend time doing research and likely supervising postgrad students. They must do this to keep their job and to maintain the reputation of the university.
Secondly, universities are not vocational training institutes. University teaches the basic theory and concepts behind the technology, and teaches students how to learn these concepts. The student should then be able to apply these theories and concepts in an employment situation.
If you want to learn how to use new technology solely to apply those skills to a job, go to polytech or do a training course. Don't sit around whining to the course instructor, because frankly he probably knows a hell of a lot more about how to run a course than you do.
If it stops Hayden Christiansen getting in front of a camera again, I'm all for it.
As I recall, that was to detonate radar fused shells. Plain old mechanical impact fused shells weren't effected. A laser will kill the ones the radio system won't.
Probably because there was no way to eject the passenger compartment. In fact, there was no way the crew could have escaped that situation. Detachment of either the orbiter or the boosters while the boosters are firing is not possible.
That makes sense - because no one would ever high jack a plane that took off from an American aiport, would they?
I think the problem wasn't just that someone was photographing police cars - it's that someone middle eastern was photographing polic cars.
In May, I travelled to Honolulu for a conference. I flew directly from Auckland to Honolulu. At Auckland, on the way out, I had to go through two sets of metal detectors and x-rays, as well as a search of my carry-on luggage (although that may have been because I was carrying a plastic poster roll). When I flew from Honolulu back to Auckland, there was just a single metal detector and a single x-ray, and no-one searched my poster roll, which I was still carrying. In short, the security for international flights in New Zealand was much better than in Hawaii.
James Tiberius
My youngest nephew is named Connor, for the Highlander
The movie hasn't opened in NZ yet, but from what I've read here, I don't think I'll go and see it, I'll just read the book again.
As a New Zealander, I now officially love the DMCA! For years we New Zealanders have tried to compete with the USA's technical dominance. Now, we don't have to worry! The USA is destroying it's own technical dominance, and we don't have to do a thing to make it happen! Woohoo!
(end irony)
This law courtesy of the US Congress®, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Disney® Corporation.
Kaikoura (it's a smallish town) has a thriving whale-watch industry, btw.
And the buggers had the gall to patent this? Dale Brown should sue.
- a class lab that I wrote a month before and tested three times has an error in it that stops it from working.
- one of my experiments just will not give me useable results, no matter how much I fiddle with it.
- the people I am writing a paper with are nowhere to be found, and the deadline is one week away(!!!)
Things I do to cope with these, include the following:Things I will not do, are the following:
Like I said, I'm in a different situation, but I think a lot of these strategies are fairly universal.
The blast wave would travel quite a long way, but worse than that would be the fallout. A two mile crater would mean the excavation of a vast quantity of soil and rock, probably billions of tonnes of it. And that all has to come down somewhere, and would probably still be quite hot when it did descend. So, we've got the combined blast / tsunami / red-hot fallout hitting large distances from the impact site, all of which is incredibly destructive. Follow that up with disease and famine from the flooding, and you could easily lose a few primitive civilisations.
Once upon a midnight dreary, while I coded weak and weary
Over many a quaint and curious file of forgotten code --
While I type'ed nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of someone gently typing, typing at my office door,
"Tis some visitor" I muttered, "typing by my office door--
only this, and nothing more"
Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak November;
And each seperate dying monitor wrought it's ghost upon the floor.
Eagerly I wished the morrow, vainly I had sought to borrow
From my code surcease of sorrow, sorrow for the local coffee store --
For that rare and radiant haven known as the local coffee store--,
Close'd now, for evermore.
And the sudden sad uncertain terror of each single compiler error
Thrilled me--filled me with fantastic pleasures I had never felt before;
So that now, to still the beating of my hard drive I stood repeating,
"Tis some late visitor coding by my office door--
Some late visitor typing outside my office door--
That is it, and nothing more"
Presently my code grew stronger; bugging me then no longer,
"Sir", said I "or Madam, truly your caffeine I do implore;
But the fact is I was coding, and so gently came you typing,
And so faintly came you coding, coding by my office door,
That I was scarce was sure I heard you"--here I opened wide the door--
My bosses there, and nothing more.
Deep unto the bosses peering, long I stood there wondering, peering,
Doubting, dreaming dreams no coder ever dared to dream before;
But the silence was unbroken, and the bosses gave no token,
And the only sound there heard was the whispered query "Work more?"
This they whispered, and I echoed back, the whispered words "Work more"
Merely this, and nothing more.
Build a KFC on the other side...