Actually, Penn State is a private land-grant university, though it pretends to be public whenever it's convenient -- like when it wants to get some money from the state.
Yes but Godel showed that you never do it completely.
Not quite... Godel showed thay you can never do it both consistently and completely -- though you can achieve either one if you put some effort into it. I'll leave it up to you and your SO to decide which one to shoot for.
Err... Mathematical induction is a fundamental ingredient of logic -- it works in every part of mathematics -- but as with everything in math YOU NEED TO PROVE THE HYPOTHESES IN ORDER TO GET THE CONCLUSION.
In order to apply induction, you have to show that it's true for some base case (say when n=0, but that's not important). But you also need to show that if the statement is true for n, it's true for n+1. If you show both of these, then induction says that the statement is true for all n bigger than your base case.
For the case at hand, it's the second part that's going to cause you a bit of trouble with Poincare.
It's bad. Wretched. If you have to burn one book this winter to keep warm, make it The DaVinci Code -- but only if you got the copy for free. No sense wasting good money on it.
The writing itself is atrocious -- it seems to be aimed at the reading level of a rather slow third-grader. It constantly uses a silly suspense gimmick, asking a question (literally, in dialog -- no subtlety here, folks!) and then postponing the answer for a few chapters while the author cuts away to some other action. As ineptly as it's pulled off, I could have forgiven this the first time, but when you combine the fact that _every_ chapter ends that way with the realization that the answers to these 'cliffhangers' are so mind-numbingly obvious that even a seriously inbred chimp could see them, it begins to get just a wee bit annoying.
Top all this off with the fact that the book tries to pass a lot of idiotic nonsense off as hidden Catholic church history and what you end up with is a big steaming pile of doo.
JR
A possible change in using/interpreting moderation
on
Moderation Ideas
·
· Score: 1
Over the last few weeks, watching how the moderation system has worked (including how it's affected my own comments), I have to wonder : How is the moderation value supposed to be interpreted?
What I mean is, if a comment gets a 5 rating, should it be interpreted as being an exceptional comment, or merely a comment 5 people thought was a little better than the usual fare? Right now it seems like the second, but in my view it should be the first.
After all, look at the disproportionate number of comments that manage to get a 5 rating because they're 'Funny'. Sure, they may be amusing, but are they really the best that Slashdot has to offer?
The problem, as I see it, is that we are asked to moderate without knowing the current rating of a comment -- it takes a while to read through and moderate all comments to some articles, by which time the values the comments had when you loaded the page are no longer valid. So if you decide to moderate up some minorly amusing AC's comment as 'Funny', it suddenly ends up a 5, because 4 other people thought the same thing -- even though you might have thought it deserved no better than a 1 to 2.
There's a nice solution to this problem, but it would be a bit more complicated than the current method. A similar problem exists in stock markets -- by the time a buy order you've submitted gets taken care of, the price of a stock could have moved way past what you wanted to spend. So along with your buy, you specify a price range -- if the stock is out of that range when the buy gets cleared, you're not left holding some overpriced stock.
Anyway, here's the idea. Instead of moderating up or down by points, you should be able to specify exactly what rating you think a message should have. Your moderation would count as a vote in favor of any rating up to the one you specify -- past that, it doesn't count.
Thus, if you think a comment deserves a rating of 2, but not better, you could moderate it to 2. If 10 other people do the same thing, the comment would still have a rating of 2 -- as opposed to the current situation, where it would have shot up to 5.
(Mathematically, you pick the highest rating such that the number of votes for that rating exceeds the rating. To get a rating of 1, you just need 1 person to vote in favor of a 1 or better. To get a 2, you need 2 people to vote it a 2 or better. Etc.)
I think it's pretty clear which lines of the interview people are going to have a problem with...
Reading through the interview, it seemed like the usual chat-session fare -- a series of idiotic (You wrote assembler? So, did you ever write a virus?) questions, whose answers should have been obvious before the person even asked the question. And then we get to the Linux question... and Gosling's role as the "Mr Java Poster Child" marketing-boy starts to show through.
Why are the JDK's on Linux so far behind what you can get on Windows or Solaris? Because of 'minor incompatibilities'? Hardly. There are plenty of other cross-platform languages out there that support even more platforms than Java and work quite well on Linux (oh, like Tcl, Perl or Python). As far as I can tell, the problem is just that Sun hasn't done squat to help the Java/Linux efforts.
I mean, up until relatively recently Sun didn't even make their code available to porting efforts -- unless you wanted to shell out for a very pricey license, you had to start from scratch. Which doesn't exactly make it easy to catch up to the ever-moving target that is Java. That changed, finally, so that the Blackdown team is able to work from the Sun source now -- but as near as I can tell, that's the limit of their assistance, and it really seems to be a matter of too little, too late.
Hell, has Sun even contributed any Linux-specific code to Blackdown? If not, I don't even know what Gosling had to base his statement on.
Amen. Writing your own widgets can make things _so_ much easier, all the while improving your code's structure by forcing a clear demarkation between the UI and the internals.
Case in point: When I started coding my first Gnome application (a port of an editor/viewer for certain game records), I quickly became annoyed by the fact that I had to deal with implementing things like popping up Open, Save and Save As dialogs, as well as prompting for confirmations when exiting without saving, etc.
Porting as I was from a Doc/View based MFC app, I didn't have existing code to throw at this, even though I did have all the routines to do the actually saving and loading. So I just buckled down and wrote my own widget to take care of this stuff -- give it routines that, given a filename, will save or load, and it will deal with all of the user prompting.
Having done that, my code is much more modular and easy to maintain, and as an added bonus I have a completely general, reuseable widget. Any time I need to make a single-doc-interface program, I can just pull it out -- and I know it's bug-free, because I've used it so many times before. (As a proof-of-concept when designing the widget, I used it to write a notepad-like editor. Took all of 10 minutes or so.)
Sure you can always cut and paste code from project to project, but if you really want to reuse code, writing your own widgets is the way to go.
Well, I think you'll find that most of the good advice people are giving about choosing a CS program also applies to choosing a math program.
One thing to be careful of, which no one seems to have mentioned yet : in math, at least, you generally don't select an advisor until 1-2 years into things. It would be a shame to spend 2 years jumping through hoops, only to approach your desired advisor and have them turn you down. The moral of this is two-fold:
1. Never choose a school because you assume you're going to be able to work Dr. Whatsisname -- if they're a big name, they probably already have a full docket of students. So make sure that, wherever you decide to go, there's more than one person you'd like to work with.
2. Your first few semesters are the time to shine. The better you do then, and the more faculty who get a good opinion of you, the better your chances are of getting the advisor you want. Everyone knows who the hot new first-years are.
One other thing -- don't go into grad school for math unless you're absolutely positive its what you want to do. If you can't work up a real passion about anything you've learned so far, don't expect it to come along in grad school. The life of any grad student sucks -- it means at least four more years of eaking out a living with barely enough cash for room and board, while all your undergraduate cohorts are making 5 times your graduate stipend. And it doesn't get any better once you graduate and start looking for a postdoc.
is an eBook that would let me read TeX, Postscript or PDF files.
If I want to read some fiction, I'd much rather curl up with a paperback -- but combined with some sort of annotation/search system, these things would be great for reading text books, tech articles and preprints. (If for no other reason than I could get rid of the film of research papers covering the floor of my study.)
It's a great 200 page book -- unfortunately it's 900 pages long. Way too much pointless stream-of-consciousness, and too many characters that start off great, but go nowhere. Frankly, it's overrated -- probably because after slogging through all 900 pages, the critics felt the need to justify the effort.
If you're keen on reading some Pynchon, but not up to going through GR, try _The_Crying_of_Lot_49_. It's a fairly short book, but it's pretty good -- not as good as the best parts of GR, but there's far less crap.
Frankly, the changes all sound pretty good to me -- _especially_ the exclusivity between moderating a forum and posting to it.
Why? Because some people post too goddamn much.
I've been reading Slashdot for a while now (I'm definitely below that 21,000 mark), and while the 'First post'-ers and the trolls are annoying, the thing that makes it unreadable is the shear repetition of the same tired opinions.
The average forum at Slashdot gets (if you're lucky) maybe five truly different opinions -- each rehashed by about 20 different people who either haven't read the previous comments, or just don't care that they're repeating the same things that have been said before.
We're not talking about poorly written opinions by 3l33t d000dz here. These are well-written posts. They just add absolutely nothing new to the discussion. They're the 500-word equivalent of a "Me Too!".
Take a look at the profiles of most of these posters and what do you see? A long list of recent posts. Did most of these posts add anything worthwhile to the discussion? No. Did some of them? Most definitely.
At this point, I'm all for anything that will give a person a reason to pause and think before they decide to fire off another post to Slashdot. If you _really_ have something worthwhile to say, well, go ahead and post. But if not, please just sit back and moderate. You'll be providing the readers of Slashdot a far greater service.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, Penn State is a private land-grant university, though it pretends to be public whenever it's convenient -- like when it wants to get some money from the state.
This is one reason why PSU gets nowhere near as much state money (per student, at least) as the state schools (aka Pennsylvania's State System of Higher Education).
JR
Yes but Godel showed that you never do it completely.
Not quite... Godel showed thay you can never do it both consistently and completely -- though you can achieve either one if you put some effort into it. I'll leave it up to you and your SO to decide which one to shoot for.
Err... Mathematical induction is a fundamental ingredient of logic -- it works in every part of mathematics -- but as with everything in math YOU NEED TO PROVE THE HYPOTHESES IN ORDER TO GET THE CONCLUSION.
In order to apply induction, you have to show that it's true for some base case (say when n=0, but that's not important). But you also need to show that if the statement is true for n, it's true for n+1. If you show both of these, then induction says that the statement is true for all n bigger than your base case.
For the case at hand, it's the second part that's going to cause you a bit of trouble with Poincare.
It's bad. Wretched. If you have to burn one book this winter to keep warm, make it The DaVinci Code -- but only if you got the copy for free. No sense wasting good money on it.
The writing itself is atrocious -- it seems to be aimed at the reading level of a rather slow third-grader. It constantly uses a silly suspense gimmick, asking a question (literally, in dialog -- no subtlety here, folks!) and then postponing the answer for a few chapters while the author cuts away to some other action. As ineptly as it's pulled off, I could have forgiven this the first time, but when you combine the fact that _every_ chapter ends that way with the realization that the answers to these 'cliffhangers' are so mind-numbingly obvious that even a seriously inbred chimp could see them, it begins to get just a wee bit annoying.
Top all this off with the fact that the book tries to pass a lot of idiotic nonsense off as hidden Catholic church history and what you end up with is a big steaming pile of doo.
JR
Over the last few weeks, watching how the moderation system has worked (including how it's affected my own comments), I have to wonder : How is the moderation value supposed to be interpreted?
What I mean is, if a comment gets a 5 rating, should it be interpreted as being an exceptional comment, or merely a comment 5 people thought was a little better than the usual fare? Right now it seems like the second, but in my view it should be the first.
After all, look at the disproportionate number of comments that manage to get a 5 rating because they're 'Funny'. Sure, they may be amusing, but are they really the best that Slashdot has to offer?
The problem, as I see it, is that we are asked to moderate without knowing the current rating of a comment -- it takes a while to read through and moderate all comments to some articles, by which time the values the comments had when you loaded the page are no longer valid. So if you decide to moderate up some minorly amusing AC's comment as 'Funny', it suddenly ends up a 5, because 4 other people thought the same thing -- even though you might have thought it deserved no better than a 1 to 2.
There's a nice solution to this problem, but it would be a bit more complicated than the current method. A similar problem exists in stock markets -- by the time a buy order you've submitted gets taken care of, the price of a stock could have moved way past what you wanted to spend. So along with your buy, you specify a price range -- if the stock is out of that range when the buy gets cleared, you're not left holding some overpriced stock.
Anyway, here's the idea. Instead of moderating up or down by points, you should be able to specify exactly what rating you think a message should have. Your moderation would count as a vote in favor of any rating up to the one you specify -- past that, it doesn't count.
Thus, if you think a comment deserves a rating of 2, but not better, you could moderate it to 2. If 10 other people do the same thing, the comment would still have a rating of 2 -- as opposed to the current situation, where it would have shot up to 5.
(Mathematically, you pick the highest rating such that the number of votes for that rating exceeds the rating. To get a rating of 1, you just need 1 person to vote in favor of a 1 or better. To get a 2, you need 2 people to vote it a 2 or better. Etc.)
Any thoughts?
JRaven
I think it's pretty clear which lines of the interview people are going to have a problem with...
Reading through the interview, it seemed like the usual chat-session fare -- a series of idiotic (You wrote assembler? So, did you ever write a virus?) questions, whose answers should have been obvious before the person even asked the question. And then we get to the Linux question... and Gosling's role as the "Mr Java Poster Child" marketing-boy starts to show through.
Why are the JDK's on Linux so far behind what you can get on Windows or Solaris? Because of 'minor incompatibilities'? Hardly. There are plenty of other cross-platform languages out there that support even more platforms than Java and work quite well on Linux (oh, like Tcl, Perl or Python). As far as I can tell, the problem is just that Sun hasn't done squat to help the Java/Linux efforts.
I mean, up until relatively recently Sun didn't even make their code available to porting efforts -- unless you wanted to shell out for a very pricey license, you had to start from scratch. Which doesn't exactly make it easy to catch up to the ever-moving target that is Java. That changed, finally, so that the Blackdown team is able to work from the Sun source now -- but as near as I can tell, that's the limit of their assistance, and it really seems to be a matter of too little, too late.
Hell, has Sun even contributed any Linux-specific code to Blackdown? If not, I don't even know what Gosling had to base his statement on.
JRaven
Amen. Writing your own widgets can make things _so_ much easier, all the while improving your code's structure by forcing a clear demarkation between the UI and the internals.
Case in point:
When I started coding my first Gnome application (a port of an editor/viewer for certain game records), I quickly became annoyed by the fact that I had to deal with implementing things like popping up Open, Save and Save As dialogs, as well as prompting for confirmations when exiting without saving, etc.
Porting as I was from a Doc/View based MFC app, I didn't have existing code to throw at this, even though I did have all the routines to do the actually saving and loading. So I just buckled down and wrote my own widget to take care of this stuff -- give it routines that, given a filename, will save or load, and it will deal with all of the user prompting.
Having done that, my code is much more modular and easy to maintain, and as an added bonus I have a completely general, reuseable widget. Any time I need to make a single-doc-interface program, I can just pull it out -- and I know it's bug-free, because I've used it so many times before. (As a proof-of-concept when designing the widget, I used it to write a notepad-like editor. Took all of 10 minutes or so.)
Sure you can always cut and paste code from project to project, but if you really want to reuse code, writing your own widgets is the way to go.
JRaven
Well, I think you'll find that most of the good advice people are giving about choosing a CS program also applies to choosing a math program.
One thing to be careful of, which no one seems to have mentioned yet : in math, at least, you generally don't select an advisor until 1-2 years into things. It would be a shame to spend 2 years jumping through hoops, only to approach your desired advisor and have them turn you down. The moral of this is two-fold:
1. Never choose a school because you assume you're going to be able to work Dr. Whatsisname -- if they're a big name, they probably already have a full docket of students. So make sure that, wherever you decide to go, there's more than one person you'd like to work with.
2. Your first few semesters are the time to shine. The better you do then, and the more faculty who get a good opinion of you, the better your chances are of getting the advisor you want. Everyone knows who the hot new first-years are.
One other thing -- don't go into grad school for math unless you're absolutely positive its what you want to do. If you can't work up a real passion about anything you've learned so far, don't expect it to come along in grad school. The life of any grad student sucks -- it means at least four more years of eaking out a living with barely enough cash for room and board, while all your undergraduate cohorts are making 5 times your graduate stipend. And it doesn't get any better once you graduate and start looking for a postdoc.
JRaven
is an eBook that would let me read TeX, Postscript or PDF files.
If I want to read some fiction, I'd much rather curl up with a paperback -- but combined with some sort of annotation/search system, these things would be great for reading text books, tech articles and preprints. (If for no other reason than I could get rid of the film of research papers covering the floor of my study.)
JRaven
Regarding _Gravity's_Rainbow_:
It's a great 200 page book -- unfortunately it's 900 pages long. Way too much pointless
stream-of-consciousness, and too many characters that start off great, but go
nowhere. Frankly, it's overrated -- probably because after slogging through all 900 pages,
the critics felt the need to justify the effort.
If you're keen on reading some Pynchon, but not up to going through GR, try
_The_Crying_of_Lot_49_. It's a fairly short book, but it's pretty good -- not as good as
the best parts of GR, but there's far less crap.
JRaven
Frankly, the changes all sound pretty good to me -- _especially_ the exclusivity between moderating a forum and posting to it.
Why? Because some people post too goddamn much.
I've been reading Slashdot for a while now (I'm definitely below that 21,000 mark), and while the 'First post'-ers and the trolls are annoying, the thing that makes it unreadable is the shear repetition of the same tired opinions.
The average forum at Slashdot gets (if you're lucky) maybe five truly different opinions -- each rehashed by about 20 different people who either haven't read the previous comments, or just don't care that they're repeating the same things that have been said before.
We're not talking about poorly written opinions by 3l33t d000dz here. These are well-written posts. They just add absolutely nothing new to the discussion. They're the 500-word equivalent of a "Me Too!".
Take a look at the profiles of most of these posters and what do you see? A long list of recent posts. Did most of these posts add anything worthwhile to the discussion? No. Did some of them? Most definitely.
At this point, I'm all for anything that will give a person a reason to pause and think before they decide to fire off another post to Slashdot. If you _really_ have something worthwhile to say, well, go ahead and post. But if not, please just sit back and moderate. You'll be providing the readers of Slashdot a far greater service.
JRaven