make the transition from physical to digital existence.
Of course, my problem would be with the transition. I don't want a digital copy of myself with the original destroyed; I want the new me to still be... me. The discontinuity of consciousness is always a disturbing thought. Then again, I lose it every night when I fall asleep. This I also find disturbing.
Thank you for taking the time to write a thoughtful reply.
Here is where I'm coming from:
No one expects a child to read and write before they know how to have a conversation.
Yet, as a student of calculus in high school, I was constantly "solving" problems completely outside of my imagination, which I liken to teaching a child to read and write, but this child does not know language and cannot hold a conversation.
If Feynman's advice were taken, mathematics education could only improve. Perhaps, my math education was not abstract enough (when I seem to be calling for something more concrete).
My wish is that, while solving those calculus equations, I would be able to "imagine" the problem, imagine the solution, imagine how the solution might change should the problem change... to have a sort of working mathematical... "vocabulary." Perhaps the words "imagine" and "vocabulary" are out of place here. Instead of all that, I felt I was just memorizing and manipulating symbols without meaning and without comprehension. I was literally just drawing pictures. Maybe that's all math is, a very abstract series of internally consistent manipulations. Maybe I just need more practice applying it in a wider variety of contexts.
But my hunch is that:
1. I should be able to know a lot of different problems and how to solve them, and only once that process has happened would I 2. later use symbolic notation to explain things I *already* know internally. 3. Finally, I would be able to use the symbolic notation to help me build new understandings.
Thanks for the link on Formalism. Perhaps I don't want to learn math at all. I personally feel that in its highest esteem, math is just a tool to help us understand the world, and the understanding is the thing I really want.
Here's where I'm coming from: as a music teacher, I'd much rather have a student who can improvise a simple melody over a simple chord progression than a student who could write a fantastically complex chord progression but have no idea what it actually sounds like.
I still don't understand math. I can manipulate the symbols but I don't understand what the symbols represent. I believe that as a student in any discipline, understanding the things that the symbols represent is far more essential than being able to decode the symbols without comprehension.
Sure I have basic concepts down such as whole numbers, but more complex functions are completely lost on me.
I would be ever grateful to a math educator who could teach understandable concepts first, followed distantly by symbolic notation.
Now that you understand what I'm taking about, I'll give this concept a name: "numbers vs numerals"
I know I have asked for features in the past (Pidgin!) and the development team has refused donations, while I would have been happy to "buy" a feature. A kickstarter-like site would be cool for feature requests. It could be carefully organized by the different the projects. It might be difficult though if the development team believes a requested feature to be outside the scope of their application, or against its philosophy. Forks and market segmentation could result.
The problem is there's always the risk that developers will deliberately avoid releasing fixes for nasty bugs until they get more money out of it.
I'd also like to point out that rather than fire everyone, my goal would be to transition all the existing employees to other tasks that improve the quality of our product (legal services).
I think I could run our entire office (13+ secretaries!) with a single secretary by automating the enormous amount of data entry that goes on. But I'm so busy doing data entry that I don't have time to automate my own job.
Durr.
Note that I do make time to post on Slashdot, but I'm not good at coding in small bursts.
The fact Apple has a highly evangelical user base says something about their products - they're meeting needs that customers didn't even know they had.
I'm a classic case where I saw the first iPod commercials and thought, "wow, that looks stupid! If I'm going to listen to music, I'm going to listen at home on my hi fi system."
Fast forward several years and I'm absolutely inseparable from my iPod.
As Henry Ford said, if I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse.
If you have money to invest, you are going to be looking for the best return on your capital, modulo the risk of the investment.
This assumes an "informed consumer" which is rarely the case. How much do you think investors and consumers know about the products they invest in and buy?
How do you think it should work?
As a society we need to begin examining long term, sustainable, healthy ways to live. We can either educate people to the point where they can make these sort of informed decisions, or we can muck with the system so that the cost of products more accurately reflects their long term total utility, including their end-of-life reuse, re-manufacture, or disposal.
Wal-Mart's secret to success is that they most efficiently communicate actual buyer behavior back to manufacturers
They also have an amazing fully automated electronic just-in-time shipment and stocking system and a powerful brand. They're a stalwart of sales process engineering.
That said, I'd be happy to pay more if I knew the floor employees and floor manufacturing workers were the ones getting the money.
Next thing you know you've accidentally signed yourself to a contract paying double the going rate, you can't get out of it and you can't sub-let it without losing money unless you can find someone equally stupid.
I work for an attorney specializing in real estate in the US. Sometimes I feel like our services are completely unnecessary, but when I read things like this I'm reminded that we can sometimes be useful.
Do attorneys get involved in real estate over there?
Williamsville East is unique for having open classrooms, being constructed without any interior walls on the upper two floors of the three-story building.
The exact style and content of his music is largely irrelevant.
I beg to differ!
Jonathan Coulton writes lyrics targeted to a technologically savvy audience, and distributes online, exactly where his target market is available. He has the perfect storm of content distribution and audience demographic.
When one of my favorite software companies started including copy protection, I was angry because I felt they were treating me, a loyal customer, as a criminal. This statistic actually makes me feel that their actions are at least somewhat justified. Almost three quarters of one million licenses... I would have never dreamed of so many cases of infringement for one program!
I'm one of those good honest people who is happy (and happily able!) to afford the applications I use and enjoy. Photoshop Elements and Premiere Elements go a long way towards making my life legal and affordable.:-)
When you learn to play an instrument, you are actually learning to play two.
The first and most important instrument is your brain. This is called your audiation instrument. This is how you learn to hear sounds which are not physically present.
The second instrument is your violin/flute/voice/drum. This is called your execution instrument.
Your sense of timing (rhythm) is based on your ability to move. Your brain "imagines" your body moving at a constant speed. That is how your brain knows time. Athletes have a better sense of timing than musicians because they know how to move.
The good news is that your ability to play your executive skills instrument may not reflect the potential strength of your audiation instrument.
If you need help finding a good teacher I can see if there is anyone in your general area, if you want to give me a city or zip.
Thanks for sharing your insight. I have always been very frustrated by my experiences with math education. You seem to be one of the few people who understands that the representational notation isn't the math. The math is an abstract thing. It's "out there in the ether." I have a hunch that many people (myself included!) learned how to manipulate the representational notation without having any but the most vague concept of what the representational notation represents.
Music education has this exact same problem. Teachers teach students how to code and decode symbolic notation while students fail to develop any idea of what this notation would actually sound like if brought to life. That's how you end up with the characteristic "school band" or "school orchestera" sound: it's out of tune, the rhythms aren't quite right, and the sound is generally sloppy and uninspiring. This is not because students are inexperienced. It's because they're receiving poor instruction.
What's the solution? Change the way teachers teach? The problem is that many teacher-education students feel successful learning the way they have been taught, and will probably continue to teach the way they have been taught.
So what you really have to do is set up an organization to find people who agree with you. Then this organization concentrates on training other people to be early childhood and parent educators, so that the next generation of children will have even more and better teachers. It's a long term Benet Gesserit sort of thing, but I don't know how else to reform education.
Fortunately, music educators have this organization. It's the Gordon Institute for Music Learning, the onlyresearch based music teacher education organization. If you want music lessons for yourself or a child, see if you can find a GIML certified instructor in your area.
If there is a similar organization for math education, I'd be happy to throw my (admittedly small) weight behind them. Anyone know of anything?
Slashdot Mirror
Very thoughtful... thanks. :-)
How about a commodity balanced digital currency where x number of units will always be equal to the price of y bailes of hay, z barrels of oil, etc.?
make the transition from physical to digital existence.
Of course, my problem would be with the transition. I don't want a digital copy of myself with the original destroyed; I want the new me to still be... me. The discontinuity of consciousness is always a disturbing thought. Then again, I lose it every night when I fall asleep. This I also find disturbing.
I said "that's not my concern." They amended the contract.
Most people are too desperate for food & housing to risk such demands.
Thank you for taking the time to write a thoughtful reply.
Here is where I'm coming from:
No one expects a child to read and write before they know how to have a conversation.
Yet, as a student of calculus in high school, I was constantly "solving" problems completely outside of my imagination, which I liken to teaching a child to read and write, but this child does not know language and cannot hold a conversation.
If Feynman's advice were taken, mathematics education could only improve. Perhaps, my math education was not abstract enough (when I seem to be calling for something more concrete).
My wish is that, while solving those calculus equations, I would be able to "imagine" the problem, imagine the solution, imagine how the solution might change should the problem change... to have a sort of working mathematical... "vocabulary." Perhaps the words "imagine" and "vocabulary" are out of place here. Instead of all that, I felt I was just memorizing and manipulating symbols without meaning and without comprehension. I was literally just drawing pictures. Maybe that's all math is, a very abstract series of internally consistent manipulations. Maybe I just need more practice applying it in a wider variety of contexts.
But my hunch is that:
1. I should be able to know a lot of different problems and how to solve them, and only once that process has happened would I
2. later use symbolic notation to explain things I *already* know internally.
3. Finally, I would be able to use the symbolic notation to help me build new understandings.
Thanks for the link on Formalism. Perhaps I don't want to learn math at all. I personally feel that in its highest esteem, math is just a tool to help us understand the world, and the understanding is the thing I really want.
Here's where I'm coming from: as a music teacher, I'd much rather have a student who can improvise a simple melody over a simple chord progression than a student who could write a fantastically complex chord progression but have no idea what it actually sounds like.
I still don't understand math. I can manipulate the symbols but I don't understand what the symbols represent. I believe that as a student in any discipline, understanding the things that the symbols represent is far more essential than being able to decode the symbols without comprehension.
Sure I have basic concepts down such as whole numbers, but more complex functions are completely lost on me.
I would be ever grateful to a math educator who could teach understandable concepts first, followed distantly by symbolic notation.
Now that you understand what I'm taking about, I'll give this concept a name: "numbers vs numerals"
Wow, I just logged in and ... sure enough, it's awful!
Good thing I get all my recommendations from Berlineale instead of Netflix.
sorry didn't meant to post as AC before... anyway:
DD-WRT on your router + ntop running on another machine. Ntop gives you all sorts of pretty graphics and stuff. Very easy to use.
I know I have asked for features in the past (Pidgin!) and the development team has refused donations, while I would have been happy to "buy" a feature. A kickstarter-like site would be cool for feature requests. It could be carefully organized by the different the projects. It might be difficult though if the development team believes a requested feature to be outside the scope of their application, or against its philosophy. Forks and market segmentation could result.
The problem is there's always the risk that developers will deliberately avoid releasing fixes for nasty bugs until they get more money out of it.
Very interesting thought...
In the future, only spam bots will be able to register for websites!
I'd also like to point out that rather than fire everyone, my goal would be to transition all the existing employees to other tasks that improve the quality of our product (legal services).
I think I could run our entire office (13+ secretaries!) with a single secretary by automating the enormous amount of data entry that goes on. But I'm so busy doing data entry that I don't have time to automate my own job.
Durr.
Note that I do make time to post on Slashdot, but I'm not good at coding in small bursts.
The fact Apple has a highly evangelical user base says something about their products - they're meeting needs that customers didn't even know they had.
I'm a classic case where I saw the first iPod commercials and thought, "wow, that looks stupid! If I'm going to listen to music, I'm going to listen at home on my hi fi system."
Fast forward several years and I'm absolutely inseparable from my iPod.
As Henry Ford said, if I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse.
If you have money to invest, you are going to be looking for the best return on your capital, modulo the risk of the investment.
This assumes an "informed consumer" which is rarely the case. How much do you think investors and consumers know about the products they invest in and buy?
How do you think it should work?
As a society we need to begin examining long term, sustainable, healthy ways to live. We can either educate people to the point where they can make these sort of informed decisions, or we can muck with the system so that the cost of products more accurately reflects their long term total utility, including their end-of-life reuse, re-manufacture, or disposal.
Wal-Mart's secret to success is that they most efficiently communicate actual buyer behavior back to manufacturers
They also have an amazing fully automated electronic just-in-time shipment and stocking system and a powerful brand. They're a stalwart of sales process engineering.
That said, I'd be happy to pay more if I knew the floor employees and floor manufacturing workers were the ones getting the money.
Next thing you know you've accidentally signed yourself to a contract paying double the going rate, you can't get out of it and you can't sub-let it without losing money unless you can find someone equally stupid.
I work for an attorney specializing in real estate in the US. Sometimes I feel like our services are completely unnecessary, but when I read things like this I'm reminded that we can sometimes be useful.
Do attorneys get involved in real estate over there?
You all may be interested in a high school with no walls.
Williamsville East is unique for having open classrooms, being constructed without any interior walls on the upper two floors of the three-story building.
My coworker prefers all capital letters. He can read them more easily because capital letters are bigger.
We work at a small law firm and use a lot of old fixed resolution software.
The exact style and content of his music is largely irrelevant.
I beg to differ!
Jonathan Coulton writes lyrics targeted to a technologically savvy audience, and distributes online, exactly where his target market is available. He has the perfect storm of content distribution and audience demographic.
I'm actually surprised by this number.
When one of my favorite software companies started including copy protection, I was angry because I felt they were treating me, a loyal customer, as a criminal. This statistic actually makes me feel that their actions are at least somewhat justified. Almost three quarters of one million licenses... I would have never dreamed of so many cases of infringement for one program!
I'm one of those good honest people who is happy (and happily able!) to afford the applications I use and enjoy. Photoshop Elements and Premiere Elements go a long way towards making my life legal and affordable. :-)
Look at a Real Estate transaction: Clients, Realtors, Attorneys, and Bankers all collaborating on documents.
Right now we fax, mail, and email them around.
Imagine a wave-based real estate transaction where everyone makes tracked changes to a single document. It's perfect!
All that remains is the hardest part: the social engineering aspect. Because wave isn't useful if only one party is using it!
I thought it is widely understood that upgrades breaks things and are a bad idea?
When you learn to play an instrument, you are actually learning to play two.
The first and most important instrument is your brain. This is called your audiation instrument. This is how you learn to hear sounds which are not physically present.
The second instrument is your violin/flute/voice/drum. This is called your execution instrument.
Your sense of timing (rhythm) is based on your ability to move. Your brain "imagines" your body moving at a constant speed. That is how your brain knows time. Athletes have a better sense of timing than musicians because they know how to move.
The good news is that your ability to play your executive skills instrument may not reflect the potential strength of your audiation instrument.
If you need help finding a good teacher I can see if there is anyone in your general area, if you want to give me a city or zip.
Thanks for sharing your insight. I have always been very frustrated by my experiences with math education. You seem to be one of the few people who understands that the representational notation isn't the math. The math is an abstract thing. It's "out there in the ether." I have a hunch that many people (myself included!) learned how to manipulate the representational notation without having any but the most vague concept of what the representational notation represents.
Music education has this exact same problem. Teachers teach students how to code and decode symbolic notation while students fail to develop any idea of what this notation would actually sound like if brought to life. That's how you end up with the characteristic "school band" or "school orchestera" sound: it's out of tune, the rhythms aren't quite right, and the sound is generally sloppy and uninspiring. This is not because students are inexperienced. It's because they're receiving poor instruction.
What's the solution? Change the way teachers teach? The problem is that many teacher-education students feel successful learning the way they have been taught, and will probably continue to teach the way they have been taught.
So what you really have to do is set up an organization to find people who agree with you. Then this organization concentrates on training other people to be early childhood and parent educators, so that the next generation of children will have even more and better teachers. It's a long term Benet Gesserit sort of thing, but I don't know how else to reform education.
Fortunately, music educators have this organization. It's the Gordon Institute for Music Learning, the only research based music teacher education organization. If you want music lessons for yourself or a child, see if you can find a GIML certified instructor in your area.
If there is a similar organization for math education, I'd be happy to throw my (admittedly small) weight behind them. Anyone know of anything?