iTunes is still somewhat on my shitlist because it has a tendency to truncate my tags. If you have the automatic directory organization, it will also truncate the filename as well. Suddenly your "Leonard Philman - You Stole My Heart, You Stole My Life, But You Ain't Stealing My Pickup Truck.mp3" file becomes "Leonard Philman - You Stole My He.mp3" and the tag is changed correspondingly. If you manually set the tag in iTunes, it keeps the full name, but if you're importing, they get truncated. And then there's iTunes's tendency to choke on special characters...
Hmm...isn't the middle finger signifying "Fuck You" pretty much universal?
I know it's a joke you're making, but actually, I don't believe it is universal although it's rapidly spreading coupled with English. I want to say that most cultures have an "up yours" gesture of some sort involving a hand punching up with some kind of finger gesture, but that's probably my ethnocentrism speaking.
In the time it takes to program the robot to do a bad simulacrum of someone doing each sign, they could have just video'd someone doing all the signs. Then it's more visible to a bigger audience, too.
Sign languages tend to be more than just words. the positioning and motion of a sign conveys location and tense of nouns and verbs. It would be like speaking English without being able to conjugate any of the nouns or verbs.
They could, perhaps, dynamically generate pictures of the signs to convey more information, but that means you have to get more information out of the original language (often the much tricker part) and even then, you still have an issue of the signing only being visible from one direction and a fixed distance (which I suspect would be even worse for a field unit which would probably have an LCD screen, which tend to be pretty unviewable from any direction but straight on.)
I heard a similar statistic in my ASL class. A lot of it, particularly with the older generation, is because deaf people were either put into ASL-only schools who often could not attract the better teaching talent or into speaking schools where they were actively discouraged from signing, often by tying their hands to the desks, and therefore could not properly partake in the learning process. I wouldn't be surprised if some of the bad writing processes have propagated in a manner like ebonics; as a tight community that's a definite minority and surrounded by people who largely can't understand the life they live, they likely have a taboo against too much correction of bad grammar and spelling within their community.
The grammar is, of course, different from English, but many children learn multiple languages growing up. So long as you're exposed to fluent speakers and forced to use the languages, anyone can pick up a language. The only reason very little children are seen to pick up languages easily is a) we excuse a lot of grammar and spelling on their part due to their age and b) lacking a language to fall back on, they have to learn quickly. There's a small segment of tonal languages which are easier to pick up as a child, but that has more to do with perfect (or near-perfect) pitch getting fixed at an early age.
Franklin was also a bit the ladies man. For instance, his treatise on the advantages of older women vs younger women. I particularly like his dismissal of the lesser attractiveness...
5. Because in every Animal that walks upright, the Deficiency of the Fluids that fill the Muscles appears first in the highest Part. The Face first grows lank and Wrinkled; then the Neck; then the Breast and Arms; the lower parts continuing to the last as plump as ever; so that covering all above with a Basket, and regarding only what is below the Girdle, it is impossible of two Women to know an old one from a young one. And as in the Dark all Cats are grey, the Pleasure of Corporal Enjoyment with an old Woman is at least equal and frequently superior; every Knack being by Practice capable by improvement.
Interestingly enough, Japanese Sign Language has a trait which makes it less appropriate for this application than American Sign Language. Ambiguous signs are generally distinguished by mouthing the letter in JSL versus the finger-signed letters in ASL.
The next question which I have is the significance of body positioning of signs in JSL. Most ASL signs have migrated to the face and upper-chest region, but I know some sign languages have a great amount of significance in the body positioning and it may range all over the place.
On the other hand, wandering the public internet is akin to strolling in the park or mall, where one would not expect privacy to be guaranteed... and the officers of the Ministry of Love happily exploit that expectation.
I don't know about you, but I always use the back paths at the parks so as to maintain secrecy. Like the old saying goes, "I've loved the same woman for twenty years. Hopefully, her husband never finds out." Depending on how your park is built (similar to how a particular network system is built), there may be different levels of available secrecy. Central Park in New York, there's sections of trees and the like where it's just you and the muggers. Central Park in Ashland, KY is all wide-open spaces with no real cover, so you'd have to go with the mask idea. Sure, you're extremely conspicuous, but no one knows it's you.
For the sake of being informative, here's a good page on Japanese Sign Language. It's not the same as American Sign Language, which isn't the same as British Sign Language as someone's sure to post eventually. *sigh* Short of Gestuno, there is no universal sign language, no more than there is a universal spoken or written language. *rolls eyes* Except, of course, Esperanto, which everyone speaks by now, right?
Unfortunately, no;-)
Yup, much the same as how, unfortunately, no one's come up with a universal spoken or written language. Gosh, let alone trying to get a universal programming language...
A good sign language interpreter can read signs from a fair distance, well across a board room at least. How far away can the PDA be before you stop being able to read the text on the screen?
I generally don't have so much of a problem when waking up from a normal night's sleep, but if I take a brief catnap of an hour or two, I often wake up with what does feel very much like mild drunkenness. My coordination is off, I feel too tall and light, and there's this general warm buzz drowning out much of the world around me. The length of sensation is usually fairly short, 10 minutes at the most, but I remember one time when it lasted over a half hour, which was one very interesting shamble across campus to class.
People believe they need cars to live.
Depending on where you live, that may be the case. Not all towns have good public transportation and the distances can easily be high enough to require some sort of motor transportation. I've lived without a car a few times and it's difficult. It limits the amount of groceries you can transport and the time involved in transportation can really eat away at your day. You get out of work at 5 and a lot of places close by 6, including the post office.
Personally, I think we're not too far from the day when automatically controlled cars will be the standard. I always want an override switch for a case where there's a glitch, a maniac swerving around in the road (probably a manual control freak...), or when the government decides they don't like where I'm going and decide to make my car go somewhere else. *sigh* Problem is, you can basically either allow manual control or have an efficient automatic system.
At most other stores if you say you're from out of town or don't have a card, the cashiers will just scan theirs instead and get you the discount. I've never had that happen at CVS -- maybe the place that I go to just has humorless employees.
I've seen that a couple times. I always wondered whether the employees cashed in on the gas price reductions. (Giant Eagle and Krogers frequently run promotions where, for every $X (usually 50) you buy in a month, you have an X cent (usually about 5) reduction per gallon of gas) I suspect that there's tracking in place to keep that from happening, though.
Spell checkers give you feedback at the time of writing. Either immediatly, or when you select the spell check feature, and yes, I would say that it does improve their spelling. If we are to assume that being told you have the wrong answer, and immediatly being shown the correct answer will not improve spelling, then all of the 'traditional' teaching methods also go down the drain. As for you looking up the words on your papers that were marked wrong...Yes, you are the exception to the rule.
It's funny... I want to say that I lack your faith in people, but on the other hand, it would seem like I'm giving them too much credit. *shrug* My experience in years of working with computer support is that most people, when confronted with a dialog from the computer saying something, will do the bare minimum to dismiss the dialog. Virus warnings? They'll click ignore. Update posts for their software? Hit ESC and they'll be gone before they do more than flicker up. Similarly, I wonder how much spelling suggestions will stick in their mind. It's there, but a quick right-click and that red underlining is gone, just a mere flicker on the screen. Did it register deeply enough in their mind that there was a misspelling and that this is the correct spelling now? Heh... but me being me, it seems utterly unfathomable that people wouldn't look up words they don't get either. But then again, I'm one of those people who gets annoyed when people "run the full gambit of possibilities."
Regarding my analogy, it wasn't as apt as I'd like it be. I was pressed for time and posted what I could. Let's take the analogy of cooking bread from scratch or from a mix. Reading forces you to have to construct more from the symbools involved than TV does. TV, you have visual and audio provided for you. You don't have to strain your head wondering what Gandalf looked like or sounded like because Peter Jackson would be glad to tell you. Similarly, if I make a cake from scratch, I'm following rules and recipes, but I'm forced to actually implement things from a lower level. With a bread mix, it's dumping a pouch in and putting it in the oven for X mintues at 350 degrees. While you'll get bread in both cases, and you'll understand something about the bread-baking process, I suspect you'll learn more cooking from scratch than when the ingredients are provided for you and you just need to mix them and bake them. I still prefer the exercise analogy, though, as really it is the mental exercise that I feel is the benefit of reading. {cocks head off to one side} Although, I could see TV as encouraging a different skill set. Maybe inductive versus deductive reasoning? In reading, you're given details and you have to create a whole. In TV, you're given a whole, and you have to pick out details. For instance, Lost is popular among viewers because if you watch closely, you can pick up all kinds of background hints and forbodings. This would be more difficult to do in a literature format because the nature of the beast is that you must give the reader all of the details although one can, of course, do so very sneakily. There's a place for both, I think, and there are good and bad examples of both. Lost is a fairly intelligent TV program IMO; Guiding Light isn't. Asimov is intelligent fiction; some of the pulp fiction isn't. There are TV shows where all there is is the surface and there are books where everything is described so minutely that there's no reason to have to dream.
As for the reading, I won't disagree that a basic literacy level is standard these days. What I find truly bizarre is how few people display a level of literacy past that. I have met people who, when reading off of a page, can't recall what they read when asked right after. They're basically just sounding out the words. *shrug* And I won't even get into some of the travesties of grammary and spelling I regularly run into at work, sometimes from people who are otherwise intelligent. On one hand, since I know they're intelligent people, it shouldn't bother me, but every time ou
I always find it amazing how when a questionable ethical action is reported people dismiss the data without really thinking about it.
First of all, I suspect people do that because of fear of slippery slope. If we allow this data gained by unethical means, how bad will it seem to do something unethical to get the next set of data?
Secondly, I suspect s/he was outraged over the mouse manipulation, not genetics.
I know that I went from being a terrible speller to being very good as a direct result of computers. I got my first spell checker in the 7th grade. Every teacher, as well as my parents were absolutely sure that spell checkers just make kids lazy. They were sure that I would never learn to spell if I used a spell checker. The fact was that the spell checker would immediately tell me when I misspelled a word, and would also give me the correct spelling. This was opposed to the "traditional" approach, consisting of the student turning in their writing, and a week later getting a paper back with red circles all over it. The typical student would then toss the paper in the trash, never seeing what their mistake actually was, and never finding out the correct spelling.
The instant feedback is a definite plus. Knowing that you've made a mistake can be as important as knowing how to fix the mistake. On the other hand, I wonder how well it's actually teaching the spelling. Does the student actually note their spelling error and remember to spell the word correctly the next time? Or do they just learn to right-click the red-underlined word and select the first option? How well will they deal with words that are close in spelling, perhaps not even in the standard dictionary? *shrug* Maybe I was an unusual kid because if I got a paper with red marks and they weren't clear proofreading marks to indicate what the mistake was, I would go to the teacher and bug them for clarification. And if I had a word misspelled and I didn't immediately recognize my error, I would look it up in the dictionary so that I not only knew the correct spelling, but also knew the full meaning of the word. *wry grin* But that latter bit is more in my rant on how the built-in thesaurus in word processors has degraded student writing skills...
I still attribute some of that to lazy teachers who graded on how pretty your handwriting was, but a lot of it was that changing a single word in the middle of a paper didn't require an extra half of an hour to rewrite the paper.
I'm fully with you on that one. I had atrocious handwriting. In 5th grade, I was in the remedial class, along with the kids with motor skill problems and the dyslexic kid. And I remember not correcting essays because I knew I'd have to rewrite the paper to insert lines.
Maybe I was the exception, but I'm not buying that immediate feedback and shifting effort to the actual task (as opposed to busywork) does not improve the learning process for kids. I also call BS on the "nothing beats a book" line. I can't count the number of times I've heard it. There is only one thing that reading a book gets you that watching TV doesn't. You learn to read better. Now, I am not saying that reading well is not a good thing, but that is all reading has on TV.
What immediate feedback? In cases where the system does provide intelligent feedback (typing programs that analyze where your trouble spots are and adjust your curriculum to force you to address them, for instance) or even dumb feedback (I have a friend from college who's tone deaf, but can sing along to Karaoke Revolution because it gives him a visual cue as to how far he is from the note), it can indeed be useful. Problem is, most software doesn't really give meaningful feedback. The word processor can only tell you that the word you used isn't in its dictionary and that this list of words are spelled in a mathematically similar way. The math quizzing program can only tell you that 33+47 is not 81, that it's 80. They don't teach you why and they don't show you where you went wrong. The programs in the article don't even give dumb feedback. As for your comment about TV and books being equivalent... I'd have to disagree there if for no other reason than that a book forces you to actually parse material. Watching TV is more or less a passive thing. They build the images and you watch them. With a book, you have to mentally construct meaning from the words even for the surface material of it. It's mental ex
These two guys get to talking and the one starts expounding upon a sexual experience he had. "It was the craziest thing. I found this woman tied to the railroad tracks one day. I untied her and the sex I had with her was awesome!" "Did she give you head?" "Naw, I never found the head."
1. You'd have to assume that the people who dislike Card for this reason are Christian, and following the same "hate the sin, not the sinner" philosphy. I, on the other hand, don't have a problem disliking someone who has a big interest in oppressing me or mine. To each his own, I suppose.
Actually I was suggesting that people were disliking the books because Card wrote them, not because they actually disliked the book. I knew I could have stated that more clearly...
2. You'd also have to assume that homosexuality is a choice, something arrived at through thought, in the same way that it is for Card to employ his brain to come to the conclusion that he thinks homosexuality is a disease, that homosexual sex is worthy of punishment [1], etc.
I can't speak for the LDSers, but many of the Christian groups don't see being homosexual as a choice. It's what you do that is your choice. They often draw the analogy to things like pedophilia. *wry grin* And some figure the two go hand in hand although, statistically speaking, pedophilia and homosexuality tend to be fairly mutually exclusive on the male side due to the fact that before puberty boys look more like girls in terms of sexual aspects until you get to the dongler. Of course, that's assuming pedophilia as a sexual desire and not one solely of control. Meh. I'm digressing, bad habit of mine. Anyhow, having homosexual desires doesn't make you evil; it just means you have greater trials to go through in life than most, resisting such sinful urges. It's all part and parcel of that "love the sinner; hate the sin" bit.
Bullshit. They were a bunch of terrorist sympathizers, and one of the most visible members of their government helped to start and finance the rebellion. Fuck 'em.
"What's the different between a terrorist and a freedom fighter? Which side you're on."
I think the parent post to yours is trying to refer to Orson Scott Card's nonfiction essays on homosexuality. As an LDS member, he is against homosexuality, views it as a disease, although he sees it as a "hate the sin; love the sinner" situation. AFAIK, these views have never been expressed in his books, but ever since he published those essays, people have certainly been looking. People loved his books and find they cannot stand the man, so they're trying to find a reason to not stand the books anymore. Personally, I find it kind of ironic because again, we're at that "hate the sin; love the sinner" situation, albeit from an opposite side. Just because Card wrote those books, do people who now dislike Card have to hate the books?
Remember this is almost a bait and switch, the people bought a Celine Deon album and got the DRM disaster along with it.
Right. They were looking for a musical disaster, not a computer based one...
Actually, one of the arguments for embryonic stem cell research is that it could save human life. It's just not the type of human life that certain political groups care about.
They're all for saving lives, but they want it done without cost to innocent lives. Why do you think so many of these groups are behind research on adult stem cells?
This begs the question. How will we know whether they're better if we don't study them? You can't use ignorance as an argument against inquiry.
Actually, unless you're implying he's using circular logic, it doesn't "beg the question." But outside of misapplied grammar, I don't agree with your stance. Similarly, one might argue that lobotomies were a perfectly good treatment since we thought they might be of use in treating the illness. Eugenics might be the best way to reduce mental illness in the population. A sharp stick to the eye might clear up nearsightedness (admittedly in a shortsighted manner...). Ok, that third was clearly sarcastic, but the first two were not uncommon in the US at one time. The point is that medicinal science has not always been on the side of angels. There have been people who've been well-meaning who've perpetuated atrocities. There are those who've done it for prestige. As moral beings, are we not obligated to speak out and to act when we see evil being perpetuated, even if in the name of good?
I don't know this area particularly well, but I am sure that if the use of adult stem cells was in every way a replacement for the use of embryonic cells, then researchers would simply want to use those.
But they do want access to embryonic stem cells, which suggests to me that embryonic stem cells have some useful property that adult stems cells don't.
They have a higher potential benefit in that they may be more able to develop into a larger numbers of types of tissue. Basically, it was initially thought that stem cells from marrow could only be used to generate red blood cells whereas it seemed perfectly evident that infant stem cells could turn into all kinds of tissue given they're what the body starts from. Since then, we've found that adult stem cells can transform into a number of different kinds of tissues. *wry grin* Not that most of these experiments try to actually transdifferentiate the stem cells. If you read into the details of these experiments, most come down to "we inject a bunch of stem cells into part of the body and see if anything happens."
Basically, the whole thing is over potential. The proponents of infant stem cells say that those stem cells may work better and the adult stem cell people are finding ways to use stem cell therapy without the requiring the sacrifice of another human life for a potential benefit.
As the secondary characters get more screen time, their names appear in the main credits, even if they were not before.
You can see it in nearly all non-sitcom TV shows (it doesn't usually happen in sitcoms cause the characters rarely shift and change).
It's also interesting to try to predict who's going to be leaving the show based on their names disappearing, changing order, or changing font sizes. I remember that shortly before Giles got written out of Buffy, he started appearing as an "also starring" credit, which was a big tipoff.
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iTunes is still somewhat on my shitlist because it has a tendency to truncate my tags. If you have the automatic directory organization, it will also truncate the filename as well. Suddenly your "Leonard Philman - You Stole My Heart, You Stole My Life, But You Ain't Stealing My Pickup Truck.mp3" file becomes "Leonard Philman - You Stole My He.mp3" and the tag is changed correspondingly. If you manually set the tag in iTunes, it keeps the full name, but if you're importing, they get truncated. And then there's iTunes's tendency to choke on special characters...
Hmm...isn't the middle finger signifying "Fuck You" pretty much universal?
I know it's a joke you're making, but actually, I don't believe it is universal although it's rapidly spreading coupled with English. I want to say that most cultures have an "up yours" gesture of some sort involving a hand punching up with some kind of finger gesture, but that's probably my ethnocentrism speaking.
Sign languages tend to be more than just words. the positioning and motion of a sign conveys location and tense of nouns and verbs. It would be like speaking English without being able to conjugate any of the nouns or verbs.
They could, perhaps, dynamically generate pictures of the signs to convey more information, but that means you have to get more information out of the original language (often the much tricker part) and even then, you still have an issue of the signing only being visible from one direction and a fixed distance (which I suspect would be even worse for a field unit which would probably have an LCD screen, which tend to be pretty unviewable from any direction but straight on.)
The grammar is, of course, different from English, but many children learn multiple languages growing up. So long as you're exposed to fluent speakers and forced to use the languages, anyone can pick up a language. The only reason very little children are seen to pick up languages easily is a) we excuse a lot of grammar and spelling on their part due to their age and b) lacking a language to fall back on, they have to learn quickly. There's a small segment of tonal languages which are easier to pick up as a child, but that has more to do with perfect (or near-perfect) pitch getting fixed at an early age.
The next question which I have is the significance of body positioning of signs in JSL. Most ASL signs have migrated to the face and upper-chest region, but I know some sign languages have a great amount of significance in the body positioning and it may range all over the place.
On the other hand, wandering the public internet is akin to strolling in the park or mall, where one would not expect privacy to be guaranteed... and the officers of the Ministry of Love happily exploit that expectation.
I don't know about you, but I always use the back paths at the parks so as to maintain secrecy. Like the old saying goes, "I've loved the same woman for twenty years. Hopefully, her husband never finds out." Depending on how your park is built (similar to how a particular network system is built), there may be different levels of available secrecy. Central Park in New York, there's sections of trees and the like where it's just you and the muggers. Central Park in Ashland, KY is all wide-open spaces with no real cover, so you'd have to go with the mask idea. Sure, you're extremely conspicuous, but no one knows it's you.
For the sake of being informative, here's a good page on Japanese Sign Language. It's not the same as American Sign Language, which isn't the same as British Sign Language as someone's sure to post eventually. *sigh* Short of Gestuno, there is no universal sign language, no more than there is a universal spoken or written language. *rolls eyes* Except, of course, Esperanto, which everyone speaks by now, right?
Unfortunately, no ;-)
Yup, much the same as how, unfortunately, no one's come up with a universal spoken or written language. Gosh, let alone trying to get a universal programming language...
A good sign language interpreter can read signs from a fair distance, well across a board room at least. How far away can the PDA be before you stop being able to read the text on the screen?
I generally don't have so much of a problem when waking up from a normal night's sleep, but if I take a brief catnap of an hour or two, I often wake up with what does feel very much like mild drunkenness. My coordination is off, I feel too tall and light, and there's this general warm buzz drowning out much of the world around me. The length of sensation is usually fairly short, 10 minutes at the most, but I remember one time when it lasted over a half hour, which was one very interesting shamble across campus to class.
Depending on where you live, that may be the case. Not all towns have good public transportation and the distances can easily be high enough to require some sort of motor transportation. I've lived without a car a few times and it's difficult. It limits the amount of groceries you can transport and the time involved in transportation can really eat away at your day. You get out of work at 5 and a lot of places close by 6, including the post office.
Personally, I think we're not too far from the day when automatically controlled cars will be the standard. I always want an override switch for a case where there's a glitch, a maniac swerving around in the road (probably a manual control freak...), or when the government decides they don't like where I'm going and decide to make my car go somewhere else. *sigh* Problem is, you can basically either allow manual control or have an efficient automatic system.
At most other stores if you say you're from out of town or don't have a card, the cashiers will just scan theirs instead and get you the discount. I've never had that happen at CVS -- maybe the place that I go to just has humorless employees.
I've seen that a couple times. I always wondered whether the employees cashed in on the gas price reductions. (Giant Eagle and Krogers frequently run promotions where, for every $X (usually 50) you buy in a month, you have an X cent (usually about 5) reduction per gallon of gas) I suspect that there's tracking in place to keep that from happening, though.
It's funny... I want to say that I lack your faith in people, but on the other hand, it would seem like I'm giving them too much credit. *shrug* My experience in years of working with computer support is that most people, when confronted with a dialog from the computer saying something, will do the bare minimum to dismiss the dialog. Virus warnings? They'll click ignore. Update posts for their software? Hit ESC and they'll be gone before they do more than flicker up. Similarly, I wonder how much spelling suggestions will stick in their mind. It's there, but a quick right-click and that red underlining is gone, just a mere flicker on the screen. Did it register deeply enough in their mind that there was a misspelling and that this is the correct spelling now? Heh... but me being me, it seems utterly unfathomable that people wouldn't look up words they don't get either. But then again, I'm one of those people who gets annoyed when people "run the full gambit of possibilities."
Regarding my analogy, it wasn't as apt as I'd like it be. I was pressed for time and posted what I could. Let's take the analogy of cooking bread from scratch or from a mix. Reading forces you to have to construct more from the symbools involved than TV does. TV, you have visual and audio provided for you. You don't have to strain your head wondering what Gandalf looked like or sounded like because Peter Jackson would be glad to tell you. Similarly, if I make a cake from scratch, I'm following rules and recipes, but I'm forced to actually implement things from a lower level. With a bread mix, it's dumping a pouch in and putting it in the oven for X mintues at 350 degrees. While you'll get bread in both cases, and you'll understand something about the bread-baking process, I suspect you'll learn more cooking from scratch than when the ingredients are provided for you and you just need to mix them and bake them. I still prefer the exercise analogy, though, as really it is the mental exercise that I feel is the benefit of reading. {cocks head off to one side} Although, I could see TV as encouraging a different skill set. Maybe inductive versus deductive reasoning? In reading, you're given details and you have to create a whole. In TV, you're given a whole, and you have to pick out details. For instance, Lost is popular among viewers because if you watch closely, you can pick up all kinds of background hints and forbodings. This would be more difficult to do in a literature format because the nature of the beast is that you must give the reader all of the details although one can, of course, do so very sneakily. There's a place for both, I think, and there are good and bad examples of both. Lost is a fairly intelligent TV program IMO; Guiding Light isn't. Asimov is intelligent fiction; some of the pulp fiction isn't. There are TV shows where all there is is the surface and there are books where everything is described so minutely that there's no reason to have to dream.
As for the reading, I won't disagree that a basic literacy level is standard these days. What I find truly bizarre is how few people display a level of literacy past that. I have met people who, when reading off of a page, can't recall what they read when asked right after. They're basically just sounding out the words. *shrug* And I won't even get into some of the travesties of grammary and spelling I regularly run into at work, sometimes from people who are otherwise intelligent. On one hand, since I know they're intelligent people, it shouldn't bother me, but every time ou
I always find it amazing how when a questionable ethical action is reported people dismiss the data without really thinking about it.
First of all, I suspect people do that because of fear of slippery slope. If we allow this data gained by unethical means, how bad will it seem to do something unethical to get the next set of data?
Secondly, I suspect s/he was outraged over the mouse manipulation, not genetics.
The instant feedback is a definite plus. Knowing that you've made a mistake can be as important as knowing how to fix the mistake. On the other hand, I wonder how well it's actually teaching the spelling. Does the student actually note their spelling error and remember to spell the word correctly the next time? Or do they just learn to right-click the red-underlined word and select the first option? How well will they deal with words that are close in spelling, perhaps not even in the standard dictionary? *shrug* Maybe I was an unusual kid because if I got a paper with red marks and they weren't clear proofreading marks to indicate what the mistake was, I would go to the teacher and bug them for clarification. And if I had a word misspelled and I didn't immediately recognize my error, I would look it up in the dictionary so that I not only knew the correct spelling, but also knew the full meaning of the word. *wry grin* But that latter bit is more in my rant on how the built-in thesaurus in word processors has degraded student writing skills...
I still attribute some of that to lazy teachers who graded on how pretty your handwriting was, but a lot of it was that changing a single word in the middle of a paper didn't require an extra half of an hour to rewrite the paper.
I'm fully with you on that one. I had atrocious handwriting. In 5th grade, I was in the remedial class, along with the kids with motor skill problems and the dyslexic kid. And I remember not correcting essays because I knew I'd have to rewrite the paper to insert lines.
Maybe I was the exception, but I'm not buying that immediate feedback and shifting effort to the actual task (as opposed to busywork) does not improve the learning process for kids. I also call BS on the "nothing beats a book" line. I can't count the number of times I've heard it. There is only one thing that reading a book gets you that watching TV doesn't. You learn to read better. Now, I am not saying that reading well is not a good thing, but that is all reading has on TV.
What immediate feedback? In cases where the system does provide intelligent feedback (typing programs that analyze where your trouble spots are and adjust your curriculum to force you to address them, for instance) or even dumb feedback (I have a friend from college who's tone deaf, but can sing along to Karaoke Revolution because it gives him a visual cue as to how far he is from the note), it can indeed be useful. Problem is, most software doesn't really give meaningful feedback. The word processor can only tell you that the word you used isn't in its dictionary and that this list of words are spelled in a mathematically similar way. The math quizzing program can only tell you that 33+47 is not 81, that it's 80. They don't teach you why and they don't show you where you went wrong. The programs in the article don't even give dumb feedback. As for your comment about TV and books being equivalent... I'd have to disagree there if for no other reason than that a book forces you to actually parse material. Watching TV is more or less a passive thing. They build the images and you watch them. With a book, you have to mentally construct meaning from the words even for the surface material of it. It's mental ex
These two guys get to talking and the one starts expounding upon a sexual experience he had. "It was the craziest thing. I found this woman tied to the railroad tracks one day. I untied her and the sex I had with her was awesome!" "Did she give you head?" "Naw, I never found the head."
Actually I was suggesting that people were disliking the books because Card wrote them, not because they actually disliked the book. I knew I could have stated that more clearly...
2. You'd also have to assume that homosexuality is a choice, something arrived at through thought, in the same way that it is for Card to employ his brain to come to the conclusion that he thinks homosexuality is a disease, that homosexual sex is worthy of punishment [1], etc.
I can't speak for the LDSers, but many of the Christian groups don't see being homosexual as a choice. It's what you do that is your choice. They often draw the analogy to things like pedophilia. *wry grin* And some figure the two go hand in hand although, statistically speaking, pedophilia and homosexuality tend to be fairly mutually exclusive on the male side due to the fact that before puberty boys look more like girls in terms of sexual aspects until you get to the dongler. Of course, that's assuming pedophilia as a sexual desire and not one solely of control. Meh. I'm digressing, bad habit of mine. Anyhow, having homosexual desires doesn't make you evil; it just means you have greater trials to go through in life than most, resisting such sinful urges. It's all part and parcel of that "love the sinner; hate the sin" bit.
Bullshit. They were a bunch of terrorist sympathizers, and one of the most visible members of their government helped to start and finance the rebellion. Fuck 'em.
"What's the different between a terrorist and a freedom fighter? Which side you're on."
I think the parent post to yours is trying to refer to Orson Scott Card's nonfiction essays on homosexuality. As an LDS member, he is against homosexuality, views it as a disease, although he sees it as a "hate the sin; love the sinner" situation. AFAIK, these views have never been expressed in his books, but ever since he published those essays, people have certainly been looking. People loved his books and find they cannot stand the man, so they're trying to find a reason to not stand the books anymore. Personally, I find it kind of ironic because again, we're at that "hate the sin; love the sinner" situation, albeit from an opposite side. Just because Card wrote those books, do people who now dislike Card have to hate the books?
Remember this is almost a bait and switch, the people bought a Celine Deon album and got the DRM disaster along with it.
Right. They were looking for a musical disaster, not a computer based one...
They're all for saving lives, but they want it done without cost to innocent lives. Why do you think so many of these groups are behind research on adult stem cells?
This begs the question. How will we know whether they're better if we don't study them? You can't use ignorance as an argument against inquiry.
Actually, unless you're implying he's using circular logic, it doesn't "beg the question." But outside of misapplied grammar, I don't agree with your stance. Similarly, one might argue that lobotomies were a perfectly good treatment since we thought they might be of use in treating the illness. Eugenics might be the best way to reduce mental illness in the population. A sharp stick to the eye might clear up nearsightedness (admittedly in a shortsighted manner...). Ok, that third was clearly sarcastic, but the first two were not uncommon in the US at one time. The point is that medicinal science has not always been on the side of angels. There have been people who've been well-meaning who've perpetuated atrocities. There are those who've done it for prestige. As moral beings, are we not obligated to speak out and to act when we see evil being perpetuated, even if in the name of good?
Who has time for that?
But they do want access to embryonic stem cells, which suggests to me that embryonic stem cells have some useful property that adult stems cells don't.
They have a higher potential benefit in that they may be more able to develop into a larger numbers of types of tissue. Basically, it was initially thought that stem cells from marrow could only be used to generate red blood cells whereas it seemed perfectly evident that infant stem cells could turn into all kinds of tissue given they're what the body starts from. Since then, we've found that adult stem cells can transform into a number of different kinds of tissues. *wry grin* Not that most of these experiments try to actually transdifferentiate the stem cells. If you read into the details of these experiments, most come down to "we inject a bunch of stem cells into part of the body and see if anything happens."
Basically, the whole thing is over potential. The proponents of infant stem cells say that those stem cells may work better and the adult stem cell people are finding ways to use stem cell therapy without the requiring the sacrifice of another human life for a potential benefit.
You can see it in nearly all non-sitcom TV shows (it doesn't usually happen in sitcoms cause the characters rarely shift and change).
It's also interesting to try to predict who's going to be leaving the show based on their names disappearing, changing order, or changing font sizes. I remember that shortly before Giles got written out of Buffy, he started appearing as an "also starring" credit, which was a big tipoff.