Typing was the ONLY class in high school I got straight A's in. Then I quit school and joined the Army. I was in Signal School and the first day of typing class I exceeded 30wpm so I spent that portion of my AIT doing scut work until time to learn crypto. I ended up doing work on IBM 1401's http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_1401 , and the "communications" part was transmitting Hollerith card information through what looked like a big keypunch machine connected through a cradle-type modem to the AUTODIN network (early WATS-line type precursor to the ARPANET). It transmitted about 55 cards per minute; less if I was using CIPHONY. This left me lots of time to study, and, since I had an IBM Selectric to practice on, I eventually got my typing speed over 90 WPM.
In the last few years I've been doing a lot of writing, and I found that I could generate about 4000 words per hour if I turned of the monitor. (I wasn't tempted to do corrections in the middle of my flow if I couldn't see them. ) OK, there was a lot of correction to be done, but I was producing OUTPUT and I was happy. Happy, that is, until one day, working for another employer, I found that I was looking at my keyboard while I typed, and my touch-typing skills had deteriorated badly.
I can now confidently TT between 45-60 wpm after lots of practice with some free typing tutors and practice stuff. It's worth the effort.
One of my un-started projects is to get some of the stuff from this "Supreme Learning" guy and see if his keyboarding system is really what it says it is. http://www.supremelearning.com/ The CNN quote on his page says he can type in 27 languages with speeds reaching up to 200 WPM. And, oh, yeah; he plays the piano.
I read about "Directed Teaching" (also called "Directed Instruction") in the book "Supercrunchers" by Ian Ayers and have done a little research since. Here is a good article: http://www.jefflindsay.com/EducData.shtml . I went to Catholic schools (over 50 years ago) and the experience of directed teaching read as similar to how I was instructed by all those nuns. In the last year, every single time I've brought up the subject to a public school teacher I've been met with anger, fear, and VERY strong resistance. They hate my argument that, "If teachers were really concerned about being the best, they would adopt what works." (Forgive the rhetorical fallacy in that statement. Reason is usually not a prominent feature of these conversations by that point.)
I'm not a teacher, but over the last 40-some years I've never had a 4th-grader (or older) that I couldn't teach to do Addition, Subtraction, Multiplication, Division and Square Roots in their head in less than two months. There is no excuse for people graduating from school without those skills. (I teach them the Trachtenberg System of Basic Mathematics. Teachers hate that because they don't know what the student is doing, but they know it works better than what they are teaching.)
Another interesting read is "The Underground History of American Education" by John Taylor Gatto http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/ . This book disturbs me for its lack of citations and the fact that it reads as if it were constructed on the same blueprint as a Dan Brown novel, but if you are concerned about the "school-as-prison" mentality, it is a good place to start. One of his other books, "Dumbing us Down" is very thought-provoking. He claims it takes about 200 hours to teach English Reading and Writing. If that's so, how can people spend 12 years in school and graduate without the ability to read and write?
Now, see? You had a perfect chance to enlighten me and show show some class while doing it, but you chose instead to be an a**hole and display your immaturity. As for understanding the 2TB problem, I've been a programmer since 1965 (the Army had me doing cryptology, on 8k machines, in assembly), and have a pretty good understanding of most of the basics of computer science, including the math behind the hardware design. I worked for Honeywell in the late '60's and early '70's and we were one of the first systems to implement striping across drives.
The original poster specifically mentioned RAID5, and I should have titled my post "Beware of RAID5". He also said that he was doing compressed archives. Since the data doesn't need to be online there is no reason to have an expensive RAID array when a dockable disk set and tar will do the job (or something similar if he's not using UNIX).
In your favor, though, I haven't implemented a RAID6 array for any of my clients. I mostly work with smaller systems and weird technical programming problems. I really don't know how RAID6 performs in real life under emergency conditions. I can, however, recount at least 5 instances in the last two years where I've been called in to retrieve data that was lost and could not be restored from a "foolproof" backup because the system was poorly conceived. I've just re-read this article, http://kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/hpa/raid6.pdf and am still under the impression that the problem comes from a guaranteed failure occurring that shuts down the process. Perhaps you would be kind enough to point me to an authoritative source that shows why this wouldn't occur in array of four or more drives where all the drives are subject to an error once in 10^14 bits?
As far as I know the 2TB Raid problem hasn't been fixed. http://blogs.zdnet.com/storage/?p=162 If anyone knows differently, please let me know. I've been using a drive docking station and splitting my backups for large databases.
I struggled through the article (I'm not a physicist although I studied lots of Physics 35 years ago), and realized I was able to understand it because I twice struggled through reading R. Buckminster Fuller's, "Synergetics" Vols I and II. His key point on systems practically begins with a tetrahedron http://www.rwgrayprojects.com/synergetics/s04/p0100.html#402.00 , but his description of close-packing atoms and molecules is pretty vivid.
(Anyone trying to visit the site above: Do not be discouraged. It is full of totally interesting concepts and well-worth the effort. It helps to have a reading method such as described in Mortimer Adler's, "How to read a Book", http://www.amazon.com/How-Read-Book-Touchstone-book/dp/0671212095 which is also worth the effort.)
Having read Lomberg's response to the criticism, I'm more comfortable with his conclusions than I am with Friel's. However, the last word probably hasn't been written/spoken on the subject. Both sides of the argument fall short of absolute proof, but Lomberg seems to be a better mathematician.
I am basing my opinion on incomplete information (as are all the posters on this topic) since, a. Friel's complete book is is not completely available to us and, b. it's a lot of dang work to analyze the books side-by-side in any case. Despite the lack of sufficient info, people will go out and vote (some of them anyway) and the minority of the voters and the general citizenry will be stuck with the results.
The information at hand doesn't support a conclusion of immediate emergency, so I'm holding out against any hasty drastic actions that mostly serve to make Al Gore richer. The urgency is for more research done a manner that we can all trust, untainted by political considerations, BEFORE it becomes a real emergency. Legitimate scientists will examine all sides of the problem before recommending any long-term solutions.
Simply blind everybody. That will certainly make the playing field equal, right? This is too stupid for words! Students should be assessed (graded) on how well they master the material. People with different capabilities will acquire the the knowledge in different ways. Am I being discriminatory because I won't hire a blind person to work in a sawmill or as a logger? Real life occupations may also be better for people who can see (like loggers who don't want branches and trees on top of them).
I've read the original documents, and I can see where blind students may want to get as much of the same experience as sighted people, but the manner and outcome of the learning HAS to be different simply because they cannot experience the class in the same way.
Hey, I always wanted to be an Astronaut! Can I sue NASA into giving fat guys a break?
Yeah, what you said. I used an off-the-cuff example that didn't clearly distinguish the differences in necessary tools. This actually parallels my experience with off-the-cuff programming; it seldom includes clear enough standards or specs. I should simply have left it at: Projects that require statistics should have someone involved who understands statistics, and other projects don't. The original article by Zed clearly shows cases where a real knowledge of statistics is valuable, but the claim that implied all programmers need to know statistics fails. The gist of his article seems to be: "There's a tool for that!"
The use of statistics is a means to an end that never ends. It has its uses in specific situations, and programmers trying to reach these ends in those specific situations would be well-off to know statistics? OK, I agree. If you are programming a data-mining application, then knowledge of probability and statistics seems pretty important. If you are programming a plane to land automatically on a runway, or a robot to place a chip on a board, then I want precision, not probability. (Although precision is probabilistic in itself.)
What Zed is describing is a situation where statistics could greatly improve the performance of the whole system, and he looks to be right. And that may be the real problem: He's more committed to being right than to resolving the problem.
I would say this is more a "people problem" than a programming problem. Placing blame, telling people they are ignorant, hostile language and the like are not leadership qualities.
There is another aspect here that interests me; the type of programming methodology. If this type of project were approached as a monolithic project, the scope, means and tools would be apparent before the project got to the argument stage. In an "agile" environment, the lack of pre-defined methodology would show up as part of the tweaking/improvement process. Picking the right method might be very important to alleviating the problem of the project with the "long tail" (i.e., the project that seems almost finished but there are a million little things to finish to make it deliverable).
This is a dumb move; it undermines our sovereignty and diminishes our status in the rest of the world. It may be constitutionally unsound to the extent that it deprives citizens and residents of the USA full protection under the Constitution. Co-operation is one thing, but this may be an assault on our civil rights by giving Interpol powers denied our own law enforcement agencies under the Constitution.
On the other hand, we've been bullying less powerful countries into fighting our legal disputes for years. It is only fitting that a more powerful government entity than the USA would make us buckle under, too.
This is the most a**-kissing president in US history. Where's Teddy Roosevelt when you need him?
OK, "right" is an opinionated position and YMMV. However, after 48 years of being a programmer, I still find discouragingly few programmers who can design a program beyond the basic forms and business arithmetic or solve problems creatively.
Get him a copy of the "The Little Lisper" or "The Little Schemer", get him a robotics kit like the LEGO system, find him some Turtle application that works interactively on his computer, get him some sort of logic controller kit (like for home automation) and focus on the areas where he has an actual interest. In a couple of years he'll be a better programmer than you are! http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html If you both have a common interest in something like games or graphics, working on a project together builds competence. The free Robotics kit from Microsoft is worth checking out.
BTW, it's interesting how the skills I learned trying to program logic gates (back in the "Tube" era, transitioning to transitors) are now so useful in developing nanotechnology, MEMS, and biologics. See if you can get him interested in the basics. He might even like assembly language because of the high degree of control and obvious cause-and-effect relationships. The transition from Assembly to C was very easy for me.
Did you buy managed service? Let them manage your system or else find out what's causing the problem yourself and report it. If you think you are better able to manage the system than they are, examine the logs yourself when the system is up and figure out what happened. You may have to boost your logging level and install/enable some admin tools, but if they think they can determine the problem by looking at the logs, you should be able to do it also.
The argument here is not copyright, but Canadian Sovereignty. In the long run, Economics will dictate how things actually turn out.
If Canada does NOT change their copyright laws, will more Canadian artists sell their works in the EU where they get residuals? My guess is that more Europeans will buy art in Canada where the cost is less (at least for the first purchase). Or maybe they will resell their Art in Canada because the cost is less. Or maybe they will just buy it in China, where no one cares?
IMO, the EU has no right to dictate to Canada how to write its laws, and the treaty should only cover methods of enforcing the laws for artists covered by their respective governments.
Depending on the complexity of the project, I use B-Liner ( http://varatek.com/ ), Microsoft Project (or Primavera) and sometimes I just use Outlook.
If you're going to use Outlook, I recommend a book from MS Press, "Take Back Your Life!" by Sally McGhee for the cool organizing hints she has in the first three chapters.
I would like to download the code for project.net ( http://www.project.net/ ) and see if I can modify it for "Critical Chain" use. "Critical Chain" and "Necessary but not Sufficient" by Eli Goldratt ( http://www.goldratt.com/ ). You might like all of Goldratt's books. NBNS is a cool book, but the typos and bad editing bothered me. The ideas were inspiring.
All-in-all, I prefer an app with Gantt/PERT diagrams so I can point to how far behind I am and tell people to, "Leave me alone so I can catch up."
After wading through the article, I'm skeptical about the conclusion: There is no evidence that "peer review" significantly increases the validity of a scientist's conclusion; only that it will test the methods that led to that conclusion.
There are many historical instances of "peer review" either bolstering false conclusions because the reviewers were inclined in the same direction, or denying the conclusion because it didn't fit in with the orthodox view.
We are going to give away technical knowledge with military and commercial value to China without them having to spend the high costs of research or espionage. Has anyone read, "The Asian Mind Game" by Chin Ning Chu? http://www.amazon.com/Asian-Mind-Game-Chin-ning-Chu/dp/0892563524 This, and many similar books show the strategies that China and Japan have been using to create dominant positions internationally. China will never be a "full participant" but will always be glad to accept any knowledge we can give them.
Actually, the problem is probably better analyzed as a dynamic system. The limbic system is highly efficient at preserving energy in the face of stress. Just thinking about restricting your food intake will slow your metabolism by as much as 40%. Exercise stresses the body, and trying to move the body from a homeostatic state of sedentary activity requires a lot of adaptation. Twelve weeks is probably not enough. A high-carbohydrate diet overloads the cellular sensitivity to insulin control which essentially "gives up" allowing high concentrations of insulin to exist in the bloodstream, and insulin causes fat accumulation in the presence of excess calories from carbohydrates. The use of high-fructose corn syrup in so many different foods stimulates the production of insulin in a manner that is not controlled by oxycalcitrin (a hormone produced in the bones), further aggravating fat accumulation. And, the onset of a life-changing activity without going through the seven steps outlined in James Prochaska's transtheoretical model of change creates mental and physical reactions that are inimical to the reduction of obesity. (And I'm just hitting the high points of the system here.)
Thank you. Yours is the best answer I've seen. I recently met a woman from Louisiana her is Houston who had a list of people who bought boats and planes in Louisiana. She was "bounty hunting" use taxes for the State of Texas. My biggest argument against Amazon (or any other company) collecting taxes on out-of-state sales tax is that it increases the cost of doing business without compensating the business for the trouble. Essentially, it is a tax on the business by a government that has no jurisdiction and provides no services to the entity required to comply.
If taxes are too high, that is something that should be resolved by the residents of the individual state. Taxation needs to be revisited. The best thoughts I've seen so far have been provided by the Fair Tax people http://www.fairtaxplan.org/ . It probably makes too much sense. Tax collection does nothing about the out-of-control spending and unneeded "services" that cause high taxes.
Actually, the problem is probably better analyzed as a dynamic system. The limbic system is highly efficient at preserving energy in the face of stress. Just thinking about restricting your food intake will slow your metabolism by as much as 40%. Exercise stresses the body, and trying to move the body from a homeostatic state of sedentary activity requires a lot of adaptation. Twelve weeks is probably not enough. A high-carbohydrate diet overloads the cellular sensitivity to insulin control which essentially "gives up" allowing high concentrations of insulin to exist in the bloodstream, and insulin causes fat accumulation in the presence of excess calories from carbohydrates. The use of high-fructose corn syrup in so many different foods stimulates the production of insulin in a manner that is not controlled by oxycalcitrin (a hormone produced in the bones), further aggravating fat accumulation. And, the onset of a life-changing activity without going through the seven steps outlined in James Prochaska's transtheoretical model of change creates mental and physical reactions that are inimical to the reduction of obesity. (And I'm just hitting the high points of the system here.)
Unfortunately, Fingerworks has died. If it was such a good design, I'd like to know why it didn't succeed as a business (which may have nothing to do with the excellence of the product).
I can think of so many people who deserve the honor more. That this prize, full of tradition and prestige, is squandered on an undeserving politician, diminishes the worth of the award. I would have awarded it to Greg Mortenson, myself.
First Al Gore, now Obama. Are Democrats BUYING these Nobel Prizes somehow?
Check out the book, "The Complete Problem Solver" by Arnold ( http://www.amazon.com/Complete-Problem-Solver-Competitive-Decision/dp/0471541982/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top ) . Then use these methods for troubleshooting technical problems that abound locally, in order to teach principles. Take easy problems, and reward students for finding and reporting on useful examples of their learning during the week. This way you can find a variety of problems in different technical areas and keep them interested. Advanced methods of this sort are in, "The New Rational Manager" by Kepner and Tregoe and, "The Thinker's Toolkit" by Jones.
Basic Electricity is a good topic to work with, as is, "Caveman Chemistry" by Dunn ( http://www.amazon.com/Caveman-Chemistry-Projects-Creation-Production/dp/1581125666 ) . Remember, technology is not just about computers and electronics; it is a way of thinking. US Army Combat Engineering courses have pretty good low tech instruction (as do some Boy Scout courses) and basic Geometry/Trig problems in doing things like finding the height of a tree/cliff/building or basic astronomy principles all contribute. I'd suggest treating it more like a lab than a lecture. Good luck.
The most useful idea behind cursive was that you could create a word in a single stream of action rather than thinking about individual letters. When I learned penmanship, we were made to practice writing whole words after we had learned the basics. Writing was supposed to be such a habit that we could ignore our writing as a skill and concentrate on what we were trying to communicate. Good cursive writers create words, not individual letters.
I think I made my point about the need for manual writing skills, not dependent on any particular style, later on in the post.
Yes, my friend's son can read a digital watch. As I mentioned, there were other uses for a digital watch which I think deepened my understanding of time, space and motion. A digital watch is no help for finding North if you are lost in the woods. Dead reckoning enhanced my love of astronomy and made it more real. The idea of someone who can only read time in digital form is a lot like someone who says he knows Physics, but has never spent any time in the lab. For one thing, it "excessively precise", meaning that it gives a false sense of precision. Interestingly enough, watches were uncommon until the "trainman's tool" became a useful way of organizing and coordinating human effort. I think it is interesting that the common sport that predates the common use of watches (baseball) is measured in periods of activity rather than in periods of time.
You may have a point about programming. As they say at the Air Force Academy, "If the minimum standards weren't good enough, then they wouldn't be the minimum." The days are long gone when a regular programmer needed to program every little action in a machine. I actually think that thinking about how a problem ought to be solved is more important than the coding, and I believe in program generators. My problem is finding people who actually know how to think a problem through. Boolean Algebra and Assembly language built a skill in logic that permeates the operations of programs and the underlying hardware. It automatically builds an understanding of cause and effect. I know a lot of programmers my age who can "feel" the code, so to speak. Programming is pretty much an Art to these guys. I have no way of determining whether they are that way because they spent so much time doing BA and Assembly, or just because they've spent so many years in the field. As for repositories and cookbooks; Fred Brooks pointed out one time that real programmers (his term) were always creating something new and solving a new problem. If it's already been done it is not necessary to start from scratch. The ACM publishes a fairly complete listing of all the fundamental algorithms for professional programmers to adapt. This is not a bad thing. Still, I think that good programs benefit from good thinking.
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Typing was the ONLY class in high school I got straight A's in. Then I quit school and joined the Army. I was in Signal School and the first day of typing class I exceeded 30wpm so I spent that portion of my AIT doing scut work until time to learn crypto. I ended up doing work on IBM 1401's http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_1401 , and the "communications" part was transmitting Hollerith card information through what looked like a big keypunch machine connected through a cradle-type modem to the AUTODIN network (early WATS-line type precursor to the ARPANET). It transmitted about 55 cards per minute; less if I was using CIPHONY. This left me lots of time to study, and, since I had an IBM Selectric to practice on, I eventually got my typing speed over 90 WPM.
In the last few years I've been doing a lot of writing, and I found that I could generate about 4000 words per hour if I turned of the monitor. (I wasn't tempted to do corrections in the middle of my flow if I couldn't see them. ) OK, there was a lot of correction to be done, but I was producing OUTPUT and I was happy. Happy, that is, until one day, working for another employer, I found that I was looking at my keyboard while I typed, and my touch-typing skills had deteriorated badly.
I can now confidently TT between 45-60 wpm after lots of practice with some free typing tutors and practice stuff. It's worth the effort.
One of my un-started projects is to get some of the stuff from this "Supreme Learning" guy and see if his keyboarding system is really what it says it is. http://www.supremelearning.com/ The CNN quote on his page says he can type in 27 languages with speeds reaching up to 200 WPM. And, oh, yeah; he plays the piano.
I read about "Directed Teaching" (also called "Directed Instruction") in the book "Supercrunchers" by Ian Ayers and have done a little research since. Here is a good article: http://www.jefflindsay.com/EducData.shtml . I went to Catholic schools (over 50 years ago) and the experience of directed teaching read as similar to how I was instructed by all those nuns. In the last year, every single time I've brought up the subject to a public school teacher I've been met with anger, fear, and VERY strong resistance. They hate my argument that, "If teachers were really concerned about being the best, they would adopt what works." (Forgive the rhetorical fallacy in that statement. Reason is usually not a prominent feature of these conversations by that point.)
I'm not a teacher, but over the last 40-some years I've never had a 4th-grader (or older) that I couldn't teach to do Addition, Subtraction, Multiplication, Division and Square Roots in their head in less than two months. There is no excuse for people graduating from school without those skills. (I teach them the Trachtenberg System of Basic Mathematics. Teachers hate that because they don't know what the student is doing, but they know it works better than what they are teaching.)
Another interesting read is "The Underground History of American Education" by John Taylor Gatto http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/ . This book disturbs me for its lack of citations and the fact that it reads as if it were constructed on the same blueprint as a Dan Brown novel, but if you are concerned about the "school-as-prison" mentality, it is a good place to start. One of his other books, "Dumbing us Down" is very thought-provoking. He claims it takes about 200 hours to teach English Reading and Writing. If that's so, how can people spend 12 years in school and graduate without the ability to read and write?
As an interesting side note: The new head of the Houston Independent School District (HISD) is removing the barbed wire around his schools so they don't look so much like prisons. http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/metropolitan/6886238.html
Oh, yeah, you might like to read the blog article I mentioned in my first post; it specifically mentions that RAID6 is not actually a solution.
Now, see? You had a perfect chance to enlighten me and show show some class while doing it, but you chose instead to be an a**hole and display your immaturity. As for understanding the 2TB problem, I've been a programmer since 1965 (the Army had me doing cryptology, on 8k machines, in assembly), and have a pretty good understanding of most of the basics of computer science, including the math behind the hardware design. I worked for Honeywell in the late '60's and early '70's and we were one of the first systems to implement striping across drives.
The original poster specifically mentioned RAID5, and I should have titled my post "Beware of RAID5". He also said that he was doing compressed archives. Since the data doesn't need to be online there is no reason to have an expensive RAID array when a dockable disk set and tar will do the job (or something similar if he's not using UNIX).
In your favor, though, I haven't implemented a RAID6 array for any of my clients. I mostly work with smaller systems and weird technical programming problems. I really don't know how RAID6 performs in real life under emergency conditions. I can, however, recount at least 5 instances in the last two years where I've been called in to retrieve data that was lost and could not be restored from a "foolproof" backup because the system was poorly conceived. I've just re-read this article, http://kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/hpa/raid6.pdf and am still under the impression that the problem comes from a guaranteed failure occurring that shuts down the process. Perhaps you would be kind enough to point me to an authoritative source that shows why this wouldn't occur in array of four or more drives where all the drives are subject to an error once in 10^14 bits?
Thank you.
As far as I know the 2TB Raid problem hasn't been fixed. http://blogs.zdnet.com/storage/?p=162 If anyone knows differently, please let me know.
I've been using a drive docking station and splitting my backups for large databases.
I struggled through the article (I'm not a physicist although I studied lots of Physics 35 years ago), and realized I was able to understand it because I twice struggled through reading R. Buckminster Fuller's, "Synergetics" Vols I and II. His key point on systems practically begins with a tetrahedron http://www.rwgrayprojects.com/synergetics/s04/p0100.html#402.00 , but his description of close-packing atoms and molecules is pretty vivid.
(Anyone trying to visit the site above: Do not be discouraged. It is full of totally interesting concepts and well-worth the effort. It helps to have a reading method such as described in Mortimer Adler's, "How to read a Book", http://www.amazon.com/How-Read-Book-Touchstone-book/dp/0671212095 which is also worth the effort.)
Having read Lomberg's response to the criticism, I'm more comfortable with his conclusions than I am with Friel's. However, the last word probably hasn't been written/spoken on the subject. Both sides of the argument fall short of absolute proof, but Lomberg seems to be a better mathematician.
I am basing my opinion on incomplete information (as are all the posters on this topic) since, a. Friel's complete book is is not completely available to us and, b. it's a lot of dang work to analyze the books side-by-side in any case. Despite the lack of sufficient info, people will go out and vote (some of them anyway) and the minority of the voters and the general citizenry will be stuck with the results.
The information at hand doesn't support a conclusion of immediate emergency, so I'm holding out against any hasty drastic actions that mostly serve to make Al Gore richer. The urgency is for more research done a manner that we can all trust, untainted by political considerations, BEFORE it becomes a real emergency. Legitimate scientists will examine all sides of the problem before recommending any long-term solutions.
Simply blind everybody. That will certainly make the playing field equal, right? This is too stupid for words! Students should be assessed (graded) on how well they master the material. People with different capabilities will acquire the the knowledge in different ways. Am I being discriminatory because I won't hire a blind person to work in a sawmill or as a logger? Real life occupations may also be better for people who can see (like loggers who don't want branches and trees on top of them).
I've read the original documents, and I can see where blind students may want to get as much of the same experience as sighted people, but the manner and outcome of the learning HAS to be different simply because they cannot experience the class in the same way.
Hey, I always wanted to be an Astronaut! Can I sue NASA into giving fat guys a break?
Yeah, what you said. I used an off-the-cuff example that didn't clearly distinguish the differences in necessary tools. This actually parallels my experience with off-the-cuff programming; it seldom includes clear enough standards or specs. I should simply have left it at: Projects that require statistics should have someone involved who understands statistics, and other projects don't. The original article by Zed clearly shows cases where a real knowledge of statistics is valuable, but the claim that implied all programmers need to know statistics fails. The gist of his article seems to be: "There's a tool for that!"
The use of statistics is a means to an end that never ends. It has its uses in specific situations, and programmers trying to reach these ends in those specific situations would be well-off to know statistics? OK, I agree. If you are programming a data-mining application, then knowledge of probability and statistics seems pretty important. If you are programming a plane to land automatically on a runway, or a robot to place a chip on a board, then I want precision, not probability. (Although precision is probabilistic in itself.)
What Zed is describing is a situation where statistics could greatly improve the performance of the whole system, and he looks to be right. And that may be the real problem: He's more committed to being right than to resolving the problem.
I would say this is more a "people problem" than a programming problem. Placing blame, telling people they are ignorant, hostile language and the like are not leadership qualities.
There is another aspect here that interests me; the type of programming methodology. If this type of project were approached as a monolithic project, the scope, means and tools would be apparent before the project got to the argument stage. In an "agile" environment, the lack of pre-defined methodology would show up as part of the tweaking/improvement process. Picking the right method might be very important to alleviating the problem of the project with the "long tail" (i.e., the project that seems almost finished but there are a million little things to finish to make it deliverable).
This is a dumb move; it undermines our sovereignty and diminishes our status in the rest of the world. It may be constitutionally unsound to the extent that it deprives citizens and residents of the USA full protection under the Constitution. Co-operation is one thing, but this may be an assault on our civil rights by giving Interpol powers denied our own law enforcement agencies under the Constitution.
On the other hand, we've been bullying less powerful countries into fighting our legal disputes for years. It is only fitting that a more powerful government entity than the USA would make us buckle under, too.
This is the most a**-kissing president in US history. Where's Teddy Roosevelt when you need him?
OK, "right" is an opinionated position and YMMV. However, after 48 years of being a programmer, I still find discouragingly few programmers who can design a program beyond the basic forms and business arithmetic or solve problems creatively.
Get him a copy of the "The Little Lisper" or "The Little Schemer", get him a robotics kit like the LEGO system, find him some Turtle application that works interactively on his computer, get him some sort of logic controller kit (like for home automation) and focus on the areas where he has an actual interest. In a couple of years he'll be a better programmer than you are! http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html If you both have a common interest in something like games or graphics, working on a project together builds competence. The free Robotics kit from Microsoft is worth checking out.
BTW, it's interesting how the skills I learned trying to program logic gates (back in the "Tube" era, transitioning to transitors) are now so useful in developing nanotechnology, MEMS, and biologics. See if you can get him interested in the basics. He might even like assembly language because of the high degree of control and obvious cause-and-effect relationships. The transition from Assembly to C was very easy for me.
Good luck.
Did you buy managed service? Let them manage your system or else find out what's causing the problem yourself and report it. If you think you are better able to manage the system than they are, examine the logs yourself when the system is up and figure out what happened. You may have to boost your logging level and install/enable some admin tools, but if they think they can determine the problem by looking at the logs, you should be able to do it also.
The argument here is not copyright, but Canadian Sovereignty. In the long run, Economics will dictate how things actually turn out.
If Canada does NOT change their copyright laws, will more Canadian artists sell their works in the EU where they get residuals? My guess is that more Europeans will buy art in Canada where the cost is less (at least for the first purchase). Or maybe they will resell their Art in Canada because the cost is less. Or maybe they will just buy it in China, where no one cares?
IMO, the EU has no right to dictate to Canada how to write its laws, and the treaty should only cover methods of enforcing the laws for artists covered by their respective governments.
Depending on the complexity of the project, I use B-Liner ( http://varatek.com/ ), Microsoft Project (or Primavera) and sometimes I just use Outlook.
If you're going to use Outlook, I recommend a book from MS Press, "Take Back Your Life!" by Sally McGhee for the cool organizing hints she has in the first three chapters.
I would like to download the code for project.net ( http://www.project.net/ ) and see if I can modify it for "Critical Chain" use. "Critical Chain" and "Necessary but not Sufficient" by Eli Goldratt ( http://www.goldratt.com/ ). You might like all of Goldratt's books. NBNS is a cool book, but the typos and bad editing bothered me. The ideas were inspiring.
All-in-all, I prefer an app with Gantt/PERT diagrams so I can point to how far behind I am and tell people to, "Leave me alone so I can catch up."
After wading through the article, I'm skeptical about the conclusion: There is no evidence that "peer review" significantly increases the validity of a scientist's conclusion; only that it will test the methods that led to that conclusion.
There are many historical instances of "peer review" either bolstering false conclusions because the reviewers were inclined in the same direction, or denying the conclusion because it didn't fit in with the orthodox view.
A benign bacteria like this, sprayed over a crowd, might reveal suicide bombers if it reacts quickly enough.
We are going to give away technical knowledge with military and commercial value to China without them having to spend the high costs of research or espionage. Has anyone read, "The Asian Mind Game" by Chin Ning Chu? http://www.amazon.com/Asian-Mind-Game-Chin-ning-Chu/dp/0892563524 This, and many similar books show the strategies that China and Japan have been using to create dominant positions internationally. China will never be a "full participant" but will always be glad to accept any knowledge we can give them.
(Somehow this reply got posted to another story.)
Actually, the problem is probably better analyzed as a dynamic system. The limbic system is highly efficient at preserving energy in the face of stress. Just thinking about restricting your food intake will slow your metabolism by as much as 40%. Exercise stresses the body, and trying to move the body from a homeostatic state of sedentary activity requires a lot of adaptation. Twelve weeks is probably not enough. A high-carbohydrate diet overloads the cellular sensitivity to insulin control which essentially "gives up" allowing high concentrations of insulin to exist in the bloodstream, and insulin causes fat accumulation in the presence of excess calories from carbohydrates. The use of high-fructose corn syrup in so many different foods stimulates the production of insulin in a manner that is not controlled by oxycalcitrin (a hormone produced in the bones), further aggravating fat accumulation. And, the onset of a life-changing activity without going through the seven steps outlined in James Prochaska's transtheoretical model of change creates mental and physical reactions that are inimical to the reduction of obesity. (And I'm just hitting the high points of the system here.)
Any more questions? (Go on, ask me a HARD one!)
Thank you. Yours is the best answer I've seen. I recently met a woman from Louisiana her is Houston who had a list of people who bought boats and planes in Louisiana. She was "bounty hunting" use taxes for the State of Texas. My biggest argument against Amazon (or any other company) collecting taxes on out-of-state sales tax is that it increases the cost of doing business without compensating the business for the trouble. Essentially, it is a tax on the business by a government that has no jurisdiction and provides no services to the entity required to comply.
If taxes are too high, that is something that should be resolved by the residents of the individual state. Taxation needs to be revisited. The best thoughts I've seen so far have been provided by the Fair Tax people http://www.fairtaxplan.org/ . It probably makes too much sense. Tax collection does nothing about the out-of-control spending and unneeded "services" that cause high taxes.
Actually, the problem is probably better analyzed as a dynamic system. The limbic system is highly efficient at preserving energy in the face of stress. Just thinking about restricting your food intake will slow your metabolism by as much as 40%. Exercise stresses the body, and trying to move the body from a homeostatic state of sedentary activity requires a lot of adaptation. Twelve weeks is probably not enough. A high-carbohydrate diet overloads the cellular sensitivity to insulin control which essentially "gives up" allowing high concentrations of insulin to exist in the bloodstream, and insulin causes fat accumulation in the presence of excess calories from carbohydrates. The use of high-fructose corn syrup in so many different foods stimulates the production of insulin in a manner that is not controlled by oxycalcitrin (a hormone produced in the bones), further aggravating fat accumulation. And, the onset of a life-changing activity without going through the seven steps outlined in James Prochaska's transtheoretical model of change creates mental and physical reactions that are inimical to the reduction of obesity. (And I'm just hitting the high points of the system here.)
Any more questions? (Go on, ask me a HARD one!)
Unfortunately, Fingerworks has died. If it was such a good design, I'd like to know why it didn't succeed as a business (which may have nothing to do with the excellence of the product).
I can think of so many people who deserve the honor more. That this prize, full of tradition and prestige, is squandered on an undeserving politician, diminishes the worth of the award. I would have awarded it to Greg Mortenson, myself.
First Al Gore, now Obama. Are Democrats BUYING these Nobel Prizes somehow?
Check out the book, "The Complete Problem Solver" by Arnold ( http://www.amazon.com/Complete-Problem-Solver-Competitive-Decision/dp/0471541982/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top ) . Then use these methods for troubleshooting technical problems that abound locally, in order to teach principles. Take easy problems, and reward students for finding and reporting on useful examples of their learning during the week. This way you can find a variety of problems in different technical areas and keep them interested. Advanced methods of this sort are in, "The New Rational Manager" by Kepner and Tregoe and, "The Thinker's Toolkit" by Jones.
Basic Electricity is a good topic to work with, as is, "Caveman Chemistry" by Dunn ( http://www.amazon.com/Caveman-Chemistry-Projects-Creation-Production/dp/1581125666 ) . Remember, technology is not just about computers and electronics; it is a way of thinking. US Army Combat Engineering courses have pretty good low tech instruction (as do some Boy Scout courses) and basic Geometry/Trig problems in doing things like finding the height of a tree/cliff/building or basic astronomy principles all contribute. I'd suggest treating it more like a lab than a lecture. Good luck.
The most useful idea behind cursive was that you could create a word in a single stream of action rather than thinking about individual letters. When I learned penmanship, we were made to practice writing whole words after we had learned the basics. Writing was supposed to be such a habit that we could ignore our writing as a skill and concentrate on what we were trying to communicate. Good cursive writers create words, not individual letters.
I think I made my point about the need for manual writing skills, not dependent on any particular style, later on in the post.
Yes, my friend's son can read a digital watch. As I mentioned, there were other uses for a digital watch which I think deepened my understanding of time, space and motion. A digital watch is no help for finding North if you are lost in the woods. Dead reckoning enhanced my love of astronomy and made it more real. The idea of someone who can only read time in digital form is a lot like someone who says he knows Physics, but has never spent any time in the lab. For one thing, it "excessively precise", meaning that it gives a false sense of precision. Interestingly enough, watches were uncommon until the "trainman's tool" became a useful way of organizing and coordinating human effort. I think it is interesting that the common sport that predates the common use of watches (baseball) is measured in periods of activity rather than in periods of time.
You may have a point about programming. As they say at the Air Force Academy, "If the minimum standards weren't good enough, then they wouldn't be the minimum." The days are long gone when a regular programmer needed to program every little action in a machine. I actually think that thinking about how a problem ought to be solved is more important than the coding, and I believe in program generators. My problem is finding people who actually know how to think a problem through. Boolean Algebra and Assembly language built a skill in logic that permeates the operations of programs and the underlying hardware. It automatically builds an understanding of cause and effect. I know a lot of programmers my age who can "feel" the code, so to speak. Programming is pretty much an Art to these guys. I have no way of determining whether they are that way because they spent so much time doing BA and Assembly, or just because they've spent so many years in the field. As for repositories and cookbooks; Fred Brooks pointed out one time that real programmers (his term) were always creating something new and solving a new problem. If it's already been done it is not necessary to start from scratch. The ACM publishes a fairly complete listing of all the fundamental algorithms for professional programmers to adapt. This is not a bad thing. Still, I think that good programs benefit from good thinking.