But if you are already summarizing in your head, you are half way there, you can just write the summarized information in some abbreviation format and skip filler words. If you have a good memory you also probably don't need to write down and can just remember by the time of the exam. Most people, like me for example, are not as good
After a while you will develop your own short hand syntax. Not every word said by the professor is important. For example he or she might say: "Most often in plasma etching, radicals will be absorbed on the wafer and then form volatile products." Possible keywords are: {plasma etching, radicals, absorb, volatile products}. Now the whole thing could translated to something like "@ plasm etch. radicals absorbed on wafer => volatile prod.". If you have established for youself that @ means during, at, while, at the same time. And "=>" means causes, forces, results, produces.
You forced yourself to extract the main idea and then wrote it down. You dictated to youself in your head what you had to write. Your hand traced the sybmols of the words. So you associated tactile, auditory and visual sensory information to the concept.
Also, you don't have to write notes in a linear, text-only format -- use diagrams. If possible. A picture _is_ worth a thousand words. So in this case draw a very simple digram of a vacuum chamber. Then show radicals with an arrow going into the wafer and then volatile products coming out of the wafer. That will be much easier to recall than a paragraph of words.
Military needs discipline and rape/murder goes against discipline
Wasn't it exactly military discipline that made not a single one of them object to what others were doing? It seems it was exactly because they were disciplined solders that they could rationalize it as "just following orders" and "helping out my bubby". Discipline means "any training intended to produce a specific character or pattern of behaviour" so the same patterns of behavior ("follow orders","don't be a pussy","don't be a snitch") that help one be a good soldier can also make one into a good cold-blooded killer.
The troops didn't seem to have any regrets, that was the problem. It was only the outsiders (friends and others who didn't participate) that eventually spread the story. Later many said they felt very bad, but I wonder if it was more because they had to say it because they were being watched by whole country now.
You can remember what you read better but you don't need a pill for it, but rather better learning skills.
One thing that should be taught first in universities and schools is "how to learn", and then the specific topics for each subject. Sadly there is no such class, everyone is expected to figure it out on their own - "just read the damn book" or "here, memorize these formulas" is what most professors/teachers are basically saying. Granted, many will say that methods of learning are something that differ so much and everyone has their own style and so on. But still there are certain techniques that are known to work best and others don't. There is a lot of medical (brain) and psychological research about how the brain learns. So why not make every freshman take a required course where they will be taught some of these learning "tips and tricks".
Here are a couple of things that helped me. I graduate with 3.9 GPA from a 4 year University, and I do think my learning style made a difference. Hope some of these will be helpful, I wish somenone had told me about them back in the day.:
Summarize and take notes. This is the most important thing. Always keep the question in mind: "what is the main point or the key idea?". The best way to summarize is to take notes on what you are reading or on what you are listening in class. When you take notes, because it takes longer to write stuff, you are automatically forced to abbreviate words and concepts, so your brain is forced to condense a paragraph in only one sentece and you are forced to extract only the main idea. When you spend more time thinking about the idea, it also helps you memorize it better. A secondary benefit is that learning is re-enforced when you associate a gesture or a hand movement with it, in this case the actual tracing of the letters of the word with your pen are associated with the concept. When you write stuff, dictate to yourself in your head, so you associate an auditory sensation with it. The more stuff you associate with the new concept the easier will be for you to retrieve it. So write notes on what you are reading and then just study off of those notes. If you already wrote notes in class, then write a new set of notes that is even better organized and integrated with all the quizes, homeworks and text from the book.
Make Mental Maps. Many believe that the mind will associate new stuff with stuff it already knows. So when you learn something new try to fit it in together with concepts that you already know well. So besides associating sensory perceptions with the concept, associate older concepts to it also. To do this I found it very helpful to draw concept maps or trees. So draw a node for each concept and an edge (a line) for a connection between two concepts. That is a much better way to organize some general knowledge than having it in form of pages and pages of text.
Review-Rest-Review. It is true that you will remember better if you study (review) your materials a week or so before the exam. So take a break a couple of days (study something else) and then review them again. If you don't have a couple of days, then at least allow one full night sleep in between the two session of review. Also the second review should be mostly looking over the notes that you took during the first review. These notes should contains only the most important stuff from all the books, homeworks, class notes, quizes etc. -- all compiled in only one set of notes. Copying that stuff into a new set of notes will take time but it will help greatly to memorize it.
But can you teach it?. To test how much you learned about the topic, try to teach it to someone else. If there is no-one around, pretend in your head that you are the teacher in front of the class and you have to teach the stuff. Could you do it? In other words, most people after reading over the chapters will just assume they know what is happening, just because they've read it X number of times.
But then again why do you personally care, or for that matter why shoud anyone? You will not be there, you will be dead. Unless you believe in afterlife, what is the point? Let the people who will live then take care of it if they want. Or to put it another way, after I am dead, it will make no difference to me whatsoever if my seed is floating in space or not.
Well, that is sort obvious. Bad hardware can always crash the system.
But I would think the people who want a compartmentalized OS would also be the ones to get reliable and certified hardware. And I think in some cases it would be possible for the OS to actually compensate for some hardware flaws - think of hard drives. Even as you look at this page, your hard drive head could have probably mis-read one of the bits from the platter but the _software_ in its controller corrected the mistake and you didn't even notice that anything happened. Here is the case where the hardware was designed to fail gracefully and the software was designed to cooperate with it and correct the problem.
In case of a video card, if it fails (say performing some exotic 3D shading operation) but in a non-fatal way, such that the processor can still re-initialize it, then the separation kernel can choose a generic default driver that uses only the minimal subset of features (think VESA) and will re-initialize in that mode, so you would still see the console prompt and the network would still be up. Maybe the application that was trying to do the rendering might have to quit but the rest of the machine would be usable. These kind of requirements are not easy to justify for home desktops but for medical equipment, airplanes, military application it is very useful.
But seriously, that is what most people think - "Oh boy, I'll play Half Life x10 faster with one of them quantum chips"
The only two known algorithms at this point that will benefit from the quantum speedup are factoring(Shor's Algorithm) and searching (Grover's Algorithm). Those are important and would greatly be useful but most other applications would not run any faster on a quantum chip than they do on a regular one from it (yet). In the future a quantum processor will probably become an add-on processor on large databases to speed up searches or to help crack public key encryption schemes.
Agree. I would even go futher and say that even some drivers should not be able to crash the operating system. If some idiot at Microsoft wrote my PS/2 mouse driver or some contractor monkey wrote a buggy graphics driver -- it shouldn't bring down the whole machine, but rather the machine should be able to detect a problem and restart the driver and the device or try to autmatically fall back to use a generic failsafe driver. I would want to have a good free OS with a separation kernel and userspace drivers. Sorry but Minix and Hurd just don't cut it yet. I remember the Andrew Tanenbaum vs. Linus debate over the best kernel architecture, and while back in the early 90's on a 33 MHz 386 processor context switches between drivers would have been too prohibitive, today with the 3GHz CPUs and gigabit memory bandwidths, it might just work. Some people will agree to sacrifice %15 or so of performance to increased reliability and fault tollerance. Even without any specific changes in programming practices going from 5,000,000 lines of code that could potentially run in priviledged mode to only 5000 would make a HUGE difference in terms of stability and fault tollerance. Who knows, maybe it's time to rethink?...
What do you mean by digital cameras needing to read the filesystem? The camera when connected via USB/Firewire reading stuff from the PC's hard drive? Or the digital camera reading/writing data from/to its own drive?
As you said, in case of USB drive the user can just be asked to format it. But in the case of a nice digital camera, it will already come with some CD with software (mostly shareware) on it that people will install - so why not just format camera's drive with ext2 and include a driver to read an ext2 system on that CD? People will be told to install the disk, restart the computer and then they can happily access the movie files from the camera's MS-patent-free FS.
The articles was about how finally they can disprove one of the main points that ID fanatics have been bringing up. As you noted the big thing missing is the explanation -- I guess the article, was only meant for the anti-ID fanatics that are just as crazy and will believe anything as long as the authors hate ID.
This is an example of research done for a political purpose to shoot down some whack pseudo-scientific crowd. In other words, they might not really want to find out how bees fly as much as they want to "stick it" to those ID people. The potential problem could be if they didn't really explain how the bees fly, or mis-interpreted their data, then it will actually end up hurting their own cause.
My university tells graduate students up front - in the first graduate seminar : "publish or perish" just like you said. I know now why my advisor told me to find some "easy" obscure problem and work on just that - then I won't have to worry about competition and tons of references - I chose a hard and pertinent topic that others are doing and at first I regretted it, but somehow I feel better about myself for being honest and trying to solve "a real" problem that would be somewhat useful.
Speaking of professors, once someone becomes a tenured professor - they sit on their butt and don't do anything significant. A professor I know (not my advisor) told me straight out that they just wanted to be tenured so they could go to the gym every day, relax, travel and just have fun. The young associate professors are forced to do all the work: teach, have grad students and get grant money for the department. I don't have a solution for the problem but something needs to be done about our academia...
You extrapolating Dr. Hwang's actions and saying this dishonesty is a trait of Korean culture is at best a logical fallacy
How is that a logical fallacy? My conjecture was that Hwang was caught because he was at the forefront - he became the scapegoat. Then they created this "mock" board to determine if he faked the results after he _admitted_ that he faked the results. If you would have read carefully what I wrote you would have understood that I was not saying "OMG! Koreans are all bad! LOL!!!! WE RULE!!!". I was just saying that (1) I doubt Hwang is the only one that would be dishonest in his situation. I didn't condone what he did but I can see how someone would do what he did because of what would happend in SK academic community. And (2) There are probably other scientists that do or attempt to do the same but we just don't hear anything about.
Is extrapolating Hwang's actions with some knowlege about the academic culture in SK and in other counries really so "outrageous"? You are right that SK deserves a better analysis but I am not publishing an article in NY Times, I just made a subjective comment on Slashdot. So if I had another month, I would have looked at the known statistics of plagiarism and corruption and compared US and SK, but I just posted a comment with an idea I had.
Isn't extrapolationg behaviors what courts do all the time? If a person lies during investigation, then is it un-reasonable to believe that they have something to hide.
Or say you hear that in Russia you can bribe your way out of jails and traffic tickets and you personally know of 100 such cases but you only know of one such case in U.S. isn't it reasonable to say that Russia is more corrupt than U.S. ?
On the final note, have you ever lived under an oppressive government? I doubt it.. So your oppinion on comparing countries is more subjective than that of someone who has.
They at least wanted to somehow seem "professional" and to put up the image that "we are serious about this", "we will openly investigate this and punish the responsible", "we are still a very honest country". In other words it is more of a show for the whole world.
This story brings up an interesting point. I wonder if there is such a thing as collective integrity or morality when dealing with a whole country not just individuals. Typically such words as morality, integrity, honesty are attributed to individuals, but I wonder if they also can be attributed to whole countries.
For whatever reason it seems that in some countries the level of dishonesty and corruption is higher. There might be a good reason for it such as poverty, authoritarian government, and so on. The reason I bring this is up is because as guilty as Hwang is he didn't act alone. Some of his collaborators knew about it, but in general I think the same stuff would be very likely to go on in South Korea, because of some specific socal or cultural factors. Somebody mentioned on the news how scientists in many Asian countries achieve this level of celebrity. As Americans we would not even understand this easily - young teenagers wanting to hang up posters of Bohr in their bedrooms instead of posters of Paris Hilton!? One one side this is admirable as it bring up people who want to learn for the sake of learning, on the other side it puts enourmous pressure on the scientist. It is also difficult when the goverment is very authoritarian and will provide funding but then will keep the gun to your head until you get some results. So the two forces - the temptation for fame and fortune coupled with pressure form the government that wants to show off to other countries will create this situation where individuals will cheat and fake their results.
I don't think that Hwang should not be held responsible -- I believe he will be punished severely for shaming the country -- but I think his case also says something about the whole South Korean culture. Not to be prejudicial but from now on anything that comes out of SK's academia will be taken with a "grain of salt."
High levels of courrption and dishonesty is why I came to this country from the former Soviet Union -- it was possible to live there and even to become very rich but only at the expense of lying, stealing, cheating and bribing. I could and did not want to function in such a society so I came to the U.S. As much as people complain about the government and society here, I think it is still the best one that exists as far as a collective sense of honesty and accountability goes.
The point was that if the platters or the turbines weren't spinning at all, the reliability would have been a lot higher!
I was talking about reliability relative to the non-spinning components. Whouldn't you agree that within normal operating parameters (no power surges and good temp. control a video card or a processor would last a lot longer than a hard drive spinning at 10K RPM?
Intuitively: I had to replace two hard drives on my machine because of failure while all other components have been working without a glitch for 5+ years. The main difference is that hard drives contain fast moving parts (fans also move fast - so once in a while I have to check them or at least clean the dust away from them).
The same goes for the turbines - I would think they would have to replace the turbines a lot more often than they would have to replace rivets or bolts. Or to put it in other words if the jet turbine wasn't spinning it would have a much lower failure rate than.07/100K hours.
You obviously didn't own an IBM Deskstar and didn't have to hear the "click-o-death" and all your data gone before you can type "tar -cf" -- which is why they became known as Deathstar. If that is not catastrophic then I don't know what is...
I would love to see the HDs go, they are the only critical moving component in the system. Anything that is moving at 10,000+ RPM is prone to failure. I also wonder whatever happened to holographic solid state memory that was supposed to hold TBs of data - that stuff has also been "right around corner"... but then again, so has the time machine...
This whole:"How would you feel, dude, if I called you subconsciously sexist! There is no way everyone is racist, man!" is not the point. The point is that there was research done where even people who say they are very sensitive and not prejudiced would associate positive qualities to a white person and negative qualities to a black person. In other words they judge without knowing that "black=bad" and "white=good". The fact that they didn't like or didn't agree with it consciously didn't make any difference.
I agree, if I would have seen Planet of the Apes and a book about MLK on the same page, I would have not thought of a racist connection, but the truth is that most Americans would have! Wal-Mart didn't take action to remove the association because they thought it meant "stuff about social change" they did it becase someone felt it meant "Wal-Mart is racist and did it on purpose, so I bet I can sue Wal-Mart and roll in the dough! Yey!"
I understand, that is what I thought, but that is not why WalMart had to take quick action and remove the association. In other words most people saw it as "black people=apes=WalMart is racist", which in itself says something about us: Why are we seeing the worse when there could be more than one explanation.
It is like showing someone a stick - and then asking then what does it remind them of. If they are a smoker, they might say "a cigar", if they are hugry they might say "a banana", or if they haven't been laid in a while they'll say "a penis".
To me it seems that today's society is just looking at reasons to be offended by anything and anyone, just to make a big thing out of it (sue, fire someone, go to the media) or profit somehow from now "being a victim". In this case someone looked at the web page saw the MLK book and the "Planet Of The Apes" together and said "Bingo! I'll sue WalMart for being racist!"
I guess WalMart never explained how their "mapping" algorithm works.
Is it a simple un-supervised algorithm that creates relationships based on customer's choices? Then shouldn't the whole American public be to blame? In other words did the people who buy "Planet Of The Apes" also buy the book about MLK, implying an association between black people and apes? The fact of the matter remains that most people in U.S. are racist - period. Even the ones who preach PC are racist even if just at the subconscious level. There have been studies done that shows this.
This makes me think of an interesting point: in one of the previous articles on Slashdot someone said how it is possible to extract so much data out of people's wish lists. But how about also gaining an insight into the American global subconscious by looking at the items people choose when they shop at the stores like WalMart, Amazon and others? I see someone in Sociology being interested in this...
Slashdot Mirror
After a while you will develop your own short hand syntax. Not every word said by the professor is important. For example he or she might say: "Most often in plasma etching, radicals will be absorbed on the wafer and then form volatile products." Possible keywords are: {plasma etching, radicals, absorb, volatile products}. Now the whole thing could translated to something like "@ plasm etch. radicals absorbed on wafer => volatile prod.". If you have established for youself that @ means during, at, while, at the same time. And "=>" means causes, forces, results, produces.
You forced yourself to extract the main idea and then wrote it down. You dictated to youself in your head what you had to write. Your hand traced the sybmols of the words. So you associated tactile, auditory and visual sensory information to the concept.
Also, you don't have to write notes in a linear, text-only format -- use diagrams. If possible. A picture _is_ worth a thousand words. So in this case draw a very simple digram of a vacuum chamber. Then show radicals with an arrow going into the wafer and then volatile products coming out of the wafer. That will be much easier to recall than a paragraph of words.
Wasn't it exactly military discipline that made not a single one of them object to what others were doing? It seems it was exactly because they were disciplined solders that they could rationalize it as "just following orders" and "helping out my bubby". Discipline means "any training intended to produce a specific character or pattern of behaviour" so the same patterns of behavior ("follow orders","don't be a pussy","don't be a snitch") that help one be a good soldier can also make one into a good cold-blooded killer.
The troops didn't seem to have any regrets, that was the problem. It was only the outsiders (friends and others who didn't participate) that eventually spread the story. Later many said they felt very bad, but I wonder if it was more because they had to say it because they were being watched by whole country now.
One thing that should be taught first in universities and schools is "how to learn", and then the specific topics for each subject. Sadly there is no such class, everyone is expected to figure it out on their own - "just read the damn book" or "here, memorize these formulas" is what most professors/teachers are basically saying. Granted, many will say that methods of learning are something that differ so much and everyone has their own style and so on. But still there are certain techniques that are known to work best and others don't. There is a lot of medical (brain) and psychological research about how the brain learns. So why not make every freshman take a required course where they will be taught some of these learning "tips and tricks".
Here are a couple of things that helped me. I graduate with 3.9 GPA from a 4 year University, and I do think my learning style made a difference. Hope some of these will be helpful, I wish somenone had told me about them back in the day.:
Summarize and take notes. This is the most important thing. Always keep the question in mind: "what is the main point or the key idea?". The best way to summarize is to take notes on what you are reading or on what you are listening in class. When you take notes, because it takes longer to write stuff, you are automatically forced to abbreviate words and concepts, so your brain is forced to condense a paragraph in only one sentece and you are forced to extract only the main idea. When you spend more time thinking about the idea, it also helps you memorize it better. A secondary benefit is that learning is re-enforced when you associate a gesture or a hand movement with it, in this case the actual tracing of the letters of the word with your pen are associated with the concept. When you write stuff, dictate to yourself in your head, so you associate an auditory sensation with it. The more stuff you associate with the new concept the easier will be for you to retrieve it. So write notes on what you are reading and then just study off of those notes. If you already wrote notes in class, then write a new set of notes that is even better organized and integrated with all the quizes, homeworks and text from the book.
Make Mental Maps. Many believe that the mind will associate new stuff with stuff it already knows. So when you learn something new try to fit it in together with concepts that you already know well. So besides associating sensory perceptions with the concept, associate older concepts to it also. To do this I found it very helpful to draw concept maps or trees. So draw a node for each concept and an edge (a line) for a connection between two concepts. That is a much better way to organize some general knowledge than having it in form of pages and pages of text.
Review-Rest-Review. It is true that you will remember better if you study (review) your materials a week or so before the exam. So take a break a couple of days (study something else) and then review them again. If you don't have a couple of days, then at least allow one full night sleep in between the two session of review. Also the second review should be mostly looking over the notes that you took during the first review. These notes should contains only the most important stuff from all the books, homeworks, class notes, quizes etc. -- all compiled in only one set of notes. Copying that stuff into a new set of notes will take time but it will help greatly to memorize it.
But can you teach it?. To test how much you learned about the topic, try to teach it to someone else. If there is no-one around, pretend in your head that you are the teacher in front of the class and you have to teach the stuff. Could you do it? In other words, most people after reading over the chapters will just assume they know what is happening, just because they've read it X number of times.
Formulas When having to memo
But then again why do you personally care, or for that matter why shoud anyone? You will not be there, you will be dead. Unless you believe in afterlife, what is the point? Let the people who will live then take care of it if they want. Or to put it another way, after I am dead, it will make no difference to me whatsoever if my seed is floating in space or not.
But I would think the people who want a compartmentalized OS would also be the ones to get reliable and certified hardware. And I think in some cases it would be possible for the OS to actually compensate for some hardware flaws - think of hard drives. Even as you look at this page, your hard drive head could have probably mis-read one of the bits from the platter but the _software_ in its controller corrected the mistake and you didn't even notice that anything happened. Here is the case where the hardware was designed to fail gracefully and the software was designed to cooperate with it and correct the problem.
In case of a video card, if it fails (say performing some exotic 3D shading operation) but in a non-fatal way, such that the processor can still re-initialize it, then the separation kernel can choose a generic default driver that uses only the minimal subset of features (think VESA) and will re-initialize in that mode, so you would still see the console prompt and the network would still be up. Maybe the application that was trying to do the rendering might have to quit but the rest of the machine would be usable. These kind of requirements are not easy to justify for home desktops but for medical equipment, airplanes, military application it is very useful.
Check the INTEGRITY 178B from Green Hills for a commercial example of such a system.
The only two known algorithms at this point that will benefit from the quantum speedup are factoring(Shor's Algorithm) and searching (Grover's Algorithm). Those are important and would greatly be useful but most other applications would not run any faster on a quantum chip than they do on a regular one from it (yet). In the future a quantum processor will probably become an add-on processor on large databases to speed up searches or to help crack public key encryption schemes.
Agree. I would even go futher and say that even some drivers should not be able to crash the operating system. If some idiot at Microsoft wrote my PS/2 mouse driver or some contractor monkey wrote a buggy graphics driver -- it shouldn't bring down the whole machine, but rather the machine should be able to detect a problem and restart the driver and the device or try to autmatically fall back to use a generic failsafe driver. I would want to have a good free OS with a separation kernel and userspace drivers. Sorry but Minix and Hurd just don't cut it yet. I remember the Andrew Tanenbaum vs. Linus debate over the best kernel architecture, and while back in the early 90's on a 33 MHz 386 processor context switches between drivers would have been too prohibitive, today with the 3GHz CPUs and gigabit memory bandwidths, it might just work. Some people will agree to sacrifice %15 or so of performance to increased reliability and fault tollerance. Even without any specific changes in programming practices going from 5,000,000 lines of code that could potentially run in priviledged mode to only 5000 would make a HUGE difference in terms of stability and fault tollerance. Who knows, maybe it's time to rethink?...
As you said, in case of USB drive the user can just be asked to format it. But in the case of a nice digital camera, it will already come with some CD with software (mostly shareware) on it that people will install - so why not just format camera's drive with ext2 and include a driver to read an ext2 system on that CD? People will be told to install the disk, restart the computer and then they can happily access the movie files from the camera's MS-patent-free FS.
This is an example of research done for a political purpose to shoot down some whack pseudo-scientific crowd. In other words, they might not really want to find out how bees fly as much as they want to "stick it" to those ID people. The potential problem could be if they didn't really explain how the bees fly, or mis-interpreted their data, then it will actually end up hurting their own cause.
Speaking of professors, once someone becomes a tenured professor - they sit on their butt and don't do anything significant. A professor I know (not my advisor) told me straight out that they just wanted to be tenured so they could go to the gym every day, relax, travel and just have fun. The young associate professors are forced to do all the work: teach, have grad students and get grant money for the department. I don't have a solution for the problem but something needs to be done about our academia...
How is that a logical fallacy? My conjecture was that Hwang was caught because he was at the forefront - he became the scapegoat. Then they created this "mock" board to determine if he faked the results after he _admitted_ that he faked the results. If you would have read carefully what I wrote you would have understood that I was not saying "OMG! Koreans are all bad! LOL!!!! WE RULE!!!". I was just saying that (1) I doubt Hwang is the only one that would be dishonest in his situation. I didn't condone what he did but I can see how someone would do what he did because of what would happend in SK academic community. And (2) There are probably other scientists that do or attempt to do the same but we just don't hear anything about.
Is extrapolating Hwang's actions with some knowlege about the academic culture in SK and in other counries really so "outrageous"? You are right that SK deserves a better analysis but I am not publishing an article in NY Times, I just made a subjective comment on Slashdot. So if I had another month, I would have looked at the known statistics of plagiarism and corruption and compared US and SK, but I just posted a comment with an idea I had.
Isn't extrapolationg behaviors what courts do all the time? If a person lies during investigation, then is it un-reasonable to believe that they have something to hide.
Or say you hear that in Russia you can bribe your way out of jails and traffic tickets and you personally know of 100 such cases but you only know of one such case in U.S. isn't it reasonable to say that Russia is more corrupt than U.S. ?
On the final note, have you ever lived under an oppressive government? I doubt it.. So your oppinion on comparing countries is more subjective than that of someone who has.
They at least wanted to somehow seem "professional" and to put up the image that "we are serious about this", "we will openly investigate this and punish the responsible", "we are still a very honest country". In other words it is more of a show for the whole world.
For whatever reason it seems that in some countries the level of dishonesty and corruption is higher. There might be a good reason for it such as poverty, authoritarian government, and so on. The reason I bring this is up is because as guilty as Hwang is he didn't act alone. Some of his collaborators knew about it, but in general I think the same stuff would be very likely to go on in South Korea, because of some specific socal or cultural factors. Somebody mentioned on the news how scientists in many Asian countries achieve this level of celebrity. As Americans we would not even understand this easily - young teenagers wanting to hang up posters of Bohr in their bedrooms instead of posters of Paris Hilton!? One one side this is admirable as it bring up people who want to learn for the sake of learning, on the other side it puts enourmous pressure on the scientist. It is also difficult when the goverment is very authoritarian and will provide funding but then will keep the gun to your head until you get some results. So the two forces - the temptation for fame and fortune coupled with pressure form the government that wants to show off to other countries will create this situation where individuals will cheat and fake their results.
I don't think that Hwang should not be held responsible -- I believe he will be punished severely for shaming the country -- but I think his case also says something about the whole South Korean culture. Not to be prejudicial but from now on anything that comes out of SK's academia will be taken with a "grain of salt."
High levels of courrption and dishonesty is why I came to this country from the former Soviet Union -- it was possible to live there and even to become very rich but only at the expense of lying, stealing, cheating and bribing. I could and did not want to function in such a society so I came to the U.S. As much as people complain about the government and society here, I think it is still the best one that exists as far as a collective sense of honesty and accountability goes.
That is true, I looked into that and the price was just way too high to justify saving my personal files...
I was talking about reliability relative to the non-spinning components. Whouldn't you agree that within normal operating parameters (no power surges and good temp. control a video card or a processor would last a lot longer than a hard drive spinning at 10K RPM?
Intuitively: I had to replace two hard drives on my machine because of failure while all other components have been working without a glitch for 5+ years. The main difference is that hard drives contain fast moving parts (fans also move fast - so once in a while I have to check them or at least clean the dust away from them).
The same goes for the turbines - I would think they would have to replace the turbines a lot more often than they would have to replace rivets or bolts. Or to put it in other words if the jet turbine wasn't spinning it would have a much lower failure rate than .07/100K hours.
I would love to see the HDs go, they are the only critical moving component in the system. Anything that is moving at 10,000+ RPM is prone to failure. I also wonder whatever happened to holographic solid state memory that was supposed to hold TBs of data - that stuff has also been "right around corner"... but then again, so has the time machine...
I agree, if I would have seen Planet of the Apes and a book about MLK on the same page, I would have not thought of a racist connection, but the truth is that most Americans would have! Wal-Mart didn't take action to remove the association because they thought it meant "stuff about social change" they did it becase someone felt it meant "Wal-Mart is racist and did it on purpose, so I bet I can sue Wal-Mart and roll in the dough! Yey!"
It is like showing someone a stick - and then asking then what does it remind them of. If they are a smoker, they might say "a cigar", if they are hugry they might say "a banana", or if they haven't been laid in a while they'll say "a penis".
To me it seems that today's society is just looking at reasons to be offended by anything and anyone, just to make a big thing out of it (sue, fire someone, go to the media) or profit somehow from now "being a victim". In this case someone looked at the web page saw the MLK book and the "Planet Of The Apes" together and said "Bingo! I'll sue WalMart for being racist!"
--Oh but she did wink at me!
--Whatever, she was just being nice/--Whatever she was just being funny
But if it is the other way around, the male will be out of the door immediatly, before anoyone can say "lawsuit".
--Oh but he winked at me!
--WHAT???! He's GONE!
I am not saying that sexual harassment or racial bias should take place, but in efforts to stop it they've swung the pendulum the other way too far.
Is it a simple un-supervised algorithm that creates relationships based on customer's choices? Then shouldn't the whole American public be to blame? In other words did the people who buy "Planet Of The Apes" also buy the book about MLK, implying an association between black people and apes? The fact of the matter remains that most people in U.S. are racist - period. Even the ones who preach PC are racist even if just at the subconscious level. There have been studies done that shows this.
This makes me think of an interesting point: in one of the previous articles on Slashdot someone said how it is possible to extract so much data out of people's wish lists. But how about also gaining an insight into the American global subconscious by looking at the items people choose when they shop at the stores like WalMart, Amazon and others? I see someone in Sociology being interested in this...
A slashjob. Abbreviated as /job
The other ones look plain creepy. The Fark should do a photoshop contest on some of those people.
Aliens are attacking and the dead are turning into zombies...
Try running your computer (monitor and everything) at 10 K degrees, see how fast it runs ;)