By "called them back" I meant all of them where called back to the location of the study and were presented with the same interface as before and where asked to repeat the tasks but were not told how to to them again. The ones that use CLI had a better recall rate. And you explained pretty much why - because humans learn leanguage and words well and faster than they will learn to recognize and remember the vizual appearance of the icons+the behaviors.
Actually research kind of supports what you say. In an Human Computer Interface (HCI) graduate class I took a couple of years ago we read a paper that compared how people did the same task using a text console and a point-and-click interface (mostly copying, renaming, moving and creating files). It turns out at first people figure out the point and click interface faster but they are more likely to remember how to do all those tasks using a command line. In other words the researchers called those people back a week later and the ones who were using the command line remembered better how to do the tasks.
As far as the whole KDE vs. GNOME thing, I was using KDE for the longest time because it had all those option and all the flash. But when I installed Ubuntu, started to login more often with GNOME and eventually switched compeletely to GNOME. The problem the way I see it is this. KDE seems to try to look and act like Windows - because it wants to cater to the people who switched over from Windows and doesn't want to confuse them. Windows interface though is broken if you ask most HCI people. GNOME is trying to do the right thing and follow the best HCI practices. These, at first might confuse people, but after a little getting used to they will find themselves being more productive.
The best UI(Desktop) if you ask me is Mac's OS X. It is the most consistent and the most minimalistic. Apple has invested more than anyone in their interface design and it pays off, also it show what a good interface should be. I think GNOME is closer to Mac OS X than KDE.
But on the same note I am not a UI religious fanaticl. If KDE 4.0 comes out with an imporoved look and works better and can be made more minimal I would use KDE (or whatever comes along that gets the job done faster).
It is interesting. I read the article and your comment about it. The way I see it is often not a black and white issue of "homeschoolers/non-traditional medical practitioners are always right" or "AMA and traditional doctors are always right." I think both are right and wrong to a certain degree.
In the case of the vaccinations and autism, I wonder if there could be a third variable that should be considered - for example what if there is something else that parents who do not vaccinate their children do that others don't. Do they also tend to hold their babies more (touch and parental attention early on might also be connected to autism), do they also choose to feed them home-made fresh baby food made from fresh fruits as opposed to formula, do they breastfeed more? The group that I would want to see included in the study is all the autistic children who have not been vaccinated, if there are such.
What about other countries? I grew up in the former Soviet Union, and there they had mandatory vaccinations for school children. I don't remember hearing of any cases of autism growing up there. It would be interesting to try to include some of that data into the study - in other words a population with a somewhat different set of vaccines and to see if the number of autistic children is different there.
One final note, a couple of years ago there was an article how someone observed a considerable increase in autism among the children of the techies in Silicon Valley. The hypothesis was that the genes that made those techies into smart geeks are also responsible for autism. In other words autism is a grey area where in some cases is just manifests as absentmindedness, social awkwardness, extreme creativity and insight - traits of geeks and geniuses. Put them all together in one spot, they will breed with each other and of course the autism gene(s) will be strongly expressed in their offspring.
It's funny too how often researchers make outlandish claims and manage to write whole books about it when in fact their data or analysis are wrong.
In this case it might be the problem with the reporting. The researcher should report what she or he found in fact based on data. In this case what the researcher you quoted said was exactly what the headline should have been. Between the "link" and "cause" is a big difference. So to jump from that to "cold triggers cancer" is big mistake.
You might also want to consider that some of the Slashdotters are also researchers and not just "kewl" 16 year old "Hax0rz".
Have some faith in science and scientists okay? That is exactly the wrong way to approach science. People shouldn't have blind faith in scientists, instead they should be educated enough to scrutinize them.
Is is also possible that the same children that have a weak immune system and get more colds would also be more susceptable to cancer? So both the colds and the cancer are effects of some other, 3rd cause.
If the ability of anyone to remotely execute code on your machine without your permission means that Windows XP "does the job just fine" then you must have very low expectations of how a fine job should be done.
I just wanted to point out that your analogy of Microsoft Windows being like real glass windows ( and thus MS should not be to blame for Sony's mishap) is not valid. If the real windows were full of holes and cracks you would go and buy a better window right away, because the faults would be evident. Now with an operating system, the every-day user has no idea how insecure and how vulnerable MS Windows is.
But to go back to the analogies, I will offer, what I think is a better one: Say you buy a car. It looks fine and nothing seems wrong with it. But later on, while driving on the highway, all your controls, like steering and breaks, stop working and your car crashes. You loose your limbs, a couple of pets and some family members. As it turns out the manufacturer of the car built a wireless remote control option into the cars that can be used by police to stop cars remotely. Alas, one of "teh bad guys" reverse engineered the protocol and some other individual used that information and built a device that allows him to remotely disable the controls of all the cars made by that manufacturer and that is what he did to your car.
The big question then is "Who is at fault here?". Is the "mad haX0r" who reverse engineered the communication protocol at fault, is the individual who built the disabling device at fault, is the manufacturer of the car at fault? I think the answer is that in reality all three could be found guilty one way or another.
By analogy then Microsoft should be partially to blame for what happened with Sony for supporting and facilitating (willingly - through design, and unwillingly through lack of code quality control) the installation and operation of such root kits.
That is why I never felt particlarly bad about using pirated versions of Windows XP or Office or Photoshop. Maybe I am a rotten to the core individual but I am sure that Adobe and Microsoft never lost money on me, because I would have never bought their software at the prices they sell it. I was never a potential customer that turned away because I found the product for free. Now I will pay for some small shareware products and if I didn't I would feel like I am taking money from the developers because the price is such that I could afford it and would buy it.
Also, Adobe isn't making a big deal about college kids using pirated $300+ Photoshop. Why? Because Adobe still wins in the end, those college students graduate and then when they get jobs the company will probably use Photoshop CS2 because that is what the employees want to get the work done. Using a pirated version for a couple of years is not that big of a deal if that person will learn to use it and the place of employment will pay for Photoshop for decades ahead.
And as you say, the same thing goes for MS Office.
On the other side, it would be great if the companies would crack down and make it harder to pirate their software. There are open source alternatives that might not be as good now but if more people turn to them, there will be an increased level of development and support for them.
The analogy of "your location" and "your house" is not that good in this case. There are a couple of things there to consider:
1.) By having a cell phone, which is on, you are broadcasting your approximate location to the cell towers anyway. The provider company needs to know where you are so it can route the incomming call to you. You cannot use the company to talk on your cell and at the same time hide your location. This makes the disclusure of your location a decision of the company. All 3 or 4 major wireless providers can just update their contract/policy that they will report your location on-demand to a law enforcement agency - chances are people won't have a choice and will not do anything about it. I am not saying that is a good thing or I like but that is what probably would happen. The government, which runs FCC, can practically force the providers to do stuff like that.
2.) Your location is already public. In other words if you are on the street, people already see you there. You go to a mall, the cameras will record your location, you go to work - the co-workers will know where you are. The police can technically follow you around to know your location, without needing a search warrant.
In other words "your location" does not = "your property".
Don't you think it is easier to create a good functional and user friendly form with Swing than it is with HTML? But Swing is still slow and even though it looks better than HTML buttons and tables, it is still ugly. But if all the browsers had a faster, better looking Swing already builtin, so the user wouldn't have to go looking for plugins and JREs, then "yeah" - I would suggest that everyone use Swing...
We just have to make sure we destroy ourselves so our lifetime is not long enough for the cosmic death rays to get us. Drugs, wars and bird-flu should do the job very nicely, and are a lot more fun than gamma rays if you ask me...
A lot of people who "build web pages" today don't even know or use HTML, they just use some WYSIWYG IDE like Dreamweaver, or whatever it is called now.
In general, I think HTML is a horrible language (if you can even call it a language) for building forms and user interfaces. It is a good language for... wait, this is going to surprise everyone - Hypertext Markup.
CSS, DOM and JavaScript seem like bandaids that were added later to make HTML do what it wasn't meant to do. Most graphical toolkits/libraries out there (QT, GTK, Microsoft's MFC, Java's Swing, wxWindows, even TCL/TK) are better than HTML at creating a user interface.
There aren't that many popular browsers out there I can think of only about 4 (IE, Firefox, Safari and Opera) if they all got together for once with W3C and implemented a good new standard it might just catch on as long as everyone agrees to support it their next major version... but that is in the ideal world which doesn't exist.
Real CS nerds would come up with an O(nlogn) algorithm to decide what to do given all the circumstances (input - n, is the number of circumstances, output is 1 or 0 - to change major or not to change major).
The reason for the warning is that an infrared ray will not be visible so your pupil will not even shrink to shield the retina. Also you won't feel anything but your retina could still end up with a hole in it. But with the CD ROM lasers you would probably be safe.
Ok, I see you point, how about this. Imagine the scenario where you would be working for a company. When you were hired you sign a contract that says that you will not post negative remarks about the company policy or its CEO on the Web or you will be terminated. That is quite a reasonable thing for an employment contract to say. A company will provide you an opportunity to work for them, you will get a paycheck but you cannot say "bad" things about it. Now, you don't have to work for that company, you can go work for another one that doesn't mind being talked about on the Web.
Now, a private school like Marquette, is like a private company. Except that instead of working for them students go there to be educated. When students are enrolled, they probably sign a contract that says "you can do A,B,C, but you cannot do X,Y,Z, if you break these rules we could expell you or take away your scholarship" And guess what, this has nothing to do with free speech because that only applies to the Government, not private entities.
So I think it suck, it is bad policy but it is not illegal. Also, I think that without realizing Marquette probably did more damage for its reputation by taking harsh action against the student as opposed to letting it go (or doing something less drastic). Now the web and the media will know Marquette as the school that "cuts your tongue out" for speaking bad about it, while before what was the chance that so many people would have read that student's blog?
Simple - all that 5% is used to pirate stuff, which is then sold on outside markets to the other %95. The pirates make money and the rest of the 95% of users of pirated software save money - ($2 for MS Windows as opposed to $200). Win-win situation as far as the Macedonians are concerned.
Expert systems where all the rage back in the 70s and 80s. Everyone was working on expert systems. Then came neural networks, every graduate in CS and his dog did their thesis on NN in the late 80s - early 90s. But the public's hope of having robots take over the world will not come true any time soon. The AI field promised too much but couldn't deliver. We have a bunch of professors at my university who still are stuck in their little 70s and 80s time capsules desperately scrambling to find funding for their expert systems and NN projects.
Speaking of social isolation, I know how you feel but I am having difficulty on the other side of the communication channel. I stutter and that pretty much isolated me as a child growing up and as a teenager. I was one of the nerds and they didn't seem to mind waiting for me to try to say a word 5 times, while all the "cool" and "popular" kids made fun of me which honestly I think was a blessing in disguise as that kept me from doing drugs and helped me focus more on academic performance.
So, what Kaaza should do is to add a spell check to the search. Where if misspelled the word would be corrected and the results for all the possible corrections would be returned. So for example, they ban "U2", well people then might search U1,U3,U4,U5 and the result will still be U2. Eventually everyone would just know to search using a misspelled name, for example "50-Cent" would be "49-Cent" (or "0.5 Dollars") , "Coldplay"--"Goldplay", "Madonna"--"Ladonna", "Korn"--"Corn Teh Cobb" and so on...
Even better than just spending time - put them to good use!
I can see the ads:
Teach your baby C++ in 21 days, let him debug that code for you, while you play Doom.
Or how about
"Database Administration for Babies" - put the pager in his crib and walk way to play D&D. Let your baby help you instead of just eating, crying and pooping all day.
I live right at the intersection of a white trash and a black community. Inside the white trash one there are also a couple of blocks of almost exclusively hispanic apparment buildings (a little sub-community). I live here because I am a poor college student and it is very close to my school. So in the course of 3 years of my graduate school I have observed quite a bit, had stuff stolen from my car and my car was hit by drunk drivers probably a couple of times. I will definetly move out when I graduate but now I am still saving money and it works out. Anyway, that is how I know...
No, the logic goes that if a customer is willing to pay $200 for a pair of shoes when they might not have enough to pay their rent, there is a good chance they will also pay $2.49 for the latest popular song. The detail of wether the particular teenagers use Sprint or pre-paid plans is irrelevant. I am sure the pre-paid companies could come up with a scheme where the pre-paid minutes would be used for downloading song - so instead of 10 hours of talk time you could download a song.
Now I am not saying that is a good thing and that companies should be marketing to the poor teenagers and exploit their in-ability to use the computer (and/or money management skills if they have any) but from an economic point of view it makes sense.
No, I wasn't trying to be racial -"ghetto" could be a Hispanic or white trash "ghetto" i.e. a community with high levels of poverty, crime and un-employment. All of them would make a great target customer base for $2.49 per song on the cell phone sheme.
Well good point, college students are another good customer base for $2.49/song scheme. They are also a bit out of touch with reality when mommy and daddy is paying for the college. But most college students (at least those who stay in college long enough to graduate) are smart enough to use a computer and could just get the song from iTunes for $0.99.
Slashdot Mirror
By "called them back" I meant all of them where called back to the location of the study and were presented with the same interface as before and where asked to repeat the tasks but were not told how to to them again. The ones that use CLI had a better recall rate. And you explained pretty much why - because humans learn leanguage and words well and faster than they will learn to recognize and remember the vizual appearance of the icons+the behaviors.
As far as the whole KDE vs. GNOME thing, I was using KDE for the longest time because it had all those option and all the flash. But when I installed Ubuntu, started to login more often with GNOME and eventually switched compeletely to GNOME. The problem the way I see it is this. KDE seems to try to look and act like Windows - because it wants to cater to the people who switched over from Windows and doesn't want to confuse them. Windows interface though is broken if you ask most HCI people. GNOME is trying to do the right thing and follow the best HCI practices. These, at first might confuse people, but after a little getting used to they will find themselves being more productive.
The best UI(Desktop) if you ask me is Mac's OS X. It is the most consistent and the most minimalistic. Apple has invested more than anyone in their interface design and it pays off, also it show what a good interface should be. I think GNOME is closer to Mac OS X than KDE.
But on the same note I am not a UI religious fanaticl. If KDE 4.0 comes out with an imporoved look and works better and can be made more minimal I would use KDE (or whatever comes along that gets the job done faster).
In the case of the vaccinations and autism, I wonder if there could be a third variable that should be considered - for example what if there is something else that parents who do not vaccinate their children do that others don't. Do they also tend to hold their babies more (touch and parental attention early on might also be connected to autism), do they also choose to feed them home-made fresh baby food made from fresh fruits as opposed to formula, do they breastfeed more? The group that I would want to see included in the study is all the autistic children who have not been vaccinated, if there are such.
What about other countries? I grew up in the former Soviet Union, and there they had mandatory vaccinations for school children. I don't remember hearing of any cases of autism growing up there. It would be interesting to try to include some of that data into the study - in other words a population with a somewhat different set of vaccines and to see if the number of autistic children is different there.
One final note, a couple of years ago there was an article how someone observed a considerable increase in autism among the children of the techies in Silicon Valley. The hypothesis was that the genes that made those techies into smart geeks are also responsible for autism. In other words autism is a grey area where in some cases is just manifests as absentmindedness, social awkwardness, extreme creativity and insight - traits of geeks and geniuses. Put them all together in one spot, they will breed with each other and of course the autism gene(s) will be strongly expressed in their offspring.
Anyway - just another look at the same problem.
In this case it might be the problem with the reporting. The researcher should report what she or he found in fact based on data. In this case what the researcher you quoted said was exactly what the headline should have been. Between the "link" and "cause" is a big difference. So to jump from that to "cold triggers cancer" is big mistake.
You might also want to consider that some of the Slashdotters are also researchers and not just "kewl" 16 year old "Hax0rz".
Have some faith in science and scientists okay? That is exactly the wrong way to approach science. People shouldn't have blind faith in scientists, instead they should be educated enough to scrutinize them.
Is is also possible that the same children that have a weak immune system and get more colds would also be more susceptable to cancer? So both the colds and the cancer are effects of some other, 3rd cause.
If the ability of anyone to remotely execute code on your machine without your permission means that Windows XP "does the job just fine" then you must have very low expectations of how a fine job should be done.
But to go back to the analogies, I will offer, what I think is a better one:
Say you buy a car. It looks fine and nothing seems wrong with it. But later on, while driving on the highway, all your controls, like steering and breaks, stop working and your car crashes. You loose your limbs, a couple of pets and some family members. As it turns out the manufacturer of the car built a wireless remote control option into the cars that can be used by police to stop cars remotely. Alas, one of "teh bad guys" reverse engineered the protocol and some other individual used that information and built a device that allows him to remotely disable the controls of all the cars made by that manufacturer and that is what he did to your car.
The big question then is "Who is at fault here?". Is the "mad haX0r" who reverse engineered the communication protocol at fault, is the individual who built the disabling device at fault, is the manufacturer of the car at fault? I think the answer is that in reality all three could be found guilty one way or another.
By analogy then Microsoft should be partially to blame for what happened with Sony for supporting and facilitating (willingly - through design, and unwillingly through lack of code quality control) the installation and operation of such root kits.
Also, Adobe isn't making a big deal about college kids using pirated $300+ Photoshop. Why? Because Adobe still wins in the end, those college students graduate and then when they get jobs the company will probably use Photoshop CS2 because that is what the employees want to get the work done. Using a pirated version for a couple of years is not that big of a deal if that person will learn to use it and the place of employment will pay for Photoshop for decades ahead.
And as you say, the same thing goes for MS Office.
On the other side, it would be great if the companies would crack down and make it harder to pirate their software. There are open source alternatives that might not be as good now but if more people turn to them, there will be an increased level of development and support for them.
1.) By having a cell phone, which is on, you are broadcasting your approximate location to the cell towers anyway. The provider company needs to know where you are so it can route the incomming call to you. You cannot use the company to talk on your cell and at the same time hide your location. This makes the disclusure of your location a decision of the company. All 3 or 4 major wireless providers can just update their contract/policy that they will report your location on-demand to a law enforcement agency - chances are people won't have a choice and will not do anything about it. I am not saying that is a good thing or I like but that is what probably would happen. The government, which runs FCC, can practically force the providers to do stuff like that.
2.) Your location is already public. In other words if you are on the street, people already see you there. You go to a mall, the cameras will record your location, you go to work - the co-workers will know where you are. The police can technically follow you around to know your location, without needing a search warrant.
In other words "your location" does not = "your property".
The reference to bird-flu was ironic - just like the whole comment...
We just have to make sure we destroy ourselves so our lifetime is not long enough for the cosmic death rays to get us. Drugs, wars and bird-flu should do the job very nicely, and are a lot more fun than gamma rays if you ask me...
In general, I think HTML is a horrible language (if you can even call it a language) for building forms and user interfaces. It is a good language for ... wait, this is going to surprise everyone - Hypertext Markup.
CSS, DOM and JavaScript seem like bandaids that were added later to make HTML do what it wasn't meant to do. Most graphical toolkits/libraries out there (QT, GTK, Microsoft's MFC, Java's Swing, wxWindows, even TCL/TK) are better than HTML at creating a user interface.
There aren't that many popular browsers out there I can think of only about 4 (IE, Firefox, Safari and Opera) if they all got together for once with W3C and implemented a good new standard it might just catch on as long as everyone agrees to support it their next major version ... but that is in the ideal world which doesn't exist.
Real CS nerds would come up with an O(nlogn) algorithm to decide what to do given all the circumstances (input - n, is the number of circumstances, output is 1 or 0 - to change major or not to change major).
The reason for the warning is that an infrared ray will not be visible so your pupil will not even shrink to shield the retina. Also you won't feel anything but your retina could still end up with a hole in it. But with the CD ROM lasers you would probably be safe.
Now, a private school like Marquette, is like a private company. Except that instead of working for them students go there to be educated. When students are enrolled, they probably sign a contract that says "you can do A,B,C, but you cannot do X,Y,Z, if you break these rules we could expell you or take away your scholarship" And guess what, this has nothing to do with free speech because that only applies to the Government, not private entities.
So I think it suck, it is bad policy but it is not illegal. Also, I think that without realizing Marquette probably did more damage for its reputation by taking harsh action against the student as opposed to letting it go (or doing something less drastic). Now the web and the media will know Marquette as the school that "cuts your tongue out" for speaking bad about it, while before what was the chance that so many people would have read that student's blog?
Simple - all that 5% is used to pirate stuff, which is then sold on outside markets to the other %95. The pirates make money and the rest of the 95% of users of pirated software save money - ($2 for MS Windows as opposed to $200). Win-win situation as far as the Macedonians are concerned.
Expert systems where all the rage back in the 70s and 80s. Everyone was working on expert systems. Then came neural networks, every graduate in CS and his dog did their thesis on NN in the late 80s - early 90s. But the public's hope of having robots take over the world will not come true any time soon. The AI field promised too much but couldn't deliver. We have a bunch of professors at my university who still are stuck in their little 70s and 80s time capsules desperately scrambling to find funding for their expert systems and NN projects.
Speaking of social isolation, I know how you feel but I am having difficulty on the other side of the communication channel. I stutter and that pretty much isolated me as a child growing up and as a teenager. I was one of the nerds and they didn't seem to mind waiting for me to try to say a word 5 times, while all the "cool" and "popular" kids made fun of me which honestly I think was a blessing in disguise as that kept me from doing drugs and helped me focus more on academic performance.
But anyway, is there anyone who still uses Kaaza?
I can see the ads:
Teach your baby C++ in 21 days, let him debug that code for you, while you play Doom.
Or how about
"Database Administration for Babies" - put the pager in his crib and walk way to play D&D. Let your baby help you instead of just eating, crying and pooping all day.
I live right at the intersection of a white trash and a black community. Inside the white trash one there are also a couple of blocks of almost exclusively hispanic apparment buildings (a little sub-community). I live here because I am a poor college student and it is very close to my school. So in the course of 3 years of my graduate school I have observed quite a bit, had stuff stolen from my car and my car was hit by drunk drivers probably a couple of times. I will definetly move out when I graduate but now I am still saving money and it works out. Anyway, that is how I know...
Now I am not saying that is a good thing and that companies should be marketing to the poor teenagers and exploit their in-ability to use the computer (and/or money management skills if they have any) but from an economic point of view it makes sense.
No, I wasn't trying to be racial -"ghetto" could be a Hispanic or white trash "ghetto" i.e. a community with high levels of poverty, crime and un-employment. All of them would make a great target customer base for $2.49 per song on the cell phone sheme.
Well good point, college students are another good customer base for $2.49/song scheme. They are also a bit out of touch with reality when mommy and daddy is paying for the college. But most college students (at least those who stay in college long enough to graduate) are smart enough to use a computer and could just get the song from iTunes for $0.99.