The human interface on these voting machines is designed to obscure your actions not improve anything. My fair Commonwealth previously used mechanical tallying machines where you could see all of your choices after you made them. You could de-select and re-select choices up until you pulled the commit lever.
The linear nature of touch screens is exactly the way not to provide an overview of your actions. For precisely the reasons that fast food drive-through ordering has been aided on both sides of the interaction by visual confirmation screens (which don't require that you hold a bunch of non-sequential information in your head), the new machines were designed to affirmatively obscure your prior decisions.
And your basis for "unprofessional" is that this like most other briefs - which you apparently haven't read - generally tell the judge "what to think"? Is there internet slang for an amateur claiming a professional an "amateur"?
...who makes examinations incapable of determining real learning as opposed to mere regurgitation of the homework. This is probably doubly so for professors who crib their exams from the textbook materials. This likely isn't an issue of academic integrity amongst students.
I was once in the presence of Connection Machines in an organization that didn't have a name. Having read that the thousands of lights were indicative of the processor states, I asked about them. They told me that during normal operation, the lights were not sufficiently interesting to impress the brass. They told the manufacturer of this problem and Thinking Machines installed a pretty - but meaningless - pattern generator. They were able to do this quite quickly as they had already done so for other customers.
In essence - your story is backward - the CM-5 was gimmicked to look like Hollywood because that is what a zillion dollar computer ought to look like.
If Second Life modeled the real world in the particulars under study, then the conclusions could be reasonable
However, since the Second Life avatars are known to be distorted (mean height ~2m), and camera positioning is like every other MMO - stand too close to something and it falls out of view or occludes your view - this study tells us absolutely nothing.
The DoD doesn't use the Internet, they use SIPRNet which is their own private IP net which is a tad bit harder to hack into from civilian nets. The DoD has also spent a little more time and effort on cryptography than consumer grade electronics firms.
On the flipside, DoD comms are typically far more clunky and over-engineered than consumer electronics; I've spoken to servicemen who said that in the field they are likely to use Motorola walkie-talkies from Best Buy as the government issue (non-secure) gear is bigger, dissipates more power, and has less range.
Having held two seminars in SL - at the request of other players - as well as doing the same in a real university I think I can fairly comment on how lacking SL is as a teaching medium.
The seminars were a "101" style introduction to a scientific subject. I prepared for it much as I would have any presentation. I made my standard dull yet structuring powerpoint slides, exported them as jpegs and scripted a slide viewer in LSL. The seminar was well attended, drawing 20+ attentive students to each two hour seminar. I had built a classroom facility that allowed all to sit close enough to me to be "heard" and able to see the slides. The seminar consisted of about one hour of me "chatting" through the slides and an hour's worth of Q & A. The slides and the chat transcript were made available and requested after the seminars.
Here were the advantages: it allowed people from any internet equipped, English understanding country to attend. It did communicate the information fairly well although it was a little taxing to IM chat continually and substantively for that long. The attendees were quite interested in the subject and were extremely polite; as far as I could tell, most were probably more focused on the chat and slides than on other avatars. Given the format, if I had to do it again, I'd have streamed audio from me to all of them and used the IM-style chat for receiving questions.
I needed two thing that I wouldn't have needed outside SL. The first was a sergeant-at-arms to watch for and ward off the disruptive "griefers" that uniformly invade any significant gathering of players in SL. The second was an assistant to ensure that questions were vectored into me as it is difficult to raise a virtual hand or grant the floor to a questioner.
I also was using something that in no way enhanced the quality of the seminar: SL. The slides could have just as easily been on a web page, and the dialog would have been equally well served by any generic multicast chat service. There is no inflection or gesturing that I'd have done in a real world seminar; I doubt anyone even looked at my avatar as it was sitting and IM-ing. Chat is about as narrowband a communication medium humans have ever used, and the incredible amount of bandwidth required for the 40-person-hour seminars would have been just as well served by IRC.
With the possible exclusion of 3D models for demonstration, SL affords absolutely nothing to the teaching or learning; indeed, the seminar was significantly slowed by the medium. Furthermore, these seminars were at least a year ago. These days, I'd have had to use a private simulator to ensure that 20 people could attend and the extremely overburdened "content" servers may have difficulty in getting the next slide image to the 20 attendees in the time it takes me to chat through one. The only way I have seen SL used as an effective teaching medium is to teach others to use SL itself.
Having traveled through countries that have actual, recurrent terrorism, I've encountered real efforts at security. These contrast markedly with the US "put a duffer in the airport to check that the name on my boarding pass matches my driver's license" policy.
Two examples stand out clearly in memory. Passing through Paris' Charles de Gaulle airport I was stopped and questioned by no less than 7 pairs of guards who wanted to see my passport and ask me some simple, relevant questions. Although the questions were simple, they studied my response intently looking for any indication that I was lying. It was polite, it was brief, but I was scrutinized. On one of those trips, I found that the luggage carousel had been locked off because an unattended bag had been discovered. Within minutes, that bag was taken outside, put under a bomb blanket, and had a primer bomb fired next to it. It turned out to be just plain luggage, but it was clear that they were taking no chances.
Another time, on business travel ending in Heathrow, I was asked questions relevant to my journey by someone as polite and as assiduous as in Paris. He finally asked me "why did your firm send you and not someone else?" which caught me quite off guard. I have little doubt that he was expecting me to fish for an answer to that question, and might have been moved to further questions if I replied more facilely.
An ID card is junk compared to civil servants like those.
Another possible reason that a machine without OS on it costs more is that you are going to wind up with someone who didn't think they needed an OS, wanted to save a few bucks, but then calls support with "my new computer doesn't do anything, it's broken".
This may be apocryphal - I can't quote a source - but I'd heard that if Dell has to take one support call, they have failed to make a profit on that box. That might be a little extreme, but an irate, clueless customer on the phone who may wind up sending the "non-working" box back is certainly costly.
This "independent" security researcher also happens to have a book published by a reputable publisher and another in the works. Cheap advertising, indeed; too bad he had to become a black-hat to get it.
Most plants try to sicken or kill you. Plants have a problem: they can't run away from the animals that try to eat them so have evolved a huge arsenal of chemical weapons to use against their predators. Toxins such as oxalic acid, tannic acid, various bitter alkaloids, tetrahydracannibinol, and even muscimol (okay, fungi are plant-like) are present throughout the plant world and are part of the reason that us historic scavengers have such large livers. Good controls are essential in any comparative study of how nasty GMO plants may be because non-GMO plants are pretty nasty themselves.
Many have noted that school is - in large part - social education. In younger grades I got picked on because I gave good reaction; come high school I just wasn't fun to tease any longer.
My daughter's elementary school has a well-intentioned, much propagandized anti-bullying campaign; it does half the job by making kids aware of the phenomenon. What it doesn't do is handle the most important side, teaching my kid that bullying is a sign of weakness in the other party; I teach her that.
School is a mere reflection of social pecking order that these kids will see all thorough their lives. If they do not learn to cope with it there, when will they? You cannot stop social viciousness, it is built into us. What you can do is teach kids how best to respond when it happens.
Is it not the case that the election commissioner in a district sends a certified tally to the people who use it? I know this is so in my state.
Given that, it really doesn't matter what the system - electronic, mechanical, manual - yields, the commissioner could transmit a false certified tally. Does a paper system save you from defective or intentional miscounting? Nope, because the same commissioner retains physical custody of the ballots and could post hoc modify them prior to investigation.
I've yet to see a voting system that cannot be violated given sufficient interest. Making votes public would allow a voter to repudiate a tampered vote, but we like private ballots.
I used to think that X11 was a heavyweight way of moving screen data. Then I saw AJAX.
On the other hand, why shouldn't we have what Scotty and Geordie have?
I have a video camera that I never use; video is too "present". I far prefer photographs as they are but mnemonic triggers for the time, place, and people and allow your memory to color the remembrance.
Yes, the seat may be smaller but one should hope that you spend considerably less time in the lavatory than at your desk. Furthermore, people tend to wash their hands after using the toilet but not after using the phone or chewing on the end of someone else's pen; shaking hands with someone is probably the best vector for pathogen transmission in the office.
Someone once said: I get up, shower, ride a bus to work, use my computer, use the community coffee pot, shake many hands, use my neigbor's phone, and then go pee and wash my hands - while my penis is probably the cleanest thing I've touched today.
Slashdot Mirror
what about pr0n traffic, soon?
It turns out that displays presented best for viewing are worst for manipulating.
The plural of "anecdote" is not "data".
The human interface on these voting machines is designed to obscure your actions not improve anything. My fair Commonwealth previously used mechanical tallying machines where you could see all of your choices after you made them. You could de-select and re-select choices up until you pulled the commit lever.
The linear nature of touch screens is exactly the way not to provide an overview of your actions. For precisely the reasons that fast food drive-through ordering has been aided on both sides of the interaction by visual confirmation screens (which don't require that you hold a bunch of non-sequential information in your head), the new machines were designed to affirmatively obscure your prior decisions.
And your basis for "unprofessional" is that this like most other briefs - which you apparently haven't read - generally tell the judge "what to think"? Is there internet slang for an amateur claiming a professional an "amateur"?
...who makes examinations incapable of determining real learning as opposed to mere regurgitation of the homework. This is probably doubly so for professors who crib their exams from the textbook materials. This likely isn't an issue of academic integrity amongst students.
I'm watching some ball game on television.
It couldn't be that hard to make a DSP degrade CD input to vinyl standards.
I was once in the presence of Connection Machines in an organization that didn't have a name. Having read that the thousands of lights were indicative of the processor states, I asked about them. They told me that during normal operation, the lights were not sufficiently interesting to impress the brass. They told the manufacturer of this problem and Thinking Machines installed a pretty - but meaningless - pattern generator. They were able to do this quite quickly as they had already done so for other customers.
In essence - your story is backward - the CM-5 was gimmicked to look like Hollywood because that is what a zillion dollar computer ought to look like.
If Second Life modeled the real world in the particulars under study, then the conclusions could be reasonable
However, since the Second Life avatars are known to be distorted (mean height ~2m), and camera positioning is like every other MMO - stand too close to something and it falls out of view or occludes your view - this study tells us absolutely nothing.
The DoD doesn't use the Internet, they use SIPRNet which is their own private IP net which is a tad bit harder to hack into from civilian nets. The DoD has also spent a little more time and effort on cryptography than consumer grade electronics firms.
On the flipside, DoD comms are typically far more clunky and over-engineered than consumer electronics; I've spoken to servicemen who said that in the field they are likely to use Motorola walkie-talkies from Best Buy as the government issue (non-secure) gear is bigger, dissipates more power, and has less range.
But in the UK they simply wouldn't do that anyway because, well it would be unseemly and people might notice.
Having held two seminars in SL - at the request of other players - as well as doing the same in a real university I think I can fairly comment on how lacking SL is as a teaching medium.
The seminars were a "101" style introduction to a scientific subject. I prepared for it much as I would have any presentation. I made my standard dull yet structuring powerpoint slides, exported them as jpegs and scripted a slide viewer in LSL. The seminar was well attended, drawing 20+ attentive students to each two hour seminar. I had built a classroom facility that allowed all to sit close enough to me to be "heard" and able to see the slides. The seminar consisted of about one hour of me "chatting" through the slides and an hour's worth of Q & A. The slides and the chat transcript were made available and requested after the seminars.
Here were the advantages: it allowed people from any internet equipped, English understanding country to attend. It did communicate the information fairly well although it was a little taxing to IM chat continually and substantively for that long. The attendees were quite interested in the subject and were extremely polite; as far as I could tell, most were probably more focused on the chat and slides than on other avatars. Given the format, if I had to do it again, I'd have streamed audio from me to all of them and used the IM-style chat for receiving questions.
I needed two thing that I wouldn't have needed outside SL. The first was a sergeant-at-arms to watch for and ward off the disruptive "griefers" that uniformly invade any significant gathering of players in SL. The second was an assistant to ensure that questions were vectored into me as it is difficult to raise a virtual hand or grant the floor to a questioner.
I also was using something that in no way enhanced the quality of the seminar: SL. The slides could have just as easily been on a web page, and the dialog would have been equally well served by any generic multicast chat service. There is no inflection or gesturing that I'd have done in a real world seminar; I doubt anyone even looked at my avatar as it was sitting and IM-ing. Chat is about as narrowband a communication medium humans have ever used, and the incredible amount of bandwidth required for the 40-person-hour seminars would have been just as well served by IRC.
With the possible exclusion of 3D models for demonstration, SL affords absolutely nothing to the teaching or learning; indeed, the seminar was significantly slowed by the medium. Furthermore, these seminars were at least a year ago. These days, I'd have had to use a private simulator to ensure that 20 people could attend and the extremely overburdened "content" servers may have difficulty in getting the next slide image to the 20 attendees in the time it takes me to chat through one. The only way I have seen SL used as an effective teaching medium is to teach others to use SL itself.
...Slashdot Headline Prufreeding To Being Sewn
Having traveled through countries that have actual, recurrent terrorism, I've encountered real efforts at security. These contrast markedly with the US "put a duffer in the airport to check that the name on my boarding pass matches my driver's license" policy.
Two examples stand out clearly in memory. Passing through Paris' Charles de Gaulle airport I was stopped and questioned by no less than 7 pairs of guards who wanted to see my passport and ask me some simple, relevant questions. Although the questions were simple, they studied my response intently looking for any indication that I was lying. It was polite, it was brief, but I was scrutinized. On one of those trips, I found that the luggage carousel had been locked off because an unattended bag had been discovered. Within minutes, that bag was taken outside, put under a bomb blanket, and had a primer bomb fired next to it. It turned out to be just plain luggage, but it was clear that they were taking no chances.
Another time, on business travel ending in Heathrow, I was asked questions relevant to my journey by someone as polite and as assiduous as in Paris. He finally asked me "why did your firm send you and not someone else?" which caught me quite off guard. I have little doubt that he was expecting me to fish for an answer to that question, and might have been moved to further questions if I replied more facilely.
An ID card is junk compared to civil servants like those.
Another possible reason that a machine without OS on it costs more is that you are going to wind up with someone who didn't think they needed an OS, wanted to save a few bucks, but then calls support with "my new computer doesn't do anything, it's broken". This may be apocryphal - I can't quote a source - but I'd heard that if Dell has to take one support call, they have failed to make a profit on that box. That might be a little extreme, but an irate, clueless customer on the phone who may wind up sending the "non-working" box back is certainly costly.
This "independent" security researcher also happens to have a book published by a reputable publisher and another in the works. Cheap advertising, indeed; too bad he had to become a black-hat to get it.
...but because I hate plants.
Most plants try to sicken or kill you. Plants have a problem: they can't run away from the animals that try to eat them so have evolved a huge arsenal of chemical weapons to use against their predators. Toxins such as oxalic acid, tannic acid, various bitter alkaloids, tetrahydracannibinol, and even muscimol (okay, fungi are plant-like) are present throughout the plant world and are part of the reason that us historic scavengers have such large livers. Good controls are essential in any comparative study of how nasty GMO plants may be because non-GMO plants are pretty nasty themselves.
In general it is best to use an authoritative source for items of this import.
Many have noted that school is - in large part - social education. In younger grades I got picked on because I gave good reaction; come high school I just wasn't fun to tease any longer.
My daughter's elementary school has a well-intentioned, much propagandized anti-bullying campaign; it does half the job by making kids aware of the phenomenon. What it doesn't do is handle the most important side, teaching my kid that bullying is a sign of weakness in the other party; I teach her that.
School is a mere reflection of social pecking order that these kids will see all thorough their lives. If they do not learn to cope with it there, when will they? You cannot stop social viciousness, it is built into us. What you can do is teach kids how best to respond when it happens.
Is it not the case that the election commissioner in a district sends a certified tally to the people who use it? I know this is so in my state.
Given that, it really doesn't matter what the system - electronic, mechanical, manual - yields, the commissioner could transmit a false certified tally. Does a paper system save you from defective or intentional miscounting? Nope, because the same commissioner retains physical custody of the ballots and could post hoc modify them prior to investigation.
I've yet to see a voting system that cannot be violated given sufficient interest. Making votes public would allow a voter to repudiate a tampered vote, but we like private ballots.
I used to think that X11 was a heavyweight way of moving screen data. Then I saw AJAX. On the other hand, why shouldn't we have what Scotty and Geordie have?
Linux Desktop 2.0!
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I have a video camera that I never use; video is too "present". I far prefer photographs as they are but mnemonic triggers for the time, place, and people and allow your memory to color the remembrance.
Someone once said: I get up, shower, ride a bus to work, use my computer, use the community coffee pot, shake many hands, use my neigbor's phone, and then go pee and wash my hands - while my penis is probably the cleanest thing I've touched today.